R.P. Aditya

A CT scan is preformed on a patient infected by Covid-19 at the Red Cross hospital in Wuhan, China, on February 28, 2020. | Stringer/AFP via Getty Images

“It’s all about speed”: the most important lessons from China’s Covid-19 response.

There’s one country in the world that currently has the most knowledge of and experience with Covid-19: China.

China, and specifically Hubei province, is where the Covid-19 disease emerged; it’s where 83 percent of the 89,000 cases known to date have been recorded; and it’s where doctors and health authorities have been battling an epidemic for two months — while other countries braced themselves for outbreaks — using unprecedented public health measures, including a cordon sanitaire and lockdowns that affected millions.

In recent weeks, though, the number of new infections and deaths reported in China has been declining, which suggests spread of the virus may have peaked there and that transmission is slowing down.

At the same time, cases are rapidly increasing in several other countries, with major outbreaks in South Korea, Italy, and Iran — and a growing case count in the United States.

It’s now critical that the rest of the world learn as much as it can from China’s efforts to respond to and limit the spread of the virus.

That was precisely the intention of a recent World Health Organization (WHO) mission to China, led by the agency’s assistant director general and veteran epidemiologist Bruce Aylward. Its major finding: “China’s bold approach to contain the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic.”

On Monday, Vox talked to Aylward about the big takeaways from the mission’s report: the playbook China used to curb Covid-19 spread, why speed in responding to an outbreak is so crucial, whether we can trust China’s data, and why smoking could be exacerbating the impact of the epidemic there. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What the world can learn from China’s Covid-19 response

Julia Belluz

The WHO has been suggesting the world should follow China’s lead, but as you know, there are concerns about the human rights effects from China’s response to the Covid-19 outbreak — most notably, the restrictions on freedom of movement through lockdowns and cordon sanitaires. How do you respond to critics who are concerned about that?

Bruce Aylward

I think people aren’t paying close enough attention. The majority of the response in China, in 30 provinces, was about case finding, contact tracing, and suspension of public gatherings — all common measures used anywhere in the world to manage [the spread of] diseases.

The lockdowns people are referring to — the human rights concerns — usually reflect the situation in places like Wuhan [the city in Hubei province where the virus was first detected]. [The lockdown] was concentrated in Wuhan and two or three other cities that also exploded [with Covid-19 cases]. These are places that got out of control in the beginning [of the outbreak], and China made this decision to protect China and the rest of the world.

Christina Animashaun/Vox

Christina Animashaun/Vox

China is now trying to restart its economy. They can’t do that with millions of people in lockdown in their apartments or with the trains stopped and all their factories suspended. They are getting those things working again, but they have their system primed for rapid detection and rapid response. They never want to be in another situation like a Wuhan — and they haven’t. That’s the first place, and 30 other provinces managed to avoid that, and not just avoid that but reverse the [outbreak].

Julia Belluz

Okay, so most of the measures used in China to stop the virus were traditional public health moves that are broadly accepted — and the draconian measures were rarer. Is there any sense of what in China’s toolkit was most effective?

Bruce Aylward

I think the key learning from China is speed — it’s all about the speed. The faster you can find the cases, isolate the cases, and track their close contacts, the more successful you’re going to be. Another big takeaway is that even when you have substantial transmission with a lot of clusters — because people are looking at the situation in some countries now and going, “Oh, gosh, what can be done?” — what China demonstrates is if you settle down, roll up your sleeves, and begin that systematic work of case finding and contact tracing, you definitely can change the shape of the outbreak, take the heat out of it, and prevent a lot of people from getting sick and a lot of the most vulnerable from dying.

The question becomes, then, how did they do that, and how much of it is replicable? Since coming back from China, everybody I talk to begins with, “We can’t lock down a city of 15 million people like China.” I say, “Why would you ever want to?” And I ask, “Does your population know x, y, z [about the virus]?” I learn they haven’t started with the basics.

So, No. 1, if you want to get speed of response, your population has to know this disease. You find any population in the West and ask them what are the two presenting signs you have to be alert to. What would you say?

Julia Belluz

Aren’t the two initial symptoms most commonly fever and dry cough?

Bruce Aylward

Right. [But many still think] it’s a runny nose and cold. Your population is your surveillance system. Everybody has got a smartphone, everybody can get a thermometer. That is your surveillance system. Don’t rely on this hitting your health system, because then it’s going to infect it. You’ve got this great surveillance system out there — make sure the surveillance system is primed. Make sure you’re ready to act on the signals that come in from that surveillance system. You’ve got to be set up to rapidly assess whether or not they really have those symptoms, test those people, and, if necessary, isolate and trace their contacts.

Here, again, is where I’ve seen things starting to break down. What I’ve been told is if you think you’ve been exposed and have a fever, call your [general practitioner]. We’ve got to be better than that. If we are going to use our GPs — do they have an emergency line where you can get through? Do they know what to do?

In China, they have set up a giant network of fever hospitals. In some areas, a team can go to you and swab you and have an answer for you in four to seven hours. But you’ve got to be set up — speed is everything.

So make sure your people know [about the virus]. Make sure you have mechanisms for working with them very quickly through your health system. Then enough public health infrastructure to investigate cases, identify the close contacts, and then make sure they remain under surveillance. That’s 90 percent of the Chinese response.

Julia Belluz

But, again, China implemented so many different measures at once. How do we know contact tracing was more important than, say, the mass cordon sanitaire and shutting down cities?

Bruce Aylward

Think about the virus. Where is the virus, and how do you contain the virus? You know the virus is in the cases and in the close contacts. That’s where the majority of the virus is; that’s where the majority of the focus should be. China did a whole bunch of things, and other countries may have to do them, too, as they go forward. But the key is public information and having an informed population, finding those cases, rapidly isolating them. The faster you isolate them is what breaks the chains. Making sure close contacts are quarantined and monitored until you know if they’re infected. Somewhere between 5 and 15 percent of those contacts are infected. And again, it’s the close contacts, not everyone.

Julia Belluz

There were reports from China about collateral damage from this outbreak — the HIV patients, for example, who were reportedly not getting treatment in time because of travel restrictions and lockdowns. What can we learn from China to minimize this type of damage in other countries?

Bruce Aylward

China took a whole bunch of steps when they realized they had to repurpose big chunks of their hospital systems to [respond to the outbreak]. The first thing is, they said testing is free, treatment is free. Right now, there are huge barriers [to testing and treatment] in the West. You can get tested, but then you might be negative and have to foot the bill. In China, they realized those were barriers to people seeking care, so, as a state, they took over the payments for people whose insurance plans didn’t cover them. They tried to mitigate those barriers.

The other thing they did: Normally a prescription in China can’t last for more than a month. But they increased it to three months to make sure people didn’t run out [when they had to close a lot of their hospitals]. Another thing: Prescriptions could be done online and through WeChat [instead of requiring a doctor appointment]. And they set up a delivery system for medications for affected populations.

Is this the big pandemic we’ve been told is coming — the “big one”?

Julia Belluz

The idea that the spread of this virus is driven mainly by families features prominently in your report. How do we know that?

Bruce Aylward

You look at the big, long lists of all the cases and identify those where you have clusterings in space and time and try to investigate what kind of clustering happened: Was it in a hospital, an old-age home, theaters, restaurants? We found it was predominantly in families. It’s not a big surprise; China had shut down a lot of the other ways people could gather. And family clusters are the closest, longest exposures [to the virus], and getting the virus is a function of whether someone’s got it, how long they’re exposed, and how much virus they are shedding.

