The humble origins of 'Silent Night'

This undated score, written by Joseph Mohr and titled ‘Weynachts Lied’ (‘Christmas Carol’), is the earliest known surviving copy of ‘Silent Night.’ Salzburg Museum

One of the world’s most famous Christmas carols, “Silent Night,” celebrates its 200th anniversary this year.

Over the centuries, hundreds of Christmas carols have been composed. Many fall quickly into obscurity.

Not “Silent Night.”

Translated into at least 300 languages, designated by UNESCO as a treasured item of Intangible Cultural Heritage, and arranged in dozens of different musical styles, from heavy metal to gospel, “Silent Night” has become a perennial part of the Christmas soundscape.

Its origins – in a small Alpine town in the Austrian countryside – were far humbler.
As a musicologist who studies historical traditions of song, the story of “Silent Night” and its meteoric rise to worldwide fame has always fascinated me.

Fallout from war and famine

The song’s lyrics were originally written in German just after the end of the Napoleonic Wars by a young Austrian priest named Joseph Mohr.

In the fall of 1816, Mohr’s congregation in the town of Mariapfarr was reeling. Twelve years of war had decimated the country’s political and social infrastructure. Meanwhile, the previous year – one historians would later dub “The Year Without a Summer” – had been catastrophically cold.

The eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora in 1815 had caused widespread climate change throughout Europe. Volcanic ash in the atmosphere caused almost continuous storms – even snow – in the midst of summer. Crops failed and there was widespread famine.

Mohr’s congregation was poverty-stricken, hungry and traumatized. So he crafted a set of six poetic verses to convey hope that there was still a God who cared.

“Silent night,” the German version states, “today all the power of fatherly love is poured out, and Jesus as brother embraces the peoples of the world.”

A fruitful collaboration

Mohr, a gifted violinist and guitarist, could have probably composed the music for his poem. But instead, he sought help from a friend.

In 1817, Mohr transferred to the parish of St. Nicholas in the town of Oberndorf, just south of Salzburg. There, he asked his friend Franz Xaver Gruber, a local schoolteacher and organist, to write the music for the six verses.

On Christmas Eve, 1818, the two friends sang “Silent Night” together for the first time in front of Mohr’s congregation, with Mohr playing his guitar.

The song was apparently well-received by Mohr’s parishioners, most of whom worked as boat-builders and shippers in the salt trade that was central to the economy of the region.

A view of the city of Salzburg and the river Salzach. Uwe Schwarzbach/flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

The melody and harmonization of “Silent Night” is actually based on an Italian musical style called the “siciliana” that mimics the sound of water and rolling waves: two large rhythmic beats, split into three parts each.

In this way, Gruber’s music reflected the daily soundscape of Mohr’s congregation, who lived and worked along the Salzach River.

‘Silent Night’ goes global

But in order to become a worldwide phenomenon, “Silent Night” would need to resonate far beyond Oberndorf.

According to a document written by Gruber in 1854, the song first became popular in the nearby Zillertal valley. From there, two traveling families of folk singers, the Strassers and the Rainers, included the tune in their shows. The song then became popular across Europe, and eventually in America, where the Rainers sang it on Wall Street in 1839.

At the same time, German-speaking missionaries spread the song from Tibet to Alaska and translated it into local languages. By the mid-19th century, “Silent Night” had even made its way to subarctic Inuit communities along the Labrador coast, where it was translated into Inuktitut as “Unuak Opinak.”

The lyrics of “Silent Night” have always carried an important message for Christmas Eve observances in churches around the world. But the song’s lilting melody and peaceful lyrics also reminds us of a universal sense of grace that transcends Christianity and unites people across cultures and faiths.

Perhaps at no time in the song’s history was this message more important than during the Christmas Truce of 1914, when, at the height of World War I, German and British soldiers on the front lines in Flanders laid down their weapons on Christmas Eve and together sang “Silent Night.”

The song’s fundamental message of peace, even in the midst of suffering, has bridged cultures and generations. Great songs do this. They speak of hope in hard times and of beauty that arises from pain; they offer comfort and solace; and they are inherently human and infinitely adaptable.

So, happy anniversary, “Silent Night.” May your message continue to resonate across future generations.

A compilation of ‘Silent Night’ performances in different languages at various Christmas in Vienna concerts.

Sarah Eyerly, Assistant Professor of Musicology and Director of the Early Music Program, Florida State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

This Christmas tell your children the real Santa Claus story

Santa Claus will soon be coming to town, bringing gifts to children.

