ATH 350 - Fieldwork Under Fire: The Ethnography of Violence & Mayhem

1 course unit

This course takes as its subject the conduct of ethnographic fieldwork amid conditions fraught with violence, terrorism, warfare, and civil instability, and amid the chaos caused by catastrophic natural disasters, the collapse of the social order, epidemic outbreaks, and other states of emergency. Students will read and discuss accounts of anthropologists who have been at the center of gunplay, riot, genocide, mass epidemics, and climatic devastations who describe their direct experience of the shattering of the “everyday order of things,” and the means by which those at the center of such crises are compelled to adapt, negotiate, innovate, react, and evolve as they try to draw cultural meaning from their circumstances and take creative action to survive, protect, provide for, heal, and mourn one another as their social and cultural worlds unravel before their eyes. This course takes to task narrow associations of violence and mayhem with devastation and death, arguing instead that these must be considered and studied as dimensions of everyday life. Students will discuss and debate the methodological strategies, theoretical approaches, ethical conflicts, and adaptive tactics that ethnographers have had to deploy in order to conduct their studies in dangerous fields that would otherwise be unapproachable. Readings, written assignments, and class discussions will engage the perspectives of the many affected by the traumas of dangerous fields: children and adults, perpetrators and victims, civilians and specialists, mercenaries and profiteers, jackals and researchers, the powerful and the powerless, the maimed and the displaced, the rescuers and the survivors, and the rebuilders of whole civilizations from the wreckage and in the aftermath of vast devastation and horrors unimaginable.
Prerequisite(s): ATH 205 Anthropological Theory .