Download Senior Seminar: Anthropological Approaches to World Issues

ANTH1910
Senior Seminar: Anthropological Approaches to World Issues
War and Violence
Spring 2016
Instructor: Catherine Lutz
Time: Thursdays, 4-6.20, Barus and Holley 141
Office: Giddings 305
Office hours: Thursdays 2-4 or by appointment
Email: [email protected]
Seminar rationale
The goal of this senior seminar is to allow you to step back and both review what the discipline of
anthropology has to offer and apply its methodologies to a particular topic. In this seminar, we will
take up the question of the human practice and experience of war, and follow how a variety of
approaches within our discipline have been brought to bear on its understanding. These include
archaeology, medical anthropology, material culture studies, political economy, historical
anthropology, feminist anthropology, the anthropology of moralities, and discourse analysis among
them. We will also engage in the classic anthropological project of deconstructing the central
categories of analysis themselves – “war,” “peace,” “civilian,” “peacekeeping,” and “war crimes”
prime among them. We will engage in a comparative project, taking cases from West Africa,
Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Japan, among others.
Seminar requirements
The main requirements of the course are careful reading of the books and articles in this syllabus,
four short papers, and a final major research paper.
The three short papers include: (1) two short (2 page) papers on the readings for two weeks during
the semester. Students are encouraged to use brief field visits, other popular press, historical, and
visual material in their organizing of the discussion. Each seminar member will also write (2) a
short paper (2 page) which reads the New York Times’ or other mass media account(s) of a
contemporary conflict with the assistance of the previous week’s reading, and make a brief
presentation of the conflict coverage and their anthropological treatment of it to the class. There
will be two students presenting each week (one focused on the readings and the other on media in
relation to the readings), and they should coordinate discussion planning with each other
beforehand.
It is important that all students come to class each week with the physical book or printed copies of
the readings to be discussed. Laptop use has been shown to be detrimental to classroom
participation and as a result notetaking should be handwritten or you can feel free to audiotape my
lecture components.
1
A final capstone research paper (18–20 pages) is required. This can involve either (1) the selection
and focus on a contemporary or historic/prehistoric context of (dis)organized violence, examined
in some part of its complexity and conducted with original research alongside the literature, or (2)
a comparative project, taking several cases and examining in depth a particular theoretical
apparatus that has developed in the discipline such as feminist or political economic analysis. In
this case, you will produce a design for potential future research from your comparative and
theoretical explorations. You should submit a 2 page research paper proposal, with a preliminary
list of research materials, by February 25th. You should meet with the instructor before this date to
discuss the project plan. Two other meetings should be scheduled to discuss the project as the
semester progresses. A literature review and draft outline is due Monday, March 28th.
This project is considered a capstone to your work in the concentration.
Grading
The short papers (media analysis and class reading analyses) and class leadership count for 45
percent of the final grade. The final research paper counts for 45 percent, and the quality of class
participation more generally counts for 10 percent of the grade. Students with more than one
unexcused absence from seminar will lose 5 points credit.
Readings
Course readings are, on alternate weeks, books and journal articles. The former are available at the
Brown book store and the latter are available on OCRA (password “approach”).
Hoffman, Daniel (2011) The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and
Liberia. Durham: Duke University Press.
Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko (2002) Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The
Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kwon, Heonik (2006) After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My
Lai. Berkeley: University of California Press.
MacLeish, Kenneth (2013) Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military
Community. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Course outline and readings
January 28: Introduction
February 4: Popular and scientific evolutionary anthropology
Pinker, Steven (2011) Violence Vanquished. Wall Street Journal. September 24.
Ferguson, R. Brian (2013) Pinker’s list: Exaggerating prehistoric war mortality. In Douglas P. Fry
(ed.), War, Peace, and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views. New
York: Oxford University Press.
2
Haas, Jonathan and Matthew Piscitelli (2013) The prehistory of warfare: misled by ethnography.