Santa has several aliases, depending on the part of the world you live in. The English call him Father Christmas, the French know him as Père Noël, and Kris Kringle seems be a version of the Christkind, or Christ Child, who leaves treats for good German Lutherans.

In the Netherlands, he arrives in town on a steamboat or horse from Spain. On the night of Dec. 5, Dutch children put their shoes on the hearth – these days near the central heating duct – hoping that he will fill them with sweet rewards rather than a reprimand for poor behavior. The Dutch call him Sinterklaas – which has come into American English as ‘S

St. Nicholas and Santa Claus are historically the same man. But unlike the jolly figure who purportedly flies on a sleigh from the North Pole, the saint came originally from the balmy Mediterranean coast.

Who was St. Nicholas really?

 

As a historian of religions who has written books about ancient saints, I caution against reading accounts of saints’ lives as factual history. However, the earliest stories of St. Nicholas seem to correlate with histories and church documents of the period.

According to these early medieval texts, Nicholas was born around 260 A.D. into a Christian family. His birthplace was near the town of Myra, now called Demre, on the southwest coast of modern Turkey. At the time, Christianity was illegal under the Roman empire.

He studied to be a priest and spent time in prison for his beliefs. However, after Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity, Nicholas was elected Bishop of Myra.

During his lifetime, he became famous for defending his people against imperial taxes and other forms of oppression. According to the earliest document about Nicholas, from the fifth century, he prevented three loyal generals from unjust execution for treason.

A ninth-century Greek legend claims he revived three scholars who had been murdered and stashed in a pickling tub. He also saved three girls whose poverty-stricken father wanted to sell them into prostitution.

After his death, people believed that Nicholas continued to work miracles. His burial place, below the floor of his church, became a popular destination for pilgrims who begged Nicholas to relay their petitions to God.

Proof that Nicholas was listening, they believed, was in the “manna” – holy oil or water – that dripped from the tomb. Pilgrims took this manna home in little bottles or used rags to sop up the moisture that dripped from the saint’s tomb in its subterranean crypt. This was a common pilgrimage practice at Christian shrines.

Visitors to the coastal town of Myra spread Nicholas’ fame along sea routes across the Mediterranean. From there, word passed to the Latin West, and upriver to Russia. Soon, pilgrims from all over Christendom were journeying to Myra to seek the gifts of protection and healing from the saint, who was said to be especially attentive to children.

Italians steal the body

This pilgrimage was disrupted in the 11th century when Seljuk Turks invaded Anatolia. Christians feared that the Muslims who now governed Demre would disregard the saint’s tomb. So, one crew of pious Italian Christians decided to take action.

In 1087, three ships laden with grain set out from Bari, on Italy’s southeast coast, bound for Antioch. However, according to a monk named Nicephorus who wrote immediately after the event, their real mission was to steal St. Nicholas’ body.

In Antioch they heard a rumor that the Venetians too were planning a similar heist. The Barian sailors hastily sold off their grain and headed for Myra in search of St. Nicholas’ church. Priestly custodians there became suspicious when the sailors asked to see the saint’s body.

The Barians claimed that the pope had a vision directing him to fetch Nicholas to Italy. When the priests refused, they offered gold for the relics, but the offer “was tossed aside like dung.” Done with arguing, the Barians caught and bound the priests. Suddenly, a phial of manna fell to the pavement and broke. It seemed that St. Nicholas spoke to them: “It is my will that I leave here with you.”

So, the Barians broke through marble floor with picks and hammers. A delicious aroma filled the church as they opened the tomb. They found the bones swimming in a small sea of manna. They carefully wrapped the relics in a silk case brought for the purpose.

Nicephorus describes how they fled to their ship, pursued by outraged priests and a howling crowd of citizens demanding that they “give back the father who has by his protection kept us safe from visible foes.”

Yet the crew made it back to the harbor at Bari, where the townsfolk and clergy processed, singing joyous hymns, to greet the saint.

St. Nicholas gets a reputation

A new church was built for Nicholas in the court of the governor of Bari. A few years later, Pope Urban II — the one who would preach the First Crusade – formally enshrined the relics of the saint.

A view of the interior of the church of St. Nicholas, built in the 11th century, at Bari. AP Photo

The Barians believed that manna continued to ooze from Nicholas’ coffin. And going by the claim on the basilica’s website, the belief persists to this day.

