Course Schedule
ARCHY/ANTH 101: Anthropology of War
University of Washington—Spring 2008
Schedule summary:
As
outlined below, each week is divided into lectures, section meetings, and
project time/skills training workshops.
Monday sections are usually project related workshops or discussion. Tuesday lectures will be for the entire
class. Wednesday sections will be
discussions of the lecture and reading material. Thursday meetings will be flexible: we will
alternate between lectures, quizzes, and workshops.
Weeks 1-2: DEFINING AN
ANTHROPOLOGY OF WAR
Examining
variations in the way war has been defined across time and space.
March
31 (M): no section meeting first day of
class
April
1 (Tu): Introduction to course structure; How can an
anthropological perspective help us better understand war?
April
2 (W): Section – Introductions and protocols
April
3: (Th): Lecture (Hoffman) – How is war defined?
Readings:
Lutz, Catherine (2002). The Wars Less Known. South
Atlantic Quarterly 101(2): 285-296.
Benenson,
Alexander (2005) Unearthing a violent past. In The Archaeology
of War, pp. 11-13 and pp.7.
April
7 (M): Section – brainstorming project sites
April
8 (Tu): Guest Lecture (Jason De Leon) - Early hominid group behavior, punishment,
and the art of throwing
Readings:
Isaac Barbara (1987). Throwing and human evolution. The African Archaeological Review 5:
3-17.
April
9 (W): Section meeting – readings discussion
April
10: (Th): Workshop (Lape) - Archaeological site mapping and documentation
Readings:
Monmonier,
Mark (1996). How to Lie
with Maps, 2nd ed.; Introduction (pp. 1-4).
Read through the Detailed Instructions for Project Part 1,
Evaluation Rubric and the Projects page.
Week 3: THE WAR
MEMORIAL: BUILT SPACE AND HIDDEN TOPOGRAPHIES
Approaches to the physical environment, both natural and built, as an
archive of violent events.
April
14 (M): Section—map training exercises
April
15 (Tu): Lecture (Lape) – War Memoryscapes
Readings:
Browse these sites of war
documentation project websites:
Various US Civil War
archaeological documentation projects: http://www.nps.gov/history/seac/civilwar/index.htm
Crisis in Darfur
project: http://www.ushmm.org/maps/projects/darfur/
Michael Stanley’s photos
of cold war sites: http://mejstanley.com/page2/page2.html
Association for World
War Archaeology (Netherlands) http://www.a-w-a.be/eng/index2.html
April
16 (W): Section – readings discussion and quiz review
April 17: (Th): Quiz #1
Week 4: THE WAR
MEMORY: NARRATING THE PAST
An exploration of how individual ethnic, national, or religious
communities do or do not speak about their violent pasts.
April
21 (M): Section--project help session
April
22 (Tu): Lecture (Hoffman) – Remembering War
Readings:
April
23 (W): Section – readings discussion
April
24 (Th): Workshop (Hoffman) – How to record interviews and make mp3 files; ethics of interviews on
sensitive topics
Readings:
Browse these oral history archives:
Veterans History Project
(Library of Congress) www.loc.gov/vets/vets-home.html
(note in particular the
Thomas Hodge video interview and written transcript of interview with Carmel Arcilesi; this is an extensive archive, so please view a
few of the projects.)
University of Texas U.S.
Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project.
(Look at both the “Browse Stories” and “Learn to
Interview” sections. These “stories” are
prose versions of the interviews rather than transcriptions.)
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/ww2latinos/index.html
Columbia Journalism Review, “Into the Abyss:
Reporting Iraq 2003-2006: An Oral History”
Cambodia: Oral Histories and Biographies
(This site contains a variety of formats – some
narrative stories and some interview transcripts.)
http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/oral_hst.htm
Please
note the following special event this week:
“From
Ethnics to Ethics: Theatrical Facilitation in the Balkans and Middle East”
Lecture by Sonja Kuftinec
Theatre Arts, University of
Minnesota
Thursday, April 24, 2008, 6:30 pm
North Creek Events Center, UW Bothell
Reception to follow
April 25 (Fri): Project Part
1 due—email to your TA by 5:00 PM
Week 5: THE ORGINS OF
WAR
A look at how
anthropologists seek out the causes of war in the grand arc of human history
and in its individual manifestations.
