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The legacy and impact of Latin American and Caribbean museology

Vinicius de Moraes Monção
p. 129-134
Cet article est une traduction de :
O legado e o impacto da museologia latino-americana e caribenha [pt]

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1As my opening words, I would like to thank everyone involved in organizing this event. As everyone knows, organizing an event requires months of anticipation and an almost Herculean dedication. In this regard, I thank the active members of the ICOFOM LAC and ICOFOM boards, as well as the staff of the Joaquim Nabuco Foundation and the Museum of the Man of the Northeast, for their promptness, competence, and sponsorship in hosting our annual joint symposium in Recife. I hope the coming days will be positively memorable.

2The theme of this panel invites us to think about and discuss the legacy and impact of Latin American and Caribbean museology. If its enunciation immediately evokes a sense of valuing our region in academic, technical, and intellectual production, it also figuratively triggers a light of attention and questioning. After all, what do we seek to understand with this evocation? What metrics can be incorporated to analyze this assertion?

3For this challenge, I have chosen to assume my interdisciplinary position that orbits, not always linearly and consistently, between the fields of pedagogy, history, museology, and museum education. It is from an interdisciplinary (or transdisciplinary) perspective that I will share my propositions.

4In this regard, I ask for your permission to begin with a story, possibly of Hindu origin, dated I believe a few centuries ago:

In an Indian city lived seven blind sages. Since their advice was always excellent, all those with problems would consult them. Although they were friends, there was a certain rivalry among them, and they occasionally argued about who was the wisest. One day, a merchant arrived in the city riding a huge elephant. The blind sages had never touched such an animal before and rushed to the street to meet it. The first sage felt the animal’s belly and declared: “This is a gigantic and very strong being! I can feel its muscles, and they do not move; they are like walls.” “Nonsense!” said the second sage, touching the elephant’s tusk, “This animal is sharp like a spear, a weapon of war.” “You are both mistaken,” retorted the third sage, who was grasping the elephant’s trunk, “This animal is identical to a snake! But it doesn’t bite, as it has no teeth. It is a gentle and soft serpent.” “You are all completely deluded!” shouted the fourth sage, who was moving the elephant’s ears. “This animal does not resemble any other. Its movements are undulating, as if its body were a giant, walking curtain.” The fifth sage said confidently, “See? You are all entirely wrong!” He was irritated as he touched the elephant’s small tail. “This animal is like a rock with a little string attached to its body. I can even hang onto it.” And so, they spent hours debating and shouting. Finally, the seventh blind sage arrived, guided by a child. Listening to the discussion, he asked the boy to draw the figure of the elephant on the ground. When he traced the outlines of the drawing, he realized that all the sages were both right and wrong at the same time. He thanked the boy and stated, “This is how men behave before the truth. They grasp only a part, think it is the whole, and remain foolish!”

5The story “The Blind Men and the Elephant” allows us to reflect on various aspects of knowledge production, such as our stance toward the object under analysis; our relationship with other fields of knowledge; the use of instruments and their procedures; the relationship with the other; and aspects related to accessibility and inclusion (which do not necessarily refer to the visual impairment of the characters in the story). Surely, other reflections can be drawn, and I would be happy to hear them during our discussion.

The world as an archipelago

6Recently, I came across the book Conversations of the Archipelago, based on a conversation/interview between Édouard Glissant, the Martinican philosopher, and Swiss art historian Hans Ulrich Obrist, published in Brazil by Cobogó in 2023. Among propositions and reflections, Glissant and Obrist advocate for the idea of archipelagos as a world/place made up of islands, united by interdependence and the coexistence of differences, in contrast to the grandeur of the continent that isolates us from the sea. The archipelago, as I understand it here, serves as a metaphor for the idea of “a world of many worlds.”

7The reference to the archipelago is linked to the idea of globality as a replacement for globalization. According to Glissant and Obrist (2023), “globalization reduces societies, makes them follow a single model, attacking them from top to bottom, diminishing them” (p. 23). Globality, on the other hand, does not homogenize culture: “It produces differences capable of giving rise to the new” (Glissant & Obrist, 2023, p. 23). For Maria Inês Coimbra Guedes (2012),

Édouard Glissant thinks of the world as an inextricable whole where the imperative to fight with all one’s might to defend the diversity of languages is driven by the political will to save identities threatened either by colonization or globalization. (p. 183)

8Diversity for Glissant and Obrist refers to what he calls creolization, in which cultures come into contact at a certain time and place, resulting in something unexpected and completely unpredictable in an infinite process. This is because the world “is a mixed world, it is an entanglement. The world is inextricable” (Glissant & Obrist, 2023, p. 26). It is important to note that cultural contacts are not always harmonious, positive, and conflict-free. Here, I open a parenthesis to suggest that the term creolization can be related to mestizaje, hybridization, syncretism, etc. In all cases, something unexpected is created (I emphasize that it is not consumed or absorbed uncritically, but rather from a perspective in which subjects are agents of historical and social processes). Both terms, globality and creolization, have been extensively and deeply discussed by various scholars in the humanities and social sciences, such as Néstor Canclini and others. As Glissant and Obrist aptly point out, “creolization is not a state of identity. It is a process that never ends” (2023, p. 27).

