I am incredibly excited to be here today. Because I want to tell you about an idea that's shaped the way that I look at the world, and I think that anyone can use to look at your own world, whether you're working in finance, business, journalism or just looking around your everyday life at things like face masks, dogs, chocolate, really. And the idea comes from the world of cultural anthropology. Now I know, to many of you that might sound pretty weird.

今天，我怀着无比激动的心情站在这里。因为我想和你们分享一个塑造了我世界观的观念，我认为任何人都能借助它审视自己的世界，不论你是从事金融、工商、新闻业，抑或者只是想审视自己日常生活中的事物，比如口罩、狗、巧克力什么的。这一观念来自文化人类学领域。许多人听到这可能会觉得很奇怪。

But I'm talking to you because my own life story has been bound up with that. Today, as you see me, I am a journalist. I live in New York. I work with the Financial Times. And I spend much of my life talking to people who work in the world of business, finance, technology, etc. That's my kind of world today. Excuse the rather bad hairstyle. But I didn't start out like that. I actually started out, before I became a journalist, as a cultural anthropologist, looking like this. I did fieldwork, as we call it, in Soviet Tajikistan, on the borders of Afghanistan.

但我之所以要分享给你们，原因是它贯穿了我的人生故事。如今，如你们所见，我是一名记者。我住在纽约，在《金融时报》工作。在我大部分的时间里，都在和各种人士打交道，他们从事着商业、金融科技等领域的工作。这就是我今天的世界。请大家别太在意我糟糕的发型。但我最初并不是记者。在成为记者之前，我是一名文化人类学家，长这样。在当时的塔吉克苏维埃社会主义共和国进行实地工作，临近阿富汗的边境。

Now, what cultural anthropology does is try to study human culture, all the assumptions that we inherit from our surroundings. And we don't often think about but which shape us deeply in terms of how we think, live and act. And anthropologists do this in two distinctive ways. Firstly, they believe in getting out and getting our feet dirty, and trying to participate in people's lives to understand them. Which is why I'm wearing Tajik clothes on the border of Tajikistan, where I was living.

文化人类学研究的是人类文化，也就是我们从周遭环境中时常不经思考而接受的假设的集合。但正是这些假设深刻地塑造了我们思考、生活和行为的方式。人类学家进行这种研究有两种完全不同的方式。第一种，他们认为要走出去，亲身实践，试图通过参与到人们的生活中去了解他们。所以我才会身穿塔吉克的服饰出现在塔吉克斯坦的边境，在那里生活。

But also, they believe in not just studying cultures that we already know that are familiar but cultures which are unfamiliar. That can be on the other side of the world. It can be down the end of the street, a different profession, or, shock horror, a different political party. And anthropologists do this for two reasons. Firstly, understanding people who have a different point of view to you is very helpful for making sense of the world. Duh. It's something we ought to all know. But actually, it's very easy to forget today.

然而，他们相信，要学的不只是我们已经熟悉的文化，还有那些我们所不熟悉的文化。这些文化可能远在地球的另一端，也可能就在街道的尽头，可以是一个不同的职业，或者是，前方高能，一个不同的政党。人类学家这么做有两个原因。首先，去了解和你持有不同观点的人有助于理解这个世界。不然嘞。这个大家应该都知道。但在当今却很容易被忘记。

But secondly, empathizing with another way of looking at the world can help you to understand yourself better as well. And the reason is that there's a wonderful proverb which says: A fish can't see water. A fish can't see water. None of us can see the assumptions that shape us unless we jump out of our fish bowl, go to somewhere completely different, talk to other fish, and then look back at ourselves to try and understand the assumptions that shape us. In my case, I did that by going to Soviet Tajikistan.

其次，去感同身受地理解另一种看待世界的方式，也能帮助你更好地了解你自己。原因就藏在一句精妙的谚语中：鱼在水中不见水。鱼在水中不见水。没有人能够看到身边塑造自身的那些假设，只有跳出自己的“鱼缸”，进入一个完全不同的环境，和其他的“鱼”交流，然后再反观我们自身，才能试图去理解那些塑造了我们的假设。对我而言，我跳出了“鱼缸”去到了塔吉克斯坦。

But later on, I used that perspective of jumping out of my fishbowl to look back at my own world, where I now work as a journalist, to look at the world of finance, to look at the world of business, to try and look at it with fresh eyes and to see not just the parts of the world that are obvious but the parts of the world that we don't often talk about, the social silences. Now I used that framework to help me predict the great financial crisis in 2008. In particular, I spent much of the years before that going to investment banking conferences, which are gigantic ceremonial rituals, which are rather similar to Tajik weddings. It's true.

