How do museums shape our understanding of culture and how does society benefit from these great vaults of historical artifacts?

 

How do museums shape our understanding of culture?

Culture can be described as the social level in which are produced those images of the world and definitions of reality can be ideologically mobilized to legitimize the existing order of relations of domination and subordination between classes, races, and sexes.

Museums are integral to the creation of identity, something that culture naturalizes. It is important to define ourselves and we tend to do so by knowing what our past was like. Museums have historical information that would help us understand where we came from, how things were done, and why that was the natural order of things.

Museums are a representation of a community and its highest values and truths. They also define the relative standing of individuals within that community. Art in museums plays part in forming ideologies about the social and cultural functions.

 How does society benefit from these great vaults of historical artifacts?

Society has a chance to find their history from museums. From the information people gather from museums, society can maintain a certain order of things. We can understand why some of the things we were born to are as they are, hence little to no resistance to how things are. For instance, before women were supposed to serve their husbands. This is something that people did not have a problem with until recently and this was due to the teaching of history that dictated that it was supposed to be so.

Society is also able to justify some of the norms of the community today like the need for governance to maintain order. Museums artifacts and books have shreds of evidence of governance even in the past like that of the kingdom of England. This justifies the need for a government today because just like in the past there's a need to maintain order and avoid chaos.