We live in a violent world. It seems that everywhere we look, humans and other living (and non-living) beings are engulfed in overwhelming cyclones of intimate and catastrophic violence. In corners of the globe, wars have continued unabated for generations while new conflicts erupt on every continent. Elsewhere neoliberal regimes flirt with coercion as a more reliable basis of social stability. Violence in social registers now echoes in environmental ones. Today, the very fact of life on this wobbly planet is thrown into question by the cascading violence of petro-capitalism, and can anything short of violence change the profitably momentum of that apocalypse?
This course examines “violence” in its dizzyingly differentiated dimensions: as an object of engaged inquiry, as an armed demand for justice otherwise denied, and as a revolutionary rupture from structures of subjugation. What we think of as violence encompasses multiple phenomena – intimacy and ecology as much as repression and resistance – that cannot be understood only as a force of absolute negativity. Violence destroys, but it also generates. Violence is fast and slow, haunting from below and threatening from above, destroying vibrant worlds and authoring new ways of relating, cohering into the flexed muscle of popular dissent and dissipating into imperial technologies that seem to strike from nowhere. Violence is physical and symbolic, a tool of repression and resistance, a crushing defeat and a desperate hope, an event and a condition. Violence often moves in different directions all at once, both in the fraught worlds we inhabit and in the inability of social analysis to lay hold to its slipperiness.
Violence seems to be everywhere – and also, sometimes, nowhere. What is at stake in our recognition of violence? This course examines violence, not as a singular category, but in its historical and anthropological manifestations. Throughout this course, we will inquire into the nature of violence, explore its epistemological and existential, sensual and structural, exceptional and ordinary, imperial and ecological dimensions. How have historical actors reflected on the insurgent necessity – or poisoned chalice – of violence? Looking at the anti-colonial movements of the past century, we will explore how have divides of North and South found new definition around the question of violence. How have scholars tried to make sense of violence? And how have artists tried to portray worlds torn apart by violence? In such readings and discussions, this course aims to renew an anthropology of violence attuned to our fractured present.
This class will be held in conjunction and collaboration with a class under the same promissory note at the American University of Cairo (AUC). This is a reading intensive class, with substantial reading assignments outside of our weekly meeting time. Monday courses will be held on Zoom with AUC, Thursday classes in person with just Bennington students.
Learning Outcomes:
Delivery Method: Hybrid
Prerequisites: Email instructor (dbond@bennington.edu) for information about registration.
Course Level: 4000-level
Credits: 4
M/Th 12:00PM-2:00PM (Full-term)
Maximum Enrollment: 12
Course Frequency: One time only
Categories: 4000 , Advancement of Public Action , All courses , Four Credit , Hybrid , SCT
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