In Douglas P. Fry (ed.), War, Peace, and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and
Cultural Views. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gorman, James (2016) Prehistoric massacre hints at war among hunter-gatherers. New York Times,
January 20. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/science/prehistoric-massacre-ancienthumans-lake-turkana-kenya.html?_r=0
If you have not encountered Paul Farmer on “structural violence,” see Farmer, Paul (2003)
On suffering and structural violence: a view from below. In Violence in War and Peace: An
Anthology. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 281-89.
https://my.vanderbilt.edu/mhs218/files/2015/01/Farmer-On-Suffering-and-StructuralViolence2.pdf
For further analysis on biological reductionism in accounts of war, I recommend: Ferguson,
R. Brian (2001) Materialist, cultural and biological theories on why Yanomami make war.
Anthropological Theory, 1 (1):99-116.
February 11: The study of cultural discourses (4-5, with class to start earlier or second half of
class to be rescheduled)
Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko (2002) Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of
Aesthetics in Japanese History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Selections TBA.
February 18: Archaeological approaches, with Dr. Andrew Scherer
Scherer, Andrew K. and John W. Verano, eds. (2013) Embattled Bodies, Embattled Places: War in
Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and the Andes. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library
and Collection.
 Introduction: Introducing war in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and the Andes, Andrew K. Scherer
and John W. Verano
 Chapters 1: War, violence, and society in the Maya Lowlands, Takeshi Inomata
 Chapter 2: War in the West: History, landscape, and Classic Maya conflict, Andrew K. Scherer
and Charles Golden.
February 25: Gender and medical anthropology
Theidon, Kimberly (2009) Reconstructing masculinities: the disarmament, demobilization, and
reintegration of former combatants in Colombia. Human Rights Quarterly 31 (1): 1-34.
Cohn, Carol (1987) Sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals. Signs 12: 687–718.
Masco, Joseph (2010) Atomic health, or how nuclear fear shaped American notions of death. In
Jonathan Metzl and Anna Kirkland, eds. Against Health. New York: NYU Press.
March 3: Visual anthropology
Gusterson, Hugh (1991) Nuclear war, the gulf war and the disappearing body. Journal of Urban and
Cultural Studies 2(1):45-55.
Biella, Peter (2009) Visual anthropology in a time of war: intimacy and interactivity in ethnographic
media. In Mary Strong and Laena Wilder, eds. Viewpoints: Visual Anthropologists at Work. Austin:
University of Texas Press, pp. 141-80.
3
Masco, Joseph. 2008. Target audience. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 64(3): 23-31.
March 10: Political economy and global flows
Hoffman, Daniel (2011) The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia.
Durham: Duke University Press. Selections TBA.
Lutz, Catherine (2001) Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century. Boston:
Beacon Press. Chapter 5, Many reserve armies, pp. 171-213.
March 17: Material culture studies, first half of class at Haffenreffer Culture Lab, Manning Hall
with curator Thierry Gentis
Moshenska, Gabriel (2010). Gas masks: material culture, memory and the senses. Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute 16(3): 609-28.
Joy, J. (2002) Biography of a medal: people and the things they value. In J. Schofield, W.G. Johnson
and C.M. Beck, eds. Materiel Culture: The Archaeology of 20th Century Conflict. London: Routledge, pp.
132-42.
Waller, R. (2014). African embodiments of modern war. In N. Saunders and P. Cornish, eds.
Contested Objects: Material Memories of the Great War. London: Routledge, pp. 88-103.
March 24: Cultural spiritualties and rituals
Kwon, Heonik (2006) After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai.
Berkeley: University of California Press. Selections TBA.
Spring break
April 7: The body in war
MacLeish, Kenneth (2013) Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community.
Princeton: Princeton University Press. Selections TBA.
Wagner, Sarah E. (2015) A curious trade: The recovery and repatriation of U.S. Missing In Action
from the Vietnam War. Comparative Studies in Society and History (1):161-90.
April 14: Applied anthropology
Gonzalez, Roberto (2008) Human terrain: Past, present and future applications. Anthropology
Today 24 (1): 21-26. Response by Montgomery McFate and Steve Fondacaro, p. 27.
McFate, Montgomery (2005) The military utility of understanding adversary culture. Joint Forces
Quarterly 38: 42-48.
Gusterson, Hugh (2009) Militarizing knowledge. In Network of Concerned Anthropologists, The
Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, pp. 39-55.
April 21 Capstone presentations
April 28 Capstone presentations
4