Two newly set-out galleries in the British Museum raise questions about collections and what you can do with them. 'Living and Dying' fills the space which joins the Great Court with the north entrance to the Museum. The glass cases which tower towards the ceiling contain items from the ethnographic collections. A display like a shop counter runs the length of the gallery and shows a single person's lifetime consumption of pills stitched into a gauzy runner. This is annotated by snapshots purporting to show scenes from ordinary lives. The theme of the gallery is cultural difference, and the objects illustrate responses to events, common to all people and all peoples, which punctuate the time between birth and death. It is very well done: the resources of the Museum are such that all the objects have an abundant life of their own. This makes the quality of the connections between, say, a Bolivian dance mask and a wooden pillow from Zimbabwe unimportant.

LRB 22 January 2004 | PDF Download