Communications in Humanities Research
- The Open Access Proceedings Series for Conferences
Communications in Humanities Research
Vol. 6, 14 September 2023
Open
Access | Article
Representing China in the British Museum: Do Museums Perpetuate Historical Biases?
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Abstract
Museums have never been neutral. Public museums and exhibitions that originated in colonial times are accused of passing on biases that feature Euro-centric interpretations of history. This paper investigates the nature of bias and the history of museums and their biases, and then focuses on the representation of China in the British Museum as an elaborate case study. The paper argues that from the British Museum’s virtual collections and public resources, the descriptive text and collection highlights in the China galleries reflect implicit and biased historical perspectives of China in the UK, exhibiting a contrast between the British appreciation of exotic Chinese art and contempt towards China’s social status arising from colonial trade. This paper provides a specific statement and analysis of western biases for colonial discussions and could contribute to decolonization actions taken in museums.
Keywords
the British Museum, Chinese artifact, cultural bias, museum, colonial times
References
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Data Availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
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- Volume Title
- Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Psychology and Humanity Studies
- ISBN (Print)
- 978-1-83558-005-9
- ISBN (Online)
- 978-1-83558-006-6
- Published Date
- 14 September 2023
- Series
- Communications in Humanities Research
- ISSN (Print)
- 2753-7064
- ISSN (Online)
- 2753-7072
- DOI
- 10.54254/2753-7064/6/20230004
- Copyright
- 14 September 2023
- Open Access
- This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited