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The first instance has probably received the most attention simply because it’s just so cool. It’s a video from Russia of some type of wild corvid (others have said it is most likely a hooded crow) that appears to snowboard down a roof. It does this multiple times by sliding on a small unidentified object under its feet, picking it up with its beak when it gets to the bottom of the roof, then flying back to the top to do it again. See for yourself (sorry, Robert –  youtube).

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Jason Goldman at Scientific American has written that while it’s tempting to infer that this represents an act of play, that there is the danger of anthropomorphizing and seeing this behavior through a human lens. He also notes that while this behavior is anecdotal, the literature on wild corvids from various locations shows that they have been observed to engage in other behaviors reminiscent of play, including sliding down snowy inclines. While snowboarding and sliding may not be a part of the regular repertoire of corvid behavior, it is not a complete aberration either.  Rather, they demonstrate great behavioral flexibility and remarkable intelligence, including improvising to make tools to obtain food, dropping nuts in traffic to crack them open (and waiting for the traffic light), and recognizing individual human faces.

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Example number two comes from wild Sumatran orangutans who have been seen eating meat (a slow loris). Orangutans are primarily frugivorous, though apparently there are a few other reported observations in the literature of meat-eating. Therefore, this behavior appears to be exceedingly rare, but as with crows ‘snowboarding’ not completely novel.

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The final example concerns another of our closest relatives, and a rare episode of violence in bonobos, who are usually quite peaceful apes. According to Barbara J. King, an anthropologist at William and Mary: “This anecdote brings the forest apes to life in a startling way and shows that there is no single way to be a bonobo. Generalizing about the behaviour of apes is an exercise doomed to failure, because variation across populations and individuals is marked.”

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The three examples above show that animal behavior is quite complex, and leaves lots of room for individual variation. If there is no single way of being a bonobo, then there is no single way of being a human either. What is ‘normal’ is a matter of statistical abstraction.

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The legendary biologist Ernst Mayr (1976) argued that one of the reasons evolution has been opposed historically (aside from religion) is that we have a strong tendency to think in typological either/or categories, including for species. A byproduct of this tendency to want to put things into neat boxes (conservative or liberal, fish or reptile, etc.) is that we downplay or overlook variation and complexity.  In his terms, most laypeople are typological thinkers, while biologists are forced to be “population thinkers.” 

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The assumptions of population thinking are diametrically opposed to those of the typologist. The populationist stresses the uniqueness of everything in the organic world. What is true for the human species, that no two individuals are alike, is equally true for all other species of animals and plants… All organisms and organic phenomena are composed of unique features and can be described collectively only in statistical terms. Individuals, or any kind of organic entities, form populations of which we can determine the arithmetic mean and the statistics of variation. Averages are merely statistical abstractions; only the individuals of which the populations are composed have reality. The ultimate conclusions of the population thinker and  of the typologist are precisely the opposite. For the typologist, the type (eidos) is real and the variation an illusion, while for the populationist the type (average) is an abstraction and only the variation is real. No two ways of looking at nature could be more different.” 

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In a given population, there may be clear trends in terms of genes, anatomy, and behaviors. However, we must also avoid the temptation to zoom out too far and miss the individual trees while focusing solely on the forest. 

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References

Mayr E. 1976. Typological versus population thinking. In: Mayr, E. (ed.). Evolution and the diversity of life: selected essays. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, p. 26-29.

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“Before criticizing someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you do criticize them, you are a mile away… and you have their shoes.”      –Jack Handey

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Stop motion photo of a girl jumping rope. A few moments of an individual life. (Photo by Harold Edgerton).

My advisor in graduate school, Mike Little, once shared with the class that he fantasized about a machine that would provide instantaneous biological data just by having a person walk through it. As he described it, the machine would work something like an airport metal detector, only instead of revealing any concealed objects, it would assess the types of variables that biological anthropologists salivate over – anthropometrics, body composition, blood pressure, hormonal profiles, presence of infections, etc. If only…

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I also think the value of such a machine would be tremendous. In addition to cutting down the time and tedium involved in data collection, we could recruit larger samples from a wider array of populations, increasing our statistical power and confidence in our data. We could also cut down the discomfort and invasiveness of our volunteers who patiently endure our probing. All for our precious data. Think of how much easier our IRB protocols would be.

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As long as we’re fantasizing, I’m going to one-up Mike here with a thought experiment that goes beyond data and biological anthropology and extends into empathy. While his hypothetical machine would be wonderful at collecting cross-sectional data, we would still have only a snapshot of the biological status of the person at a given moment. Such a picture would be inherently limited if a person’s status had changed significantly over time. What about the day before, or after? Or weeks, or years? What if our hypothetical volunteer had just come from running a marathon, or given birth, was ill or dehydrated, or had just gotten into a heated argument? How representative would our data be then? Even if we screened out such cases, we’d still only have the tip of the iceberg on the biology of each remaining person in our dataset.

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For some biological variables, such as adult height, this wouldn’t matter much since they are relatively constant. Others like blood pressure, body water, or hormonal profiles fluctuate in a continuous, homeostatic process of give-and-take. Of course, even height changes over time, as we pass through various stages of growth through prenatal development, infancy, childhood, adolescence, etc. Human biology research has made strides to account for these changes by incorporating a longitudinal approach and following people over time by using things like ambulatory blood pressure monitors, accelerometers, or diet/ activity diaries. But even these are usually done over a period of days or weeks.

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What if we could have unlimited data over a person’s lifetime? And what if we had not only data on variables like body composition, but also behavior and cognitive and emotional states – something like an open diary or an ambulatory fMRI machine? And what if we had these data sequentially, so that we could find a few predictor variables that could account for a disproportionate amount of the variance in things like health, longevity, or even happiness?

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Though this scenario may sound Big Brother-ish or dystopian, I suggest this not just to fantasize about omniscience through biological data, but also to present a thought experiment in empathy. Time, for the most part, is invisible to us. When we meet someone new, we have something akin to Mike’s metal detector machine – a few pieces of data at one point in time. From their behavior, we know (or think we know) a person’s psychological state or personality at the moment. But unless we ask or they volunteer, we have little knowledge of how representative their behavior is and how it fits with their track record or what they’re personal histories are. We are quick to assess the type of person they might be in terms of their kindness, intelligence, sense of humor, etc.

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However, as Forrest Gump famously put it: “stupid is as stupid does.” I think this is an often misunderstood piece of folk wisdom. My interpretation of this is that one can evaluate actions without leaping to evaluations of states of being. Certainly one can do stupid things without “being” stupid. To believe another person “is” stupid (or any personality trait you can imagine) is to claim one has found the signal among the noise, while ignoring a LOT of complexity, the deviation around the mean. In short, we have just a cross-section in the totality of that person’s life. Even Hitler laughed. Even Gandhi had periods of depression. Certainly, we have more than a snapshot of these particular individuals’ lives, but we don’t have that for everyone we meet. How different would our impression of others be if we had that longitudinal data in front of us? Of course, for most people the amplitude of one’s personality does not fluctuate that widely. Most people are consistent in either being kind, or funny, or complete assholes. But context and variation are essential. Perhaps data from our imaginary ambulatory fMRI machine could verify our snap impressions, working something like a combination of a mood ring (an actually functioning one) and stop-motion photography seen above. 

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The larger point is this: everything has a history, not only individuals, but also cities, cultures, species, elements, mountains, and stars. Even light has a history. Writing about the concept of marriage, James Peron said this:

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The moment someone tells me “marriage has always been” something or another, I know they are ignorant of the actual history of marriage. It has never “always” been anything. It has taken different forms, with different social rules attached. Those forms and rules changed as the function of marriage changed.”