但后来，我利用“鱼缸”外的视角回头审视这个我作为记者的世界，去审视金融的世界，商业的世界，试图以全新的视角看待它，去看见这个世界中显而易见的部分，也去看见这个世界中我们不常谈论的部分，看见社会的沉默。我利用这个框架帮助我预测了2008年的金融危机。展开说就是，我在金融危机前的数年里，游走于各种投资银行大会。这些会议好比大型庆典仪式，和塔吉克的婚礼仪式差不了多少。真的。

They pull people together, the scattered tribe, they reaffirm their social ties. And they reaffirm a shared worldview through rituals, not through dancing, but through hanging out by the bar and having PowerPoints. Same function. But I did that in the world of high finance. But what I want to make you think about today is that you don't have to be using these tools in Tajikistan or Tokyo or Wall Street. You can actually use them to look around your own world today. Your everyday life.

他们把分散在各个部落的人聚集到一起，巩固自身的社会关系，通过仪式重申他们共有的世界观，只不过这个仪式不是舞蹈，而是酒吧里的社交和PPT演讲。但作用都是一样的。我把这个框架运用在了大规模金融交易领域。但我今天要给大家传递的想法是这些工具不一定要去到塔吉克斯坦、东京或是华尔街才能用。实际上，你可以利用它们来观察周围的世界。你的日常生活。

You can use them to look at something which is completely different from either Wall Street or Tajikistan. The world of dogs. This is my dog, Charlie. Adorable, smelly, out of control. And when people ask me about my dog, I often say: Charlie, she's part of my family. I bet many of you who have dogs will say exactly the same thing. But here's something to think about. If you are in America or Europe, you think it's kind of normal to say that your dog is part of your family. I can tell you, though, that if you're sitting in Tajikistan or most other cultures which are non-Western, saying that a dog is part of your family makes you look really weird. If not exotic.

你可以使用它们去审视那些与华尔街或塔吉克斯坦完全不同的事物。比如说狗的世界。这是我的狗查理。可爱，体味上头，完全不受控制。当有人问起她时，我常说：查理是我家庭的一份子。我敢打赌，你们大部分养狗的人都这么说过。但是请大家思考一下下面这件事。如果你生活在美国或欧洲，你会认为，把自己的狗当家人是很正常的。然而，我可以告诉你如果你身处塔吉克斯坦或是大多数其他的非西方文化中，把狗当做你的家人会让你看起来非常奇怪。甚至是怪异。

Because the reality is that in many cultures throughout history, animals have been defined in opposition to humans. Dogs lived out in the fields or live out in the fields or the yard. They might come in the house. They didn't come into the bedroom. And they certainly didn't come into the bed. Charlie's not supposed to be in my bed, but, hey. And the thing to think about that was interesting is this. What is different in these different contexts isn't necessarily the dog. It's our idea of family. Many non-Western cultures have an idea that a family is something that is imposed on you.

因为现实是在历史上的许多文化中，动物和人是对立的。狗过去生活在户外，现在依然生活在户外或后院。它们可以进入家中。但却不能进入卧室，跳上床就更不可能了。查理其实不应该出现在我床上的。一件值得思考而又有趣的事就是，在这些不同的文化环境中，差异因素并不一定是狗。而是我们对于家的观念。许多非西方文化中，家庭是强加于你的东西。

And it's pretty non-negotiable. In the West, we have this wonderful, individualistic consumer culture where everything is pick-and-mix and customized. We customize our coffee choice. We have our music playlists. We get to define our families. And that's liberating. It's also sometimes quite nerve-wracking. And what it means is that people say: Well, if I want to put a dog in my family, I'm going to put a dog. It also means that people use dogs to define and create families as an active choice.

