Throughout human history, the spread of disease has closed borders, restricted civic movement, and fueled fear of the unknown; yet at the same time, it has helped build cultural resilience. On 11 March 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) classified COVID-19 as a pandemic. The novel zoonotic disease, first reported to the WHO in December 2019, was no longer restricted to Wuhan or to China, as the highly contagious coronavirus had spread to more than 60 countries. The public health message to citizens everywhere was to save lives by staying home; the economic fallout stemming from this sudden rupture of services and the impact on people’s well-being was mindboggling. Around the globe museums, galleries, and popular world heritage sites closed (Associated Press 2020). The Smithsonian Magazine reported that all 19 institutes, including the National Zoo and the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), would be closed to the public on 14 March (Daher 2020). On the same day, New Zealand’s borders closed, and the tourism industry, so reliant on international visitors, choked. Museums previously deemed safe havens of society and culture became petri dishes to avoid; local museums first removed toys from their cafés and children’s spaces, then the museum doors closed and staff worked from home. In some cases, front-of-the-house staff were redeployed to support back-of-the-house staff with cataloguing and digitization projects. You could smell fear everywhere.

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Considered by ICOM members as the "backbone" of this organisation , the museum definition is a central part of its Statutes and the best known and most replicated museum-related text in the world. Adopted into national A concept throughout history: some background on the ICOM museum definitionSince its creation in 1946, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) has concerned itself with the definition of specific terms and concepts for the museum field. In the 1950s, ICOM proposed its own definition for the term "museum" that has proven to be an evolving definition throughout the history of this organisation. At the centre of the debates continuing to the present, the definition has set the tone for most of the theoretical and normative discussions conducted within ICOM specialist committees and affiliated organisations.In the late 1950s, while disseminating ICOM's words and perspectives throughout the world, its first director, the French museologist Georges Henri Rivière, emphasised the importance of a museum definition according to ICOM Statutes. The definition that was put forward in different parts of the world stated that:"The museum is a permanent establishment, administered in the general interest, for the purpose of preserving, studying, enhancing by various means and, in particular, of exhibiting to the public for its delectation and instruction groups of objects and specimens of cultural value : artistic, historical, scientific and technological collections, botanical and zoological gardens and aquariums, etc." (Rivière, 1960, p. 12).

The article proposes a postcolonial reflection on the impacts of the ICOM museum definition on the practice of community-based museums and considers the possible effects of engaging these museums in the international conversations for a new definition. It investigates ICOM's internal debates on a new museum definition, resumed since 2016, and its normative, political, and financial effects on the reality of community museums in the peripheries of the global South. By exploring the historical roots of the present debate and its decolonial rhetoric, this paper questions what forms of "decolonisation" are at stake, once again, in the discussions concerning a new museum definition for the 21st century. To demonstrate the impacts of the definition on community museums around the world, the article recurs to the example of Brazilian Social museology, which serves to illuminate how the persistence of political relationships between a centre and its peripheries help to define museum marginality. The ICOM museum definition, conceived as a tool by some central agents to be applied globally in different social contexts, establishes the boundaries between the subjects who have the right to memory and the means to make museums and those who are currently deprived of them.Bruno Brulon Soares is a professor of museology at the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNI-RIO), in Brazil. Currently he is chair of ICOFOM and co-chair of the Standing Committee for the Museum Definition (ICOM Define).

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