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The same holds true for biology in general. Birth, growth, reproduction, decay, death, descent with modification. Organisms themselves are in a constant state of flux, ceaselessly turning over energy and matter. Elsewhere, Richard Dawkins has used this idea to suggest that organisms are more like ‘waves’ than permanent ‘things.’ As an example, it’s been estimated that 98% of the atoms in our body are replaced annually (the exact percent doesn’t matter as much as the concept). Dawkins had some fun with this by reminding us that the memories of our childhood selves are just that – memories. The person you were then no longer exists in any physical sense. All of that matter has been replaced gradually, piece by piece. Yet, here we are, with memories from our disintegrated and reconstituted former selves.

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I wonder if consciously tapping into a longitudinal perspective would prove valuable not just in understanding biology and health, but also in increasing empathy, reminding us that single slices of a person’s life are never enough to fully understand the complexity of a person. In our time lapse photography, there are many frames missing.

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Forgive me if this post seems convoluted. It made sense to me when I wrote it, on a blustery January day interspersed with writing letters of recommendation for students, listening to heavy doses of Florence and the Machine, and playing board games with my toddler son. (If you want to empathize more with my state of mind at the time I wrote this, play Parcheesi with a 4 year-old and listen to Cosmic Love). I may feel differently about this tomorrow, or whenever, depending on my song playlist and how the New England Patriots fare in tonight’s playoff game, and a hundred other variables. Do I contradict myself? Very well, then … something, something multitudes.

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#1.

Greg Downey at Neuroanthropology has begun a new series on anthropology and the evolution of human sexuality, titled: “The Long, Slow Sexual Revolution.” I’ve been looking forward to it for a few weeks since Greg first told me he was working on this, and I can say that the wait was worth it (and not just because he kindly cites some of my stuff from the Blank-ogamous series). He takes a *very* big picture approach, and what I liked most about it was that it stressed the need to confront the evidence while also keeping an eye on context and complexity, and avoiding overly simplistic narratives. As he wrote:

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in summary, a flexible, even contradictory sexuality, which, although it confounds the simple description of human sexual ‘nature’, is actually an adaptive strategy given an animal that is going to have to adapt quickly and respond sensitively to shifting contexts (such as a large-bodied, hyper-invasive, wide-ranging mammalian omnivore).”

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It’s a long read, but very thorough and well-written. And, it’s about sex.

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#2.

From the Smithsonian, Top Ten Hominid Discoveries of 2011.

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#3.

The December Newsletter of the organization Legacies of War mentioned that U.S. Congress increased the budget “from $5 million in 2011 to an incredible $9 million in 2012 – the LARGEST annual amount ever“  for the removal of unexploded ordnance (UXO) in Laos. UXO remains an enormous problem in Laos, so this is welcome news. Though the amount of funds could always be higher, considering the magnitude of the problem, and the fact that most of the ordnance originated from U.S. planes.

NOTE: (Jan 12) Please see the discussion thread below.

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#4.

John Tirman at M.I.T. had a couple of hard-hitting editorials in the New York Times and the Washington Post that reflected on the impact that the United States’ wars have on civilians. In the second of these, “Why Do We Ignore the Civilians Killed in American Wars?,” he argued that: ”There’s little evidence that the American public gives much thought to the people who live in the nations where our military interventions take place.” He is concerned mainly with the wars in Iraq (just ended) and Afghanistan, but notes that despite the fact that we Americans can be quite generous in the case of giving to others during natural disasters, we also have a long tradition of ignorance of – and indifference toward – civilian deaths in our wars overseas.

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#5.

David Dobbs at ‘Wired’ had a thought-provoking piece, “Our Sickening Rush to See PTSD – and What It Costs Vets“ on our misconceptions of mental health among soldiers.

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Our culture’s obsession with PTSD, our reflexive painting of all combat vets as probably ruined by combat, is based on error and misconceptions —  and cruelly unfair to the veterans we think we’re helping by viewing as sick.”

