Kill Assessment: An Investigation Into Death, Genocide, and Other Forms of Violence

3 units

Is violence best understood as a set of random acts marginal to society, or do societies need violence to make culture systematic and hierarchy functional? This course is not about the psychology of individual pathology; rather, we will think about violence as a potential category of culture. We will address two major issues throughout this course. First, we will discuss different types of violence: physical/material violence and symbolic violence. Second, we will become familiar with ways that social groups turn violence into an aesthetic object and an artistic project. To accomplish our task, we will take both an ethnographic and theoretical approach so that we may better ground our understanding of violence in various people's everyday experiences while at the same time developing a broader, more complete idea of what violence entails. Specific readings include the following topics: U.S. and Brazilian hip-hop; Puerto Rican reggaeton; video games; contemporary Latin American plastic arts; U.S. hate crimes; rape and other form of domestic violence; violence workers in Latin America; genocides in Rwanda, Guatemala, and Armenia; drug lords in Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles, and Mogadishu, Somalia; and the legality of lethal injections for capital punishment in the United States.