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June 20, 2024 - 7:00am
Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum has decided not to showcase a West African mask, and online photos of it, because Igbo culture has a taboo against women seeing it. The decision is justified in the name of “cultural safety”.
The rot starts at the top. Museum curator Laura van Broekhoeven could have been invented by Andrew Doyle or planted by grievance studies hoaxers James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian. Though she obtained her PhD in 2002, she has only a smattering of largely uncited low-prestige publications to her name, none of which prevented her being made Professor of Museum Studies at Oxford in 2021. By comparison, Harvard’s deposed Claudine Gay, who has several well-cited publications in top journals, is a veritable superstar and paragon of rigour.
Perhaps van Broekhoeven has shot to the heights of academia because she has been showered with research grant funds as part of right-on curatorial projects such as “Sharing a World of Inclusion, Creativity and Heritage” and “Taking Care: Ethnographic and World Cultures Museums as Spaces of Care”. She seems to have gravitated to the more censorious end of academic governance such as ethics and repatriation of objects committees, while her service to the DEI gods is especially impressive, taking in spells as Co-Chair of the Oxford and Colonialism Network, a member of the Race Equality and Diversity Taskforce, and a member of the Museum Association Decolonisation Guidance Working Group.
Her university webpage features three videos of keynote speeches, including one given at a conference titled “Settler Colonialism, Slavery, and the Problem of Decolonizing Museums” and another labelled “Museums and Heritage Decolonisation presentation at Queen’s University Belfast, 2022”. The museum’s trustees are cut from the same cloth.
Pitt Rivers has set the pace when it comes to virtue-signalling, and the museum is a textbook case of institutionalised Left-liberal extremism. It blends critical theory tropes such as “decolonisation” with the radical Left-liberal embrace of “emotional safety”. Together, the two have fused to create the belief system we know as “woke”, which I define in my new book Taboo as “the sacralisation of historically marginalised race, gender and sexual identity groups”. This school of thought establishes a moral-emotional hierarchy of victim narratives and tripwires around sacred groups which underpins today’s cultural Left-liberalism.
“Diversity and Equity” may be translated as discriminating against white people, men and Asians to hit race and gender quotas. “Inclusion” means censoring freedom of speech to prevent the most hypothetically sensitive member of a totemic group from feeling emotionally “unsafe” or “traumatised”. This incentivises activists to play the trauma card, even as “woke” whites’ cultural antennae are so finely honed that they will have internalised this move and headed it off through self-censorship and racial self-abasement. This is likely what happened in the case of the Pitt Rivers display, even before the obligatory consultation with “stakeholder groups”.
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SubscribeBeen convinced you are a victim? There’s an activist (making a good living) working for your rescue. But do note that ‘activists’ are always hungry for greater campaigns and the previous campaigns will be recycled to provide fuel for someone else’s sense of victimhood.
How will they deal with trans people? I am guessing that a self-declaration at the door should provide access.
Well that self declaration seems to work for men who want access to female only areas, doesnt it!
Why are all those ads on tv getting increasingly graphic about women’s “lady parts” asy lovely late neighbour used to term that part of the female body.
And yet we’re going to vote these people into government with a landslide. Why?
Because most people just want the Tories out including half their traditional base , and the Tories have anyway been useless at tackling these issues . George ‘repatriate the Elgin Marbles’ Osborne must have been having Pow Wows with this woman .
Surely even the dumbest voter must realise that these people won’t be happy until they’ve got cameras in our bedrooms?
The dumbest voters are those who think there’s a net benefit to our society to have cameras in the bedrooms.
In the future, everyone will be a porn star for 15 minutes?
Mine be very boring.
Same here. Maybe the NHS should do something about it
Because the party supposed to be keeping these people out and ensuring a future for Britain has been in power for 14 years and has utterly failed in it’s purpose, so it needs to be extinguished.
and replaced by the party that will usher in more of the same. Politics there are as screwed up as they are here.
These mad or malign curators wish to show cultural sensitivity to the primitive patriarchal beliefs of dead Igbo that most present day Igbo are unlikely to hold but disregard the cultural beliefs of the present day British population. They are not even consistent in that In their ideology they have abolished the concept of the sex of men and women and replaced it with the concept of identity gender that can be adopted or dropped at will. If they were consistent they would simply request that women adopt a male gender identity when gazing upon the taboo mask.
Unfortunately because the Conservatives have mucked up our economy and culture by adopting many of the woke and socialistic nostrums peddled by these people we are going to elect a party that will double down on all the malign policies that have brought us to this pass because so many disgusted conservatives can’t bring themselves to vote for the faux Tory’s and so many leftist women who know that Labour support anti-women policies can’t bring themselves to vote in favour of any party that doesn’t proclaim itself leftist even though they know it is against their interest.
If they were consistent they would simply request that women adopt a male gender identity when gazing upon the taboo mask.
Wouldn’t that be appropriating the male gaze? I ask tongue in cheek because there is little left to do but mock the identitarian crowd, cultural appropriation, and the rest.
