Museum Worlds

In mid-2025 an online meeting was held for editors of international museum journals. It was clear from this gathering that there are serious issues facing not just the museum sector, but also universities, academic journals, and indeed publishing in general. While the world is grappling with several geopolitical conflicts, economic uncertainty, and accelerating climate crises, the cultural and tertiary sectors are dealing with declining funding, heavy workloads, new and emerging technologies including AI, and fragmentation of the media landscape with the resulting crisis of trust in scholarship, and the rise of hate, misinformation, and disinformation. This has meant, for many journals, that it is difficult to attract submissions, particularly from mid and late career scholars, and to maintain diverse and inclusive content from around the globe. There is also a shortage of readers to peer review articles, and even getting e-books to review is sometimes tricky. Despite the fact that research, critical thinking and debate are needed more than ever, the future of many journals is at stake.

This special section proposes somewhat provocatively that sound is a “museum outcast” in need of recovery. To be more precise, its contributions address a contradiction: On the one hand, verbal arts, music, and dance as practiced in ritual and politics on the local level and at major international events are a pivotal dimension of Indigenous and Afro-Latin American knowledges. Accordingly, these auditory expressions have been intensively recorded, collected, and stored for research in the fields of anthropology, ethnomusicology, and linguistics. The long-term existence of numerous specialized sound archives bear witness to this development. But on the other hand, in many ways sound remains the stepchild of anthropological museums. The separate archiving of the “material” and “immaterial” aspects of sonorities has resulted in long-standing neglect of the sense of hearing: Museums specialized in collecting physical objects like musical instruments, while audio recordings were reserved for storage at sound archives (Lewy 2020: 93). In addition, many institutional sound archives focused solely on either music or speech: for example, the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv only collected “traditional” music, while the Berlin Lautarchiv worked on oratory.

This article examines the historical dispersion and fragmentation of Iskonawa cultural heritage across museums and archives in North America, Europe, and Peru, and explores how these collections might be reassembled to support current revitalization efforts. It traces how both material and immaterial objects were shaped by the trajectories of collectors, scholars, and institutions. Drawing on long-term collaborative research, the article highlights initial engagements between the Iskonawa and these collections, while addressing the barriers they face in accessing them. It argues that a global collection reassemblage could mark a major milestone for the grassroots Iskonawa movement—led by youth seeking to reclaim their ethnic identity and revitalize their culture and language—by providing essential resources to sustain and expand their efforts.

This article discusses historical Indigenous sound recordings and their role as modes of existence. These recordings connect the recording location (Parque de Tumucumaque, Brazil), the recording researcher (Daniel Schöpf), the recording period (1970s and 1980s), the associated heritage community (Aparai-Wayana) with its cultural bearers (Ikuyukpë Apalai), the museum archive (Musée d'ethnographie de Genève), and the exhibition context (sound installations/sound stories). The way these recordings are treated as socially active entities reflects the ethical protocols developed by representatives of the Aparai and Wayana. These protocols provide a foundation for the ethical handling of these peoples’ sound recordings in exhibition spaces: compliance with their ownership categories balances the public visualization of Indigenous sound practices in a responsible way.

This conversation with Francy Baniwa took place in January 2026 just after Ingrid Kummels's visit to the exhibition Amazônia: Indigenous Creations and Futures at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac. It featured a sound installation representing an initiation ritual through an audio recording of women's dialogue with the sacred animals or Kowai (referred to as Yuruparí by other Upper Rio Negro clans). The sound installation was based on Francy Baniwa's research and her book Umbigo do mundo [Navel of the World]. In the conversation she explains musicality based on women's interaction with the sacred animals, which are often misinterpreted in scholarship as “sacred flutes.” Indigenous women's knowledge needs to be conveyed through translation, writing, hearing, seeing and the emotions experienced during rituals.

