The point of our festivals and our displays of Man's diversity strikes home to the people who come to our museums and reach out for reaffirmation of identity. We fear the loss of it in the sense of anomie that comes with being a cipher, a numeral, a set of digits. We fear big government, big business, megastates that might rule the world. Coupled with the fear of homogenization is the fear of the loss of our own souls.

Those of us who follow peoples across the world--families, clans, tribes, especially in the less developed areas of our planet--are desperately aware of the tensions created by the suppression of roots, of traditions that ...