Ethics. An approach to understanding museums

The idea of modern museums emerged in the second half of the Eighteenth Century with a clear ideology and ways of seeing the world and a particular set of skills with which to go about curating. As happens with human beings, this genetic code strongly determined museums' future development. This is why many of our museums present themselves as the unquestionable heirs of the encyclopedic knowledge that the philosophers of the Enlightenment pursued. Since they were first established they have based their authority on the mastery of knowledge and have developed a story of the world through a scientific mode of interpreting reality. This paper has two objectives: firstly, to analyze the nature of the museum as a technology of modernity and how they are employed as instruments of legitimation of liberal states; secondly, to show how ethics can help museums to adopt a new role in the knowledge society, by questioning the ideological foundations of the Western paradigm. It does this through an interdisciplinary analysis, combining the voices of philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and museum curators and concludes with a proposal on how to apply such thinking to the Latin American cultural environment.