Biocultural Territories are Living Museums

Abstract

The decline and exhaustion of museological spaces and other institutions dedicated to safeguarding memory open the horizon for ancestral biotechnologies to bring new forms of critical and purposeful understanding. These transformations challenge long-established institutional models that have historically framed memory as something to be collected, stabilized, and preserved within archival structures. In this context, it becomes necessary to rethink the role of museums not merely as repositories of objects and narratives, but as dynamic spaces capable of engaging with living systems of knowledge.
Biocultural territories are constituted by the wisdom of Indigenous peoples and traditional communities inhabiting the Pan-Amazon, where cosmovisions are articulated with practices of language, cultivation, healing, ecological management, and the intergenerational transmission of knowledge. These territories function as complex knowledge systems in which cultural practices and ecological processes are inseparable. Within them, ancestral biotechnologies operate as forms of experimentation, adaptation, and regeneration that sustain life and social continuity over time.

Such practices tension institutional models of preservation by foregrounding processes of transformation, circulation, and relationality rather than permanence and fixation. From this perspective, ancestral biotechnologies suggest alternative epistemological frameworks through which museums might reconsider their own functions, responsibilities, and alliances with Indigenous and traditional communities. We propose here a reflection on the transition from the museum-archive of hegemonic narratives to the museum-laboratory: living spaces for the activation of memory and for socio-ecological and cultural regeneration. In this sense, museums can become sites of encounter where different systems of knowledge interact, fostering new forms of collaboration, experimentation, and collective imagination about the future of memory, territory, and life.