Museum and Pandemics a Cautionary Tale from History: Impact, Innovations, Learning from Crises

The invisible virus created a terror among the most survived ‘Wise Man’ (human) who survived millions of year and seen uncountable epidemic challenges and now packed in a home with less facility. The question is now where we go from here and does this trauma will leave a permanent epidemic marks on our civilization like happened in history? The world don’t want to visit those dark areas happened in early. But now this Novel COVID-19 created a whole new ball game where the entire world came into the pitch and ultimately the entire community leading to psychiatric illness. The potential of museum personals is now has been challenged to create meaningful experiences for the civilizations to overcome from this pandemic situation which is central to their service as a champion tool to identify the social values of the communities. As agents of trusted institutions the museum personals specifically the museum anthropologists are facing challenges to overcome from these challenges of inclusion and diversity and the difficulty of navigating complex social issues in this isolation situation. The healing process of our societies after the COVID-19 crisis will be long and complex for many museums as places of meeting and learning for societies. Museums have important role to play now to repair and strengthening the social fabric of communities which are affected due to this pandemic. “Governments all over the world have taken necessary measures to stop the virus from spreading, by closing schools and public spaces, and especially Museums. Billions of people have been confined to their homes, and the number keeps growing. During this period many museums and museum personals are finding ways to keep engage the people with the museums and ICOM as representing the international museum community, calls on policy and decisionmakers to urgently allocate relief funds to salvage museums and their professionals, so they can survive the lockdowns and continue their vital public service mission once it is over, for the generations to come out from the situation,” the council announced in an statement on April 2. As Museum Anthropologist we used to study history, archeology and anthropology as Humanity and with this Humanity we study what makes us humans. Anthropology and history like a source has reminded us that humanity has faced lot of similar challenges in past and that this pandemic is really not unprecedented. Though these thing has been a part of culture since millennia and even only a hundred years ago similar challenges has been faced by our ancestors. Museums and Museum anthropologists needs support to make the humanity understand what collections means to you and what the collections may represent to the future anthropologists during such pandemic situations.