Anthropology of War

Catalog description

Why do wars happen? What causes violence to erupt between different groups of people? Are we, as humans, biologically predisposed for violence, or are we pushed towards violence based on the social structures around us? How are societal inequalities exacerbated by war? How do different groups negotiate conflicts to leverage more power or violence, or reduce levels of violence? How do we commemorate and remember war and the casualties of conflict? What do our memories about the past tell us about how power is societally distributed in the present? This course explores the role of warfare in cultural construction and expression using a four-field anthropological approach, evaluating archaeological, skeletal, ethnographic and linguistic evidence of war throughout human existence.