ABSTRACT
The chapter exposes museum marginality as a trace of neocolonialism and an effect of museums’ authority based on professionalism and scientific knowledge. Looking at the role of the “expert” in museums’ disputes and considering my own positionality in a critical assessment, I will approach some of museums’ current practices and the politics of the sector. My line of argument will draw from the observation of Brazil’s social museology as it has been developing in the last three decades in obedience to international concepts and recommendations while being appropriated by communities. Within this particular context, I’ll seek to evince how marginal groups have been relegated to making their museums in the margins while struggling to “compete” with major institutions supported by the state and legitimised by authoritative knowledge. Community-based museums, either in the so-called global South or in the subaltern experiences of museums in the periphery of richer countries in the North, are, today, a force to be reckoned with in the decolonisation of museology and in the reconstruction of the museum. With their own interpretation of time and of their past, these communities defy the particular conception of time based on progress, improvement and development from an industrialising and colonising “West” that was inherited from European philosophy and still defines cultural and social hierarchies up until our present day.
