Museums in Brazilian urban periphery

Abstract Nowadays, in Brazil, community initiatives in urban centers express their social and cultural values through museological processes. The main objective in this article is to investigate museums and cities as anthropological ethnographic fields, when identifying these processes in low income neighborhoods of Brazilian urban centers. The study is applied to the Pilot-project for the Memory Points Program, linked to the Brazilian Institute of Museums, based on the ethnographic experience with the Ponto de Memória da Terra Firme, a community initiative that develops a museological process in the neighborhood of Terra Firme in Belém, Pará. After analyzing strategies and relations established due to the consolidation of the Memory Points, it is concluded that these museological processes derive from a political will to register social memory through the appropriation of cultural heritages recognized by its residents, thus consolidating in community museums.