The Bristol Conversation – Darcia Narvaez

Welcome to the Bristol Conversations, a new podcast and video series by Local Futures. In these longer-format, meandering episodes, our founder Helena Norberg-Hodge speaks with some of the great minds who joined us in Bristol for the Planet Local Summit.

We kick the series off with Darcia Narvaez. Darcia is professor emerita of psychology at the University of Notre Dame. She studies morality, child development and human flourishing, and she does so by integrating disciplines like anthropology, neuroscience, developmental psychology and evolutionary biology. Helena, in turn, holds a very compatible perspective on human development thanks to her learnings from many years spent in the indigenous culture of Ladakh.

Their conversation explores who we really are as human beings and the kind of supports we need to develop healthily. They show how so-called 'human nature' itself is molded by the economy and culture, and give anecdotes that illuminate some fundamental differences between modern Western (i.e. globalized) culture and more land-based communal cultures. How deep does the damage of disconnection go in the modern world? And how might we begin to reverse that damage through care, touch, play and vulnerability?