26 Jul 2023  |  Philipp Schorch & Diana Gabler

Contested knowledge: Museological perspectives

Museums have been under intense scrutiny for decades by a variety of actors: Indigenous activists, politicians, journalists, scholars, among others. For example, critics have dissected museum institutions to shed light on what knowledge is produced how and by whom. In doing so, they have often contested museums’ modes of knowledge generation and dissemination as well as the legitimacy of their knowledge claims. The interconnectedness of these processes with historical developments, societal conditions, and power relations have been examined from various perspectives. In Germany, a current example is the establishment of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, which has brought the country’s long neglected colonial histories back to the forefront of political, journalistic, and academic debates, and has exposed the academic discipline of ethnology, or social and cultural anthropology, to an unseen level of public awareness. As a consequence, particularly ethnographic museums are facing much more scrutiny than other museum types and knowledge-producing institutions with similar legacies, such as universities and libraries. Given the increasing interest of activists, scholars and practitioners in historical collections and their contemporary and future relevance, as well as recent academic developments such as the material and ontological turns, it seems timely to ask what knowledge claims can and should be made based on museum things, if (re)approached as living entities, material archival records, creative expressions, sources, witnesses, and interlocutors, among other manifestations. This plenary engages with the challenge of gearing (post)colonial critique towards decolonial knowledge practices. It explores what museological reimaginations and reinventions from around the world, enacted through e.g. Indigenous and interdisciplinary museologies, can tell us about how the contestation of knowledge can help to bring about more collaborative and participatory knowledge practices.

Invited speakers:
Joshua Bell (National Museum of Natural History, Washington, USA)
Jacek Kołtan (European Solidarity Centre, Poland)
Flower Manase (National Museum of Tanzania, Dar es Salaam)

 Visit the conference website for more information on the program and register here for the event.

The conference of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologieon, DGSKA (German Anthropological Association, GAA) “Contested Knowledge: Anthropological Perspectives“ will take place in Munich from 25 – 28 July 2023. It is organised and hosted by the GAA together with the Munich Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology.