Museums are privileged loci for the representation of the nation: ‘museums are major apparatuses in the creation of national identities. They illustrate the nation as cultured, as elevated in taste, as inclusive and as paternal’ (Hooper-Greenhill 2000, 25). Museums are the warrants for national identity as they are ‘the site of a symbolic transaction between the visitor and the state. In exchange for the state's spiritual wealth, the individual intensifies his attachment to the state’ (Duncan and Wallach 2004, 59). To this, one should add the temporal dimension: the museum ‘confers unity to the past, a unity of place and time’ (Ditchev 2001, 330).

The representation of national identity implies the selection and (re)interpretation of its components (ethnic, historical, territorial, linguistic, cultural, artistic and symbolic, among others). As Prasenjit Duara (1993, 19–20) remarks:

Museum representations (and particularly those in national museums) supply ‘miniatures’ of culture (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 22—30): history, language, literature, art, cultural production, technological achievements — all the major defining features of a culture find representation in the museum.