Decolonising the epic: heritage Dissonance, meaning-Making and community curation at the Museu dos Descobrimentos in Belmonte (Castelo Branco, Portugal)

Abstract

This study interrogates the structural reception gap between Portuguese (n = 106) and Brazilian (n = 40) visitors to the Museu dos Descobrimentos in Belmonte (Portugal) and advances from diagnosis to methodological proposition. Building upon previously disseminated empirical material (Melo Filho, 2025), this investigation introduces three original contributions: a long durée genealogical framework anchored in the History of Museums; an institutional discourse analysis of the museum’s three operative voices, sustained by previously unreported qualitative interview data and by a systematic reading of the exhibition panels; and a three-vector action research design for community curation. The study mobilises the theoretical frameworks of Sociomuseology, Decolonial Theory and the History of Museums, with particular anchoring in the construction by Dufresne-Tassé (2023) on adult meaning-making in museum contexts. The quantitative strand draws on a survey of 164 visitors, reporting the distribution of cognitive assessments and the intensity of eight affective scales across national and ethnic subgroups. The analysis shows that the affective profile of the Afro-descendant subgroup exhibits a signature of trauma (sadness M = 4.50; discomfort M = 4.00), whereas the mixed-heritage Brazilian subgroup displays the most luso-tropicalist profile in the entire sample (pride M = 4.17; identification M = 4.83). A generational analysis reveals that the Portuguese-Brazilian alienation gap is pronounced among older visitors and attenuated among younger ones, suggesting the narrowing of the intergenerational window for reparative intervention. The discourse analysis of three institutional voices, the museum’s designer, the current manager and the exhibition panels themselves, reveals a productive internal tension: the designer’s discourse mobilises fourteen utterances of a justificatory nature, whereas the manager’s discourse accumulates nine recognitions of the need for updating and eight openings to community voices. The institutional voice of the panels, conversely, registers zero occurrences in either of these two categories. The article therefore reframes the Belmonte case not as a communicative failure but as a site of structurally asymmetrical meaning-making, where the same museal object generates, for the descendants of the coloniser and for the descendants of the colonised, experiences that differ in their very affective constitution. An action-research design is proposed, based on institutional alliance, workshops for mapping silences and museographic prototyping, aligned with the museum definition of the ICOM (2022) and with the post-Dubai 2025 agenda of the international museum community. The contribution to museum education is methodological and transferable, in that it provides a replicable protocol for diagnosing and intervening upon narrative dissonance in post-imperial museal contexts.