Transnational museological community

9In recent years, due to my research in the history of education and my involvement in proposing projects for ICOFOM LAC, I have engaged with certain theoretical and methodological discussions that I consider quite relevant and that can be applied to museology discussions. These involve the transnational approach as an analytical perspective aimed at scrutinizing the relations of social constitution in a given time and space, starting from the principle that the term transnational differs from international. According to Hannerz (2000), the former refers to the actions of individuals/subjects, social movements, families, and non-institutionalized and non-state groups, while the latter refers to state subjects and corporate actors. The idea of transnational refers to “activities initiated and maintained by non-institutional actors, whether organized groups or networks of individuals, across national borders” (Portes, 2006, p. 210).

10When considering the possibilities of transnational museum studies, I draw inspiration from an existing theoretical and methodological movement in the field of history that adopts a perspective and focus that helps think about the transits, flows of ideas, knowledge, museum subjects and models, overcoming the notions of geopolitical borders, the paradigm of unilateral cultural transfer, and the recognition of multicentric zones.

11Within the transnational perspective, “methodological nationalism” and its product, “epistemic blindness,” are perspectives/concepts that do not favor the perception and understanding of the processes of creolization and/or hybridization within the dynamism of the exchange system.

12According to Octávio Sacramento (2017),

the expansion of so-called global studies [constitutes] a certain trend towards including in their sphere the research and reflections that break with traditional “methodological nationalism,” in which the boundaries of the nation-state were considered the natural limits of society and the framework of reference for explaining its structures, processes, and practices. (p. 288)

13Furthermore, according to Wimmer and Schiller (2022),

Methodological nationalism thus inhibited a true understanding of the nature and limits of the modern project. It produced a systematic blindness to the paradox that modernization led to the creation of national communities in the midst of a society supposedly dominated by modern principles. (p. 304)

14Similarly, Diana Vidal (2019) considers the transnational perspective as a possibility for overcoming the modernity paradigm and its product, epistemic blindness, as she considers the permeabilities that exist in social, political, economic, and cultural exchanges. When we shift to our context, we can think about the mestizajes of museum processes on an international scale that feed back into the institutional experiences scattered across the globe and among various regions, without ignoring the asymmetries constitutive of the miserable processes of extractive colonization and a wealth-accumulating society that generates inequalities.

15From an analytical perspective that questions the naturalness attributed to the “national,” the notions of boundaries, territories, border zones, and frontiers are once again brought into debate. Borders are not always solid enough to prevent crossings. Their porosity must be considered. Thus:

  • We can understand borders as zones of intercultural contact and conflict,

  • Their porosity can be seen as an opportunity for contact and fertility for a history of the movement of people, objects, and models that are mutually reinforcing,

  • Understanding boundaries from a transnational perspective contributes to overcoming the perception of a one-way flow of ideas and knowledge, usually seen as flowing from the “center” to the “periphery.” It allows us to envision the possibility of geographical and temporal dispersion in complex modes of appropriation.

16The challenge of transnationalism has been utilized by researchers involved in the history of museums: Andrea Meyer and Benedicte Savoy have discussed the role of the museum in the constitution of modern states and their geopolitical dynamics in a context of questioning the certainties engendered by modernity. Stefanie Heraeus, Sabine Skott, and Alessandra Galizzi Kroegel have addressed the circulation of architectural and exhibition models. Kroegel has also analyzed the role of publications on museums in shaping disciplinary thought in museology. Thomas Adam has pointed out the role of study trips commissioned by museums and research institutions as a means of circulating ideas and forming projects between states that go beyond the perspective of the constitution of national identities. Other studies examine collection formation, legal and illegal acquisition, piracy, and loans.

17Quoting Meyer and Savoy (2014), the transnational approach has contributed:

to this growing theoretical turn towards research approaches that seek to transcend national borders, both empirically and methodologically. On the one hand, the idea present in the current writing of history is that nations do not emerge naturally but are the results of social processes and practices, and therefore, projections. (p. 5)

Looking at Latin America and the Caribbean

18The effort to establish and maintain a transnational museological community in Latin America and the Caribbean has been a subject of action by ICOFOM-LAC over the decades. However, it is in recent years that we have observed a closer and more continuous movement of contact with the Caribbean region. (I apologize in advance if I have overlooked any previous movements.) In this sense, I would like to recall the projects “Latin American and Caribbean Perspectives for the New Definition of Museums: Decolonization of Thought and Theory in Museums to Discuss the Definition of Museums” (2021) and the project “History of Museology in Latin America and the Caribbean: Fundamental Collections” (2022-2023), both funded by ICOM’s Strategic Allocation Review Committee.