没有商量的余地。在西方，我们有着很棒的、具有个人主义色彩的消费者文化。在这样的文化下，什么都能挑选组合和定制。我们自定义我们的咖啡品类。我们有自己的专属歌单。我们能够去定义我们的家庭。自由空间很大。但有时候也相当的伤脑筋。言下之意是，有人说：“听着，如果我想把狗算作我的家人，我就会把它算作我的家人。”这也意味着，人们主动选择用狗去定义和创造家庭。

And what is interesting is that the issue at stake here is not about the human and the dog relationship, let alone your dog versus dog relationship, it's humans to humans. And that's something you need to think about if say, you're in the business of selling dog food or you just want to get a dog. And it's something very hard to see unless you jump out of your fishbowl. Or for another example, think about cell phones. I spent a lot of time with my teenagers worrying about why they can't get off their cell phone.

令人寻味的是，这里涉及的问题不是人和狗的关系，更不是你的狗和其他狗的关系，而是人与人之间的关系。比方说你是卖狗粮的，或者你只是想养条狗，上述问题是值得你深思的。而如果你不跳出自己的“鱼缸”，就很难看清这一点。或者再以你的手机为例。在和我家的小年轻们长期相处时，为什么他们总是手机不离手，这个问题让我担忧不已。

And the normal way that people talk about that is to say, well, they're addicted to cell phones. Because guess what, it's those algorithms, screen time is a technology. But an anthropologist called Danah Boyd went out a few years ago and tried to look at teenagers in the wild with their cell phones, and realized that when you observe teenagers with this kind of broad anthropological perspective, when you try and look with a worm's eye view, not a bird's eye view, actually, there's something about teenagers that's quite remarkable.

人们谈论这一问题时，通常会说，他们之所以沉迷于手机，你猜怎么着，都是算法的锅，屏幕使用时间是一项科技。但是人类学家达娜·博伊德几年前试图研究“野生”青少年和他们的手机。她发现，在观察青少年群体时，从宽泛的人类学角度出发，以从下往上，而非从上往下的视角观察时，会发现这个群体的非凡之处。

Which is that 50, 100 years ago, teenagers were physically roaming in the world a lot. They were on their bikes. They were walking around the streets. They were congregating in fields. They could explore the world, test boundaries, essentially, have adventures without parents watching. Today, in many American contexts they can't. Nevermind lockdown, even before that, because of stranger danger, because of overscheduling, the only place they could roam without parents watching was in cyberspace with their cell phones.

在50、100年前，青少年到世界各地游历。他们骑行探索，徒步穿行在大街小巷，群聚在野外探险。他们可以游历世界，探索边界，其实就是，在没有父母干预的情况下冒险。在今天的美国，许多情况下他们都不能这么做。更别提因疫情导致的封锁，即使是在疫情之前，由于担心认识陌生人带来的风险，由于塞得满满的日程，青少年唯一可以自由活动且无需父母陪伴的场所就是他们手机所连接的虚拟世界。

So is it any surprise that teenagers love their cell phones? If you want to change behavior, you can't just look at the phone, the noise, you have to look at the physical experience, the silence too. And again, that's hard to see if you just know one fishbowl. Another example. What is sitting at the end of your noses right now or hopefully, called your face mask. In the last two years, we've heard a lot about how face masks stop germs through that physical fabric. But they're cultural signaling devices, too.

所以他们总爱抱着手机这事又有什么好惊讶的呢？如果你想要改变行为，你不能只关注手机和杂讯，你还得关注实际经历和沉默。而如果你从未跳出过自己的“鱼缸”，做到这些是很难的。再比如，现在盖在你鼻子上的东西叫做口罩。在过去的两年里，关于口罩能通过面料从物理上阻断病菌传播的言论不绝于耳。但同时，它们也在传递着文化信号。

They send messages to your own brain to remind you to change behavior, to each other, to show whether you respect science, whether you are upholding community norms. And although doctors don't often talk about that cultural aspect, we need to. Because one thing we've learned, is you can't stop a pandemic just with medical science or computer science, you need to think about social science and behavior. And behavior could change. Because there's another thing about those face masks, which is that effectively they have shown how culture can change.

