Global Journal of Human-Social Science, A: Arts and Humanities, Volume 21 Issue 12

Furthermore, sometimes, people have tried to dominate others, giving rise to a different identity, yet with persistent traces of the original. However, a situation of domination does not always imply assimilation. Acculturation implies an absence of internal group cohesion and the lack of a model with which to identify because it is not possible to identify with a dominator. However, this situation can also occur in the case of immigrants who, faced with two different worlds, the one they come from and the one they find when they arrive in another country, are forced to create a new mixed-race identity. Crises and acculturation lead to situations of anxiety when a new culture does not meet expectations. In this situation, museums can contribute to satisfying the socio-cultural needs of people by preserving the signs of identity from the past in which people can still find aspects that they recognize about themselves. Museums, thus, become a means of preserving identity and can be a valid model for conserving collective memory, offering elements that allow people to identify themselves as members of a given human group. On the other hand, they can be used to destroy certain identities, presenting unreal models that leave the individual defenseless in the face of deculturation or colonization aggression. Indeed, museums must be committed to defending marginalized and socially excluded populations, if only as a gesture of reparation for the time they spent pandering to the tastes of certain elitist minorities that often dominated museum institutions (Miquel and Morral 1987: 54). The same authors (1986: 41ff) also speak of identity as a dynamic concept, always evolving and transforming, involving differences, comprising conscious and unconscious aspects, made up of different ingredients, a cultural product, which can be diverse. Museums were an inseparable part of Western cultural identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are part of our consciousness, a social passage and self-affirmation representing our need for admiration, as well as a market mechanism. Stránský (1986: 50) highlights the ideas of these authors that identity a relationship between the "model", and "reality". The model is created from memory, which serves for identification. Still, it should be borne, in mind that in intellectual memory, everyone creates their model, whereas in objectual memory, it is the museum that creates the model and presents it to the public. On the other hand, Stránský, following Tereza Scheiner's idea, insists on the need to study the identity of the museum by relating both memories because this would result in a new orientation in the development of museums and museology, as well as in the activities to be carried out by museology professionals by their own identity. e) Museology, Museums and Social Development At the symposium on Museology and Museums , Stránský (1987: 287ff.) asked whether museology as a consequence of the existence of museums, or whether museology already existed before museums were created. Are museums the subject of museology or should they rather be seen as a means of bringing museology closer to reality? Does museology encompass museums and their fruit, or does museology go beyond museums given its objectives? Finally, it is necessary to ask whether museums can exist without museology and whether museology can exist without museums. The answer to these questions is that the theoretical approach to museums is closely linked to museum practice in such a way that the former precedes, penetrates, and succeeds the latter. Moreover, the object of museology cannot be just the museum, as it is something material, an objective element of reality created by humans with the purpose of satisfying certain social needs. Therefore, a museum needs the supervision, criticism, and involvement of museology. But we must not forget that the museum is not an end, but a means and one of the possible ways of realizing humans’ approach to reality. Finally, Stránský believes that both contemporary museums and those to be created in the future cannot exist without museology as a science, just as museology cannot exist without museums, because any theory without practice loses its meaning and its social function. In this respect, Miquel and Morral (1987: 53-55) point out how in 1980, the members of ICOFOM placed museums at the center of the debate: museology exists because there are museums. They stated that the scientific field should not be confused with experimental sites. Stránský ironically commented on the fact that everyone must discover for themselves that the museum is not the centre of the world. Our relationship with the material testimonies of the past can be questioned according to the needs of the ever-changing present. The museum, as Stránský says, is a solution to a problem posed in its twofold spatial-temporal dimension, but not the only one, nor the best possible one, but it is the real one. On the other hand, we must recognize that the heterodox highlights the crisis of the theoretical system but does not overcome it. For Dolors Forrellad (1987: 105 ff.), the museum has projected itself into the community to fulfill its functions. Museum-society interaction has come about thanks to the efforts made by museums in the field of dissemination. It has ceased to be a repository of testimonies, offered only to some sectors of society, and has become a source of information and research for the whole of society. Many museums have inherited collections as their starting point, which often have nothing to do with the goals they have set for themselves to serve the community. Museum science needs to make itself better known, to define itself more © 2021 Global Journals Volume XXI Issue XII Version I 27 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2021 A Zbyněk Zbyslav Stránský’s Museological Impact on Spain