Courses of Study 2013-2014 
    
    Mar 28, 2024  
Courses of Study 2013-2014 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

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ANTHR 3140 - [Anthropology of Sacrifice]


(GB) (CA-AS)
Fall. 4 credits.

Next offered 2015-2016.

C. Garces.

The decision to sacrifice is an omnipresent theme in contemporary societies. This course will review the configurations and problems of sacrifice in U.S., Near Eastern, and Latin American contexts. In class readings and discussions, we analyze the logic of sacrifice from its classical expression(s) in collective religious beliefs and ritual processes, to modern governmental practice(s) of marshalling civil society toward the goals of the state, to its many spectral and/or unwanted social byproducts, such as the Holocaust, collateral damage, suicide bombings, seldom-considered types of social abandonment, and the persecution of pariah populations. In the course as a whole, we reflect not only on the decision to sacrifice, in ordinary and exceptional circumstances, but we also pause to consider the rhetoric and symbolic operations of the imperative to sacrifice: its portrayal as the only course of fruitful action, its claims to singular beneficence, and its marriage of temporal context and transcendental form. Topics to be addressed will include the ethics of life, death, and immortality, the intimate relationship between the victim and perpetrator of sacred violence, and the new types of subjectivities produced in the aftermath of a sacrificial event. Course readings will include philosophical tracts, ethnographic, and historical works; student’s own life-history narratives; and up-close textual analyses of newspaper reports and public media.



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