Anthropology of Violence and Memory

Catalog description

This course examines the role of culture in understanding the relationship between memory and history, especially focusing on the politics of memorial practices in the aftermath of violence. Violence fundamentally destroys the social fabric and challenges the possibility of representation. Yet, memory in its various cultural manifestations, including testimony, narrative, monuments, and memorials, often becomes central to the way individuals and communities try to rebuild. We start by exploring the relationship between memory and history, looking specifically at questions of oral history and historical memory, as well as understandings of collective memory and historical consciousness conceived by anthropologists, sociologists, and historians. We then move on to the particular cultural forms and sites through which history and memory emerge, including testimony, truth commissions, monuments, and studies of struggles over commemoration and the politics of memory, truth, and witnessing in the wake of political violence and genocide. We explore these questions through an ethnographic examination of several cases, including the Holocaust, state violence in Latin America, the Rwandan genocide, and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This course will be taught using a combination of lectures, readings, films, art, and podcasts. This is a challenging, upper-level undergraduate course. Engaged and timely participation, especially regarding reading and writing assignments, as well as intellectual generosity are required. Students will receive credit for either ANT 3710 or SOC 3710, not both. These courses may substitute for each other with the F-replacement option.