Podcast appearances and mentions of nicholas herriman

"The body of the people is in that landscape so when its mined and crushed and dug up, you're not just doing it with rock, you're also doing it with people, with the remains of people, and we know that happened on Banaba.” Katerina Teaiwa, Associate Professor at the School of Culture, History and Language at ANU, author of ‘Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba', and current Vice-President of the Australian Association for Pacific Studies, spoke to our own Simon Theobald about phosphate mining on Banaba Island. They discuss the history of phosphate mining and the spread of Banaba around the world through the global agricultural industry, the impact of the mining on the indigenous people of Banaba, continue The Familiar Strange's exploration of decolonisation in the social sciences, and critique the current modes of knowledge production in academia, before ending with one of modern anthropology's ultimate questions: do outsiders have the right to makes comments about other cultures? QUOTATIONS Simon: “Banaba ends up spread across the world effectively in the form of this phosphate industry.” Katerina: “It's not just a metaphor. It's literally a material fact that the island gets spread across the world and enters these ecological and food chains, so it ends up in animals, it ends up in humans.” "Land, body and people are not disconnected from each other ... The breaking apart of that means culturally, socially, spiritually, those relationships start to fragment and become unhooked from each other.” “We were taught to question everything in academia, to not take texts and ideas at face-value and just because they'd been written down by some powerful guy or, you know, famous people, that was truth.” “I say this to my students … I am learning as much as you are. This is an exchange of knowledge and ideas.” “Empowerment isn't just about race, or class, or ethnicity. Empowerment is about helping people feel comfortable to be able to critique their own positions, their own positionality, without falling apart.” CITATIONS AND LINKS Teaiwa K. (2014) Consuming Ocean Island: stories of people and phosphate from Banaba, Indiana: Indiana University Press. For an introduction on the concept of 'emodiment', give this a watch by Nicholas Herriman (2012): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF7ksSmd4Wg For an overview of the life of late Professor Greg Denings and his contributions, see: www.smh.com.au/national/historians-way-opened-new-roads-into-the-past-20080411-gds90q.html You can read more about Kirin Narayan here: https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/narayan-k?term=kirin+narayan and Paige West here: https://paige-west.com/ For more on TFS' discussion about decolonisation, check out our podcast episode with Sana Ashraf and Bruma Rios-Mendoza here: https://thefamiliarstrange.com/2018/10/01/ep-23-decolonizing-anthropology/ This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU's College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association. Music by Pete Dabro Show notes by Deanna Catto

The population of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands have emigrated far, from Indonesia to Western Australia, but have maintained a strong community and bartered goods through the use of Facebook. In this episode of Asia Rising, Dr Nicholas Herriman (Anthropology, La Trobe University) speaks to host Matt Smith about the Cocos (Keeling) Island community and gift-giving. Copyright 2015 La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for permissions.

The population of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands have emigrated far, from Indonesia to Western Australia, but have maintained a strong community and bartered goods through the use of Facebook. In this episode of Asia Rising, Dr Nicholas Herriman (Anthropology, La Trobe University) speaks to host Matt Smith about the Cocos (Keeling) Island community and gift-giving. Copyright 2015 La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for permissions.

In this lecture, I want to analyze witch-hunts in terms of the concept “revitalization movement”. This concept, theorized by Wallace in 1956, describes three ways societies to deal with cultural change: by slowly changing; by deliberately attempting to create a new culture (revitalization); or, by stamping out perceived agents of change (reorientation). As we shall see, Schoeneman argues that witch-hunts attempt to stamp out agents of change. Nevertheless, I argue that some witch-hunts are better analyzed as revitalization. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

In this lecture, I want to analyze more deeply relationships between those involved in both witchcraft and accusation. I suggest that harm can result from either the perceived black magic or from accusations and attack against ‘witches’ and ‘sorcerers’. In analyzing this we can see that both forms of harm can be analyzed as in-group or out-group as well as upwards, sideways, or downwards. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

In the previous lecture, we looked at the “how” of identification. Now we will look at who is involved. I proposed that identification, in many cases, works through accusation that is gossiped. In this lecture, I want to look at the ‘who’ of identification. So the question now is “who is identified as a witch or a sorcerer?” I look at three explanations. First, the witch or sorcerer is a type of person, be it unsociable, marginalize etc. Second, the witch or sorcerer is identified through a relationship with the accuser. In particular, the relationship may be strained—between people who should get along but do not, for example. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

