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...

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...

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...

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. ...

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....

In parts of Indonesia, a fishing boat owner will provide a large loan to the captain and crew of his boat. Remaining chronically indebted, the captain and crew should never repay the loan; rather they continue to provide the boat owner with a share of each catch. The boat owner gets a reliable captain and crew; the captain and crew maintain reliable employment. When anthropologists come across close intimate and hierarchical relationships of mutual obligation, we use the term “patron client”....

Life cycle is the process of change and development of a person. These are often marked by rituals (such as “baby shower” and birthday parties) or rites-of-passage (such as a stags’/bucks’ night). The experience of life stages, even the conception of what constitutes a life stage, differ. Thus, studying life cycle show us that even birth and death (the most ‘inevitable’ ‘facts’ of life) can be differently understood. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights...

What is the difference between England 1200 and England 1900? Tonnies’ made the most basic distinction in sociology and anthropology; between community (Gemeinschaft) and society (Gesselschaft). Community is based around traditions, mores, kinship and locality, religion, personal bonds; and, reciprocal relations. It was found predominantly in the village and the rural town. Society is based around written laws; a national community; science; legalistic bonds between citizens mediated by a...

The idea of social construction is scary. It implies you don’t own your own experience—it is determined by society/the system. We can never be fully in charge of defining who we are. For instance, most people define themselves in relation to what it is to be a mother—they have one and they might be one. But you never really own our experience of motherhood; it is rather structured in terms of discourses such as “working mum”, “soccer mum”, “super-mum”, “doting mum” etc.. All accounts of...

The concept of "moral economy" describes our perception of how people in our economy should behave. "Riots" in 1700s England, historian EP Thompson explains, were only partly caused by a lack of food. More important for the rioters was that farmers sold their products to ‘scalpers’. These ‘scalpers’ bought grains in bulk and sold them on to the common folk at inflated prices. Rioters thought this kind of behaviour was reprehensible, so they took to the cobbled streets. Moral economy has...

“Structure” refers to the way humans organise themselves economically, socially, and politically. It also refers to the way language and thought is organised. Obvious examples of social structures can be found in the organisation of class (upper/middle/lower), gender (male/female), race (black/white, Aryan/Semitic), religion (priest/laity), economy (boss/worker), and politics (state/citizen). The structures often appear quite natural to us. Yet closer analysis demonstrates that what we humans...

Although the past is something we often take for granted, in fact the past is understood differently in different cultures. Anthropologists studying history, typically analyse the way a culture generally makes sense of the past. In the Western Desert of Australia, for example, the past is composed of a Dreaming period, when superhuman ancestors created the world and set out the rules which humans must live up to. The heroic past establishes a spiritual imperative for those living in the...

When we talk about the spread of world religions, like Christianity or Islam, we tend to assume a one-way process: the world religions simply replace indigenous religions. In fact, the process is often more interesting. Indigenous people often respond to the introduction of a world religion by blending indigenous beliefs with the beliefs of the world religion. This is what anthropologists call “syncretism”. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please...

Notions of gender are culturally specific. Until recently, at least, Western societies tended to define sexuality (ie. homo-, bi-, and hetero-sexuals) in terms of sexual orientation or attraction. In Western understandings of rape, women’s genitalia and sexuality were frequently understood as inherently vulnerable and subject to brutalisation, while men’s were thought inherently brutalising and penetrative. However, for various reasons, mostly circulating around conceptions of the body, these...

Of all the living organisms in the world, plant and animal, humans start life least equipped. We have almost no instincts for survival, such that most of what we know and do, we need to learn. That stuff which we learn and share is culture. Most of it we also take for granted. And that's where anthropology comes in. Anthropologists study this learnt, shared, and assumed stuff; stuff which we call culture. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please...

What is rationality and why is it important? According to Weber, the most rational actions are scientific ways of achieving scientific ends. You and I act according to scientific means and ends, and this defines us as modern. As such, our guiding principles for action are general, universal and abstract. For instance, medieval European cathedrals were built mostly according to specific local knowledge and practical trial and error. Modern buildings are constructed largely according to general...

Commodity value is the most beautiful and metaphysical product of the capitalist market and our imagination. Few things could be more supernatural than this value; it makes a pound of gold appear ‘naturally’ more valuable than a pound of steel. And the day gold stops appearing naturally more valuable (that is, the day commodity value disappears) is the day capitalism dies. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for permissions.

What is the hold that Christmas has on so many people? Maybe we all share an unconscious symbol of two births—spirit and body. Perhaps the nativity and passion story follows a set of universal structures. Or, do the symbols provide us with a model of the world and for how to behave? In this episode, I consider these and other approaches to explain why Christmas is so significant for millions. Copyright 2012 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for...

I Googled “Christmas” plus “time of reflection” and got literally hundreds of direct hits. We all know the internet can’t be wrong, so I guess for many of us, Christmas is a time of reflection; reflection, I would add, about what is most important in our lives. Anthropologists are particularly interested in what members of a society find important and how it is represented through symbol and ritual. So in this episode, I want to analyse the way Frazer, Durkheim, and Freud—being among the...

We often take the way we live for granted. Living in a home with our family and working for a salary can seem like the normal way to do things. Anthropology teaches us that this arrangement is the exception, rather than the rule. In fact this ‘mode of adaptation’, as we call it, is a recent innovation of our species. Other modes of adaptation practiced by our ancestors and many societies today lead to less hierarchy in society and more leisure time. Copyright 2012 Nicholas Herriman / La...

We often take the way we live for granted. Living in a home with our family and working for a salary can seem like the normal way to do things. Anthropology teaches us that this arrangement is the exception, rather than the rule. In fact this ‘mode of adaptation’, as we call it, is a recent innovation of our species. Other modes of adaptation practiced by our ancestors and many societies today lead to less hierarchy in society and more leisure time. Copyright 2012 Nicholas Herriman / La...

Rites of passages are a form of ritual: they are a ritual process which initiate a person into a new position in society, such as “married”, “adult”, “club member” etc.. Involving pain, fear and, humiliation, rites of passage are often intentionally brutal. Profound anthropological analysis shows how rites of passage turn the world upside-down for initiates until they are ready to emerge with a new status. The initiate, in other words, is broken down and remade into somebody with the ‘right...

What is difference between drinking to a toast (say, to the bride’s health at a wedding) and drinking a Coke in McDonald’s? If you deliberately and openly do not drink to the bride’s health, you are effectively saying “I do not wish the bride a long and healthy life”. It’s possible, but extremely unlikely, that not drinking a Coke at McDonald’s would have the same effect. Drinking to a toast conveys a meaning because it is a symbolic action, or what anthropologists call “ritual”.  In this...