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Happy reading.

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Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that come with this spring of 1953.

This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made, if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace.

It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honesty.

It calls upon them to answer the question that stirs the hearts of all sane men: is there no other way the world may live?

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The first great step along this way must be the conclusion of an honorable armistice in Korea.

This means the immediate cessation of hostilities and the prompt initiation of political discussions leading to the holding of free elections in a united Korea.

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We could proceed concurrently with the next great work — the reduction of the burden of armaments now weighing upon the world.

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The details of such disarmament programs are manifestly critical and complex.

Neither the United States nor any other nation can properly claim to possess a perfect, immutable formula. But the formula matters less than the faith — the good faith without which no formula can work justly and effectively.

The fruit of success in all these tasks would present the world with the greatest task, and the greatest opportunity, of all. It is this: the dedication of the energies, the resources, and the imaginations of all peaceful nations to a new kind of war. This would be a declared total war, not upon any human enemy but upon the brute forces of poverty and need.” 

(“The Chance for Peace,” Apr. 16, 1953).

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I cannot imagine how such a statement from a sitting President would be received in today’s political climate. And, despite his later warnings of the influence of the military-industrial complex, Eisenhower was a five-star general. Not exactly a  flower child. 

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The Korean peninsula at night (google earth)

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The above image of east Asia at night is worth more than a thousand words. Below the 38th parallel is the birthplace of my mother-in-law in South Korea, which is luminescent at night as the result of its highly developed economy. My father-in-law was born above that line in North Korea, which today appears to be little more than a shadow of its southern neighbor. Even if one knew nothing about history or geography, they could infer from that single satellite image that there must be a chasm in living standards on either side of the border.

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A full history of the two Koreas and the war of 1950-53 is beyond the scope of this post. What is relevant is that the forces of history and politics took a once cohesive nation and cleaved it in two, having disparate effects not only on the ideologies on either side, but also on the physical bodies of the respective inhabitants. It’s almost as if someone collected a population of dandelions from a single field and then placed them in two different greenhouses for six decades, replete with different soil quality, sunlight, and temperatures, and then observed how they fared. By now, many people have heard something about how North Koreans are significantly shorter than their southern cousins, implying that, like our dandelion example, the conditions for physical growth are quite different in the two greenhouses. John McCain even mentioned this during the 2008 presidential debates to illustrate North Korea’s brutality toward its citizens. How true is this claim?

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There are at least two ways for the average physical stature of a population to change over time. The first is via genetic evolution over fairly long expanses of time. For example, modern humans are much taller on average than chimpanzees or early hominins such as Orrorin or the australopithecines (McHenry and Coffing 2000; Nakatsukasa et al 2007).  The second way occurs over relatively short periods – a few generations – stemming from our developmental plasticity and ability to respond to fairly rapid changes in economic, ecological, or nutritional conditions. In human biology, these are known as ‘secular trends’ in growth. (Note that the word ‘secular’ in this case has nothing to do with religiosity, but it plays off the alternate meaning of ‘sacred’ as eternal, whereas secular is something that occurs in observable time). It is likely that there is a third important way that populations change over time, via epigenetic inheritance and ‘phenotypic inertia’ (Kuzawa 2005). But that is a story for another day.

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Although historical data can be tricky and must be pieced together carefully, secular trends in average population height, weight, or even sexual maturation such as age at menarche, have been observed to occur relatively rapidly (Steckel and Rose 2002; Euling et al 2008). One of the more commonly cited examples is that the Netherlands has gone from one of the shortest countries in Europe to one of the tallest in the world in roughly a century (Bilger 2004).  Many countries have seen similar upward changes over time as their economies and public health measures have improved, including South Korea. It’s northern counterpart, however, has not fared nearly as well.

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Sunyoung Pak and Daniel Schwekendiek (a biological anthropologist and an economist, respectively) have published extensively on the differences in growth between North and South Koreans. Pak (2004) compiled height data from the medical examination records of 2,384 North Korean adults who had fled to the South between 1999 and 2003. These data were then compared to a South Korean reference.

