Towards a reflexive museology: the history of ICOFOM and the creation of a contemporary discipline for museum theory

The term ‘museology’ has been perceived, in different global contexts, as a field of studies formed by actors organized in specific positions with particular goals. In the 1960s, attempts were made to give museology academic legitimacy in countries from Czechoslovakia to Brazil. In the existing courses of museology, the goal was to achieve improvements in the training and thinking of museology, providing the necessary bases for museum work. Since the 1970s and during the 1980s, the term acquired a more specific meaning for museologists who wished to develop a theory of museology, referring to what some call a science in the making. Those museum professionals and scholars were collaborating in an international committee created in 1977 by ICOM President Jan Jelínek from Czechoslovakia. The International Committee for Museology (ICOFOM) was conceived as a platform for challenging persistent geopolitical divisions in this field of knowledge. Fundamental in those first decades was the work of the committee’s first president, Vinoš Sofka, who built significant bridges between museologies and museologists, and Zbyněk Stránský, who created a theoretical base. Because of their work, museology has been configured as an evolving discipline, which can be confirmed by the history of several existing courses and training programmes that would become university courses, leaving the museums that originally housed them. At the same time, the committee’s first texts and publications were responsible for the construction and circulation of a theoretical corpus which came to be known as the Theory of Museology, encompassing what is today called Museum Theory. This chapter proposes to revisit ICOFOM history from 1977 to 2000, mapping the configuration of a cross-cultural field of knowl- edge that still today bears the traces of the bridges built in the past.