More of a surprise, and this is something we still don’t understand, is how little virus there was in the much broader community. Everywhere we went, we tried to find and understand how many tests had been done, how many people were tested, and who were they.

In Guangdong province, for example, there were 320,000 tests done in people coming to fever clinics, outpatient clinics. And at the peak of the outbreak, 0.47 percent of those tests were positive. People keep saying [the cases are the] tip of the iceberg. But we couldn’t find that. We found there’s a lot of people who are cases, a lot of close contacts — but not a lot of asymptomatic circulation of this virus in the bigger population. And that’s different from flu. In flu, you’ll find this virus right through the child population, right through blood samples of 20 to 40 percent of the population.

Julia Belluz

If you didn’t find the “iceberg” of mild cases in China, what does it say about how deadly the virus is — the case fatality rate?

Bruce Aylward

It says you’re probably not way off. The average case fatality rate is 3.8 percent in China, but a lot of that is driven by the early epidemic in Wuhan where numbers were higher. If you look outside of Hubei province [where Wuhan is], the case fatality rate is just under 1 percent now. I would not quote that as the number. That’s the mortality in China — and they find cases fast, get them isolated, in treatment, and supported early. Second thing they do is ventilate dozens in the average hospital; they use extracorporeal membrane oxygenation [removing blood from a person’s body and oxygenating their red blood cells] when ventilation doesn’t work. This is sophisticated health care. They have a survival rate for this disease I would not extrapolate to the rest of the world. What you’ve seen in Italy and Iran is that a lot of people are dying.

This suggests the Chinese are really good at keeping people alive with this disease, and just because it’s 1 percent in the general population outside of Wuhan doesn’t mean it [will be the same in other countries].

Julia Belluz

That’s really concerning for the rest of the world. Are you suggesting this is the big one — the once-a-century pandemic people have been bracing for?

Bruce Aylward

It’s not. It can be the big one but like, for flu — whether you have a pandemic with flu, it’s a function of the virus. That’s a virus with a very, very high infectivity rate, a very, very high transmissibility rate. The time [the virus] takes to go from [one person to the next] can be as short as 1.5 days. For Covid-19, it’s longer — four to five days. Look around the world. We’re seeing a whole bunch of outbreaks controlled with the right responses, and even turned around if they get to a bad state.

Panic and hysteria are not appropriate. This is a disease that is in the cases and their close contacts. It’s not a hidden enemy lurking behind bushes. Get organized, get educated, and get working.

Julia Belluz

How should countries look out for the virus?

Bruce Aylward

Originally, I was a big believer in the idea that we should swab millions and see what’s going on [how many have the virus]. But the data from China made me rethink that. What could be done instead is that every hospital should test people with atypical pneumonia for Covid. People with flu-like symptoms — test for Covid.

We have a lot of surveillance systems for flu in the world, trying to pick up the big one, and should use those systems to test for Covid.

Trusting China

Julia Belluz

We have been seeing a small uptick in Hubei for the last couple of days. What is going on there?

Bruce Aylward

I wrote to the [team] in China yesterday and asked them about the uptick in cases, which was very slight. They said they are getting through the backlog of suspect cases — so people who had clinical symptoms, CT scan findings — and rather than clinically confirming them, they are making sure they test them. Some of them are also in some of those prison outbreaks. But the big driver is coming off the suspect cases. In 48 hours, [we’ll know if that] theory is true. Already today, cases started to come down. The [new case count] dropped again today.

Julia Belluz

Can we trust China’s data?

Bruce Aylward

The big question is, are they hiding things? No, they are not. We looked at many different things to try to corroborate that cases are dropping. When I went to fever clinics and talked to people working there, they’d say, “We used to have a line out the door, and now we see a case once per hour.”

According to the national data, fever clinics went from seeing 46,000 people per day at one point and it’s now down to 1,000. So there’s been a huge drop in numbers into the feeder system.

Second thing: When talking to physicians in hospitals, I heard again and again that we have open beds, we can get people isolated even more rapidly. I heard that in Wuhan and other provinces. The third thing: I talked to people running clinical trials of drugs, and they are having a problem recruiting patients. All these things helped corroborate [China’s data].

WHO-China joint mission report on Covid-19

Julia Belluz

What were the biggest vulnerabilities in China, and what are you most worried about for other countries as they face more cases?

Bruce Aylward

You have to have enough beds. In China, they closed off whole wings [of hospitals], sealed them to make them a dirty zone [where patients with the disease could be treated safely]. They worked at scale. They bought a heap of ventilators to keep people alive. They made sure they had a lot of high-flow oxygen, CT-scanning capacity, lab capacity. So beds, ventilators, oxygen, CTs, and labs. And they had problems with all of those supplies at different points. [The Chinese] will say there are shortcomings in our response, in how fast we found this, how fast we responded. And there will be a major reform to address that.

Why the virus disproportionately kills the elderly and spares the young

Julia Belluz

While deaths are occurring at higher rates in elderly people, there have been reports of young, otherwise healthy people dying, too. What’s going on there? And is there any talk of how China’s high smoking rates may be contributing to these deaths?

Bruce Aylward

[Smoking] definitely does because the co-morbid conditions makes [Covid-19] worse. Over the long term, we know smokers get cardiovascular and lung disease, and these are all co-factors in terms of a higher probability of mortality. From that perspective, we know it’s a problem. In some of the mortality [research,] we see a higher mortality rate in males than females in China. There’s a suspicion that may be a function of differences in smoking patterns: There’s very high smoking rates among men in China compared to women.

We spent a lot of time asking doctors who these people in their 30s and 40s are who are rapidly progressing and getting this disease and dying. They’d say, “We don’t know.” I’d ask, “What about smoking?” I never found one who said yes to that question. It’s something I couldn’t get an answer to.

Julia Belluz

What are the other important knowledge gaps?

Bruce Aylward

It’s hard to find the virus in general swabs done in the community. And that’s interesting and reassuring. It’s not like flu. But we couldn’t answer the question of why some young, otherwise healthy people suddenly deteriorate. We need to understand that if we [want to] keep people alive.

Julia Belluz

In the elderly, what explains the high death rate? Is it something about deterioration of the immune system with age or the higher probability you have [of developing] other illnesses as you age?

Bruce Aylward

I think it’s the latter. These people are dying of an inflammatory process in their lungs. It’s not an infectious process, like a bacterial or viral infection. It’s inflammatory, like we see with SARS. We’re not sure of the mechanism. We do know the proportion of people who die who had cancer was half compared to hypertension and cardiovascular disease. Diabetes is a little bit lower than those two, and cancer lower again.

Julia Belluz

So why do kids seem to be spared so far? What’s the best hypothesis?

Bruce Aylward

It’s a million-dollar question. There are three possibilities: Kids don’t get infected for some reason; they get infected but have a low expression of disease; they get infected and express disease like everyone else but we haven’t seen it because of schools being closed. I think the first and last aren’t the reality. So it’s that middle group.

There are a couple of theories going around [to explain this]. The receptors [Covid-19] binds to in the lungs aren’t very mature in children. But the reality is we see this phenomenon up to 90 years of age, so that sounds unlikely. Second, maybe the four coronaviruses that cause colds confer some temporary immunity in kids. But then why aren’t the elderly [protected]?

We’ve got to get an antibody test [to test the population for antibodies to the virus] to know if kids are driving the epidemic and we just can’t see it.

Correction 3/2: A graphic in this piece previously misstated the percentage of cases in China that were not linked back to the Wuhan area. The graphic has been updated with the correct figure, 14 percent.

She belongs in a way I never could. I’m comforted — and worried.