Within a decade of the saint’s arrival in 1087, the Basilica di San Nicola was one of Europe’s most popular pilgrimage destinations. May 9 is still celebrated as the day that Nicholas moved shrines or was “translated.”

For at least five centuries, the region, which includes Bari and its saint, was caught in constant wars for possession of southern Italy. In 1500, Bari fell into the hands of King Ferdinand of Aragon, whose marriage to Queen Isabella of Spain created a global naval power.

Because Nicholas was a patron saint of sailors, Spanish sailors and explorers carried stories of the saint wherever they went: Mexico, the Caribbean, Florida and other ports around the world.

St. Nicholas around the world: Russian Orthodox believers line up to kiss the relics of St. Nicholas that were brought from an Italian church where they have lain for 930 years. AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko

Even the Dutch, who rebelled against Catholic Spain and formed a Calvinist republic in 1581, somehow maintained their devotion to Sinterklass. In other parts of Europe, St. Nicholas lost his feast day but his concern for children helped link him to the gift-giving tradition of another December feast day: Christmas.

How true is this story?

In the 1950s, Italian scientists examined the bones enshrined in the Basilica di San Nicola, seeking evidence of authenticity.

They found the skull and incomplete skeleton of a man, dating to around the fourth century. More recent technology has allowed experts to use the bones to reconstruct Nicholas’ face – he looks like an old Greek man with a broad, worn face. He lacks the rosy cheeks and Anglo-Germanic features of modern Christmas decorations, but like the Santa Claus of greeting cards, he was probably bald.

Turkish archaeologists now claim that the Italians stole the wrong body and that Nicholas’ remains never left Demre. They have discovered another sarcophagus dating to the fourth century in the same church, which they claim contains the saint.

Meanwhile, historians have suggested that the story of Nicholas’ translation is a fiction purposely created to advertise a new pilgrimage center in the 11th century. Although relic theft was common in the Middle Ages, grave-robbers often made mistakes or lied about the authenticity and source of their bones. Nothing in the shrine at Bari proves that the bones inside belong to the fourth-century Bishop Nicholas.

Which Santa story will you tell this holiday season? Delta News Hub/Flickr.com, CC BY

Still, this holiday season, when you tell your children about Santa Claus, why not include the tale of Santa’s well-traveled bones? And don’t forget the manna, which is believed to still flow in Bari.




Lisa Bitel, Professor of History & Religion, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Faith in turbulent times: a priest's autobiography of life under apartheid

Peter Storey (middle) outside the Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg, 1985. Supplied

The argument has dragged on long enough about who should take the credit for bringing South Africa’s apartheid regime to an end. Of course, some will immediately respond by saying that apartheid has not yet been defeated – it still lives on in innumerable ways. But at least the regime that promulgated the legislation and promoted the ideology has been defeated, whatever remnants remain.
So who, in fact, brought that regime to its knees? There is probably no single, or simple, answer. But one of the groups that certainly played a role was the faith community. Christian leaders like Beyers Naudé, Desmond Tutu and Allan Boesak, played a very significant role in fighting apartheid.

The flip side, though, is that some churches actively supported apartheid. Others, meanwhile, remained silent when they should have spoken out.

Still, the struggle of some churches – leaders and congregants – against apartheid was both profoundly non-racial and ecumenical. While black voices were predominant, white voices of protest and resistance could also be heard and observed. And while a large number were Methodists, as was Nelson Mandela himself, nobody involved in the church struggle was bothered about denominational affiliation or loyalty.

This, I suggest, is the framework within which to read Peter Storey’s very readable, absorbing, and at times, as the title suggests, provocative book, I Beg to Differ: Ministry Amidst Teargas. Storey, who eventually became the Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church as well as president of the South African Council of Churches, was one of the white church leaders who played a very important role in the church struggle against apartheid.

Convictions

Who was Storey, what shaped his convictions, and what role did he play, are naturally questions we might ask. And we should ask them, not only out of interest, but in order to understand better how Christian moral and political convictions are nurtured. How did a young white South African brought up under apartheid, educated in a segregated school (all were), and an officer in the South African navy, become a leading opponent of the system?

Also, how did he maintain his faith and hope through many a crisis and challenge, often caught between different factions, and sometimes sidelined. How did he learn to say:

I beg to differ!

An autobiography often resembles an iceberg. We are introduced to what is on the surface, but we don’t always get to see what is beneath. Storey’s narrative certainly presents a public face: the face of a leader, a man of Christian conviction, compassion and commitment. He also takes his reader below that persona to his early upbringing as a son of the manse (his father was also a minister), and later as the devoted husband of Elizabeth – a remarkable person in her own right, and to whom his book is dedicated – and the father of four sons, some of whom followed him into the ministry.

