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1By naming "The Power of Museums" as the theme for its 26th General Conference in Prague (Czechia), the International Council of Museums (ICOM) gave its members, national committees, international committees and regional alliances the opportunity to develop themes highlighting the role of museums to counter the worlds major upheavals. After the intervening three years of pandemic and dissension, it was a rich and varied program signalling the resilience of the museum sector. 

2Yet the theme chosen by ICOFOM (the International Committee for Museology) for its meetings questioned this "power" by discussing “how museums and museology could also have the potential to take power away, to disempower, by preventing the discussion of sensitive subjects" (ICOFOM, 2022). In other words, ICOFOM’s symposium invited participants to discuss Taboos in Museology. 

3Taboos are a complex societal phenomenon, rooted in historical, cultural, or political contexts. Originally a Polynesian word used to describe forbidden cultural practices, “taboo” carries the double meaning of practices either too special and sacred or too repugnant and repulsive to be casually undertaken. While the word’s entrance into the Western vocabulary is a lesson in colonialism, carried to England by the published accounts of Captain James Cook’s voyages of so-called discovery in the 18th century (Taboo, 2023), the concept of “things prohibited” exists in all societies. It has proven useful to the social sciences in the 20th-21st centuries, and its usage was expanded by psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud (Totem und Tabu, 1913); anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss (Mythologiques, 1964-71) and Edmund Leach (Structural Study of Myth and Totemism, 1989); and by scholars of religion and mythology, such as Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth, 1988). In our symposium, taboos in museology were meant to bring to light the ways in which museum power carries with it concurrent responsibilities.

Museum neutrality: The original taboo

4As the papers at the symposium and in this collection demonstrate, one of the key taboos that need addressing in the museal world is the belief that museums are neutral. According to the recently published Dictionary of Museology, museums came into being for the development of knowledge and became modern as they grew open to developing that knowledge with the public (Mairesse, 2023, p. 334). Museums, for centuries, have preserved human history, knowledge, and culture, encapsulating a collective narrative of the societies they represent.

5However, they have never been neutral repositories because to tell that collective narrative, museum staff must continually make choices: selecting from the world at large what to collect, selecting from their collections what to display, selecting from everything on display what to highlight, selecting from the myriad words in the language which ones will be used to explain those artefacts and contextualise them into an exhibition. At each stage of the process the narrative of the ongoing reality is carefully selected, and therefore, inevitably, at each stage other possible pieces of that reality – a different artefact, a different sign, a different exhibition – are deflected from (Burke, 1943, p. 27). Thus, by its very nature as a microcosm of the larger world, run by people who must use symbolic communication (visual and verbal) to select for and deflect from the larger reality, the idea of the museum as neutral repository is rendered impossible. Indeed, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argued in an ICOM Prague plenary on the museum’s place in civil society, neutrality discussions merely distract from the museum’s real potential to serve as an agora, a marketplace of ideas informing civic debates.

6Yet to say that museums are not neutral is still in many circles to break a longstanding taboo against calling these institutions partisan, even as the narratives that museums choose to represent are often subject to the societal taboos that govern them. Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological notion may prove analogous here: For him, the original human taboo was the prohibition against incest because the resultant need to go outside the family group for a mate necessarily required humanity to forge the social relational systems that make us human (1949). The ICOFOM symposium raised for us the possibility that neutrality as a norm confines the museum to insularity -– a site focused on its internal functions of collection/preservation -– while non-neutrality, with its focus on the social role of the museum, pushes the institution out into the social-relational world, the human world.

7That dilemma -- the inevitability and perhaps even the desirability of museal partisanship and the taboo against naming it -- formed the backdrop to our 2022 symposium. For two days, participants theorised the nature of museological taboos and presented examples of and reasons for confronting them (see Weiser et al., 2022). Four panels on the themes of “Neutrality and Activism”, “Collections and Audiences”, “Problematic Museology”, and “Coloniality, Collaboration and Working Conditions” were held at the National Museum of Technology (Prague) and Masaryk University (Brno) in the form of sessions designed to encourage dialogue and discussion between participants and the public. This issue of the ICOFOM Study Series follows on that discussion and its Materials publication of short abstracts with a series of more richly explored articles.

