Received: 13 July 2022 Accepted: 19 July 2022 DOI: 10.1111/aman.13768 BOOK REVIEW Museum Matters: Making and Unmaking Mexico’s National Collections Miruna Achim Susan Deans-Smith Sandra Rozental Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2021. 312 pp. Museum Matters offers a fascinating look at the formation of an iconic collection, examining the omissions, exclusions, and historical contingencies that shaped Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology and other national collections over the past two centuries. As outlined in the useful intro- duction, Mexico’s history of museums began early: the National Museum of Mexico was founded in 1825, just a few short years after the nation declared independence from Spain, building on prior viceregal collections of Mesoamerican antiquities and natural history specimens. Over the next century and a half, the collection was moved, added to, and subdivided in various ways. New museums were founded to house the natural his- tory, history, viceregal art, and world anthropology collections. The present configuration dates to 1964, with the transfer of the archaeological and ethnographic collections to the National Museum of Anthropology. Housed in a magnificent building designed by architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, “the new Museo Nacional de Antropología was reimagined and reconstituted as an object in itself, a storehouse of collections presented as the col- lective heritage of a homogenous national whole” (p. 8). Yet, as the essays in this volume demonstrate, there is nothing inevitable about the ways that ancient Mesoamerican sculpture and modern Indigenous craft have been recruited into symbols of national identity. On the contrary, museum collections have long been “vibrant and contingent sites of contention, dissent, discussion, and negotiation” (pp. 17–18). Several of the chapters focus on less-expected things that form or have formed part of national collections. Miruna Achim and Bertina Olmedo Vera explore the ambiguous status of fakes within the archaeological collections of the museum, raising the provocative question of how the presence of fakes has shaped the study of authentic objects, particularly the adoption of new analytical technologies. Laura Cházaro traces the transformations of a collection of human anatomical models and pathological specimens that began as part of the National Museum of Mexico, emphasizing the role that such collections played in the constructions of race in the growing nation. Frida Gorbach studies the loss and reconstitu- tion of natural history collections through a poetic meditation on the temporalities of the five objects from the original collections of the National Museum of Mexico—out of tens of thousands—that remain in the present Museum of Natural History. Carlos Mondragón describes how Mexico came to have an outstanding collection of art from South Pacific Islands and the Pacific Northwest Coast of the United States and Canada, acquired through the advocacy of artist Miguel Covarrubias, who engineered an exchange of objects with Chicago’s Field Museum, the results of which are now housed in Mexico’s National Museum of the Cultures of the World. Other chapters trace the role of Mesoamerican antiquities in the national collecting project. Susan Deans-Smith uses four Aztec sculptures in the collection of the Royal Academy of San Carlos (the first academy of arts established in the Americas) to trace the “contested and ambiguous” (p. 39) reception of Mesoamerican antiquity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In her chapter, Cristina Bueno offers a focused study of the different trajectories of the three carved panels from the Temple of the Cross at Palenque before they were reunited at the National Museum of Mexico in 1909. She pays particular attention to the panel that had formed part of the Smithsonian Institution collection between 1842 and 1908, exploring how its repatriation was cast as a personal gesture of goodwill on the part of US Secretary of State Elihu Root. In an insightful essay, Miruna Achim studies how objects from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec became part of national collections, emphasizing the nineteenth-century imbrication of geographical survey, plans for economic development, and museum collecting. Crucially, she stresses how “the process by which pre-Hispanic antiquities became stabilized as metonyms of the nation’s past is also a process of loss” (p. 221), paying attention to the things destroyed in the process of collecting, as well as to the kinds of objects excluded from museum collections. Sandra Rozental addresses the equivocal history of a stone monument from Cuauhtinchan now displayed outside the National Museum of Anthropology, demonstrating that its placement along the Paseo de la Reforma was a late decision in the design of the museum, one that continues to provoke anger, doubt, and disbelief among viewers. In addition to considering the effects that this decision has had on the physical state of the object, she examines its transformation into a feature of the urban landscape and a site of political protest. The remaining chapters address ethnographic collections, denaturalizing the National Museum of Anthropology’s juxtaposition of archaeolog- ical and ethnographic objects. Mario Rufer’s meditation on the placement of a Purépecha feathered emblem reveals just how artificial a division between ethnographic and historical collections must be, while simultaneously exposing different kinds of violence deliberately suppressed in the Am. Anthropol. 2022;1–2. © 2022 by the American Anthropological Association. 1 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/aman