To what extent do the Asháninka and Nomatsigenga of the Peruvian Central Rainforest exercise control over their recorded sonic arts kept in diverse sound archives ranging from institutional repositories to the collections of individual anthropologists? Indigenous teachers who reactivate original song-dances as a pedagogical tool also rely on the accessibility of historical recordings. This article traces how the return of materials from an activist archive resulted in the wider process of collaboration with a Native Community to develop Amasonic archiving: advancing relations between diverse sound archives and the originator community to prioritize Nomatsigenga and Asháninka epistemologies in a new archival format. The opportunities offered by re-archiving are assessed by assembling and hosting sonic legacies in ways that are meaningful and empowering to the originator communities today.

This article addresses the issue of the persistence of ethnographic and linguistic materials of Indigenous communities in private collections, and the process of reunification, digital re-archiving, and community devolution. The four collections encompass oratory, music, ritual discourse, and images that the author recently returned to the Manoki and Mỹky communities in the southern Brazilian Amazon. These materials were collected by Robert E. Meader (texts and photos from the 1940s and 1950s), Luis Fernández (musical recordings), Ruth Monserrat and Elisabeth Amarante (sound recordings from the 1980s and 1990s), and Gisela Pauli (sound recordings from the 1990s). For the Manoki and Mỹky, the resurfacing of these materials at a time when they are reclaiming their culture and endangered language represents nothing short of a miraculous return of lost voices.

This article explores digital register, archiving, and representation of folk music traditions in Venezuela. Drawing on projects developed in Caracas and supported by the Latin Grammy Cultural Foundation, it examines how audiovisual documents of traditional music, such as the Christ Child pilgrimage, Diversiones (street theaters), and diverse joropo practices were curated and presented through websites that function as virtual museums. Central to these initiatives is an understanding of sound not as a mere component of website audiovisuals but instead as integral to the events they represent, and to the formation, resilience, and transmission of musical identity. The article highlights challenges related to sustainability, technical quality, and institutional fragility while advocating for proactive archiving, community validation, and sustainable funding models to ensure that living traditions remain accessible and meaningful.

Museum collections enable us to learn and unlearn about the world in a diverse way. This special section delves into how museum collections can be activated and reimagined by shifting traditional narratives and partaking in alternative forms of knowledge-making. It explores how museum collections are mobilized by different groups of people and considers the role they play in today's society. The section encompasses a diverse range of topics (Indigenous curation, Sikh art, student collaboration and human remains) from different parts of the world (Brazil, Canada, Germany and the USA), as envisaged by artists, museum curators, researchers and Indigenous collaborators and knowledge holders.

This article explores the collaborative process of creating the first Indigenous-curated ethnographic collection at the National Museum of Indigenous Peoples in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Led by Francy Baniwa, an Indigenous anthropologist, and supported by a UNESCO project, the initiative aimed to document Baniwa ceramic traditions while centering Indigenous perspectives. The project sought to decolonize museum practices by incorporating audiovisual materials, oral histories, and Indigenous knowledge systems. The article concludes with a conversation between Baniwa and coauthor Julia Sá Earp, reflecting on the challenges and possibilities of Indigenous curation, the role of women in preserving cultural practices, and the importance of bridging Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds through collaborative research and museum practices.

The opening of the Narinder Singh Kapany & Satinder Kaur Kapany Sikh Art Collection Gallery at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts provides a timely opportunity to explore alternative modalities of caring and curating by giving voice to alternative sense-making. This article conveys some reflections born out of the interactions with diasporic artists who tied their own stories to the historical corpus that was conceived through the collector's own bias and mission. Adopting Sikhi (continuous learning) may provide a meaningful curatorial approach that allows contemporary diasporic artists to assert their agency and modes of self-representation, as in the case of Keerat Kaur's Sweet Speech exhibition.

