Journée d’études à l’ENS – “Museum Orders, Epistemic Disorders. Documenting tensions”

In today’s (post)colonial world, marked by socioeconomic inequities, the (post-)ethnographic museum, which contains the material evidence of colonial processes, crystallizes a dialectic between established orders (the ordering of collections and a “scientific” discourse) and maintained disorders (cosmological, political and academic inequalities that are still effective between states/populations). This type of institution is today subject to deep tensions: on the one hand, they are now places where indigenous voices that were once made invisible are heard and they are opening up to ‘decolonial’ perspectives; on the other hand, they are based on collections that still bear the scars of violence, domination and even extermination, with objects reterritorialized in epistemes that are exogenous to them. We also note that by adopting “decolonial” paradigms and in-depth dialogues (which is welcome), (post-)ethnographic museums maintain their epistemic pre-eminence on the international scene, and in a way phagocytize the very criticisms that they have generated against themselves. Our approach to these difficulties will be rather documentary: if the museum is a place where an epistemology is constructed to document non-Western ensembles and objects (with underlying violence), it is in itself the historical document of the paradigms and policies that have structured it. We therefore propose to study the tensions, hiatuses and frictions that exist between museum institutions, the epistemes they perform and the political and economic contexts that determine them, based on specific case studies of different geocultural areas around the globe. It will also be a question of evoking initiatives outside the walls of (post-)ethnographic museums that allow us to take another look at these institutions.

Zoom link :
https://cnrs.zoom.us/j/92108086025?pwd=OIzsz1f7gW5E77f4dtuYnmg03BiaPl.1
ID : 921 0808 6025
Code : 3Nk2cu