I propose that all serious adults on the political right and left fully refuse these pathetic culture wars. Leave the right-wing and left-wing identarians to their respective reductive nonsense. Former and latter represent the most intellectually shallow and debased parts of right and left. Farage/Braverman/Trump and their Alt-right keyboard warriors vs the postmodern narcissists and prigs sadly scattered across the left spectrum. Buried under all of this is the only political and economic struggle that ultimately matters: free market capitalism vs socialism.
This decision by Oxford is so educational.
I had no idea that Igbo culture was so misogynistic and patriarchal, but now I am much better informed as to the relative status of women in African society.
In another article on this I read that what used to be called (and universally condemned) ‘female genital mutilation’ is now named ‘female circumcision’ (and so presumably to be regarded as acceptable). That’s progress for you!!
Yeah,women do all the work,men sit under the shade tree and shoot the breeze
‘Women are latest victim of identity politics at Oxford University’
Enforced by a woke white woman. What are the chances of that???
It’ll be ‘internalised misogyny ‘ that’s the problem. Now if she changed gender (I bet she’s non-binary) she’d be OK.
But I bet you she’s looked at it already.
Yes, a cheeky peep I’d wager
Entirely unsurprising, but also, a lot of these kind of changes at Oxford that I have personally seen have been brought in by men, often relating to things which they imagine would be ‘good’ for women (but in fact aren’t).
Wouldn’t posting a “No Igbo Women Allowed” sign have been easier? Although you have to think that Igbo women already know that.
I imagine an actual Igbo woman’s marginalization status would be high enough that she could go in.
So who is the museum catering to? Igbo women that adhere to traditional taboos wouldn’t enter the exhibit anyway. Enlightened Igbo women who don’t consider it a taboo will visit assuming they’re interested in that sort of thing. So the museum is worried about insulting Igbo men? That’s some kind of cultural pretzel logic.
Give the damn thing back to the Igbo. Then not only women, but anyone not of the correct color or tribe will be unable to see it. Problem solved.
In one sense, this is so silly you would imagine the whole decolonising project is feeble and thinly grounded until you realise it has taken root in the institutions.
Indeed it has taken over in so many parts of higher education that inevitably there are some people who overdo it like Broekhoeven. Given the Pitt Rivers museum is devoted to the White Male Gaze on Africa, her post can only have driven her mad.
I was at that QUB conference which she addressed. Half the speakers were decolonisers, the other half serious museum curators. One who spoke on Roger Casement was in a terrible quandary. He brought home objects and people from Africa and Peru (and had sex with their youth) yet was about as progressive as you could then get.
But Hell at least he paid them (said in George Peppard A team voice,),but did he?
Well, Dutch liberals take progressivism to the nth level. The latest fashion over there has been to defend prostitution by students to pay their tution and bills as ‘sex-positive’ activity expressing the spiritual heart of the current generation of feminist campaigning.
Oh we’ve also got lecturers here in the uk organising conferences to destigmatise sex work for students, don’t you worry…
Have we reached the point where DEI starts to devour itself yet? It’s almost farcical when the purveyors of inclusion actively exclude half the population from an exhibit and ultimately decide to exclude the other half as well. Nothing says ‘cultural safety’ like museum materials that no one can see.
There’ll be more of this with the creeping Islamisation of the West.
The ant-woke crowd has succumbed to profit. They really exist now as a flock of writers who spend all their time preaching to the choir to sell books, podcasts and Substack subscriptions. It isn’t about influence or change anymore, it’s just about making a buck. The idea is to find anything with a whiff of wokeness and just rip it, gin up some outrage, start a twitter feud among the crazies, and oh, remember to mention your new book. I recently read some guy complaining about the Word grammar checker being too woke, and realized how ridiculous it has become.
Change requires understanding and compromise. You have to listen to people. Instead, everyone sits in their castle like bubbles lobbing bombs that only the other people in their respective bubble care about. I hate most of what people describe as wokeness, but I am pretty sure that none of the people I read or listen to are being heard by anyone they criticize. It is useless unless you’re selling books.
Of course, everyone does it, not just the anti-woke crowd. Our culture wars will go on forever because so many writers make their living fighting them. Democracy is supposed to be noisy but today there is no incentive to change anything because it is more profitable to complain endlessly.
To paraphrase some brilliant person who’s name I can’t recall:
Every good cause in time becomes a business which in turn becomes a racket…
We are now at the business phase of anti-woke but boy* do we need it if only for rational latecomers to be able to find a place which confirms they are not crazy for being simply rational and heterodox…
*Can I say boy as a means of conveying exasperation or must I say “zim” or “ze” or something…
“What began as play and as play was most useful and excellent became the first and most enthralling business.”
Dr. Moberly, headmaster of Winchester, on abandonning sports matches against Marlborough.
Why not just don’t exhibit the silly old thing? Problem solved.
This is hardly surprising given that across Europe there is already a tacit tolerance of polygamy to accommodate the practices of certain communities. This weakness has consequences.
The sacred Teutonic belief in Kultur Sicherheit demands a taboo on persons of the Israelite persuasion . . . but who would dare announce such a thing at Oxford? (Oh, wait, “from the river to the sea . . .”)
We could always identify as men at the door but hell, they can stick their stupid mask.
I think I need an Igbo mask to decorate the meeting room of our roleplaying and board games club.
It’s the Pitt’s