The Audible Anthropologist Dr Nicholas Herriman

Some of the West biggest moral disputes, such as abortion, life support, and euthanasia, centre on defining life and death. Anthropology shows us that while the definition of “alive” is culturally specific, one commonality many cultures appear to share is two concepts. Biological life consists in breathing, heart beating and so on. What we could call civil life consists in having ritual status or personhood. In other words, ‘being alive’ is not simply breathing. Nor is it simply having ‘civil life’.

Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for permissions.

According to a modern world view, things exist which can be measured in terms of weight, length, volume, time, temperature, etc.. A spoon or a stone has all these qualities. We call such things “matter” and we have made “science” the proper study of them. The other kind of thing that exists includes consciousness, soul, thought, and feeling. We do not think a spoon or a stone possesses these qualities. We call such thinking-things “mind”. This mind-matter distinction is not made in all cultures. Indeed, things like stones and spoons may have mind. Stones may be, as the Ojibwa see it, non-human persons—certain humans can talk with them. Among the Mardu Aborigines, Tonkinson shows us, some sacred “stones are revered as metamorphosed parts of the bodies of ancestral beings” who created the world as we know it. As such these stones may have a vital power or life essence.

Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for permissions.

Some would argue that 'modernity' encapsulates your and my experience of being alive now, in the 21st century. So what is 'modernity'? In this episode, we cover the basics. I divide the modern era into three periods: mercantile (or early modern); modern; and late-modern (or post-modern).

Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for permissions.

Many of us, whether from Macedonia or Malaysia, Mexico or Madagascar, identify strongly with our nation. Implicitly, we understand the nation as a group of citizens whose rights and responsibilities are mediated by state. This idea emerged from France and the US in the late 1700s, replacing the certainties of “King and Country” and “Christendom”. The idea is that the people of a nation possess something real which ties them together. However, anthropologists think that the nation is actually a product of the imagination.

Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for permissions.

The ideas associated with Freud have impacted strongly on anthropology. The main point is that we have an unconscious mind. Further, the experiences of socialisation and especially childhood dominate this. These experiences relate mostly to trauma and unresolved conflict of our infancy. Such experiences are also often ‘sexual’ in nature. Although, by definition, we are not aware of our unconscious thoughts, they often manage to slip through into our conscious thoughts and behaviour.

Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for permissions.

According to 1948 UN declaration all humans have rights to life, liberty and security, law and trial, asylum etc. This created a new kind of right. Formerly, rights used to be through contracts or arrangements. Now you could have rights without this—just by being human. How does an anthropologist think about this? The idea of Human Rights presents problems of relativism versus universalism. Nevertheless, a more fruitful line analysis focuses on how the idea is taken up in local contexts. After all anthropology is the study of big concepts in little places. So in this podcast I discuss how this new, largely Western idea of Human Rights has been adopted and appropriated in different contexts.

Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for permissions.