This article examines a university–museum collaboration centered on the collections of the Museum of European Cultures (Museum Europäischer Kulturen [MEK]), which include objects often considered “difficult” to display within the museum's current curatorial framing of “Europe.” Drawing on two student-led projects that engaged the MEK's collections through speculative, embodied practices of making, crafting, and fabulation, we explore how such process-oriented and collaborative experimentation can open new paths for reshaping long-standing curatorial habits. We argue that by embracing the messiness and uncertainties inherent in such multimodal collaborations, we may begin to challenge existing curatorial frameworks, and generate possibilities for institutional unlearning.

For archaeologists and anthropologists, human remains offer direct insight into the past. In museums, there is hardly an “artifact” more visceral and informative than the remains of the dead. Ethical concerns over their excavation, collection, and display have grown, particularly regarding remains obtained through racial and colonial violence. Drawing on mortuary archaeology, museum studies, death studies, forensic anthropology, and legal theory, this article develops an integrative framework for understanding how the public encounters human remains in a single case study: the Hyrtl crania at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, PA, USA. Through this example, the article explores how institutions might navigate the enduring ethical challenges posed by human remains in museums and how processes of learning and unlearning can guide more responsible stewardship.

This article presents the outcomes of a scoping exercise undertaken by the research project Mobilising VOC Collections for New Global Stories (MOB-VOC) to identify the extent of Dutch East India Company [Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC)] shipwreck artifacts held institutionally. The project, funded by the Australian Research Council (LP210300960), aims to investigate the interpretation and legacy of the VOC in the context of Australia through international partnerships. To build a more robust understanding of the extent of VOC shipwreck material that could be consulted for our research, the MOB-VOC project reviewed public available information (such as published material, online collection databases and exhibition catalogs) for the current location and scope of objects extracted from identified VOC shipwrecks or shipwrecks carrying cargo for the VOC market.

New institutionalism (NI) seems to be the last major curatorial movement to gain broad support, bringing together many curators, mainly from Western Europe, particularly wealthier northern countries. Emerging in the early 2000s, it laid the groundwork for smaller, more specialized curatorial movements that followed, such as the educational turn, activist curating, and curatorial engagements with decoloniality, feminism, and LGBTQ+ issues. Despite its limitations, revisiting NI is critical for understanding how it shaped contemporary curatorial thought and why many of its bold propositions remain only partially fulfilled. By examining the barriers to its implementation and its resonance with today's challenges, we can evaluate whether its ideas still hold relevance and explore how they might be reactivated in current curatorial practices.

In the early 1970s, prompted by Henry Wassén, the director of Gothenburg's Ethnographic Museum (hereafter GEM), three women of Scandinavian heritage in Chile facilitated the transportation of pre-Columbian artifacts to Sweden. These women occupied different positions within the Scandinavian community in Chile. Ingeborg Lindberg, a non-doctoral museum worker, had resided in Chile for most of her adult life, with minimal connection to her relatives and heritage within the Swedish-speaking community in Finland. Bente Bittmann, a Danish anthropologist, had been working in various parts of Latin America, including Chile since 1967. The third individual, Martha, was a Swedish tourist who visited Chile for the first time during the winter of 1969/1970. As Martha's involvement in these events lacked professional capacity, she will be referred to by her first name only in this article.

Over the last few decades, cultural diplomacy has considerably expanded in terms of arguments and practices. Starting as an extended strategy of foreign policy, it now implies various practices (and modes of communication) that are related to the use of culture for cooperation between countries, which is generally perceived as instrumentalism (Ang et al. 2015; Clarke 2016; Cull 2009). Various cultural forms, such as art, music, films, and exhibitions, have been adopted for policy implementation, and this adaptation is the point at which numerous discussions on instrumentality have taken place. Instrumentalism in culture is defined as the tendency “to use cultural ventures and investments as a means or instrument to attain goals in other areas” (Vestheim 1994: 65) and, within cultural policy areas, its political impact on the arts has mainly been discussed. Considering its diplomatic nature and purpose, cultural diplomacy has been placed at the center of instrumentalist discussions. The abundant resources on this topic mainly consider instrumentalism as either good or bad by focusing on its negative impact. Governmental intervention and its adverse impact on the artistic quality and bureaucracy in the field are among the most pertinent issues addressed (Nisbett 2013), which are highly sensitive and controversial across the art and cultural sectors.