19In fact, since the times of ICOFOM LAM, the production and circulation of knowledge from these lands have been a strict effort to establish and legitimize Latin American and Caribbean museological thought. Among the approaches in structuring a Latin American and Caribbean historiographic and museological perspective is the production of biographical texts whose agencies and experiences allow us to identify the various forms undertaken in projects of formation, establishment of partnership networks, and even in the formation of schools of thought that have been renegade or forgotten by traditionalist historiographies and museological approaches strongly marked by European thought.

Final comments

20To think about the impacts and legacy, it is fundamentally important to consider that we do not have the same resources and possibilities to act equally on the international stage. The lingua franca of science, commerce, and international communication (English) is not the language of most of us. Our currencies are always sidelined, and we are always haunted by financial and political crises.

21The grammatical connotation of unity for “Latin American and Caribbean” needs to be revised. We need to engage in the exercise of establishing connections between centers of museological production in this vast region, creating a polycentric network. Here, I refer to Glissant’s figure of the archipelago as a possibility for the constitution of a transnational community. The relationship between centers in a polycentric system cannot be fixed or permanent. It requires constant reconfiguration. Its beauty lies in the dynamism that comes from exchanges, waves, and movements of subjects, artifacts, and ideas.

22In this direction, I would like to add the question of what role ICOFOM should play in the establishment and maintenance of a transnational museological community that recognizes and values diverse experiences not established in a binary flow of center-periphery. Contrasting the terms regional and transnational refers to overcoming boundaries for a given region that fit into historically consolidated and molded ideas and placing them rather in another place on the scale of geopolitical analysis.

23In the examples cited regarding discussions about museums and the transnational, it is possible to observe a tendency for research to approach discussions on transnationalism centered in the European and American contexts. To insert ourselves into these discussions, we need to look at our Latin American and Caribbean trajectories to integrate into the networks of ongoing discussion and mark our presence and contribution.

24The possibility to strengthen our community lies in transcending multiple borders through the creation of networks of subject flows, knowledge, projects, and ideas. This requires overcoming binary perspectives, such as producer and consumer, local and global, towards notions of prosumer and glocal. Acting with a transnational perspective does not mean automatically fitting into global studies. Research in the humanities and social sciences and its artisanal dimension allows for a patchwork composition, obviously respecting the affiliations of thought.

25Paraphrasing Savoy and Skott (2014, p. 88), from the transnational perspective, we can see how museum models (and here I include museology) are developed that transcend borders, how they circulate, are accepted, adapted, and established as standards. Thus, what are the potentialities and limitations for considering the impact of Latin American and Caribbean museology from a transnational perspective in the current context?

26The establishment of a community (transnational or not) requires that we increasingly talk to each other and not about each other. If the blind men from the story told at the beginning of this presentation had talked more to each other, they would have identified the entirety of the pachyderm. Fortunately, I believe we are on the right path when we come together to discuss aspects of a collective and community agenda. I hope that some of the propositions presented here may resonate and contribute to the challenge of producing socially committed museological knowledge and practices.

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Bibliographie

Glissant, E. & Obrist, H. U. (2023). Conversas do arquipélago. Cobogó.

Guedes, M. I. C. (2012). O imaginário das línguas. Ipotesi, 16(1), 183-185.

Hannerz, U. (2014). Transnational research. In Bernard, H. R. (Ed.), Handbook of methods in cultural anthropology (pp. 325-256). Second edition. Rowman & Littlefield.

Sacramento, O. (2017). Sociedade, espaço e fluxos: reflexões sobre processos transnacionais. Tempo Social, 29(2), 287-304.

Meyer, A. & Savoy, B. (2014). Towards a transnational history of museums. In Blunck, L., Savoy, B., & Shalem, A. (Eds.), The museum is open. (pp. 1-16). De Gruyter.

Portes, A. (2006). Estudo sobre as migrações contemporâneas: Transnacionalismo, empreendedorismo e a segunda geração. Fim-de-século.

Savoy, B. & Skott, S. (2014). A European museum-cocktail around 1900: The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. In Blunck, L.,Savoy, B., & Shalem A. (Eds.), The museum is open (pp. 77-88). De Gruyter.

Vidal, D. G. (2019). História transnacional da educação: (Des)conexões entre Brasil e a New Education Fellowship (1920-1948). In Arata, N. & Pineau, P. (Eds.), Latinoamérica: La educación y su historia: Nuevos enfoques para su debate y enseñanza. (pp. 119-134). Editorial de la Faculdad de Filosofia y Letras Universidad de Buenos Aires.

Wimmer, A. & Schiller, N. (2002). Methodological nationalism and beyond: Nation-state building, migration and the social sciences. Global Networks, 2(4), 301-334.

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Vinicius de Moraes Monção, « The legacy and impact of Latin American and Caribbean museology »ICOFOM Study Series, 52-2 | 2024, 129-134.

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Vinicius de Moraes Monção, « The legacy and impact of Latin American and Caribbean museology »ICOFOM Study Series [En ligne], 52-2 | 2024, mis en ligne le 08 novembre 2024, consulté le 10 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/iss/6137 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12oa3

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Vinicius de Moraes Monção

Universidade Federal Fluminense – Niterói, Brazil

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