精读外刊第107期原文.pdfVIP

London’s Horniman Museum has squeezed a world into a room FOR all our eccentricities as individuals, we humans still manage to dream and scheme in groups: in tribes, peoples and communities of faith. I’m not sure the reimagined, renovated and rehung World Gallery at London’s Horniman Museum manages to explain the deep drivers of human oddness, individually or collectively. But I’ve never seen important anthropological questions posed with such urgency, humanity – or such obvious enthusiasm. A board at the gallery’s entrance says we are entering a space of celebration: it’s not kidding. There are ceremonial blades next to which the Klingon bat’leth is a butter knife. There is a gown of sea grass and bark from Oceania that Alexander McQueen would have loved to have sketched. There are toys, masks, a video of a Tibetan rapper, baskets made from plastic waste – and what looks like a fairy trumpet made of blown glass. In fact, it is easier to write not about what the gallery contains, but about what it does not. The World Gallery is not really interested in time. It has no need to be. Cultures do not follow each other like buses. They nudge up against each other, blend and spark, wear each others’ motley, hide and then re- emerge, often thanks to a healthy dose of reinvention. For example, First Nations cultures along North America’s Pacific seaboard were virtually moribund in 1900. They have surged since 1950. Traditional Bhutanese textiles now grace the global fashion circuit. Sami reindeer herders assemble cheap Chinese barbecues to cook food stored in containers that have been passed down for centuries. “How can 3000 objects fashioned by a grumpy ape leave visitors exhilarated, to the point of tears?” Which brings us to one of the gallery’s other important, deliberate, creative omissions. It is not at all interested in borders and nations. Indeed, from a global perspective, the nation state can seem a latecom