Anthropologists have long been concerned with questions of violence in many forms: structural violence, everyday violence, state violence, gendered violence, violence and the body, violence and visuality, violence and the built environment, etc. Over the course of the semester, we will study both foundational works on violence from the last century as well as the ways that violence, in its varied forms, has been theorized and narrativized in recent ethnographic texts. Readings from Agamben, Arendt, Bourgois, Butler, Das, Fanon, Farmer, Foucault, Jain, Hoffman, Masco, Said, Scarry, Scheper-Hughes, Tickin, Taussig, Wohl and others.
Cultural Anthropology