Using the past in the present for the future

This special issue is the culmination of several years of research and associated workshops in which professionals and scholars came together to talk about their work in and with museum and archival collections across the Pacific, the Americas and Europe. In this introduction, we discuss the conceptual frame of this issue—‘the museum as archive’—which is geared towards ‘using the past in the present and future’. Such cultural futures perspective is in line with recent literature on historical material in archives, which theorises their contemporaneous and utopian dimensions, creative potentialities, and decolonial affordances. In contrast to the salvage paradigm of the late nineteenth century in which material collected in museums and archives served to chronicle ‘lost’ culture and cement racial and economic inequalities, this information often provides vital data for current tribal reclamation, revitalisation and social and cultural development. What is the relationship between the historical material gathered in collections and contemporary projects of decolonisation and Indigenisation? What happens when archival and museum collections are used in the present and mobilised towards the future? And what happens if we approach archives, libraries, galleries and museums, not only as mechanisms of collecting, ordering and governing, but also as dynamic-contingent processes, heterotopian spaces, and living resources for creative interventions and utopian (re)imaginations

Decolonization · Futures contract · Indigenous · Material culture · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis · Philosophy, History, and Historiography

• Unsettling collections, revitalizing culture

  Open Access•Anna Weinreich, Vicki Couzens•Journal of Material Culture•2026

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