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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Anthropology and its institutions have come under increased pressure to focus critical attention on the way they produce, steward, and manage cultural knowledge. However, in spite of the discipline’s reflexive turn, many museums remain encumbered by Enlightenment-derived legitimating conventions. Although anthropological critiques and critical museology have not sufficiently disrupted the majority paradigm, certain exhibitionary projects have served to break with established theory and practice. The workshop described in this article takes these nonconforming “interruptions” as a point of departure to consider how paradigm shifts and local museologies can galvanize the museum sector to promote intercultural understanding and dialogue in the context of right-wing populism, systemic racism, and neoliberal culture wars.

While museums are perceived as institutions dedicated to the dissemination and exchange of culturally diverse knowledges, museum scholarship has been hampered by a lack of multilingual networks and publications necessary for the exchange of museological perspectives between different linguistic, regional, and national communities. At the same time, the museum decolonization movement, the move from monocultural to pluricultural societies, the political resurgence of cultural essentialism, escalating environmental deterioration, and the international impact of current migration crises—by both uniting and dividing peoples—have clarified the need for institutions to socially and intellectually engage with the increasingly complex global flows and disruptions of people and ideas.

This paper describes and expands on the discussions held at a symposium at the Research Center for Material Culture in the Netherlands in February 2020, which was held as part of the planning of an upcoming “Amazonia” exhibition to be curated at that institution by some of the authors. The symposium invited curators and museum directors who had recently carried out projects with Amazonian communities to share their experiences with co‐production and co‐curation. The discussion and this paper aim to be a reflexive critical first step before reaching out to potential partners in South America. This paper supplements discussions on participative museology by examining the underlying frameworks of an exhibition project at its outset, in addition to contributing, as happens more commonly, post‐rationalizations in a final written evaluation. The discussion furthermore contributes to exhibition co‐curation by focusing on Amazonian‐European collaborations, which are under‐represented in Anglophone museological literature.