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Height of North and South Korean men (Pak 2004)

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It is difficult to imagine a more stark contrast. The above figure illustrates how height has changed between South and North Korean men over time (the same trend was found in women as well). For the older men, who were born in the 1930s before the division of the country, heights were nearly identical between North and South. However, as subsequent generations found themselves in increasingly different environmental conditions, the disparities in height between the two groups grew remarkably. South Koreans had a marked secular increase in height, whereas the North Korean trend was minimal. 

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There was some concern that this study could be misleading because its sample from the North was made entirely of defectors who were possibly not representative of the population as a whole. However, in 1997 and 2002 the United Nations conducted two independent nutritional surveys within North Korea itself (Schwekendiek and Pak 2009). From those studies, it was found that young North Korean children were about 6 to 8 cm (2 to 3 in) shorter than those in the South. And keep in mind that those children measured in North Korea were those fortunate enough to survive famine and extreme poverty.  

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From Schwekendiek and Pak (2009)

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It is necessary to point out that these trends were set in motion before the famine in the 1990s which claimed the lives of up to one million North Koreans. That famine appears to have resulted from a combination of factors, including natural disasters, deficiencies in food production and distribution, and the loss of support from the defunct Soviet Union (Schwekendiek, 2008). Today, hunger-related deaths are still occurring, resulting from a new suite of factors, including government policy decisions and consequent price shocks (Haggard and Nolan 2009).

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But another factor certainly must be the high percentage of scarce resources that the North Korean military siphons away from other important areas of life. According to the U.S. Department of State:

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“North Korea has one of the largest armies in the world. It has an estimated active duty military force of up to 1.2 million personnel, compared to about 680,000 in the South. Military spending is estimated at as much as a quarter of GNP, with up to 20% of men ages 17-54 in the regular armed forces.” 

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By comparison, U.S. military spending – despite its astronomically high figure in absolute terms – has been about 3 to 5% of GNP over the last two decades. Of course, military spending will always have opportunity costs for any nation, not just North Korea, since those resources cannot be invested elsewhere, such as infrastructure, public health, education, human development, etc. But North Korea is a special case since it puts such a high percentage of its resources into its military, and because its leadership believes it is still fighting for its existence in a war that never officially ended. It is also isolated, Orwellian, and extremely repressive, and that confluence of attributes does not bode well for its population.

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Elsewhere, Schwekendiek noted that the North Korean government’s attempt to influence its image as a prosperous nation to the rest of the world by releasing dubious statistics on health and economics are negated by objective data on the growth of its population (as well as many other pieces of information). The human biologist/physician James Tanner once referred to physical growth during childhood as a mirror for “the material and moral condition” of a society (Tanner 1986: 3; Tanner 1990). By those criteria, the conditions in North Korea are found severely lacking. One wonders if the recent death of Kim Jong-il will lead to changes in those conditions, but it seems unlikely that the gap in physical growth between North and South will be closed anytime soon.   

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References

Bilger B (2004) The height gap: why Europeans are getting taller and taller-and Americans aren’t.  New Yorker Apr: 38-45. (Link)

Euling SY, Herman-Giddens ME, Lee PA, Selevan SG, Juul A, Sørensen TI, Dunkel L, Himes JH, Teilmann G, Swan SH. (2008) Examination of US puberty-timing data from 1940 to 1994 for secular trends: panel findings. Pediatrics 121 Suppl 3:S172-91. (Link)

Haggard S, Nolan M (2009) Famine in North Korea redux? Journal of Asian Economics 20(4): 384-95. (Link)

Kuzawa CW (2005) Fetal origins of developmental plasticity: are fetal cues reliable predictors of future nutritional environments? American Journal of Human Biology 17: 5-21. (Link)

