Lifestyles : Thursday, October 21, 1999

You know what a normal person looks like, don't you? I mean, if you were contacted by intergalactic travelers and they asked you to show them a picture of a typical human being, you'd go find a picture of a Chinese woman, right?

Of course you would. There are more women than men, and most human beings are Asian, about 61 percent of us.

Last week there were lots of stories about the world's human population reaching 6 billion. Some of the reports included charts showing where we all live.

The picture is dramatically at odds with the impression you'd get watching a movie or reading a book or even sitting in a classroom studying world history.

Just before the world reached this new threshold, there were more stories about demographic changes inside the United States, which in another 50 years will look a whole lot different than it does now. It will look a little more like the world.

We are so used to seeing our European-descended kinfolk as the majority that we can forget what the world outside our box looks like.

Africa has 13 percent of the world's population, Europe 12 percent, South America 9 percent and North America 5 percent. In 50 years Europeans will be only 7 percent of the world's population, and North Americans 4 percent.

I was thinking about this more than usual because a friend e-mailed me an interesting speech about perspective.

The speech was a commencement address by Troy Duster, a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Here is a little bit of what he said, taken from the UC Berkeley Web site:

"In the university, the study of music is called Musicology.

"We start usually with Gregorian chants, and move on through history chronologically up through Palestrina, the Baroque period, followed by the classical, then romantic, 12-tone scale of Webern, then on to Stravinsky, Bartok, Cage and so on.

"Forty years ago, UCLA pioneered a new field, Ethnomusicology. It included the study of, for example, the koto of Japan, the sitar of India, the didgeridoo of Australian Aborigines, the gamelan of Indonesia, peasant songs of Korea, the music of the Bedouin nomads of the Sahara, the Lapps of northern Scandinavia, and, and . . . and the list kept on growing and growing, until it became clear that Ethnomusicology included the music and instruments of all the rest of the world."

He noted that there is something amiss when the "residual category overwhelms the defining category." And he pointed out that similar examples could be made of art and ethnic art, dance and ethnic dance, food and ethnic food, and, finally, studies vs. ethnic studies.

A minority of people have decided what is normal, and it is, not surprisingly, what that minority does, eats, believes. Everything else is ethnic something or other.

Of course, if you are told often enough and from an early enough age what normal is, it is very difficult to see beyond that. That is why people with multiple university degrees cannot understand why someone might see an all-white history book as incomplete. Everything in their education has told them that they are all that matters.

Our language itself draws lines around our understanding.

There is so much of the world that we are blind to. We are told what is wrong with other parts of the world, but that is often the extent of our exposure.

Significance is measured in more than population numbers, but how can we trust our measurements if our instruments are flawed? Maybe this isn't something folks want to talk about out loud - not if they're like the grasshoppers in the movie "A Bug's Life."

In the film, a group of grasshoppers terrorize an ant colony and each year make the ants harvest food for them.

At one point in the movie, the ants finally realize there are a lot more of them than there are grasshoppers. Things change fast.

A smart grasshopper would open an eye and see the ants.

Jerry Large's column appears Sundays and Thursdays in the Scene section of The Seattle Times. You can reach him c/o The Times, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111.
Phone: 206-464-3346. Fax: 206-464-2261. E-mail: [email protected]

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