People of Afghanistan

Projected into a black room was the high resolution thermal imagery of bombing footage anonymously published on the internet in 2002 of an American AC-130 Specter Gunship attack. A slide projector overlayed onto this footage the photographs of Afghan men compiled during a 1960s Russian anthropological survey by G.F. Debets. This anthropometric survey of Afghanistan was then used as the basis of the book, Physical Anthropology of Afghanistan 1-11, which was part of a Russian translation series published by Harvard’s Peabody Museum in 1970. American anthropologist, Henry Field wrote the forward and credits himself as having suggested the survey to Debits. Physical Anthropology of Afghanistan is a collection of data relating to hair color, skin color, size of skull and other body- based measurements.