它们向你的大脑发出信息，提醒你去改变自己的行为；同时也让他人看到，你是否尊重科学，你是否遵守群体规范。虽然医生很少谈及戴口罩的文化意义，但我们需要这么做。因为我们已经认识到，光靠医学或是计算机科学是无法阻止疫情的。社会科学和社会行为也应当纳入考虑。而行为是可以改变的。因为口罩还揭示了另一件事，即文化是可以被改变的。

We weren't wearing them two years ago. And culture can change in all kinds of surprising ways. Culture isn't a box with rigid, static sides. It's more like a river that flows. And if you want to understand that, think about one last issue, which is chocolate. Hurray. Kit Kats started life a century ago as a British brown biscuit. It then went around the world as an export, turned up in Japan, and some local Japanese teenagers, about 20 years ago, started using Kit Kats as good-luck tokens for exams. And then they started adding in Japanese flavors like soy sauce, wasabi, green tea.

两年以前，口罩都没什么人戴。文化可以通过各种令人惊讶的方式改变。文化不是一个边界死板、固定的盒子。它更像是一条奔涌的河流。如果你想要理解这一点，思考一下这最后一个问题，也就是巧克力。耶。奇巧巧克力在一百年前推出时，是英式的棕色饼干。然后被出口到全世界，并进入日本市场。大约20年前，一群日本年轻人，开始把奇巧作为考试幸运符。然后更多的日式口味被加入其中，比如酱油、芥末、绿茶等。

And then it became a Japanese biscuit and a Japanese souvenir and then was sold back into Britain, where today you can buy green tea Kit Kats. And they're actually made in Germany. So today a Kit Kat is British and Swiss. Because Nestle owns it, and Japanese and German. Culture is a river. It changes. New streams come in. And that is fantastic. And that is one of the big ideas I want to leave you with last of all. Because right now as we speak, COVID-19 and the lockdown in many ways has been an extraordinary period of culture shock.It's given you all what anthropologists experience when they go to other cultures.

然后，奇巧就成为了一种日式的饼干和纪念品，进而又反向卖到了英国，如今，你可以在英国买到绿茶味的奇巧。而这些奇巧实际上产于德国。今天，一块奇巧巧克力既是英国的，又是瑞士的。因为它是雀巢旗下的产品，还是日本和德国的。文化是一条河。不断变化。最棒的是不断有新的水流汇入。真的很棒。这就是我今天想传达的其中一个重要的想法。因为就在我们说话的此刻，新冠和封城在许多方面让我们经历了一场不同寻常的文化冲击，给你们带来了类似于人类学家进入另一种文化时的体验。

The chance to be jolted out of what was normal and to look at your world again. To become a stranger in your own land again. So however much you might hate that experience, however much you might be scared by that culture shock, the lesson from anthropology is this. Don't run away from culture shock. Seize it as an opportunity. Recognize that lockdown has kept us all trapped with our own tribe, physically. Our own pod. We've gone online into echo chambers. But now, more than ever, is a time when we need to jump out of our fishbowl. Go talk to other fish. Widen our lens.

它给了我们一个从常态中抽离，并审视自己所处世界的机会。一个在自己的世界中成为陌生人的机会。所以，无论你有多讨厌这一经历，无论你有多害怕这场文化冲击，来自人类学的经验是，不要逃离文化冲击。把握这一机会。封控从物理上将我们困在了自己的群落中。困在自己的小环境中。我们转向网络，掉入了信息茧房。但是我们要趁现在跳出我们自己的“鱼缸”，去和其他的鱼交流，拓宽我们的视野。

Not just so that we can understand the rest of the world, which we need to. But also so that we can understand ourselves better, too. And just think of that when you see a dog, a Kit Kat bar, a face mask or your cellphone. All of them show the power of culture. Why culture matters. But why culture can change. And why, right now, we have an opportunity to rethink that. Thank you.

这么做不仅是为了了解外面的世界，虽然这一点很重要。也是为了更好地了解我们自己。在你看到一条狗，一块奇巧巧克力，一个口罩，或是你的手机时，就想一想前面所说的。这些事物都展现了文化的力量，文化之所以重要的原因，文化之所以可变的原因，以及我们现在应当重新思考这一点的原因。谢谢。