Storey also writes about his personal struggles which are inevitably part of the life of a leader committed to truth. We also discover his interest in making furniture and his interest in sailing. I can speak about this from personal experience. Under his captaincy and along with Elizabeth, my wife and I successfully sailed off the Cape Town coast on a stormy afternoon in what seemed to us a rather small craft for such an occasion. But that is a parable of Storey’s leadership, steering a sometimes threatened ark through choppy seas, and doing so with a firm hand on the rudder.

Back to his public face, which perhaps first came to prominence when he became a student leader at Rhodes University, gaining a little notoriety in the process. Then as minister of the Methodist church in Cape Town’s District Six, where he was in the forefront of opposition to the shameful forced removals by the apartheid regime that reduced a vibrant community to a vacant, ghostly plot of land.

Next as a minister in Johannesburg, first in Braamfontein and then at the Central Methodist Mission in the heart of the city. Storey left a large imprint in all these places and contexts.

He spent some of his retirement years as a professor in the US teaching many an aspiring minister. On his return to South Africa he played a leading role in establishing the Seth Mokitimi Methodist Seminary in Pietermaritzburg.

There is so much more that could be said about Storey’s life and witness, from his brave participation in many a protest march, to his courageous standing up for the truth during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process.

Not all will necessarily agree with him on all he said. I had a few quibbles here and there, but Storey always allowed others to differ just as he begged to do so himself. That is, after all, at the heart if democracy. So anyone interested in the role of the church not just in the struggle against apartheid, but also in the struggle to build a transformed democratic society, should take up this book and read. You won’t be disappointed.

I Beg to Differ: Ministry Amidst Teargas ,Cape Town: Tafelberg._
John de Gruchy, Emeritus Professor of Christian Studies, University of Cape Town
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

When you're grateful, your brain becomes more charitable

Volunteering at a food bank is one way people feel rewarded by giving. AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar

‘Tis the season when the conversation shifts to what you’re thankful for. Gathered with family and friends around a holiday feast, for instance, people may recount some of the biggies – like their health or their children – or smaller things that enhance everyday life – like happening upon a great movie while channel-surfing or enjoying a favorite seasonal food.

Psychology researchers recognize that taking time to be thankful has benefits for well-being. Not only does gratitude go along with more optimism, less anxiety and depression, and greater goal attainment, but it’s also associated with fewer symptoms of illness and other physical benefits.

In recent years, researchers have been making connections between the internal experience of gratitude and the external practice of altruism. How does being thankful about things in your own life relate to any selfless concern you may have about the well-being of others?

As a neuroscientist, I’m particularly interested in the brain regions and connections that support gratitude and altruism. I’ve been exploring how changes in one might lead to changes in the other.

Volunteers’ brain activity was tracked while in an MRI scanner to try to untangle the relationship. University of Oregon, CC BY-ND

 

Shared pathway for gratitude and altruism

To study the relationship between gratitude and altruism in the brain, my colleagues and I first asked volunteers questions meant to tease out how frequently they feel thankful and the degree to which they tend to care about the well-being of others. Then we used statistics to determine the extent to which someone’s gratitude could predict their altruism. As others have found, the more grateful people in this group tended to be more altruistic.

The next step was to explore more about how these tendencies are reflected in the brain. Our study participants performed a giving activity in the MRI scanner. They watched as the computer transferred real money to their own account or to the account of a local food bank. Sometimes they could choose whether to give or receive, but other times the transfers were like a mandatory tax, outside their control. We especially wanted to compare what happened in the brain when a participant received money as opposed to seeing money given to the charity instead.

Deep in the front part of your brain, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex helps process risk and reward. Christina Karns, CC BY-ND

It turns out that the neural connection between gratitude and giving is very deep, both literally and figuratively. A region deep in the frontal lobe of the brain, called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, is key to supporting both. Anatomically, this region is wired up to be a hub for processing the value of risk and reward; it’s richly connected to even deeper brain regions that provide a kick of pleasurable neurochemicals in the right circumstances. It holds abstract representations of the inner and outer world that help with complex reasoning, one’s representation of oneself and even social processing.

Beyond identifying the place in the brain that was especially active during these tasks, we also saw differences in just how active this region was in various individuals.

