De-centring museums in Indigenous community engagement

Abstract

Abstract Museums have been critiqued for upholding colonial networks and asymmetrical power relationships, but critical museologies and Indigenous community action have resulted in interruptions to dominant paradigms. This chapter introduces some models that have been used to frame these developments, including the ‘contact zone’, noting, however, that multilingual world museologies outside of anglophone publications have frequently been overlooked. In the case of archaeological material ‘allochronism’ has often alienated contemporary people from their own histories and collections, de-politicizing their display through the spectacle of exotic and distant civilizations. How museums manipulate time and history is examined in this chapter with specific reference to the Maya. There have been few museum projects about the pre-contact Maya that position historical cultures within contemporary Maya theoretical frameworks. Two projects in which contemporary ancestral knowledge in the Yucatan is incorporated into museums with pre-contact Maya collections are presented here, highlighting how Indigenous archaeologies can overturn interpretational frameworks.