This is the kind of gentle density we need.

The upside-down jellyfish is mostly stationary, so it evolved self-propelling cells that can swim over and sting you on its behalf.

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The lower Congo River’s depths have made it a natural lab for convergent evolution, yielding fish with unexpected features.

The Berkeley show marks the largest and most comprehensive exhibition ever presented of the work by this celebrated artist, one of the most inventive quilt makers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

At first, villagers thought the dark, dense blot in the sky was a harmless cloud. Then came the terrifying realization that the locusts had arrived.

A shopkeeper surveys fresh fruit and vegetables at a food market in Istanbul. | Tim Graham/Getty Images

The answer is not “eat local.”

“Eat local.” It’s a recommendation you’ve probably heard before. Environmental advocates and even the United Nations have hyped a “locavore” diet as a way to reduce your carbon footprint and help the climate. The basic idea is that more transportation leads to more emissions, so you want to reduce the distance your food has to travel to get to you.

And certainly, if you can eat local, that’s great. But it’s not the most effective way to reduce your food’s carbon footprint.

The website Our World in Data recently explained, with some great charts, why your focus should really be elsewhere.

“Eating locally would only have a significant impact if transport was responsible for a large share of food’s final carbon footprint. For most foods, this is not the case,” writes Hannah Ritchie. “Emissions from transportation make up a very small amount of the emissions from food and what you eat is far more important than where your food traveled from.”

Take a look at the chart below, which examines 29 different food products, from beef to nuts, and breaks down how much greenhouse gas emissions each stage in the supply chain is responsible for. The data comes from the biggest meta-analysis of worldwide food systems we’ve got so far, published in Science in 2018.

Our World in Data

As you can see, the share of emissions from transport (shown in red) is generally pretty tiny; the distance our food travels to get to us actually accounts for less than 10 percent of most food products’ carbon footprint. Processes on farms (shown in brown) and changes in land use (shown in green) typically account for much more of the emissions from our food.

Translation: What you eat is much more important than whether your food is local.

So, next time you find yourself trying to choose between a couple of different dinner options — local prawns versus non-local fish, let’s say — remember that from an emissions standpoint, the fish is the better choice even though it comes from farther away.

One caveat: Although transport has a small climate impact for most food products, that’s not true for products that travel by air. Now, very few products actually fall into that category — just 0.16 percent of food is air-freighted, while the vast majority travels by boat (including those beloved avocados). But it’s worth noting which products do travel by air, and avoiding them when they’re not in season, since air travel is so bad for the climate.

It can be hard to know which products in your grocery store are air-freighted, since they’re almost never labeled as such. But a good rule of thumb is to avoid fresh fruits and vegetables that have a short shelf-life and that come from far away (check the label for their country of origin). Berries, green beans, and asparagus are examples of foods that are often air-freighted. Locally sourced berries, green beans, and asparagus, though, have a low carbon footprint.

What about “sustainable meat” versus plant-based foods?

At this point, you might be wondering where plant-based foods fit into all this. With so many grocery stores and restaurants now selling Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, it’s reasonable to wonder about the carbon footprint of products made from protein sources other than meat.

Some have argued that you can have a lower footprint if you eat beef or lamb sourced from low-impact producers than if you switch to plant-based alternatives. But the evidence suggests that’s just not true. (Remember that only 0.16 percent of food is air-freighted, and that figure includes fruits and vegetables.)

“Plant-based foods emit fewer greenhouse gases than meat and dairy, regardless of how they are produced,” Ritchie writes.

Here’s another chart, which shows that less meat is nearly always better than sustainable meat when it comes to reducing your carbon footprint. The data comes from the same 2018 meta-analysis mentioned above, which considered the food systems in 119 countries.

As you can see, beef and lamb are way over on one extreme in terms of the amount of emissions they produce. By contrast, plant-based protein sources like tofu, beans, peas, and nuts have a very low carbon footprint.

“This is certainly true when you compare average emissions. But it’s still true when you compare the extremes: there’s not much overlap in emissions between the worst producers of plant proteins, and the best producers of meat and dairy,” Ritchie notes.

Translation: Eating plant-based food is almost always going to be better for the environment than eating even the most sustainable meat.

That said, it’s worth noting that some types of meat are much harsher on the environment than others. Replacing beef or lamb with chicken or pork — again, regardless of where you get the products from — is an effective way to reduce your carbon footprint.

This is all coming strictly from an emissions standpoint, mind you. It doesn’t take into account animal welfare. Perhaps you think the welfare of animals like pigs, which show signs of high intelligence, is an important consideration here; if so, you might think it’s a bad idea to substitute pork for other types of meat. And we have to slaughter about 200 chickens to get the same amount of meat we’d get from one cow, which raises environmental as well as animal welfare concerns.

There are multiple factors to consider when making food choices, and your final decision may shake out differently depending on how you weight each of them.

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Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg speaks on stage during her induction into the National Museum of American Jewish History’s Only in America Gallery. | Gilbert Carrasquillo/Getty Images

A half-century-long fight for equality is likely at an end.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the most important feminist lawyer in American history. Long before she became a judge, she convinced the Supreme Court to hold that gender discrimination can violate the Constitution. She spent many of the following years working to strengthen those protections for women.

Yet Ginsburg said on Monday that one of her life’s goals — writing a strong prohibition against gender discrimination into the Constitution — must be put on hold.

At an event at Georgetown University’s law school, moderator and federal appellate judge Margaret McKeown asked Ginsburg about an ongoing effort to revive the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which provides that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

Three-fourths of the states, or 38 total, are required to amend the Constitution. Last month, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the ERA and one of only three states to do so since 1977 — but there’s a catch. Congress imposed a 1982 deadline on states hoping to ratify the ERA, though there’s doubt about whether this deadline is binding.

Ginsburg’s comments on Monday suggest that she believes this 1982 deadline should be considered binding. “I would like to see a new beginning” for ERA ratification, the justice told McKeown.

“There’s too much controversy about latecomers,” Ginsburg added. “Plus, a number of states have withdrawn their ratification. So if you count a latecomer on the plus side, how can you disregard states that said ‘we’ve changed our minds?’”

According to the Washington Post, five states — Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, Tennessee, and South Dakota — voted to ratify the ERA but later rescinded that ratification.

Ginsburg’s comments are likely to be the death knell for the ERA. Without Ginsburg’s vote, it’s tough to imagine that five members of the Supreme Court would agree the ERA was properly ratified. And while Congress could, in theory, start the ratification process over again, it’s also hard to imagine two-thirds of the House and Senate agreeing to do so in an age when Congress often struggles to perform basic functions like funding the government.

Ginsburg also made her somewhat surprising remarks in a moment when the bulk of her feminist accomplishments are endangered by an increasingly conservative Supreme Court.

Justice Ginsburg’s feminist legacy teeters on a knife’s edge

In Reed v. Reed (1971), a case that Ginsburg helped litigate while she was still a practicing attorney, the Supreme Court held for the first time in American history that the Constitution limits the government’s ability to discriminate on the basis of gender. Ginsburg spent much of the 1970s convincing the Court to expand its holding in Reed. And she resumed this project shortly after the joined the Court.

Under Ginsburg’s opinion in United States v. Virginia (1996), “a party seeking to uphold government action based on sex must establish an ‘exceedingly persuasive justification’ for the classification.”

Had the Equal Rights Amendment been ratified, it would have given women somewhat stronger protections than they enjoy under Virginia, but the bar on gender discrimination laid out in Virginia is still quite robust. As a practical matter, current legal doctrine achieves almost the same outcome that would have been achieved if the ERA were part of the Constitution.