We calculated what we termed a “pure altruism response” by comparing how active the reward regions of the brain were during “charity-gain” versus “self-gain” situations. The participants I’d identified as more grateful and more altruistic via the questionnaire had a higher “pure altruism” scores – that is, a stronger response in these reward regions of the brain when they saw the charity gaining money. It felt good for them to see the food bank do well.

In other studies, some of my colleagues had zeroed in on this same brain region. They found that individual differences in self-reported “benevolence” were mirrored by participants’ brains’ responses to charitable donations, including in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

So is this brain reward region the key to kindness? Well, it’s complicated.

Practice makes grateful, makes altruistic?

The human brain is amazingly flexible. The absence of hearing in someone who’s born deaf opens up brain real estate that would have processed sound to instead deal with other sensory information, like touch. Neuroscientists call this plasticity.

In recent years I’ve been testing the idea that the plasticity of the mature brain can be used to enhance the experience of well-being. Could practice change how emotions that support social relationships – like gratitude, empathy and altruism – are typically programmed into the brain? Through practicing gratitude, could people become more generous?

My colleagues and I decided to test whether by changing the amount of gratitude people felt, we could alter the way the ventromedial prefrontal cortex responds to giving and receiving. I randomly assigned study participants to one of two groups. For three weeks, one group wrote in their journals about gratitude, keeping track of the things they were thankful for. Over the same period, the other group wrote about engaging topics from their lives that weren’t specific to gratitude.

Just writing it down had an effect. fotografierende/Unsplash, CC BY

Gratitude journaling seemed to work. Just keeping a written account about gratitude led people to report experiencing more of the emotion. Other recent work also indicates that gratitude practice makes people more supportive of others and improves relationships.

Importantly, the participants in our study also exhibited a change in how their brains responded to giving. In the MRI scanner, the group that practiced gratitude by journaling increased their “pure altruism” measure in the reward regions of the brain. Their responses to charity-gain increased more than those to self-gain.

The pink in these scans shows the region that responded more to giving after practicing gratitude for three weeks.

 

Altering the exchange rate for what’s rewarding

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is connected to other brain systems that help you experience reward. These high-level systems in your frontal lobes are constantly assessing the value of your decisions. This part of the brain helps you place various things in a hierarchy of how rewarding you find them to be. It may help you determine which decisions, goals and relationships to prioritize.

Here’s an analogy: When I was 13, my aunt gave me an amazing opportunity to travel with her to Britain. When I started saving up my babysitting money, it cost US$1.65 to buy one British pound sterling. But by the time of the trip, it cost nearly $2.00 to buy one British pound. A £10 British souvenir that would have cost $16 a few months ago would now cost me $20. In other words, the value of each dollar bill fluctuated with the exchange rate.

I imagine the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is like the office where you exchange dollars to pounds or vice versa. For the people with more grateful and altruistic tendencies, it seems the ventromedial prefrontal cortex assigns more value to charitable donations than to receiving money for themselves.
Practicing gratitude shifted the value of giving in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. It changed the exchange rate in the brain. Giving to charity became more valuable than receiving money yourself.

After the brain calculates the exchange rate, you get paid in the neural currency of reward, the delivery of neurotransmitters that signal pleasure and goal attainment.

So in terms of the brain’s reward response, it really can be true that giving is better than receiving. As you sail through the holidays – whether with a Thanksgiving banquet spread out for our friends and family, a busy shopping day on Black Friday or a pile of Christmas presents – taking time to practice gratitude can help make giving the most rewarding of activity of all.





Christina Karns, Research Associate in Psychology and the Center for Brain Injury Research and Training; Director of Emotions and Neuroplasticity Project, University of Oregon
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

How where you're born influences the person you become

In some societies, kids are taught that they’re in control of their own happiness – which makes them more indulgent. Oleksii Synelnykov/Shutterstock.com

As early as the fifth century, the Greek historian Thucydides contrasted the self-control and stoicism of Spartans with the more indulgent and free-thinking citizens of Athens.

Today, unique behaviors and characteristics seem ingrained in certain cultures.

Italians wildly gesticulate when they talk. Dutch children are notably easygoing and less fussy. Russians rarely smile in public.

As developmental psychologists, we’re fascinated by these differences, how they take shape and how they get passed along from one generation to the next.

Our new book, “Toddlers, Parents and Culture,” explores the way a society’s values influences the choices parents make – and how this, in turn, influences who their kids become.

The enduring influence of cultural values

Although genetics certainly matter, the way you behave isn’t hardwired.

