Rui Barbosa Museum of the Faculty of Law of Recife: from choosing a name to building a memory

Abstract

This article investigates the founding process of the Rui Barbosa Museum of the Recife Law School, founded on May 13, 1927, with documents and personal objects of the jurist, donated by Ulysses Brandão. At that time, the academy already had the Recife Law School Museum, created in 1922 by director Netto Campello, with an iconographic collection representing the historical trajectory of the Law School. The political and social transformations that culminated inthe Revolution of Thirty and the Estado Novo (1945) directly affected the School, both politically, culturally, and administratively, with reforms and changes that led to losses in museum collections. It is estimated that the museums merged in the 1950s. During the 1980s, the space was restored andreopened under the name: Rui Barbosa Museum. The lack of records of the collection incorporation process and criteria for choosing the name led to the erasure of the 1922 Museum and raised questions: Why wasn’t the Rui Barbosa collection incorporated into the existing Museum? How did the merger of the museums and the prevalence of the name Rui Barbosa Museum occur? The objective of this article is to suggest possible answers to these questions. The research included a bibliographic and documentary survey. The analyses were based on Maurice Halbwachs’s theoretical perspective of Collective Memory and subjected to the criteria suggested by Pollak. It was observed that the choice of the name Rui Barbosa Museum was a notably symbolic political choice in the construction of the institutional memory of the Recife Law School.