McHenry H, Coffing K (2000) Australopithecus to Homo: transformations in body and mind. Annual Reviews in Anthropology 29: 125-46.  (Link)

Nakatsukasa M, Pickford M, Egi N, Senut B (2007) Femur length, body mass, and stature estimates of Orrorin tugenensis, a 6 Ma hominid from Kenya. Primates 48(3): 171-178. (Link)

Pak S. (2004) The biological standard of living in the two Koreas. Economics and Human Biology 2(3):511-21. (Link)

Schwekendiek D. (2008) The North Korean standard of living during the famine. Social Science and Medicine 66(3):596-608. (Link)

Schwekendiek D, Pak S. (2009) Recent growth of children in the two Koreas: a meta-analysis. Economics and Human Biology 7(1):109-12. (Link)

Steckel RH and Rose JC (2002) The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere. Cambridge University Press. (Link)

Tanner JM (1986) Growth as a mirror for the conditions of society: secular trends and class distinctions. In Human Growth: A Multidisciplinary Review. Arto Demirjian and Micheline Brault Dubuc, eds. Pp. 3-34. London: Taylor and Francis.

Tanner JM (1990) Fetus into Man: Physical Growth from Conception to Maturity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Link)

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It really is a beautiful world. 

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Lessons from the Christmas Truce of 1914. This is easily the most widely read thing on this site, with nothing else coming close. It looks at the truce negotiated by German, French, and Scottish officers on Christmas Eve of 1914 during WWI, and the lessons we can draw upon from this and similar events to facilitate cooperation. I’m grateful to John Rennie for linking to it on his site.

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The “Humans are (Blank)-ogamous” series. I’m fudging a bit here, merging five posts together, but they were essentially a unit. It views human sexuality from a bio-anthropological perspective, arguing that we have a complex array of features consistent with both pair-bonding and promiscuity. I’m sure I didn’t get everything right and will rethink things as I learn more in the future, but it was a popular series. I also noticed that the post on promiscuity was read three times as often as the one on romantic love (interesting what catches on). There’s also a forthcoming conclusion, but I’m still not quite sure how to write it yet.

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A Reverence for Life. Essentially, this is a look at how biologists marvel at the beauty of the living world. It got some attention mostly thanks to a mention from Ed Yong on his wonderful site and Kate Clancy for having her students read this. (Nods to Richard Dawkins, Lynn Margulis, Neil Shubin, Richard Fortey and Neil deGrasse Tyson).

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Reconciliation, Biology, and the Second Indochina War . I actually consider this one of the most meaningful things I’ve written here, or anywhere. It looks at the biology and history of guilt, forgiveness, and reconciliation. I’m grateful that it was well-received, with many thanks to Daniel Lende for mentioning it. (Some important pieces: Kim Phuc, cluster bomb damage in Laos, UXO, My Lai, Pham Thanh Cong, William Calley, consolation in chimpanzees, hawks and doves).

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Inequality, Health Disparities, & Obesity. A look at the relationship between poverty and obesity. In higher income countries, what are some of the factors involved in persons of lower socioeconomic status having  higher rates of obesity? Ed Yong again.

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On Life, Death, and Shaking Hands with Your Ancestors . A look at our mortality as individuals, and our immortality through our ancestors and descendants. We stand in a chain of continuity.

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One Planet. One Species. Homo sapiens. A brief look at how our species has adapted to so many different environments.

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On Optimism and Human Nature.  A hopeful look at humans, in spite of the fact that we are sometimes miserable to each other. “In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted shortcuts to love…”  - John Steinbeck (also Richard Wrangham, Frans deWaal, Steven Pinker).

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Peace with the ‘Enemy’. More examples of reconciliation among formerly hardened enemies. I see a pattern here.  “The list of examples may not be a long one, but it is full of significance and meaning.” 

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Public Outreach: Sharing Anthropology Outside the University. Teaching anthropology to grade school kids and older adults can help share a pretty interesting field of study, and can also be quite enjoyable.

