The Audible Anthropologist

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 Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for permissions.

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 Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for permissions.

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 stuff’ to join the group.

Copyright 2012 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for permissions.

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 episode, Nicholas Herriman (aka The Audible Anthropologist) analyses various ways of understanding ritual.

Copyright 2012 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for permissions.

Belief and practices associated with “magic” conjure up, for some people, images of backward tribal peoples or kooky contemporary eccentrics. For anthropologists, magic is neither. It is a feature of almost all societies, it flourishes among the educated and wealthy, and rather than dying out, it seems to be on the rise. In this episode, I distinguish white from black magic; critique an analysis of magic as a placebo effect; magic and confidence; and look at the modern witchcraft movement (Wicca). My beliefs and practices which I comfortably dismiss as “superstition” are, in fact, magic. Magic, as I will be argue, is a large part of life in many parts of the world.

Copyright 2012 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for permissions.

Anthropology is the study of human culture and society. It asks what it is to be human? Socio-Cultural Anthropology, the approach of this lecture series, studies different contemporary societies to answer this question. Anthropologists have a ‘kit’ full of conceptual tools they bring to this study. Let’s find out what some of these tools are…

Copyright 2012 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for permissions.