Towards the pluriversal museum: from epistemic violence to ecologies of knowledges

ABSTRACT

Climate change, species extinction and accelerating inequalities are manifestations of a more fundamental crisis facing humanity: the global dominance of a capitalist/colonialist world order based on logics of extraction and exploitation. The modern, “universal” museum is implicated in this history. It is not only that the accumulation of exotic things was made possible through mercantile and colonial territorial expansion, but the transformation of such things into “objects of knowledge” and their incorporation into universalizing knowledge systems, given architectural expression in the museum, involved forms of epistemic violence that rendered other ways of knowing, understanding and being in the world non-existent. As part of the project of decolonizing the museum, this article questions whether this process of “epistemicide” was indeed so complete, considers whether marginalized forms of knowledge may be reactivated in historical collections, and imagines the role of the “pluriversal museum” in contributing to the shaping of more just and sustainable planetary futures.

KEYWORDS:

• Universal museum
• coloniality
• epistemicide
• pluriversalism
• ecologies of knowledges

Acknowledgements

Originally published in French in Culture & musées 41, pp. 63–91 (2023).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As both the last Keeper of the King’s Pictures under Louis XVI and one of the first curators of the new Musée Central des Arts, Robert occupies an ambiguous position in relation to this museological revolution.

2 There is considerable debate around the concept of the “universal museum”, particularly since the “Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums” issued by a group of directors of major museums in Europe and the USA in 2002 (see Curtis, 2006; Fiskesjö, 2014). This declaration drew on the vocabulary of the 1972 UNESCO World Heritage Convention and the concept of “Outstanding Universal Value” as a means to designate heritage “which is so exceptional as to transcend national boundaries and to be of common importance for present and future generations of all humanity” (UNESCO, 2019; see also Labadi, 2013). A different genealogy relates to the notion of the “universal survey museum”, defined by the encyclopaedic and totalizing scope of collections and displays, epitomized in the British Museum’s slogan: “a museum of the world for the world”. The totalizing vision of such museums also relates to European Enlightenment ideas of universalism, including principles of rational, scientific knowledge asserted to be of universal validity. According to Hicks (2018), the term “universal museum” was seldom used prior to the late 20th century, and constitutes “a 21st-century charter myth” used by some European museums to justify retaining “collections representative of world cultures”. I am mindful of these various debates and connotations when I use the term in this essay in contradistinction to the proposed notion of a “pluriversal museum”.

3 The collections of Elias Ashmole (1617–1692) were foundational to the establishment of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 1683; it was one of the world’s first university museums. Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) bequeathed his collections to the British nation, leading to the establishment of the British Museum in 1753.

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Notes on contributors

Paul Basu

Paul Basu is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oxford and Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum. He previously held professorships at University College London, SOAS University of London, and the University of Bonn, where he was founding director of the Global Heritage Lab. Specializing in critical heritage, museum and material culture studies in transcultural contexts, his research draws upon a wide range of ethnographic, historical and participatory methods to explore how pasts are differently materialized and mediated in the present, and how they shape futures. Paul’s research examines the complex ways in which natural as well as cultural heritage is entangled in shifting regimes of value and geopolitical configurations. His work has often involved re-engagements with colonial archives and collections relating to West Africa, exploring their ambiguous status as both sites of epistemic violence and, potentially, resources for communities to recover cultural histories, memories and alternative ways of knowing and being in the world. He recently led the multi-sited research, community engagement and exhibition project Museum Affordances / [Re:]Entanglements (https://re-entanglements.net).