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Johns Hopkins University | AS.070.307

Anthropology of Catastrophic Violence

3.0

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This course introduces students to anthropological approaches to the study of trauma, focusing on the anthropological imperative to study catastrophic violence kinship relations and the everyday. In recent years, critical scholarship in anthropology has shown how the diagnosis of PTSD hinges on a medico-legal picture of trauma wherein violence is understood through the (white) American experience of the Cold War. That is, war is taken as a distant phenomenon with a clean distinction between the home front and battlefield. In this course, we take gender as our core analytic for unsettling this picture of trauma. Through interdisciplinary readings in anthropology and the humanities, we shift our frame to look at intimate relations, the domestic sphere, and everyday life. What social, cultural, and political factors shape testimonies to/of atrocity? How does political violence mediate intimate relations in a household? How does growing up under conditions of war shape the experience of childhood?

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