But it’s also unclear if there are still five justices on the Supreme Court who agree with Virginia. There may even be five justices who think Reed was wrongly decided.

Chief Justice John Roberts is the most moderate member of the Supreme Court’s Republican majority. Yet as an aide to Attorney General William French Smith in 1981, Roberts prepared a draft article arguing that the Court’s constitutional decisions protecting against gender discrimination were “an unjustified intrusion into legislative affairs.” The future chief justice later argued, unsuccessfully, that the Justice Department should not intervene on behalf of female prisoners who alleged sex discrimination by Kentucky’s prison system.

It’s unclear whether these writings represented Roberts’s beliefs or if he was merely a political aide advancing his boss’ opinions. There is, however, at least some evidence that Roberts personally opposed constitutional gender equality. As a White House attorney in 1983, he criticized a version of the ERA because it would “ipso facto override the prerogatives of the states and vest the federal judiciary with broader powers in this area.”

To be clear, Roberts’s views may have evolved since the 1980s. It’s also possible that one of his four Republican colleagues would vote to preserve a decision like Virginia either for an idiosyncratic doctrinal reason or out of respect for precedent. The fate of Ginsburg’s feminist legacy is uncertain, but its doom is not inevitable.

Nevertheless, their fate is more uncertain than ever. And cases like Virginia and Reed are even less likely to survive if President Trump gets to fill more seats on the Supreme Court.

The question of whether the ERA was properly ratified is also uncertain

Setting aside Ginsburg’s recent comments, it is also unclear whether the 1982 deadline Congress imposed on ERA ratification should be considered binding. The answer turns on two rather dated Supreme Court opinions.

In Dillon v. Gloss (1921), the Supreme Court held that Congress may “fix a definite period for the ratification” of a constitutional amendment. But Dillon involved the 18th Amendment, whose text states that it “shall be inoperative” unless it is ratified “within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the states by the Congress.”

The ERA’s text, by contrast, does not mention a deadline. The deadline is mentioned in the resolution proposing the amendment, but not in the text of the amendment itself. So it is not clear that Dillon applies to the ERA.

Less than two decades after Dillon, in Coleman v. Miller (1939), the Court suggested that Congress, and not the courts, has the final word on whether an amendment was properly ratified. “Congress, possessing exclusive power over the amending process, cannot be bound by, and is under no duty to accept, the pronouncements upon that exclusive power by this Court or by the [state] courts,” the Court explained in Coleman.

That suggests that if Congress were to decide that the ERA was properly ratified, the courts would be bound by that decision. But Congress has not done so, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he is “personally not a supporter” of the ERA, so he may simply refuse to call a vote on whether the ERA is part of the Constitution.

And without congressional action, Ginsburg’s statement that supporters of the ERA need to start over is likely to be dispositive.

The first — and maybe the last — descent of Salto del Maule. A national kayaking champion dreamed of being the first person to run a 134-foot waterfall in the mountains of Chile.

Photo by Sebastian Gollnow/picture alliance via Getty Images

What drives women in America to have babies at home rather than in a hospital or birth center?

For the past few years, we’ve been talking with hundreds of women and their families about what it’s like to give birth, recover from birth, and become a mother in the United States.

Many of you suggested doing more research into home births. Our next round of reporting will focus on what leads women in America to opt for home births rather than hospital or birth center births. Help us out by filling in this survey.

We take your privacy seriously, and we’ll be the only ones reading what you send to us through the questionnaire.

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Two brothers have given everything to treat raptors injured by a popular pastime.

In the remote northern steppes of Mongolia, in 2017, anthropologist Christina Warinner and her colleagues were interviewing local herders about dairying practices. One day, a yak and cattle herder, Dalaimyagmar, demonstrated how she makes traditional yogurt and cheeses.

In spring, as livestock calve and produce the most milk, Mongolians switch from a meat-centered diet to one based on dairy products. Each year, Dalaimyagmar thaws the saved sample of the previous season’s yogurt, which she calls khöröngo. She adds some of this yogurt to fresh milk, over several days, until it is revived. With this “starter culture,” she is then able to make dairy products all summer.

Afterward, as the anthropologists drove their struggling vehicle up steep hills back to their camp, graduate student and translator Björn Reichhardt had a realization. Khöröngo is also the Mongolian word for wealth or inheritance.

In Mongolia, dairy products are vital dietary staples—more than 70 are made and consumed. From a certain perspective, then, the double meaning of khöröngo was unsurprising.

But there was some irony at work. In Mongolia, most herders have no idea that the khöröngo is, in fact, made up of a wealth of microbes. And that lack of knowledge could be a problem. Not only do these microbes bring benefits to the health, diet, and food practices of Mongolians—as well as a distinctive taste endemic to their cuisine—but they could be lost as Western industrial practices come to the country.

It’s become a dual mission of Warinner’s to not only help Mongolians value their microbial riches, but also explore the impact these regional microbes have had on human history. “Bacteria are amazing, overlooked, and misunderstood,” says Warinner, who splits her time between the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Warinner and her collaborator, Jessica Hendy, an archaeological scientist at the University of York, started the Heirloom Microbes project in 2017 to identify and preserve rare microbes, specifically the bacteria that turn lactose into lactic acid, the first step in transforming milk into yogurts and cheeses. In the process, they hope to understand which microbes were unique to specific early dairy communities—and how they spread from one region to the next.

Combining interests in ancient diets, traditional cultural practices, and gut microbiomes, the Heirloom Microbes project collaborators are blazing a trail that traces the origins of dairying—and promises to reveal previously unknown microbial influences on human culture. The project has sampled dairy products from several parts of the world, including the European Alps and Jordan.

But the project team has focused on Mongolia, a country where traditional dairying practices from nomadic herding communities remained largely intact. Along the way, they have realized they may be sampling what are effectively endangered microbes if the world’s remaining traditional dairying societies industrialize.

Warinner, who calls herself a molecular archaeologist, set out to investigate past human diets more than 10 years ago. She found a goldmine of information trapped in the tartar on skeletal teeth, including the individual’s DNA, the oral bacteria they carried, and clues to that person’s eating habits.

That’s why Warinner teaches her archaeology students to wield an unusual tool: a dental scalar. Researchers use this hooked metal instrument, commonly found at dentists’ offices, to scrape ancient tartar from exhumed remains. The calcified microbial biofilm on teeth effectively offers researchers dietary sedimentary layers for each individual that can be preserved for centuries.

Dairying was practiced for 4,000 years before the emergence of a mutation that allowed lactose digestion.

When the decayed plaque is particularly tough to dislodge, Warinner pops the ligament-free tooth out, cleans it, and puts it back—without damaging the skeleton itself. (Following training, her students receive a “Dental Hygienist to the Dead” certificate.)

Warinner first started scraping the hardened calculus from medieval skeletons in England, Germany, and Greenland to study ancient periodontal disease. Results from Greenland, however, yielded truly unbelievable results: milk proteins on teeth from Vikings who lived roughly 1,000 years ago. Convinced it must be a mistake, Warinner ignored the Greenland data for a year.

When she eventually re-ran the samples and got the same exact results, Warinner was flummoxed. “When I realized it might be real, I almost scared myself,” she says. “What if we could reconstruct dairying in the past?” Dairy, she realized, could serve as a window into human diets—and the practices supporting those diets—through time.

Milk proteins trapped in layers of tartar would allow Warinner to not only determine which animal produced the milk, but also date milk consumption across space and time, something that had previously only been attempted by tracing milk fats in ancient pottery. This new approach provided scientists with a way to “extract evidence of milk directly from the mouths of past people,” Hendy notes.

