Anthropology of Violence and War

Topics

• What insights can anthropology contribute to understanding violence and war, when
• anthropology itself, as a Western discipline of imperialism that enabled settler colonialism
• has been guilty of violence in its practices? How do people come to understand, normalize
• trauma, injury, death, genocide, ecocide, domicide, and other harms, whose eDects are
• catastrophic, long-lasting, and transgenerational? In this class, we develop a critical
• anthropology of violence and war by inquiring into discursive and social contexts in relation
• to power and by looking at various resistances, challenges, interventions, and disruptions
• What critical questions emerge from decoding the ideologies, narratives, myths
• representations, and propaganda that construct normative ways of thinking about violence
• focus include Canada, the United States, Indigenous nations, Palestine, and Israel. We
• violence, war, and resistance
• Think critically about violence and war and their multiple forms and eDects
• violence and war as social, political, and historical constructs
• conflict
• what purposes, in what contexts, and to what eDect
• Analyze visual representations of war and violence
• practices of war and violence