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Perspective.  This isn’t really one of the most-visited pages, nor did I really write much for it, but I’m including it anyway. It’s basically a great video clip featuring Carl Sagan: “For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness… How many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.”

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Thanks again for reading.

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Related posts:

Life is Beautiful (May 15, 2010)

A Reverence for Life  (May 6, 2011)

On Life, Death, and Shaking Hands with Your Ancestors (Aug 28, 2011)

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The latest example of this comes from the Bronx and the uplifting NPR story of Julio Diaz, who confronted his mugger with compassion, and had inspirational results. Highly recommended.

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Something similar to the story of Mr. Diaz actually happened to me when I was a teenager. Each summer from the ages of 16 to 21, I worked six days a week on a ferry boat in order to save enough money for college. It was a great job at that age, but the 12-hour days were long and monotonous, and left little time for much else.

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One evening in my first year on the job, we arrived back in port, got the passengers off, then cleaned up the boat. As I rode my bicycle home after a long day to eat dinner, maybe watch some TV and go to bed before doing the whole thing all over again the next day, a woman asked me for the time. I stopped my bike to talk to her, but after a few seconds I felt a blow to the back of my head. After stumbling and being disoriented for a few seconds, I realized I had been set up, and the woman’s male accomplice had crept behind me and sucker-punched me pretty hard. 

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From there, the story is not nearly as tidy as the one of Julio Diaz, who was able to talk to his mugger in a clear and coherent manner right from the start. For me, it was much messier. As the woman rode off on my bike (which in fact belonged to my brother), my initial reaction was rage, and I probably let out every curse word I knew. But I really wanted my brother’s bike back so I chased the woman for some distance, caught her, and grabbed the handle bars. Meanwhile, the man who had hit me was chasing us, and as badly as I wanted the bike I couldn’t bring myself to hit the woman before he arrived … even though, understandably, a part of me really, really wanted to.

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We then entered into a standoff that lasted probably around a half hour. Maybe longer. It’s been a while, and my memory of that evening becomes more hazy as time elapses. What I do remember clearly is entering into a dialogue, interspersed with the woman throwing rocks at me, which I deflected with my backpack. She was a lost cause. However, the man seemed more empathetic to me, and I thought I could reach him, despite the obvious thorn in our relationship that that he had hit me earlier. He was also much larger than me, and I knew that he probably could have hurt me a lot worse than he did if he really wanted to. But he didn’t, and from the woman’s level of aggression, I sensed the whole scheme wasn’t his idea. Most likely, he had been put up to it in order to make some relatively easy money. All it would take would be to hit some unsuspecting stranger in the head. 

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At this point, I cannot remember exactly what I said, but I talked to him for a while, asking something along the lines of how he felt about hitting me and taking my brother’s bicycle, and whether he was raised to hurt and rob people.  On the other hand, the woman was pretty cold-blooded, and continued to throw rocks, telling me to shut up and that I couldn’t talk them out of the bike.

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But something got through to the man. He relented, reconsidered what he had done, took the bike away from the woman, and handed it to me. I said ‘thank you’ (really!) and rode home.

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If something similar happened to me today, I don’t know if I would react in exactly the same way. Circumstances definitely affected my actions that evening. One of the lessons from that experience was that decent people can do shitty things, but empathy – as seen in the examples of the Christmas Truce and Julio Diaz – can go a long way to bring them back. 

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Related: Reconciliation, Biology, and the 2nd Indochina War (Mar 11, 2011)

Related: The Christmas Truce of 1914 (Dec 23, 2010)

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Last week, the American Anthropological Association held its annual meeting, this year in the beautiful city of Montreal (for a couple of summaries of the conference, see here and here). Rahul Oka, from the University of Notre Dame, asked if I would like to be one of two discussants for his session (co-chaired with Nerina Weiss) “Traces of Violence and Legacies of Conflict,” and I agreed. The session was full of very erudite presenters who spoke on a range of topics related to the anthropology of conflict and violence.

