ANTH 3071 - Environmental Conflict and Collective Violence

Content: This course explores the anthropological meanings and effects of violence in both historical and cross-cultural contexts with a special focus on responses to climate change and environmental degradation. Our goal will be to examine how we might understand violence, in and of itself, as an always already contested category of cultural practice. To do so, we will work to examine the various experiences and subjectivities of perpetrators, victims, and witnesses in relation to acts that some may deem violent while others may seek to legitimize or condone. To this end, we will explore how violence is complexly defined and how such definitions involve contestations about whether or not a certain act is considered legitimate or illegitimate, prosaic or extreme, individual or collective, etc. Throughout class, we will examine notions of physical, psychological, state, gendered, structural, and environmental violence while also exploring the role violent imaginaries assume in contemporary culture.

Credits: 4