Loaded Objects: The Anthropology of American Gun Culture

3 Credits.

There are roughly two firearms owned by civilians for every person living in the United States—a country with by far the highest rate of civilian firearms ownership in the world. Making sense of this fact leads invariably to diagnoses of America’s “gun culture,” a term used to explain both the popularity of firearms and the devastating rate of gun-related injury and death. But what does it mean to think about gun ownership and use as a “cultural” phenomenon? And what happens when we treat firearms not simply as policy problems or public health liabilities, but as objects uniquely embedded within violent histories, vested with symbolic power, and enmeshed within everyday circuits of exchange and use? While historians, social scientists, and cultural theorists have begun to consolidate a new field of Gun Studies, anthropology brings distinctive tools for analyzing how firearms mediate agency, value, symbolism, and identity across individual, communal, and institutional scales of social life. This course invites students to apply those tools by connecting theoretical readings to case studies drawn from both scholarship and media, from tragic headlines to blockbuster films to YouTube productions to video games.