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But in preparation for the session, I have to admit to some trepidation because nearly all of the presenters were  ethnographers or archaeologists. And as a biological anthropologist, I felt out of my element.  The presentations were also quite diverse in geography, time period, theoretical perspective, and outcome variable, ranging from structural violence and undocumented border crossings from Mexico into the United States, to skeletal trauma in Neolithic Europe, to Kurdish survivors of torture. I found it hard to discuss the various papers with much sophistication and detail while also finding commonalities among them (and all in fifteen minutes, no less). I tried, but finally concluded that it probably wasn’t going to happen. Therefore, I decided to do a rather broad analysis of the papers, which I read ahead of time. But there was always the risk of zooming out too far, thereby making any analysis overly simplistic and virtually meaningless.

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Here were some of the common threads I identified among the presented papers:

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1. War and large-scale violence harm more than military personnel.

From the perspective of the media and policy makers, there is a tendency to focus on nation-states, and whether military actions are successful. Who’s ‘winning’ the war? From an anthropological perspective, the concern is more with the everyday people on the ground. In nearly all of our presentations, there was the common denominator that civilians were harmed through mass slaughters of villages, violence through slavery, forced displacement, defaced or confiscated property, psychological trauma, etc. War is not healthy for children (or other living things).

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2. Anthropological ‘stories.’

As Rahul said at the conference, anthropologists tell stories. Our populations, time periods, theoretical backgrounds, and variables of focus may vary, but what we have in common is that we are concerned with some story of people’s lives that in all likelihood would not be told otherwise. This requires active, systematic research and data collection under sometimes risky circumstances. 

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3. People are resilient.

It is important to remember that people are not just passive recipients of their surrounding environments, subjected to circumstances beyond their control. They are also semi-autonomous agents with the ability to adapt, or at least make the most their circumstances, however horrible they may be. This is also true during times of war and violence. 

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War and violence are such relevant topics, and anthropological perspectives are sorely needed. Sessions such as this one, and other works like the 2010 book “The War Machine and Global Health” (edited by Merrill Singer and G. Derrick Hodge) are a good way to bring anthropologists of different perspectives together. Collectively, they can make strides in illustrating the way war and structural violence has real impacts on human lives.

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There is no clear segue into this next section, but I recently saw a 3-D video interpretation of Picasso’s famous painting Guernica, an obvious commentary on the brutality of the bombing of the Basque town, and perhaps war in general (for example, the hidden skull in the horse’s body). It got me thinking about other works of art that focused on civilians during times of war, rather than on famous generals, battles, etc. Below are just a few examples.

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Guernica (Picasso, 1937)

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Returning to the Reconquered Land (Clausen, 1919)

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Hmong paj ntaub storycloth

Hmong embroidery (paj ntaub translates as ‘flower cloth’) has a range of styles, but one of the more common varieties depicts a narrative of the ‘Secret War‘ in Laos and the subsequent flight to refugee camps in Thailand. Hmong, shown in traditional black clothing, are shown fighting and fleeing from Pathet Lao and Northern Vietnamese troops (though the reality was obviously more complex than this).

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Bitter Bread (Mikhailov 1944)

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Some works are a bit older, such as Jacques Callot’s 1633 The Great Miseries of War and Francisco Goya’s 1820 The Disasters of War.

They escape among the flames (Goya 1820)

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The looting and burning of a village (Callot 1633)

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What the above artworks have in common is that they try to make an unsanitized portrayal of war’s brutality toward civilians, rather than solely as a military contest.  When the elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers. This proverb has been attributed to multiple cultures, including from East Africa and Laos. I’m uncertain of its actual origins, but the basic premise still stands – the little people suffer when powerful militaries collide.

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Note: If anyone can suggest other works of art (preferably paintings) related to war and civilians, please feel free to comment. -PC, Nov 26. 

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