Milk and the microbes behind dairy products are intriguing objects of study on many levels, say Hendy and Warinner. For one, Hendy says, “Humans are the only species to drink another mammal’s milk.”

Even more intriguing is why early societies would practice dairying for thousands of years when they could not easily digest lactose, the sugar in milk. For decades, scholars thought that dairying increased after humans evolved a gene to digest milk.

But that presumption was overturned once the extent of lactose intolerance was documented. In fact, research suggests that dairying was practiced for 4,000 years before the emergence of a mutation that allowed lactose digestion.

Even today, the majority of people around the planet—65 percent—are lactose intolerant, meaning their bodies struggle to break down the sugar lactose found in fresh milk. (Mongolia offers a stark example: Consumption of dairy products in Mongolia remains extraordinarily high, despite the fact that 95 percent of Mongolians are lactose intolerant.)

Milk continues to be an incredibly fraught food, a lightning rod for discussions around nutrition and health. “It’s either a superfood or the worst thing in the world,” Warinner says.

“Dairying is this amazing invention that people came up with in prehistory,” she adds, “but it’s a complete puzzle why and how it worked.” In addition, dairy products were among the earliest manufactured foods.

And that is the work of microbes. “Cheese doesn’t exist in the wild,” Warinner says. Milk itself is highly perishable and goes bad in hours.

Through trial and error, humans figured out how to harness bacteria to consume the lactose—and thereby acidify and ferment milk into cheeses and yogurt, respectively. “People from deep prehistory, millennia ago, were domesticating microbes they didn’t even know existed,” Warinner says. “It must have seemed magical to them.”

In fact, Warinner notes, this microbe-driven approach was likely among the earliest—and most important—food storage mechanisms in ancient times. Warinner and Hendy soon turned their interest to identifying early dairy microbes. If they could find milk proteins in skeletal tartar, they hoped to find DNA from the lactic acid bacteria.

In arid or grassland steppe regions like Mongolia, there would have been few shelf-stable foods several millennia ago. Dairying proved transformative. Given the harsh and arid environment, barren landscape, and limited foodstuffs, it is hard to imagine how Genghis Khan could have conquered Asia and Eastern Europe without portable, probiotic-rich, high-calorie cheese, explains Warinner.

And the menu of dairy options is vast. Mongolians milk every one of the seven livestock species in the country: cows, sheep, goats, horses, yaks, reindeer, and camel.

From that native diversity, Mongolian milk products have a distinctive terroir, or characteristic flavor infused by the environment producing the food. Aaruul, which are dried, hardened curds eaten as a snack, have a pungent, tangy flavor. Shimiin arkhi is yogurt made from yak’s or cow’s milk that is distilled to make a vodka. Airag is a fermented mare’s milk liquor that is light and bubbly. “People listen to mare’s milk ferment and say, ‘It’s alive’ when they hear it fizzing,” Hendy says.

Mongolians hand down starter bacterial cultures, the khöröngo, from generation to generation—and typically the work is carried out by women. “They often receive starter cultures from their mothers, who received it from their grandmothers,” Reichhardt says. “There is a chance that these microbes are hundreds of years old and still alive today.”

But when Warinner and Hendy first asked to collect dairy microbes in Mongolia, the nomadic herders denied their products had any bacteria in them. “In Mongolia, microbiology is taught from a clinical perspective—namely, that bacteria only cause disease,” Warinner says.

She found that herders were unaware of beneficial or food microbes. They also did not know that the hides and wooden vessels used to store starter cultures were crucial to maintaining these bacterial populations over time. Unbeknownst to contemporary and early herders, the porous, organic materials used as containers were inadvertently inoculated with the lactic acid bacteria over and over again. As a result, the containers themselves helped desirable microbial populations persist over time—in part because nothing else, including pathogens, could grow in the containers.

“Pathogens are like weeds, they are the first to grow, whereas lactic acid bacteria are like old-growth trees,” Warinner explains. “If you get the lactic acid bacteria established, they’ll prevent weeds from growing.” In short, the traditional nomadic dairy model promotes the growth of “good” bacteria that naturally outcompete pathogens.

Still, that hasn’t stopped the spread of western practices, including industrialized dairy cultures. The Heirloom Microbes project has not found traditional practices to be as prevalent in the other regions the team has studied, such as Jordan and the European Alps, as compared to Mongolia. The concern, as stated in their project grant, is that with “contemporary food globalization and industrialization, traditional methods of dairying and their unique microbial cultures are being lost at an alarming pace.”

While traditional practices continue in isolated pockets in Jordan and the Alps, those practices can be, in part, a tourist attraction. European countries largely industrialized their dairying procedures in the 1970s and 1980s. In contrast with traditional methods using heirloom bacterial cultures, industrial practices begin with sterilization and then introduce lab-grown, high-performing bacterial cultures. In these industrialized systems, everything has to be constantly killed in large part because the first things to come back are pathogens.

For Warinner and her colleagues, helping Mongolian herders and policymakers understand the benefits of the traditional methods has become even more urgent as the first steps toward dairy industrialization begin in Mongolia. Most notably, European lab-grown starter cultures are being introduced into the region.

“Bacteria are amazing, overlooked, and misunderstood,” says anthropologist Christina Warinner.

Warinner does not think the lab-grown strains, produced under highly controlled conditions, will fare well in Mongolia simply because they lack the region’s traditional diversity. “These are cultures developed in a completely different environment,” she says. “Industrial methods of sanitation are not easily implemented on the steppe and doing so would disrupt the microbial ecologies that support traditional Mongolian dairying,” she notes. “I fear that well-intentioned attempts to introduce such techniques—without consideration of their cultural context—would actually reduce the safety of the dairy products and radically transform and undermine the lives of nomadic herders.”

Hendy adds that microbes may not only support the process of dairying but also play a role in people’s health and digestion. Microbes in traditionally made dairy foods help maintain a healthy gut microbiome, which could be altered—to unknown effect—by a switch to industrialized microbial cultures.

Over the past three years, the Heirloom Microbes project team has scraped tartar from roughly 200 skeletal remains around the world. As they piece together ancient microbial sequences in the tartar, they will start this summer to sample the microbiomes of both Mongolian nomadic herders and urban dwellers to determine whether herders’ gut microbes have played an unrecognized role in their dairy digestion.

As a growing body of research makes clear, the gut microbiome exerts a shocking degree of control over many aspects of our health—from mood to immune function to pain. It may even shape seemingly unrelated aspects of our behavior, including social interactions.

Mongolian researcher Soninkhishig Tsolmon has documented nutrition in her homeland for the last 20 years. It has not been easy. With few resources or existing studies available, Tsolmon has focused on the dietary differences between nomadic and urban people.

Tsolmon suspects that many traditional foods could reveal intriguing health and microbial connections—but time is running out. In addition to looming industrialization, climate change is transforming the landscape under herders’ feet.

“We’re starting to lose traditions,” Tsolmon says. “Mongolians have traditional ways of using meat and milk.” The traditional meat-based diet in the winter is replaced with fermented dairy products in the summer that, elders say, eliminate the toxins from a winter’s worth of meat eating. She adds, “I’m afraid that some bacteria are disappearing.”

To help stem the loss, Tsolmon, Warinner, and their colleagues created opportunities to share knowledge between the scientists and the herders. In July, for example, the researchers held a Seeing Microbes workshop in villages near Mongolia’s Lake Khuvsgul.

