ANT 3645 - Anthropology of Violence (3)

When Offered: Spring; Alternate years
This course introduces students to the study of violence through anthropological perspectives, beginning in early human communities with the institutional of ritual sacrifice, and across history as we consider the place of violence in tribal societies, acts of terror deployed during the colonial encounter, the violence of the state, and the philosophical writings of thinkers who challenge us to consider that violence produces within us feelings of both attraction and repulsion, that violence and death are fundamental to sexuality in the modern West, and that understanding violence means we grasp senseless violence and cruelty, as much as that part of violence which breathes vitality into human worlds, invigorating communities rather than obliterating them.