Over the past two decades, researchers have shown how culture can shape your personality.
In 2005, psychologist Robert McCrae and his colleagues were able to document pronounced differences in the personalities of people living in different parts of the world. For example, adults from European cultures tended to be more outgoing and open to new experiences than those from Asian cultures. Within Europe, they found that people from Northern Europe were more conscientious than their peers in Southern Europe.

Recently, we were able to trace some of these differences to early childhood.

Parenting – perhaps not surprisingly – played a role.

To conduct the research for our book, we worked with colleagues from 14 different countries. Our goal was to explore the way broad societal values influenced how parents raise their children. We then studied how these different parenting styles shaped the behavior and personality of kids.

We did this primarily by administering questionnaires to parents around the world, asking them to describe their daily routines, hopes for their kids and methods of discipline. We then asked them to detail the behaviors of their children.

We also relied on the work of Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede, who, in the 1970s, asked IBM employees around the world about factors that led to work satisfaction.

We were able to compare his findings to ours, and we were surprised to see that his results correlated with our own. The cultural values that were revealed through work preferences in the 1970s could be seen in parenting practices and child temperament 40 years later.

This is important: It shows cultural values are relatively enduring, and seem to have an effect on how kids develop over time.

To think about yourself, or to think of others?

Perhaps the most well-known of these broad cultural values are individualism and collectivism.

In some societies, such as the U.S. and Netherlands, people are largely driven by pursuits that benefit themselves. They’re expected to seek personal recognition and boost their own social or financial status.

In more collectivist societies, such as South Korea and Chile, high value is placed on the well-being of the larger group – typically their family, but also their workplace or country.

We found that the way parents discipline their children is strongly influenced by these social values, and likely serves to perpetuate these values from one generation to the next.

For example, compared to parents in individualist cultures, collectivist parents are much more likely, when reprimanding their kids, to direct them to “think about” their misbehavior, and how it might negatively impact those around them.

This seems to promote group harmony and prepare a child to thrive in a collectivist society. At the same time, if you’re constantly being told to think about how your actions impact others, you might also be more likely to feel anxiety, guilt and shame.

Indeed, we’ve found that kids in collectivist cultures tend to express higher levels of sadness, fear and discomfort than children growing up in individualist societies.

Free to pursue happiness?

A second set of values we studied was indulgence versus restraint.

Some cultures, such as the U.S., Mexico and Chile, tend to permit and promote self-gratification. Others – like South Korea, Belgium and Russia – encourage restraint in the face of temptation.
These values seem to be connected to a specific set of parenting goals.

In particular, parents in indulgent societies tend to emphasize the importance of developing self-esteem and independence. For example, they expect children to entertain themselves and fall asleep on their own. When one of their kids misbehaves, they’ll often suggest ways he or she can make amends and try to repair the damage.

The message kids may get from this kind of treatment is that they’re the ones in control of their happiness, and that they should be able to fix their own mistakes. At the same time, when kids are expected to pursue gratification, they may be more likely to impulsively seek immediate rewards – whether it’s eating candy before dinner or grabbing a toy off a shelf at a store – before getting permission.

Meanwhile, in societies that prioritize restraint, parents were more likely to shout or swear when disciplining their children.

This might make them more obedient. But it might also cause children to be less optimistic and less likely to enjoy themselves.

Is individualism the future?

Parents seem to be motivated to best prepare their kids for the world they’re likely to inhabit, and what works in one culture might not necessarily work well in another.

But as our world becomes more interconnected, this diversity of parenting approaches may dwindle. In fact, most countries have become more individualistic over the last 50 years – a shift that’s most pronounced in countries that have experienced the most economic development.

Nonetheless, there’s still a huge difference in parenting styles and childhood development across cultures – a testament to the enduring influence of societal values.

This article has been updated to indicate that Thucydides was a historian, not a philosopher.
Samuel Putnam, Professor of Psychology, Bowdoin College and Masha A. Gartstein, Professor of Psychology, Washington State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Unsuitable antivenoms are being sold in Africa, costing lives

Echis, also known as the saw-scaled viper, dominates snakebite statistics and kills more people annually than any other. Shutterstock

Snakes bite more than 5 million people every year. Of these, around 1.8 million people are envenomated and over 94,000 are killed. These statistics suggest that snakebite is one of the most neglected tropical diseases.

