Contribution short abstract:

Imperial power is expressed in the will to possess, name, know, and preserve the culture of ‘others’. We must remake the museum otherwise. Practices from southern Mexico can challenge anthropologists to redefine ‘the museum’ – and the meaning/making of collections and 'authenticity'

Contribution long abstract:

In this roundtable contribution, I point to two museums in San Cristobal de Las Casas to argue that a radically expanded conceptualisation of ‘the museum’ is a necessary feature of efforts towards decolonising praxis. Attention to how museums are being reimagined, de- and re-constructed by Indigenous communities, outside of large institutions and geographic centres of power, reveals novel reparative methods and new forms of generative knowledge production already in play – paradoxically overlooked because they sit outside of, and challenge, eurocentric frames.

The Kakaw Museo del Cacao teaches the history and culture of cacao. Its collection of objects is valuable, but none are ‘real’. ‘Mayan codices’ are flanked by interpretation noting the whereabouts of the originals – Bodleian Libraries; Museo de America (‘Códice Madrid’); Dresden Library (‘Códice de Dresde’) – but the analysis is authored, assertively, by the Kakaw team. Downstairs, traditional chocolate-making workshops offer ‘authenticity’ otherwise.

Museo Migrante (MuMi) is a pop-up framework of photographs, political education texts (in Tzotzil), and craft resources. It is (re)constructed and filled in with drawings, reflections, paper cranes and figures at each site it occupies – in agricultural fields, village squares, remote schools. Its ‘collection’, exploring the intersections of migration, Indigeneity and rights, is ever-changing; always fleeting. It is a site of knowledge-production and sharing reserved for its makers alone.

These infrastructures critique inescapable facts of Imperial power: to take, to (re)name, to create knowledge about, to preserve. They are museums undoing museums. The challenge is: will Anthropology recognise them as such?