For me it started with bound feet. The exquisite embroidered “lotus shoes” on display in my local museum caught my childish eye, but it was the gruesome custom of foot binding that captured my imagination. I remember breathing on the glass surrounding the tiny boots as my mum explained to me that for centuries Chinese girls, of around my age, had the bones in their feet crushed and wrapped up tightly. She told me that although misguided, this was done not through malice but to improve their chances of getting a husband. The message I took was the very same as the one articulated by Kemi Badenoch last week: people are equal, but cultures are not.

At five years old I probably didn’t think about this in depth. Instead, I was disgusted yet fascinated; marvelling at the pretty chrysanthemums of the shoe and squirming at the idea of being forced to wear them. Though I’ve never formally studied anthropology, it sparked an interest in cultural practices, and it was the first time I realised that ideals of beauty change through time and across continents. But a child today visiting the same museum wouldn’t have the opportunity I did: the lotus shoes have been removed. It seems the custodians of our own culture have deemed them problematic.

The practice of purging exhibits is of course not confined to one museum. Last Friday I took a trip to the Pitt Rivers in Oxford, a museum which has removed the most famous exhibits that once drew in crowds; the shrunken heads, or tsantsa, which were once displayed in a cabinet labelled Treatment of enemies.

Following much controversy and after over a decade of debate and deliberation, these war trophies were taken from display. The museum explained: “It was felt that the way they were displayed did not sufficiently help visitors understand the cultural practices related to their making and instead led people to think in stereotypical and racist ways about Shuar culture.” Their removal followed apparently unacceptable comments from the public which were revealed during interviews. The horror at the plebeian and ignorant attitudes of visitors is barely concealed by the curators who note:

Several people thought the heads represented a stage in human development and in the development of ethics, which brings into play the idea that some societies are more ‘advanced’ than others. This is a completely false idea and one that the Museum does not wish to support. 

The heads were bought by people, probably men, who also had a culture that was very different from our own. Museum staff are quick to acknowledge and judge the moral failings of our Victorian ancestors, long-dead people who denied women their rightful place in public life, who sent children into mines and up chimneys. As the Pitt Rivers’ brochure makes clear “the processes of colonial ‘collecting’ were often inequitable and even violent.’’

This is fair criticism and ought not to be glossed over. But notably, the much derided Victorians had access to technology which allowed them to explore, and yes sometimes exploit, the globe. The Ecuadorian tribes they bought the tsantsa from did not. And as a whole, humanity has benefited more from the medicine, science and politics advanced by the Victorians than the beliefs of the indigenous peoples whose lives they touched.

Cultural relativism is an odious conceit that can only be indulged in by a sanctimonious few

Interestingly, the Shuar did not deem the souls of women and children as worthy of being trapped, and so their heads were not taken in the shrinking rituals. Modern Britain is a country where beheading enemies is frowned upon, and women and children are at least nominally recognised as fully human. Given this, is it really unfair to judge our culture as morally superior to those who beheaded the enemies in grisly attempts to capture their souls? Is that not a clear example of a more advanced culture?

Cultural relativism is an odious conceit that can only be indulged in by a sanctimonious few who benefit from life in industrialised, liberal democracies. Do the curators, people who so clearly consider themselves better than the museum’s ordinary visitors also believe that the culture of, for example, present day Afghanistan under Taliban rule, is equal to our own?

It is quite obvious to those who have not been educated into ignorance that Britain is a better place to live than either Afghanistan, China or indeed 19th century Ecuador. To believe that people suffering under Taliban rule are different from us, that unlike British women, women in Afghanistan are content to be treated as property, is rank racism. Our culture, imperfect and fragmented though it may be, is better by every metric.

It is sobering to reflect that had the women who now lead collections at the Pitt Rivers museum been born in nineteenth century China, they would scarcely be able to stand on their mutilated feet, let alone hand down diktats about what visitors should think about other cultures.

Undoubtedly, the explorers and anthropologists of the Victorian age had values that are now jarring. But their curiosity about other cultures, some of which are now long dead and only remembered thanks to museums, has benefitted all of us. For me, seeing the lotus shoes as a child didn’t make me question the humanity of the girls whose feet were broken. Rather, it made me feel exceptionally privileged to have been born in what is undoubtedly an advanced and tolerant culture. It’s time for the custodians of our collective culture to check their prejudice.