Description

Undergraduate

Module Content

This course begins with Hannah Arendt’s notion of thoughtlessness. We study the wooden phrases or formulaic language that accompany acts of war. Language and ritual both qualify the cultural elaboration of torture and warfare. Sacrifice and ritualised killing as well as dehumanization are central topics for an anthropology of war. The lectures are constructed around personalised accounts, and records of the speech of the Red Army’s Nikolai Moskvin, the Polish hero Leszek, the Indonesian Komando Aksi’s Inong, the warrior Simba in Kenya, Theresa Holland of West Belfast, Um Mahmoud of Hamas in Gaza, and Duch the commander of S-21 in Cambodia. The culture of war, with its local and global aspects, is the starting point to study war and predation in its human guise.

Learning Outcomes:

To gain knowledge about how to study war ethnographically.
	To be part of a team of ethnographers and compare field notes. To present this work as part of a peer-review process.
	To select relevant quotes from the required readings and embed them within a theoretical argument.
Delivery Method

One 2 hour lecture and one 1 hour tutorial per week.

 

Postgraduate

Module Content

This course begins with Hannah Arendt’s notion of thoughtlessness. We study the wooden phrases or formulaic language that accompany acts of war. Language and ritual both qualify the cultural elaboration of torture and warfare. Sacrifice and ritualised killing as well as dehumanization are central topics for an anthropology of war. The lectures are constructed around personalised accounts, and records of the speech of the Red Army’s Nikolai Moskvin, the Polish hero Leszek, the Indonesian Komando Aksi’s Inong, the warrior Simba in Kenya, Theresa Holland of West Belfast, Um Mahmoud of Hamas in Gaza, and Duch the commander of S-21 in Cambodia. The culture of war, with its local and global aspects, is the starting point to study war and predation in its human guise.

Learning Outcomes:

To gain knowledge about how to study war ethnographically.
	To present a key text as part of our post-graduate seminar.
	To select relevant quotes from the required readings and embed them within a theoretical argument.
Delivery Method

One 2 hour seminar per week.