Barcelona Disputatio 2023 reflects on the origin of violence
The fourth deputy mayor, Jordi Valls, presided today at the Saló de Cròniques of the City Hall the Disputatio of Barcelona 2023, an annual academic debate organized by the Barcelona Knowledge Hub of the Academia Europaea and the City Council, which this year has allowed to discuss the origin of violence. The debate was led by the French-American cultural anthropologist Scott Atram, from the University of Michigan (USA), and the Argentine paleoanthropologist Marta Mirazón Lahr, from the University of Cambridge (UK), with the moderation of Òscar Vilarroya, Director of Research at the Department of Psychiatry and Legal Medicine of the UAB and the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Unit.
Before the debate, Jordi Valls welcomed “the opportunity that Disputatio gives to think, debate and reflect on concepts such as violence or dialogue so present in everyday life”. According to the fourth deputy mayor, “we are constantly bombarded with headlines, tweets and brief messages that leave no space for reflection. We are surrounded by the fever of immediacy of modern times. But today, what Disputatio seeks is for us to stop, breathe, open our minds, reflect and learn.”
Valls has defended the power of dialogue. “The ability to dialogue requires patience, a willingness to listen and an ability to assume that our own perspective may be incomplete. In a diverse society, dialogue is breaking down the very walls and opening the mind to other ideas. Disagreement is not a sign of weakness; it represents the richness of humanity and its different perspective.”
The dialogue then began. For more than an hour, Scott Atram and Marta Mirazón Lahr discussed the origin of the phenomenon of violence based on the interrelation of evolutionary, genetic, environmental, social and neurobiological perspectives.
Protagonists of the Disputatio
Scott Atran (1952), a French-American cultural anthropologist, is director emeritus of research in anthropology at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, Research Professor at the University of Michigan (USA) and co-founder of ARTIS International and the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at the University of Oxford (UK). He has researched terrorism, violence, religion, indigenous environmental management, and the cross-cultural foundations of biological classification; doing fieldwork with terrorists, Islamic fundamentalists and political leaders, and Native American peoples.
Marta Mirazón Lahr (1965), an Argentinean national, graduated in Biology from the University of São Paulo (Brazil). She holds a PhD in Biological Anthropology from the University of Cambridge (USA). From 1995 to 1998 she was an assistant professor in the Department of Biology at the University of São Paulo. She returned to Cambridge, in 1999, as a Lecturer in Biological Anthropology and a member of the Clare Faculty, being promoted to Assistant Professor in Human Evolutionary Biology in 2005. In 2012 she discovered the Nataruk site in Kenya, which contained the earliest prehistoric skeletal remains found from a human-to-human massacre.
