Paper short abstract:

Around the world indigenous communities are experimenting with integrating indigenous perspectives into curatorial work. What challenges and implications does this entail for museum theory and practice? I discuss this question through insights from my research in Taiwan and other countries.

Paper long abstract:

Around the world indigenous communities are engaged in projects aiming to display, protect and preserve indigenous cultural heritage; in so doing, they are often experimenting with integrating indigenous perspectives into curatorial work. These may express for instance specific local understandings of, and approaches to, the concept of heritage and the structures, policies and governance of heritage institutions; notions of what is considered valuable and worthy of being preserved and transmitted to future generations; approaches to display, and conservation methods.

Regrettably, many of these perspectives remain under-explored. This is in part due to the historical entanglement of museums in the colonial system, and the ensuing legacy of discriminatory practices of collection, display and interpretation of indigenous heritage. But in part, this is also the result of the persistent, largely unchallenged centrality of North-American and European disciplinary traditions (in anthropology, museum and heritage studies) and museological practices.

In this paper I will ponder this situation, and frame my reflection through the following questions:

What prevents museums from further opening up to multiple indigenous curatorial perspectives? What challenges and implications does this entail for museum practice? Is it possible to think of 'multiple museologies', and how is the very concept and field of museology reconfigured by that?

I will draw on current debates on the 'decolonization' and 'Indigenization' of museums, and on insights from my research among indigenous communities in Taiwan - and to a lesser extent Norway, Canada (British Columbia) and Belize - to illustrate, problematize, and begin to answer these questions.