April
28 (M): Section - brainstorming second project sites
April
29 (Tu): Lecture (Lape)
– The Archaeology Debates about War
(Odell) – Warfare in the Aleutian Islands, Alaska
Readings:
McCartney, Allen 1984. Prehistory of the
Aleutian Region (read first 4 pages of this selection, the remainder is for
those interested)
April
30 (W): Section - readings discussion
May
1: (Th): Lecture (Jordan)
- Maya ritual and warfare
(Zanotti)
– Amazonian warfare
Readings:
Week 6: WAR &
POPULAR CULTURE
Emphasizing the
way diverse cultures use popular art forms to commemorate or comment on wars
past, present and future.
May
5 (M): section – interview exercises
May
6 (Tu): Lecture (Hoffman) – War, Technology and the Popular Imagination
Readings:
Wright, Evan 2004. Generation Kill. Prologue, pp. 1-8.
May
7 (W): Section meeting – readings discussion and quiz review
May 8 (Th):
Quiz #2
Lecture (Allen) – Video Games and the Military Entertainment
Complex
Week 7: CASE STUDY:
EAST TIMOR
Relating course themes to date to a specific field site.
May
12 (M): Section--project help sessions
We will provide individual help
(first come, first served) using audio editing software at the following
locations and times:
If you have your own computer (bring your laptop
with you if you have one) and need help using Audacity:
12:30: Denny 209
If you need help using UW computers and software:
10:30 and 12:30: Mary Gates
Hall 058 (Macs)
10:30 and 12:30: Odegaard 102 (PCs)
May
13 (Tu): Lecture (Lape): War past and present in East Timor
Readings:
Lape, Peter V. and Chin-yung Chao 2008.
Fortification as a human response to
late Holocene climate change in East Timor, in Climate Change in the Indo Pacific: Human Responses from the Late
Pleistocene to the Little Ice Age edited special issue in Archaeology in Oceania 43:11-21. (this is an optional reading, lecture will provide similar
information. Also note that captions for figs 1 and 2 have been reversed in
error in this pre-publication page proof)
May
14 (W): Section - readings discussion
May 14 (W): optional related
lecture: Kurt Raaflaub (Brown University) Leaders in War and Bravery: The Ideology of War in Fifth-Century Athens
2:30 PM, Sieg 134
May
15 (Th): Lecture (Capuder) – Desecration and 'development': the theft of Sequalitchew
Village
General Project Help Session (following the lecture)
Readings:
Reddick, SuAnn
M., and Cary C. Collins 2005. Medicine creek to Fox Island: cadastral
scams and contested domains. Oregon
Historical Quarterly 106.3: 374.
May 16 (Fri): Project Part 2
due—email to your TA by 5:00 PM
Week 8: CASE STUDY:
SIERRA LEONE
Relating course themes to date to a specific field site.
May
19 (M): Section – Project parts 1 &2 debriefing and Project part 3
brainstorming session
May
20 (Tu): Lecture (Hoffman) –
Readings:
May
21 (W): Section – readings discussion
May
22: (Th): Lecture (Peterson): Archaeology, nationalism, and colonialism
Readings:
Meeting
for those interested in presenting at the June 10 Difficult Dialogues Event
(see below) after the lecture
Week 9: THE FUTURE OF
WAR
Given that war
itself has a “history,” what might be some of its possible futures?
May
26 (M): holiday – no section meetings
May
27 (Tu): Lecture (Hoffman) – Where do we go from here?
Readings:
Barnett, Thomas 2003. The Pentagon's
New Map. Esquire (March)139(3): 174-182
May
28 (W): Section – readings discussion and quiz review
May
29: (Th): Quiz
#3
Lecture (Lape) – The Future of the Past
Readings:
The Economist 2008.
Streams of blood,
or streams of peace, May 3, 2008.
Additional
optional readings on this topic on resources page
Week 10: CONCLUSIONS
Review of
course themes and relation of course material to students’ future educational
experiences.
June
2 (M): Section – Project part 3 workshop: writing essays
June
3 (Tu): Lecture (Hoffman & Lape) – Anthropology at the Frontline
Readings:
Interview with David Price, Ana
Simons, Catherine Lutz NPR “Morning Edition”. 14 August 2002.
(Please note: you will
need Real Audio or another audio player to listen to this file.)
Human Rights Watch 2004. Iraq: the State of Evidence, Chap. IV, The Forensic Evidence. Vol. 16, No. 7(E) November 2004. (note—contains depictions of human skeletal remains-for text only version without images see this link)
June
4 (W): Section meeting & course evaluations
June
5: (Th): Conclusions:
The future of our project
June 10 (Tu):
Difficult
Dialogues Performance, HUB Auditorium, 6PM (reception to follow)
Selected students from our class
will perform/present projects
Extra credit available for attending
(2 points) and presenting (up to 10 points) in this event!
June 11 (W): Project Part 3
due—email to your TA by 5:00 PM