The nature of taboo

8The different themes and questions raised by speakers at the symposium inspired Marion Bertin, along with her co-writer Olivia Guiragossian, to question our initial notion of taboo as a shared “silence” in their Metis-Lab report (Bertin & Guiragossian, 2022). They point out that contributions and discussions in Czechia raised questions about the conditions under which taboos are expressed: Is there a strict boundary between what is taboo and what is not, or are taboos instead characterised by a blurred zone, with variable and sometimes never clearly established dimensions? Is it even possible to make a clear distinction between a “sensitive” subject and a “taboo” subject? Further, do museum communities all deal with taboos in the same manner, or are the considerations of taboos as diverse and complex as are taboos themselves?

9Canonically, those who break a taboo may be shunned by their community -- they have failed to follow the unwritten social rules. But the ability to break a taboo may also mark one as special, an insider to the community with unwritten permission to transgress. We can see both these implications in modern museum practices. For instance, museum administrators may actively avoid discussions that seem to threaten the status quo of their institutions on topics ranging from collection repatriation to the influence of donors on display decisions to the working conditions of their staff (see for example Debrosse, Duarte Cândido & Pappalardo, Galssini, Leeder, Tezoto de Lima, Vikmane in Weiser et al., 2022). Heritage curators may feel pressure, consciously or unconsciously, to avoid topics and histories deemed controversial or uncomfortable (see Zabalueva, Viita-aho, Scheiner, Maranda, Jagodzińska in Weiser et al., 2022), while art curators may argue for respecting one set of social, moral, or religious beliefs over another in display choices (see Botte, Pauliac in Weiser et al., 2022). Many of our symposium participants, meanwhile, argued that museums should use their “special” authority in society to break – or at least bend – longstanding exhibit taboos that marginalised non-dominant groups (see Galla, Satil Neves, Niangao, Cury in Weiser et al., 2022). In other words, they argued for museum activism.

10As Joan Anim-Addo, Viv Golding, and Wayne Modest (2023) explain in the Dictionary of Museology, activism in museums means becoming more attuned to the changing nature of their publics. As they write:

[S]ome museums are engaging in grassroots collaborative work with diverse communities, to re-imagine the status quo and open up their spaces for dialogue, critical reflection and action, in order to meaningfully tackle historical and contemporary injustice, discrimination, prejudice and stereotype. … Activism argues that museums are not neutral spaces but play key social roles, of connectivity and engagement, at local and global levels. (pp. 18-19)

11What was seen as appropriately shunned or silenced in an earlier, more homogenous or more narrowly focused social group may well be seen as desperately needing to be uncovered, discussed, and dealt with by a more diverse society today – and museums are ideal public spaces for such discussions.

12Yet museum professionals and their communities frequently struggle to find a balance between upholding, questioning, and breaking taboos as they try to take a more activist stance. As we see in our own nations, in countries around the world, this struggle is getting more difficult as populism and authoritarianism combine to censor ideas and actions that critique the status quo or show support for the human rights many activists call on museums to address, as multiple speakers noted in ICOM Prague sessions. The liberalist economy also generates precarity for museums and museum professionals. The need for money, at a time when public funds are more and more reduced, creates taboos regarding private funds and conditions of working. The rise in such censorship, making it taboo to discuss social problems and changing norms, is a clear hallmark of the precarity of our times, or what theorist Judith Butler (2009) called the “politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support” (p. ii). Communications scholar Kundai Chirindo (2021) notes that in the age of pandemics and the climate disruption of the Anthropocene, precarity has spread well beyond the most vulnerable, such that the “affective register of precarity – feeling at once exposed to, vulnerable to, dependent upon, and impinged upon by others” – has become a universal trait (p. 432). “One’s life,” as Butler observes, “is always in some sense, in the hands of the other” (p. 14). All these elements – who approves, who visits, who pays and who works – have consequences in museums, whether they concern exhibitions, relationships with communities, or acquisitions and collections management. How, then, can museums answer the call to break the taboos that would name their exhibitions on contested issues as “overly disruptive”? How do they fully partner with tabooed LGBTQ communities, Indigenous activists, or denigrated ethnic minorities when the dominant culture cries foul? One key component symposium participants alluded to is simply better listening, more attention paid to what the minoritised group is actually saying. The more power that subaltern communities have in crafting their own vision, the more that their version of truth-telling and their understanding of resilience can make their ways from the old margins to the new centre of the museum narrative. This is apparent in a place like the recently opened First Americans Museum, an Indigenous-run collaborative effort of the 39 tribal nations in Oklahoma, U.S. The museum’s deputy director Shoshana Wasserman (Muscogee Creek) commented on its first anniversary: “Because everything is in first-person voice, our Native communities have walked out very empowered and very grateful that, finally, they feel like their perspective of history has been added to the greater dialogue” (McDonnell, 2022). Elizabeth Weiser (2023) called this “restorative rhetoric”: the pairing of truth-telling by marginalised voices with celebration of the resilience of the everyday community and the re-centring of “othered” life as mainstream life. 

