Episode 48 – Idioms of Normality hosted by Dr. Paul H. Mason

Professor Susanna Trnka

How do different peoples define their sense of normality? In the discipline of socio-cultural anthropology, researchers are often preoccupied with a cross-cultural and historical understanding of what normal looks like among diverse communities. Professor Susanna Trnka from the University of Auckland draws upon her fieldwork in Fiji, in the Czech Republic, and in New Zealand to unpack how normality is constructed and contested. She shares some wonderfully insightful fieldwork stories to help us to view normality from different angles. She discusses examples from her research articles and books to explain the conventions of normality in diverse cultural settings. The cross-cultural examples offer some multifaceted understandings of normality as humans can come to live it in different life circumstances and conditions.