Towards the pluriversal museum: from epistemic violence to ecologies of knowledges

Abstract

ABSTRACT Climate change, species extinction and accelerating inequalities are manifestations of a more fundamental crisis facing humanity: the global dominance of a capitalist/colonialist world order based on logics of extraction and exploitation. The modern, “universal” museum is implicated in this history. It is not only that the accumulation of exotic things was made possible through mercantile and colonial territorial expansion, but the transformation of such things into “objects of knowledge” and their incorporation into universalizing knowledge systems, given architectural expression in the museum, involved forms of epistemic violence that rendered other ways of knowing, understanding and being in the world non-existent. As part of the project of decolonizing the museum, this article questions whether this process of “epistemicide” was indeed so complete, considers whether marginalized forms of knowledge may be reactivated in historical collections, and imagines the role of the “pluriversal museum” in contributing to the shaping of more just and sustainable planetary futures.