There the group showed local herders microscopic images of the bacteria in their dairy products. “We explained how their practices maintain plenty of good microbes in their products—and that microbes don’t just cause disease,” explains translator and graduate student Zoljargal Enkh-Amgalan. “They were proud of their way of life and how pastoralism and dairying still exist,” she adds.

At another meeting earlier last summer, traditional steppe herders, cheesemakers from the Swiss Alps, the Heirloom Microbes team, businesspeople, and government officials came together for a traveling conference held in both Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the European Research Council funded the meetings.

These disparate groups shared their insights on traditional practices and the science underpinning their success. While traditional dairying practices, which go back at least 5,000 years, have not been studied intensively, they are clearly adapted to the Mongolian landscape and sustainable, explains Warinner.

Warinner believes the deep time emphasis that her discipline brings to such discussions is especially valuable. “Anthropology matters. Archaeology matters,” she says. “We work to understand humans in the past and how we are today—in order to inform public opinion and government policies.” That perspective can help counterbalance the ways in which globalization and well-intentioned interventions may, intentionally or not, threaten traditions, with complex consequences.

In addition to educating Mongolians about the science underpinning their ancestral practices, Warinner and colleagues hope they will take stock of the microbes that have played a starring, yet unsung, role in their nutrition and health. It is ironic that Mongolia has this very deep tradition of dairying that is so central to identity, culture, and history—and yet possesses no archive or any centralized collection of the many bacterial cultures. The Heirloom Microbes project collaborators hope to develop and maintain a storehouse of these resources for Mongolia.

“We live in a microbial world,” Warinner says. “We are only now realizing how integral microbes are to being human.” Put another way, science is just starting to uncover the degree to which microbial cultures have shaped human cultures.

 

This article was republished on Discovermagfazine.com. 

 

Correction: February 10, 2020
An earlier version of this story misspelled Björn Reichardt. It has been corrected to Björn Reichhardt.

The post What Bacterial Cultures Reveal About Ours appeared first on SAPIENS.

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Is it okay to look for a nanny who can ski?

“Seeking Household Manager/Cook/Nanny.”

This was the brief but loaded title in a job ad that went viral last week, inspiring debate around everything from the culture of Silicon Valley “disruption” to the meaning of the word “wife.”

The ad, posted on the Calendar Group, a job search platform owned by Google, listed the requirements for a job with a “CEO family in Menlo Park, CA with girl-boy twin 10-year-olds.” Some were relatively run-of-the-mill, like being able to help the kids with their homework and being a safe driver (the family would provide the car). Others were more unusual, like having the ability to “strategically think through vacation options based on the developmental levels of the kids and the need for the mom to relax,” enjoying “river swimming,” and, preferably, being able to ski. All told, the ad came in at more than 1,000 words.

The ad went viral on Thursday thanks to a now-deleted tweet by author Kimberly Harrington, who dared readers “to find ANYTHING more bananas batshit than this.”

Criticism was swift, with many arguing that the incredibly long list of requirements and preferences signaled that the mom would likely be a terrible employer. Some saw the ad as an attempt by a highly privileged parent to “disrupt” family life, with Jezebel’s Emily Alford joking that that poster was basically looking for a person “to act as a stand-in for another human’s existence.”

On Saturday, the poster of the ad responded to some of the criticism in an interview with Slate. She noted that she is a single mom, something that some readers of the ad may have missed. “If I had a two-parent household, I would assume that the other parent would at least be doing” some of the things she outlines in the ad, she said.

The poster also mentioned “I Want a Wife,” a 1971 essay published in Ms. Magazine in which writer Judy Brady muses on how nice it would be, as a woman, to have someone on hand to do all of the tasks that wives and mothers are expected to perform for families.

“It’s 39 years later,” the CEO mom, who has remained anonymous, told Slate. “And as a working woman, I need a wife.”

Her explanation didn’t stop the criticism, however. And her ad has opened up larger conversations about the labor involved in raising kids, who does that labor, and what its conditions and compensation should be.

When it comes to the work of child care, “our society is broken,” the CEO mom said. Many would agree. But how to fix it is a harder question, one that most people aren’t able to solve by hiring someone, whether that’s a “household manager/cook/nanny” or a “wife.”

A CEO and single mom is looking for a nanny who can cook, ski, use Excel — and much more

If there’s one thing everyone can agree on, it’s that the CEO mom’s ad was very, very specific. The duties of the position include:

• “Conduct research into domestic and global vacation options based on criteria, populate information into a simple Excel spreadsheet, recommend and book vacations, track vacation expenses in Excel including track vacation home deposits getting returned”
• “Compare and make recommendations regarding using credit card points to [book] vacations versus paying cash”
• “Assist 10-year olds with light homework in long division, subtraction, and writing. Play math games with them, such as ‘How much fish should we buy today for five of us?’ and ‘How long will it take us to drive to the snow if it’s 150 miles and we go 50 miles an hour?’”
• “[R]eview and modify household handbook, kids’ chore sheet, etc.”
• “[B]uild alliances with other kids’ parents and nannies and arrange playdates and joint travel with other families.”

The right candidate, the ad says, will be physically fit and talented — “can ski at least at an intermediate level (preferred)” — able to cook organic meals and research the latest developments in food science, and, ideally, fluent in Spanish or French. Moreover, the right candidate will have both “room in their heart to love the kids and the mom” and “appropriate boundaries in relationships and interactions.” As many noted, the two seem to contradict each other. Is the right candidate supposed to “love” her boss or maintain healthy boundaries in an employer-employee relationship?

Initial reactions to the ad fell into a few camps. To a lot of readers, working for the CEO mom sounded like a nightmare.

Alford wrote that the ad seemed like an “attempt to revolutionize the day-to-day business of existing as a pair of human beings with a couple of children by outsourcing the job to a single individual who could also act as chef, account, travel agent, math teacher, and personal trainer, like the iPhone of people.”

Alford also joked that the listing “assures potential applicants that the family is ‘civil rights oriented’ and most likely will only discriminate against those who are not French-speaking travel agent math genius skiers.”

Meanwhile, at the Guardian, Poppy Noor wrote, “If you want to be a nanny for a CEO these days, you’d better be a top-rate chef, professional athlete, and stunt driver — all for a salary dependent on experience, naturally.”

Others argued that the CEO mom was just being clear in her requirements. “As a nanny with 15 years NYC experience and a mom myself, I’d jump on the opportunity to work for that family,” a Twitter user going by Zora said. “She’s clear in her expectations & focused on raising healthy kids in a balanced, loving home.”

Some said a busy working mom shouldn’t be criticized for hiring someone to take care of some of the very real responsibilities of parenthood, as long as she paid well. “That household manager thing seems fine to me, as long as they pay decently,” New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum tweeted.

Meanwhile, writer and podcast host Doree Shafrir tweeted, “It seems pretty clear she’s a single mom, no? And is looking for someone to basically ... be a wife.”

On Saturday, the CEO mom told Slate that’s exactly what she’s looking for. “Here it is January, and I’m having to spend hours of my time, like late at night, trying to figure out summer camp and get them signed up for sports and all that,” she said in her interview with Slate’s Ruth Graham. “I think that people related to the post because it’s absolutely true. If you’re a working woman, you need a wife.”

She also said the job would pay $35 to $40 an hour, with time-and-a-half for overtime, paid time off, and health benefits, as well as a cottage to live in and a car to use. That works out to a salary of about $86,000, before taxes and benefits, according to Garrett Schlichte at Jezebel.