13Involving previously marginalised stakeholders in their own truth-telling may mean not only better understanding and valuing what had previously been overlooked or hidden away, it may also mean respecting community decisions over what needs to not be on display. The situation of human remains in museums and laws such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) offer clear examples, and the acceptance of this form of community participation, having a say over display practices, is growing. As Bertin’s (2021) work in Oceania demonstrates, since the 1980’s, Indigenous communities have been more and more recognised as stakeholders in museums, both in Oceania and in other parts of the world (Peers & Brown, 2003; Hooper et al., 2012). In Oceania (a region with more than 25,000 islands), taboos are connected to ancestors, to the sacred, and to power. They refer to a wide range of social practices which entail both interdictions and obligations that may differ from one individual to another, depending on their social status. A person, an object, a word, a social practice or a place can all be tabu, either permanently or for a certain period. In museum collections, some taboo objects are considered as secret and can be seen or touched only by a few members of the community, or only at certain times.

14The increased recognition of Indigenous opinion on how to display these objects is having a strong impact on the management of collections: Taboo prohibitions regarding objects and human remains are now being acknowledged. As the First Americans Museum staff note in their Indigenous art collection Winiko: Life of an Object, they are inviting visitors to move “from collecting to decolonizing,” noting, “Today, as more Native people enter the museum field, we are effecting positive change. With our guidance, museums have instituted new standards in consideration of Native perspectives” (First Americans Museum, 2021). Fulfilling taboo restrictions means dealing with contradictions regarding the classical goals devoted to museums: public exhibition vs. secret conservation; sharing knowledge with a wide audience vs. restricting knowledge to a few people. Indigenous curators and collaborations with communities help to handle these challenges (De Largy Healy, 2011; McCarthy et al., 2013), particularly as museums find themselves under financial and political pressure to display every visitor-attracting artefact.

15A second key component in the response to felt precarity of both institution and individual, then, lies in restorative rhetoric’s emphasis on care. Rather than condemn prior curators or current visitors for their ignorance and inaction in the face of ongoing injustice or bureaucratic inertia, restorative rhetoric frames re-narration of the old story as part of a larger attempt at healing division. For instance, Lonnie Bunch, the first African American Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, says that he worked to found their National Museum of African American History and Culture in the hope that it would become “a site of transformation that would make America better … by helping to bridge the chasms like race that have divided America since its inception, … [crafting] a vision that we hoped would help a country heal” (Bunch, 2019, p. 31). 

16This emphasis on truth that heals and teaches rather than shames and blames is crucial for museums that wish to persuade their visitors of new perspectives in a precarious world, because the desire to avoid painful heritage can so easily make any effort to reveal it into a taboo topic, as we see in current censorship efforts around the world. As German educator Stephan Marks (2011) notes, writing of his work on the Nazi legacy, the emotion of shame “is a much deeper fear than that of punishment: [shame] is the fear of psychological annihilation, of expulsion from society,” and our mind and body “focus only on escape from the source of the fear” (p. 98). This escape takes the form not only of avoidance – visitors choosing not to enter a museum and therefore not escape their own narrow perspective – but of the same kinds of toxic divisions that simply add to communal precarity. “Obviously,” Marks writes, “unconscious, defended shame is poisoning our relations with arrogance, humiliation, cynicism, and violence” (p. 99). A fear of shame forestalls the healing of community brokenness by perpetuating one group’s pain and another’s blindness. This poison has only spread in the intervening decade since he wrote.

17When exhibitions are censored in ways that avoid causing discomfort to the dominant, all groups lose the possibility of the healing power of what Marks (2011) calls “healthy shame”, which “protects our integrity, so that we know how to act in accordance with our conscience, values, and ideals, so we can look at ourselves in the mirror each day” (p. 97). Accepting and acknowledging that visitors may indeed experience a degree of “healthy shame” – that this discomfort is to be celebrated as the vulnerability inherent in challenging previously unspoken taboos – would make material the oft-repeated mantra of museums as “safe places for unsafe ideas”: safe places to bring precarity out in the open so its shameful fear can be overcome. Addressing this silenced approbation can help the museum world to challenge existing perceptions and promote critical thinking through plural voices and narratives, avoiding what Chimamanda Adichie (2009) refers to as “the danger of a single story.” Rather than aiming for an impossible neutrality, then, museums may instead aim for transparency, being open about the choices they necessarily make in filling their sites, the internal disputes that lead to certain choices over others, and the inevitable mistakes made along the way that lead to critical self-corrections.