But getting accurate statistics is incredibly difficult. Many bites go unreported, with as few as 8.5% of snakebite victims seeking medical treatment. In Africa snakebite probably kills over 30 000 people per year. This is proportionally more than in most other regions around the world. A large percentage of these deaths can be attributed to one genus of snake, Echis.

Also known as the saw-scaled viper, Echis can be found throughout sub-Saharan Africa north of the equator and in parts of Asia and the Middle East. This small viper dominates snakebite statistics and kills more people annually than any other. For example, Echis ocellatus is responsible for as many as 95% of snake bites in northern Nigeria.

Many of the toxins in their venom target the blood to induce clotting. For humans, this causes a potentially lethal condition called “venom-induced consumption coagulopathy”, more commonly called VICC. This disrupts the body’s ability to regulate blood flow and results in severe internal bleeding. Haemorrhage, stroke, and shock are typically the cause of death following VICC. Antivenom is the only effective antidote.

But the continent is experiencing an antivenom crisis. This crisis is a result of the discontinuation of a key antivenom in Africa, Fav-Afrique. Fav-Afrique was very effective at treating snakebites in Africa. Some clinics reported a 100% success rate when using this antivenom. But the antivenom’s manufacturers, Sanofi-Pasteur, stopped production of Fav-Afrique after claiming they were priced out of the market.

The disappearance of Fav-Afrique from African clinics partly explains the exceptionally high rates of snakebite death on the continent. It has seen an increase in the use of cheaper, Indian-produced antivenoms - many of which appear to be largely ineffective.

To investigate the issue further, we conducted a comparison of four antivenoms that are commonly used to treat Echis bites on the continent. Two were made using Indian Echis venoms and two made using African Echis venoms. We tested these antivenoms against venom samples from ten different populations of Echis across their distribution, from Africa to Asia.

Comparing antivenoms

We first added the venom to human blood plasma and measured the rate at which each venom induced a blood clot. We then repeated the experiment, but with an additional step. Before adding the venom to the plasma, we mixed the venom and antivenom. This step was to give the antivenom a chance to bind with the venom toxins and neutralise their harmful activity on the blood. We assessed the effectiveness of the antivenoms by looking at how well they were able to slow the clotting caused by the venom when compared to our first experiment.

What we found was alarming. Despite the antivenoms being marketed as species-specific (that is, able to treat the bite of a given species), we found extreme region-specific variability in their effectiveness. This means that the performance of the antivenoms varied based on the geographical origin of the venoms, even within a single species.

The Indian-made antivenoms, common throughout Africa because they are affordable, showed little-to-no neutralisation of the African Echis venoms. Even the venoms of some Indian Echis populations showed limited response to the Indian antivenoms.

Clinical case statistics support our findings. After switching to an Indian-produced antivenom following the discontinuation of Fav-Afrique, some African clinics have recorded a horrific 7 to 20-fold increase in case death rates.

Why such variability in the antivenoms?

Antivenoms are developed by injecting a small amount of venom from either one or from multiple species (to produce “monovalent” or “polyvalent” antivenom, respectively) into a host animal, such as a horse. The animal’s immune system responds by producing antibodies that recognise and fight those venom toxins, much like what happens in our bodies when we get a vaccine. These antibodies are extracted and purified. The resulting antivenom is then marketed as being able to treat a bite by the species whose venom was used during its production.

This process is effective and reliable when venom composition does not differ much between individual snakes. Antivenoms may even be effective in treating the bite of a closely related snake species. Unfortunately, this is not the case for Echis as their venom composition varies between populations.

This is partly thought to be an evolutionary adaptation linked to diet. A key function of snake venom is to assist in prey capture. The toxins in venom do this by targeting specific parts of the prey’s physiology, such as the blood or the nerves, to disrupt normal body function and immobilise the animal.

Different Echis populations feed on different prey types. For example, some feed mostly on vertebrates such as rodents or lizards, while others prefer invertebrates such as scorpions. The physiology of these prey animals differs, and this dictates what makes a toxin effective for predation. This could be why some populations have evolved different sets of toxins.

From a medical perspective, this means that the antibodies in an antivenom may not be able to adequately recognise and fight all the harmful toxins in the venom. The outcome for patients and clinicians is variable or reduced antivenom effectiveness between regions.

Our results show the failings that come from using a geographically restricted range of antivenoms and marketing them inappropriately. Given the seriousness of snakebite in Africa and around the world, this puts the pressure firmly on antivenom manufacturers to develop, market, and distribute their antivenoms responsibly.