In the interview, the mom also made a distinction between a “grandmotherly baby nanny” and a “wife,” saying, “What differentiates the nice, grandmotherly baby nanny from this wife type is the executive functioning: the ability to plan, to do research, to make good decisions about ‘this is the right flag football team versus that one and this is why.’”

Her somewhat odd taxonomy of child care roles inspired its own criticism. “Thank god someone is doing the important work of parsing out the wife types from the grandmotherly baby nannies,” Schlichte wrote, “because otherwise she might be left with someone who wouldn’t be able to both arrange a ski vacation and then also take her kids down the mountain while she, apparently, enjoys herself at après-ski.”

The debate is a reminder of something America sometimes forgets: Child care is work

The entire episode, aside from providing some entertainment for internet users burnt out on President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, raised a lot of questions about class inequality, gender double standards, and child care in America.

For example, many pointed out that high-powered men are rarely criticized for outsourcing child care and household duties (though sometimes they outsource them to their wives). “If I were Scott McNealy, former CEO of Sun Microsystems, and I’d done this ad, nobody would think twice,” the CEO mom told Slate.

The ad itself was so over-the-top that it might have made something of a splash regardless of its poster’s gender. But the mom is probably right that there’s something about mothers seeking help with the responsibilities of child care and housework that tends to rub Americans the wrong way.

The US is one of the only countries in the world to lack mandated paid parental leave. And while other nations offer generous subsidies for child care, ours are woefully inadequate. A lot of the reason is that Americans still think parents — and, specifically, moms — should be doing all the work of caring for their kids.

In a 2019 Pew poll, 21 percent of US adults said mothers of young children should not work outside the home, while 42 percent said they should work part-time. Just 33 percent said it was best for a mother to work full-time, while a full 76 percent said it was best if dads worked full-time outside the home.

Moreover, as some defenders of the CEO mom pointed out, she doesn’t have a spouse who could support the family even if she did want to stay home, nor does she have a partner to help her take care of tasks such as cooking for her kids or driving them to sports practice.

But some argued the mom’s need for help with child care labor shouldn’t stop people from asking what kind of employer she’d be.

“Now, I know what you’re all thinking: when a man outsources his child care, nobody bats an eyelid — and here we are laughing at a single mom who made it and just wants to lean in,” Noor wrote at the Guardian. “That’s a fair point — but it shouldn’t make us feel any less bad for the nanny.”

For a lot of critics, the extremely long laundry list of requirements and suggestions in the ad raised concerns that its poster would micromanage her employee or have unreasonably high expectations of them. The entire Jezebel staff got together and determined that, collectively, they only “almost” met the qualifications for the position.

Meanwhile, some of the criticism likely came because the mom is not only asking for someone to do spreadsheets and cook organic meals but also asking for someone to love her and her kids. And even though she’s paying relatively well — far above the average wage for child care workers in America, which is $10.82 an hour — there will almost certainly be a gulf in power between her, as the employer, and the person she employs to both care for her family and love them. And asking for love in addition to the performance of needed tasks may turn the CEO’s posting from a highly complicated job ad into a request for something more than work, something for which it may not be possible to fairly compensate a worker.

“I’m a loving person,” the CEO mom told Slate. “I love the people I work with in my business. I love the people I work with in my home. My housekeeper, who’s the cousin of my former nanny, we love each other like sisters.”

But the mom presumably has the ability to hire and fire her housekeeper and anyone else who works for her. They’re not family members. And so it’s reasonable to ask whether the CEO mom — or really any employer hiring someone for a highly demanding nanny job — will treat whoever is hired fairly or whether she’ll make unreasonable demands of her employee in terms of physical, intellectual, and emotional labor.

Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and the larger public conversation about a high-powered woman’s (who’s often white) career advancement has led to a larger debate about whether that advancement comes at the expense of the workers, usually female and usually lower-income, who provide child care and other household services like cleaning.

While the average child care provider makes just over $10 an hour, some dog walkers in New York City make more than caregivers for babies do, Leslie Banks reported at the Wall Street Journal on Saturday. A majority of child care workers are women, and 40 percent are women of color. In many states, they lack union representation, and nannies and housekeepers are exempt from federal harassment protections. In other words, the CEO mom might be a good boss, but child care workers in America have few protections from bad ones.

Ultimately, the ad made one thing incredibly visible: Raising kids is work, sometimes a lot of work. And whoever does it, whether it’s a parent, paid caregiver, or someone else, deserves to do that work in fair conditions, with their needs met and their humanity respected. Regardless of whether that’ll be the case in the CEO mom’s home, it’s not the case for too many child care workers in America — something that, if nothing else, the discourse around the ad can perhaps illuminate.

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I remember distinctly the moment I realized I had two childhoods. I was in third grade and had waddled down the hill of my suburban German neighborhood to wait for the bus. My best friend was waiting there with her mother, and an exasperated group of parents was discussing the head lice epidemic plaguing our school. When I arrived, my friend’s mother turned around to scrutinize me.

“Let me see your head!” she demanded. “You have spent so much time in India, and people over there are very unhygienic, so you probably brought in the lice!” Then she added: “It’s just very different over there. They don’t have the same standards. Your parents really shouldn’t take you to such a place!”

As she examined my scalp, I gulped in a failed attempt to swallow rising tears. I didn’t know why, but I felt sad, slightly ashamed, and out of place. Later that day when I relayed the story to my father, he was furious. While he raged about prejudice and racism—big words I didn’t fully understand—I thought about my double life.

Every year between the ages of 5 and 13, I went with my parents—both trained anthropologists and scholars of South Asia—to the Himalayas, where my mother conducted in-depth fieldwork. I learned Hindi, and the family we stayed with became our family.

Half the year I went to school in Germany, took flute lessons, and competed on the swim team. The other half, I learned about Himalayan agriculture, watched water buffalo and goats wander through our village, and excitedly awaited the newest Bollywood films. I loved both places. Both were home. And even though the settings couldn’t have been more different, I never truly drew a line between Germany and India in my mind.

But after the lice incident, I wondered: Was there something wrong with my village life? Was it weird? Were my friends there so different from my friends here? It began to dawn on me that my life had two different parts. And I thought, if I want to truly belong to one, would I have to give up the other?

Over the years, as I’ve seen the world increasingly divided by notions of “us versus them” and have set out on my anthropological studies of caste issues in India, I have reflected on these issues frequently.

Most people are taught from a young age to make distinctions between themselves and “others” or “here and there.” But the children of anthropologists—much like other children raised in a cross-cultural environment—frequently struggle to make those distinctions. Their upbringing profoundly shapes the ways they interact with people from various cultures and places who hold vastly different viewpoints.

So, I believe the lessons from an anthropological childhood are particularly important today as “us versus them” debates dominate sociopolitical conversations. These lessons can help people answer powerful questions about belonging, “othering,” and connecting: Does truly belonging in one group mean we must “other” people who are outside that sphere? Is universal empathy only possible by living as an outsider? And most important of all, how can we connect with people whose lives and perspectives seem so different from ours?

In the 1990s, when my mother conducted fieldwork, she was never without her camera. She owned a slightly battered vintage Kodak Six that she loved fiercely. Watching her from the backseat of a car, or from the squeaky wooden balcony of the room we rented in a joint family home in what is now the Indian state of Uttarakhand, I used to think research consisted mainly of photographing the world and people around us.

The route to a new sense of familiarity and belonging tends to follow the same bends in the road.

The images of my mother climbing on rooftops, wading through dense crowds, or stopping the car without warning to get that one good shot have haunted me. They haunt me because unlike her, I was never so keen or comfortable taking that shot—a photograph that essentially marks its creator as an outsider. And I always felt a little uneasy admitting I was an outsider.