Tim Boon (TB): If we accept, as is now a museum commonplace, that one object can have different meanings for different people—that objects are polysemic—then the same is surely true of lyrics. A case in point is Tom Wait's lovely song ‘Broken Bicycles’, which metaphorically describes a junkyard as an orphanage for unwanted items, which feels like a provocative metaphor for the core business of museums. After all, orphanages, despite their undoubted social value, carry a reputational burden of second best: a scrap yard's broken bicycle wouldn't be in an orphanage if it had a loving family. This is relevant to the discussion in this piece because it nails the ambiguous status of museum objects: both treasured and kept out of the way because inconvenient and useless except for their curator-assigned value.

Katarzyna Puzon (KP): Thank you for speaking to me, Chantal. Maybe we can start by talking about your background and museum career, and then we move on to the origins and history of the University of Antananarivo's Institute of Civilizations Museum of Art and Archaeology [Institut de Civilisations Musée d'Art et d'Archéologie—(ICMAA)], where we are currently speaking on the occasion of the transfer of sound recordings made with Malagasy prisoners of war in Germany during the First World War. This is also the reason why I am here, that is, to hand over digital copies of these recordings, which until recently were stored exclusively in the Lautarchiv of the Humboldt University in Berlin. We will discuss this in more detail later in the conversation.

Deconstruir Colonialismo, Descolinazar o Imaginário. Colonialismo Português em áfrica: Mitos e Realidades [Deconstructing Colonialism, Decolonizing the Imaginary. Portuguese Colonialism in Africa: Myths and Realities] (National Museum of Ethnology, Lisbon)

New Presences and Abstinences in Times of Healing: Renewing the World from Amazonia. Exhibiting Amazonian Indigenous Rituals as Relational Ontologies (Museum of Gold, Bogotá, 2 December 2023–4 August 2024) Mariana Almaraz Reyes and Ingrid Kummels

Framing Amazonies as an Attempt to Reconnect the Object–Sound Divide (Musée des Confluences, Lyon, 18 April 2025–8 February 2026) Cristiana Bertazoni

The Opening of the Museum of West African Art, Benin City Ann Marie Peña

Remembering Geneva in the Colonial World (Museum of Ethnography, Geneva) by Julia Binter

Chandigarh Architecture Museum (Chandigarh) by Neha Khetrapal

Historia za Tanzania (Humboldt Forum, Berlin) by Mareike Späth

Grand Egyptian Museum, Cairo by Heba Abd el-Gawad

Post-Future/Astana: Venice/GEN1 (National Museum of Kazakhstan) Hanlin Yang

Memory of the White Mountains and Pine River (Jilin Provincial Museum) by Zheng Zhang

Ku a Lanakila! Expressions of Sovereignty in Early Territorial Hawai‘i, 1900–1920 (Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Honolulu) by Halena Kapuni-Reynolds

The Museum of Babel: Meditations on the Metahistorical Turn in Museography, Mark Thurner. Abingdon: Routledge, 2025.

The Future Is Indigenous: Stories from the new Native North America Hall at the Field Museum, Alaka Wali and Tom Skwerski, eds. Oxford: BAR Publishing, 2024.

Deaccessioning Museum Objects: Transparency and Ethics in Disposal Practice, Jennifer Durrant. Abingdon: Routledge, 2025.

Who Owns Beauty?, Bénédicte Savoy. Trans. by Andrew Brown. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2025.

Das Museum dekolonisieren? Kolonialität und museale Praxis in Berlin, Brücke-Museum, Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, Daniela Bystron, and Anne Fäser, eds. Bielefeld: transcript, 2022.

Ghosts Behind Glass: Encountering Extinction in Museums, Dolly Jørgensen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025.