In the previous three lectures, we have, for the purpose of analysis, distinguished the witch of our imagination. When someone is accused of being a witch, some of the qualities of the witch image are attributed. So how does the imagined quality (the image of the witch) become attached to a real person? In this lecture, we look at how someone is identified as a witch. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

In previous lectures, we have looked at how we can we analyze the image of the witch. Mair says the witch image represents the opposite of good. Needham says it is a synthesis of primary factors. As we will see in this lecture, Stephen, an anthropologist who has researched the Mekeo and the Balinese, says that the image of the witch is a fantasy the child has about the mother. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

One idea to explain the similarity of witch imagery between cultures is that the witch represents the opposite of good. As I show in this lecture, another idea is that the witch image is created through joining together some of the most basic elements of experience. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

In the previous four lectures, we considered witch-hunting in various contexts. Now we need to analyze what is going on in these cases. The basic idea is that “society creates the image of the witch, and pins this image down onto particular individuals” (Mayer 1982, p. 61). So what is this image and how can understand it? The image is the nightmare witch who “epitomizes all kinds of evils”. We consider this in relation to the Balinese nightmare witch—Rangda. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

This lecture provides an overview of witch-hunts I have studied in Indonesia. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

This lecture focuses particularly on witch-hunting in Africa. As we shall see, such witch-hunting has, on certain occasions taken the form of a cult based around a reincarnated saviour. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

The lecture focuses on the Salem Witch Trials and McCarthyism. In doing this, I hope to provide a clearer sense of what we might call “persecution” and “witch-hunt”. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

In this lecture, we consider several famous cases from Europe’s Great Witch-hunt. We cover aspects of the late Medieval and Early modern period that form the backdrop to the events. We also consider various theories which purport to explain the Great Witch-hunt, including Cohn’s idea about the merging of witch and heretic. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

The killing of witches and sorcerers is a pressing contemporary issue. Studying such killings will provide greater insight into persecution in general. In order to undertake this study, the concepts of anthropology can be very useful. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

In this unit, we use the anthropological perspective to analyze witch-hunts and persecution. What is unique about anthropologists is that they use data obtained from participant-observation fieldwork and analyze this data using principles of relativism, comparison and holism. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

Secularization theory holds that with increasing modernization of the world, magic and religion would decline. Most scholars now argue religion and magic have grown in the past half-century. To explain this, scholars have developed ideas of the “religious resurgence” and “modernity of witchcraft” Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

If we are going to study the persecution of alleged witches and sorcerers, we first need to understand what we mean by “witchcraft” and “sorcery”. In this unit, we will use specific definitions for these concepts. But there are limitations to these definitions. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

Now we have an idea of what we are talking about with “magic”, we need to understand how anthropologists account for its existence. In this lecture, I want to explain what anthropology can tell us about magic and particularly sorcery and witchcraft. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

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.

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”. In this case, the patron is boat owner and the clients are the captain and crew. Both patron and client typically complain that they are short-changed in the relationship. Nevertheless, it is one of the most common forms of human relationship. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for permissions.

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 reserved. Please contact for permissions.

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 state; and, capitalism. It is found in the city. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for permissions.

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 reality are marred or embedded in discourse. This implies that it is impossible to stand outside society and study it objectively. The most we can do, according to this concept is to try to unearth or dig out the underlying discourse of structure, in a process called “deconstruction”. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for permissions.

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 proven to be a powerful concept in understanding contemporary societies, including our own. Listen and find out why. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for permissions.

“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 construct as class, gender, race, religion, economy, and politics. Moreover, these structures clearly have political implications. Changes in these structures (e.g. the transformation from a society based on king/subject to a society based on state/citizen) are often revolutionary and mark the changes in eras of human history. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for permissions.

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 present. In 1800s England, by contrast, the vision of history was one of progress of savage to barbaric to civilised life. Anthropologists understand such different visions of history in a cultural and social context. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for permissions.

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 contact for permissions.

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 brutalization, while men's were thought inherently brutalizing and penetrative. However, for various reasons, mostly circulating around conceptions of the body, these ideas are not shared in all societies. In this episode, we consider several examples from non-Western societies that conceptualise and work with gender in unique ways. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for permissions.

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 contact for permissions.

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 laws of gravity, abstract engineering principles, and universal ideas about construction. Honestly, I'm not sure which kind of building I'd rather spend my time in, but I know I'd rather hop on plane that built according to scientific principles. As for Weber, he detested the modern, rational world, seeing it as an iron cage that we have built around ourselves. Copyright 2013 Nicholas Herriman / La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Please contact for permissions.

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 permissions.

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 most influential thinkers for anthropology—would analyse the symbolism of Christmas. 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.

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.