Even though I understood on some level that we were moving between countries, I did not conceive of Germany and India as separate experiences. They were just different seasons with different friends, and I always enjoyed telling one about the other. Happily unconcerned with disparities between nations or communities, I simply looked forward to the different moments of my life spent entertaining people (and sometimes goats) anywhere.

“I think we intuitively learn to fit in,” says a friend whose anthropologist mother also dragged her around the world. “I don’t mean in a follow-the-peer-pressure kind of way. I mean in the sense that you kind of always know what it means to make community and be part of it. And you realize that the process is the same wherever you go.”

Her statement points to an important insight: As much as we learn something novel when moving to a new cultural setting—how to prepare a meal, greet someone, or tell an appropriate joke—the route to a new sense of familiarity and belonging tends to follow the same bends in the road.

As different as cultures are on some levels, the process of open engagement and interaction that forms the heart of home and belonging is probably similar everywhere. In this process, different ideas of family life or what registers as funny bleed into one another. Without needing to be compared, demarcated, or analyzed, these habits simply coexist—sometimes separately, sometimes in conversation with one another.

At the same time, intuitively learning to fit in everywhere comes at a cost.

When my mother did fieldwork, her tendency to jump around with her enormous camera or travel without a male companion—even though other women in the village would not—was accepted. If her behavior inspired some gossip, she was still entitled to her eccentricities as a “Western woman.”

But for me, expectations seemed different, both when I was growing up in Uttarakhand and when I later conducted fieldwork in Rajasthan, India. The transgressions my mother was allowed were, while possible, certainly more discouraged for me—someone who spoke Hindi fluently and had adopted particular cultural mannerisms and local forms of humor from a young age.

“Sandhya may look Western, but she is one of our girls,” the mother of my host family in Rajasthan used to tell people. “She doesn’t behave like most Westerners.”

Even when I spent a week volunteering in a refugee camp in Swaziland (now called Eswatini), a country I didn’t get to know until much later in life, the camp manager, a Swazi mother of four, used to squeeze me tight and say, “You are a good girl—just like one of ours.”

Implicit in both statements was a responsibility to adhere to local codes and behavioral boundaries that outsiders—including my mother—were exempt from. Perhaps it was self-imposed, but there seemed to be a subtle contract of belonging that I had to negotiate in a different way and that demanded a level of conformity. This is the price of blending in.

Because of this, children who grow up immersed in anthropologic field experiences can simultaneously be the ultimate insider and the forever outsider. Equipped with the behavioral, psychological, and linguistic toolbox to become part of many worlds without drawing categorical boundaries between them, we exist more directly at the margins than most. Adopting a single national, professional, or personal category of identity seems suffocating.

But does that mean people can only truly belong to a group if they conform? Can those who live at the margins between groups and places still have a sense of belonging?

My partner, who was born and raised in Southern England, was heartbroken when his parents sold his childhood home when he was in his late 20s. He says it made him feel like he had lost not only a home, but an identity. His sense of belonging was spatial. Home was a place, a family, and a community at a particular point in time. He was determined to buy the house back someday in order to rebuild his fractured sense of belonging.

I empathize with him, but I can’t fully comprehend his need for geographical settledness. Home for me has always been my family. Home is wherever they are.

On the other hand, unlike my partner, I have often agonized about the no man’s land of my identity. I never feel more German than when I live far away from Europe. At the same time, I am most certainly not Indian or anything else. In India, I am a Westerner. To the Americans with whom I attended college in Maine, I was European. My British boyfriend thinks I am quite Continental. And in Germany, I still am that strange kid who grew up in India.

Despite all this, I believe people who lack a certain rootedness can still have a sense of belonging.

People tend to think of belonging as a binary option: You either do or you don’t. In reality, most people negotiate shades of belonging in different areas of their life. Someone might acknowledge deep roots in a place they no longer live in and don’t plan to return to. Someone might be raised in a certain religion yet become nonreligious.

People who are unfamiliar can nonetheless be yours.These scenarios don’t imply that a person does not belong. Rather, their feelings of belonging are simply different: They can be multiple, dual or singular, liminal or complete.

Growing up inside a community, yet traversing between places and ways of belonging, can teach you countless valuable lessons: People who are unfamiliar can nonetheless be yours. The opposition between you and the “other” ultimately doesn’t hold up. You have a capacity within you for growth and otherness—to become multifaceted. You can be part of many things without losing yourself. Not being completely one thing does not make you a person without a home or an identity but someone who can belong in myriad places with a variety of people.

This perspective has profound implications for today’s increasingly divided world.

During my fieldwork in Rajasthan, I worked with Dalits, members of India’s lowest caste who are also referred to as “untouchables.” I was surprised that many of my Dalit informants, who had explicit concerns about the discrimination and exclusion they experienced daily, seemed unwilling to extend their concern to other communities.

When I told a Dalit activist that I was visiting a Muslim family in the neighborhood, she was appalled. “You should stay away from Muslims,” she warned. “They treat women really badly and strategically try to have as many children as possible to become a stronger political force!”

I was stunned. As a woman who devoted her life to battling the caste-based prejudice and abuse that she deemed inhumane, how could she speak about other groups in this way?

Abstract notions of “us versus them” are at the heart of Brexit, U.S. immigration policies, and the growing influence of nationalist parties in Germany, India, and elsewhere. Discussions about distinctions cause us to wonder whether it is possible to be part of different communities on equal terms or whether truly belonging to one group means exclusion from all others.

What I’ve learned from an anthropological childhood is this: Having a deep feeling of being part of a community, nation, or place doesn’t limit a person’s capacity for empathy. But embracing a multifaceted notion of our identity prevents us from drawing potentially dangerous lines between us and other cultures, professions, countries, or political parties.

What makes a person genuinely able to embrace difference is a moment of stepping across the boundaries of one’s early identity and the assumptions that accompany it. This allows for the emergence of new questions, new ideas of selfhood, and new social connections. We must be willing to face the possibility of finding ourselves out there at the margins between groups, and to welcome the discomfort of growing and learning in ways we never expected.

This growth may ultimately lead us away from the security of a comfortable, unquestioned sense of belonging. And it will make it almost impossible to declare an entire country an unhygienic place filled with strange people, the way my friend’s mother described India. Because a view like that from inside a contained culture, surrounded by emotional glass walls, distorts the way we can and should think of others. That protective glass denies us the potential for connection.

Two years ago, I met up with my primary school friend, the one whose mother catapulted me into a precocious identity crisis.

“I am doing a master’s in anthropology now,” she told me, to my utter surprise. When I asked her about her decision, she replied: “I don’t know, there was just something about hanging out with you and your parents that made me realize that faraway places or people in other cultural contexts don’t have to seem far away. It made me feel like I didn’t even understand what ‘difference’ meant and that maybe I had all these wrong ideas of other places. I looked at your family and thought, ‘They are all anthropologists; maybe if I study anthropology, I will see the world in a new way!’”

I hope she will. An anthropological life—whether it be one given to you in childhood, one you explore in a university while doing fieldwork, or simply one you adopt as an outlook—is one whose heart beats to the notion of interaction. Personal interaction has the power to counteract the dangers of abstraction. And it allows us to embrace a multiplicity of belonging in such a way that we never have to feel rootless or marginal.

The post The Gift of a Bicultural Upbringing appeared first on SAPIENS.

Article URL: https://news.wttw.com/2019/10/02/fearing-insect-apocalypse-renowned-entomologist-says-get-rid-your-lawn

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Article URL: https://grumpy.website

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