Bianca op den Brouw, PhD Candidate in Toxinology, The University of Queensland
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Cancer causing toxicants found in a tributary of South Africa's second largest river

A water bridge over the Klip River in Gauteng, South Africa. Shutterstock

A new study has established that sharptooth catfish found in the Klip River which feeds into the Vaal River, South Africa’s second largest river, contains banned pesticides which can cause cancer when consumed by humans.

The river runs through high density residential areas, including Soweto, Lenasia and Fleurhof in the south of Johannesburg. Some residents supplement their diet by fishing the popular catfish in the rivers as well as dams fed by them. The Conversation Africa’s Nontobeko Mtshali asked Rialet Pieters to explain the implications of these findings.

What are these banned pesticides?

The pesticides we looked at are collectively known as organochlorine pesticides. They are used in agriculture to control insects that eat crops.

We did a human health risk assessment on the sharptooth catfish found in Orlando Dam and the Fleurhof and Lenasia areas in the south of Johannesburg. We chose this fish because it’s popular and widely consumed. The pesticides we targeted in the sharptooth catfish were lindane, heptachlor, aldrin, dieldrin, endrin and dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane (DDT). We found levels of heptachlor, DDT, and lindane in the fish.

All of the pesticides except for one, DDT, which is used against malaria-carrying mosquitoes, are banned in South Africa. So they should not be in the river. It’s not clear how they ended up in the Soweto, Fleurhof and Lenasia areas, though they could have made their way down the river from malaria-prone rural areas of the country.

The pesticides, with the exception of DDT, were banned by the international community under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants because of their harmful effects on the health of humans and wildlife. South Africa is a signatory to the convention and is obliged to reduce and eliminate the use of all the compounds listed in the convention.

The DDT presence is unusual in an urban area because it’s mostly used in more rural settings to control mosquitoes and the spread of malaria.

How bad are the pollution levels in the river that runs through Soweto, Fleurhof and Lenasia?
We found the pesticides were present in fish tissue that we tested. DDT was the most prevalent at all the sites. The concentrations of the pesticides were at levels much higher than internationally accepted parameters. This suggests the fish pose a risk to human health because the compounds bio-accumulate in the fish and when people eat them they can potentially cause cancer.

There is evidence that the banned pesticides, as well as DDT, can cause a host of cancers such as lung, skin, bladder, and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, to name but a few.

We did a human health risk assessment using the concentrations of the pollutants in the fish to predict their effects in humans when consumed regularly. We collected 30 sharptooth catfish (one of several species of fish in the river) and determined the concentrations of DDT in the fillet.

We then calculated the chances of developing cancer for a human weighing 60 kg and eating 30 g of the contaminated fish every day. We followed the internationally standardised calculations and values for predicting human cancer risk. To account for the varying levels of pesticides in fish, cancer risk was calculated for the mid-range and high range pollutant level.

The probable cancer risk to DDT exposure varied between the three sites. The probability of developing cancer from eating the fish contaminated by DDT from Lenasia was the highest. We found that 251 out of 10 000 people may develop cancer if exposed to the mid-range level of the pesticide and 1 105 out of 10 000 people may develop cancer from the high range. At Fleurhof the risk ranged from 172 to 359 in 10 000 and at Orlando Dam from 191 to 624 in 10 000 people.
According to the US Environment Protection Agency, any risk greater than 1 in 10 000 is deemed an “unacceptable risk”.

We did not calculate the total cancer risk potentially posed by all the compounds together. Our focus was on DDT because of the high concentrations we found.

What should be done to fix the problem?

People who regularly eat or buy fish from the contaminated water need to be made aware of the risks to their health. One way of doing so is to have notice boards that advise on the safe consumption levels of the different species.

Fish from these areas need to be monitored regularly. And the sale of pesticides needs to be regulated better to ensure that the banned ones aren’t being traded.

Nico Wolmarans also contributed to this article.



Rialet Pieters, Associate professor, North-West University; Mayumi Ishizuka, Professor of Environmental Toxicology, Hokkaido University; Nico J Smit, Director: Unit for Environmental Sciences and Management, North-West University; Ruan Gerber, Postdoctoral fellow, North-West University; Victor Wepener, Director: School for Biological Science, North-West University; Wihan Pheiffer, Senior Lecturer, DST/NWU Preclinical Drug Delivery Platform, North-West University; Yared Beyene, Researcher, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Hokkaido University, and Yoshinori Ikeneka, Researcher, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Hokkaido University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.