COURSE DESCRIPTION FOR SPRING 2006

ANTH/PACE 345 Aggression, War and Peace (Theory)

This course explores enduring and contemporary questions, problems, and issues of violence, war, nonviolence, and peace. These and related phenomena will be critically analyzed through the unique perspectives of the humanistic science of anthropology with its focus on holism, culture, fieldwork, comparison, evolution, and prehistory. Furthermore, the course will also critically analyze in historical perspective the role of anthropology and anthropologists in war and peace from Western colonialisms of the past five centuries to the neocolonialisms of the present. The main topics covered are reflected in the titles and sequence of the case studies listed below. This course is reading, thinking, discussion, and debate intensive, and it has an oral communication skills designation.

Every student is required to read and discuss each of these three textbooks:

Jack David Eller, 2006, Violence and Culture: A Cross-Cultural Interdisciplinary Approach.

Douglas Fry, 2005, The Human Potential for Peace: An Anthropological Challenge to Assumptions about War and Violence.

Roberto J. Gonzalez, ed., 2004, Anthropologists in the Public Sphere: Speaking Out on War, Peace, and American Power.

In addition, every student is required to read at least two of the following case study books of their choice (listed in order covered) and to discuss them in an individual or panel presentation:

Paul Christopher, 1999, The Ethics of War and Peace: An Introduction to Legal and Moral Issues.

Ward Churchill, 2003, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality.

Chris Hedges, 2002, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning.

Thomas C. Patterson, 2001, A Social History of Anthropology in the United States.

Keith F. Otterbein, 2004, How War Began.

R. Brian Ferguson and Neil L. Whitehead, eds., 1992, War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare.

Eric Wakin, 1992, Anthropology Goes to War: Professional Ethics and Counterinsurgency in Thailand.

David H. Price, 2004, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists.

R. Brian Ferguson, 1995, Yanomami Warfare: A Political History.

Patrick Tierney, 2001, Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon.

Carolyn Nordstorm and Antonious C.G.M. Robben, eds., 1995, Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival.

Jeffrey Sluka, ed., 2000, Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror.

Mark Juergensmeyer, 2003, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence.

Pamela R. Freese and Margaret C. Harrell, eds., 2003, Anthropology and the United States Military: Coming of Age in the Twenty-first Century.

WilliamUry, 2000, The Third Side: Why We Fight and How We Can Stop.

David Graeber, 2004, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.