Taboos in museology

18In that spirit, we in the International Committee for Museology acknowledge the multiple ways in which scholarship deems itself taboo, too special to be casually undertaken, and therefore its practices serve to silence less-dominant voices. In many ways, “people issues” play a role in museology taboos. For instance, decolonising is a process that involves so much more than a degree of power-sharing, as Shahid Vawda (2019) notes: “It is to question and unmask the epistemological, sometimes the ontological, foundations of such ideas, which inform the knowledge that make the societies and people of Africa, Asia and Latin America ‘invisible’ for the colonisers” (p. 76). Such processes are in their infancy in a field still dominated by scholars (writing in languages) of the global North and West. We pride ourselves on publishing new voices in the ICOFOM Study Series … but we prioritise those voices which had the means to travel to a symposium, the global understanding to make their topic interesting to a diverse audience, the educational background to know the often unwritten – but unbending – rules of academic scholarship (from what a scientific research investigation looks like to how to write a scholarly argument to how to appropriately cite other scholars), and, of course, the ability to convey this information in one of the three official ICOFOM languages. We admit to being uncertain how to reconcile our commitment to global inclusivity with our commitment to the unwritten scholarly code that establishes our place among our peers. Yet the barriers to participation in global meetings and journals are a reminder that equality within the museum community is far from a given.

19As Bertin and Guiragossian (2022) have written, participants in the symposium also led us to question whether all silences in museology are “taboo”. The question seems intrinsically linked to issues of participation and transparency, and to the different voices that can express so many narratives. Here again, selection and deflection come into play. What is the boundary, for instance, between a taboo and the ways in which lines of research are subject to rapid movements of fashion and interest/disinterest? Is the response “no one studies that anymore” indicative of an unacknowledged taboo?

20On the other side, what of the issues that are, today, “fashionable”? Only a few years ago, discussing the legacy of colonialism and the idea of repatriation were anathema to both nations and major museums among the former colonisers, while today decolonisation is a major topic of both scholarly and geopolitical interest, including at our symposium. Is this spotlight just a fad? And does the transition from taboo silence to visibility create a new set of taboos – is it now taboo to not discuss repatriation, for example (Bertin & Guiragossian, 2022)? As another example, collaborative projects are now almost de rigueur for funded efforts, but there is still a great deal of compromise, giving greater power to host museums and funders to the detriment of the communities or groups of people invited to collaborate – and these inequities are much less discussed in the circles of those who have the power to evince change. In similar fashion, ICOM celebrated the rise of LGBTQI+ museums at its 2022 conference, while at the same time celebrating its upcoming 2025 conference in Dubai, where homosexuality can lead to a ten-year prison sentence (Bureau of Democracy, 2021) and there is no legal protection against identity discrimination. The celebration was widely pronounced; the approbation muted, made taboo.

21Weiser (2022) points to the importance of having subaltern and minoritised communities themselves enter the conversations both in the museum and in the university. As curators and scholars, diverse scholars raise questions and provide interpretations that the dominant do not consider. They move their views to the centre of history. “Without marginalised voices taking the lead,” Weiser noted in her Prague address, “I believe we who are not marginalised can never really break the taboos because we will always see ourselves as both the storytellers and the audience.”

22Indeed, most participants at the ICOFOM symposium pointed to the broad spectrum of political and power issues that lurk behind many taboos. These issues were evident throughout the years-long ICOM debate over a renewed definition of “museum,” including both the failure of the initial Western-dominated attempt in 2019 to define its own version of the new “inclusivity” and the successful attempt in 2022, moderated by two representatives of the Global South who focused on creating a fully participatory and transparent process for decision-making. Through our taboos – and our restorative transparencies – we are highlighting the power issues underlying all museum work and the production of knowledge about museums.

23For the taboo issues of power to continue to be addressed, we need to celebrate the uncomfortable dialogues that inevitably occur. For instance, Muthoni Twanga (2022), a Kenyan museologist, insisted in her keynote address at ICOFOM Prague on the need to address the power differentials of our global world. “If your history makes you proud,” she told this roomful of mainly Western museologists, “maybe it’s not history at all”. Or perhaps, we add, a sense of pride is a necessary but contingent reality – necessary to bind one to fellow citizens in a shared project but also necessarily treated cautiously, with an awareness that power dynamics like the legacy of colonialism are also a part of any history – and it is these latter stances that are so often hidden away, unspoken and tabooed. With conflicting perspectives, it can seem difficult, even impossible, to choose the best path forward, but we know that not acknowledging and dealing with our uncertainty or unease is its own kind of taboo.

24Confronting our taboos in museum studies, then, is not just morally important but also imperative for the progress of the field. If we refuse to consider alternatives which might require breaking with tradition, we perpetuate not only the taboo, but the precarity – the feeling that we stand on a precipice from which we are constantly in danger of falling. Stepping away from that false abyss is an exercise in honesty, inclusivity, and intellectual maturity, capable of fostering an environment of intellectual growth and mutual respect. As Bryan Stevenson (2022), founding director of the U.S.’s Legacy Museum – an institution focused on historical and ongoing racial violence – puts it in his welcome video, “It is hard to confront these painful truths. But the powerful thing is, when we have the courage to learn the truth, we open up doors that permit justice, that permit reckoning, that permit healing.”

Structure of the issue

25François Mairesse begins the issue with an overview of three levels of prohibition in the museum world: those dealing more internally with the presentation of objects and subjects or relating to the rules and practices of museum professionals, and a third more external level concerning political and economic inequality in a museal context more generally. As we will see throughout this collection, many of the taboos with which museums struggle have to do with their relationships to their communities and the changing roles both they and the communities are undergoing. First, Rogerio Satil Neves looks at the history and future of identitarian museums, focusing on the rise of LGBTQ+ museums and exhibitions to argue that, by engaging with these communities as counterpublics, such sites symbolise a call for recognition rather than just visibility. Then Julie Botte surveys exhibitions that subvert gender norms and transgress the taboos that enclose female bodies, focusing on three aspects of women’s bodies in museums: the erotic view of female nudity, the display of gynaecological parts, and the discussion of sexual violence. She argues that these initiatives modify the vision of women’s bodies in museums and the relationship between seeing subject and seen object.

26The next section of the issue places into dialogue several writers considering some of the issues broadly raised by decolonisation. First, Clementine Debrosse considers how power dynamics influence what display decisions are made, and who is allowed to make them, for the artefacts and human remains still in the collections of ethnography museums across Europe. Then Mariana Tezoto de Lima looks at how assumptions are perpetuated in public discourse in both the Global North and South over who has the “right” to objects in the repatriation process. The press, she argues, play an important role in moving that discourse into the public arena. Next Leonie Leeder examines the ways that power is perpetuated when a “universal” museum collaborates digitally with Indigenous Maya communities. And Hsiao-Chiang Wang presents her model from Taiwan for improved collaboration with Indigenous communities, in which the values of the community itself subvert traditional, prohibitory practices of museum experts and become the foremost consideration for museal actions.

27The issue ends with two writers considering the benefits and potential pitfalls of innovative museum work First, Nina Robbins tackles the unspoken values assumptions that can impede both community/museum collaboration and student success in the field, proposing via an extended example that open discussion of differing values structures can function as a bridge between museum professionals and municipal stakeholders. Then Elīna Vikmane provides evidence of how the youngest, most digitally savvy staff members may be overworked, their enthusiasm exploited in the contemporary rush toward online, digital content. Working conditions are often a taboo so internalised in institutions committed to doing good that we fail to recognise their existence, and so we end on this sober note that reminds us all to question the secret-sacred amongst ourselves as well as in the outside world.

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M. Elizabeth Weiser, Marion Bertin et Anna Leshchenko, « Introduction: Challenging the silences: Confronting taboos in museums and museology »ICOFOM Study Series, 51(1-2) | 2023, 7-16.

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M. Elizabeth Weiser, Marion Bertin et Anna Leshchenko, « Introduction: Challenging the silences: Confronting taboos in museums and museology »ICOFOM Study Series [En ligne], 51(1-2) | 2023, mis en ligne le 10 octobre 2023, consulté le 07 novembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/iss/4855 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/iss.4855

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Auteurs

M. Elizabeth Weiser

The Ohio State University – Columbus, USA
weiser.23[at]osu.edu

Marion Bertin

Université Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne – Paris, France
As of November 1, 2023
marionbbertin[at]gmail.com

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Anna Leshchenko

Eberhard Karls Universität – Tübingen, Germany
ann.leshchenko[at]gmail.com

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