Anthropology for a Safer World
Open Anthropology highlights anthropological research for understanding and teaching about gun violence & the #MarchForOurLives for gun reform
Anthropology – Understanding – Possibility
In July 2012 I took up the issue of the use of the word “culture” in Charles Blow’s New York Times column on Gun Culture. Then in December 2012 with the horrors of Newtown, I returned to the issue of gun violence in a series of posts.
Since then, I have urged US anthropology to tackle these issues. In 2018, there were signs that the events in Florida were reshaping national discourse on these matters. Can anthropology help turn the tide?
The March 2018 issue of Open Anthropology, titled Enough: Anthropologists Take on Gun Violence featured 15 articles in anthropology that were free-to-read through March 2019. And here is a summary of the key blog-posts in the gun control and gun violence series:
Open Anthropology highlights anthropological research for understanding and teaching about gun violence & the #MarchForOurLives for gun reform
As gun violence continues in the United States, this gun control podcast reflects on how anthropology can bring sanity and contribute to political debate.
Globalization was supposed to render the national state irrelevant. Such claims had already been disproved by an anthropology of the state.
When Bill Gates recommends Jared Diamond & Steven Pinker, reiterate anthropology’s calling: “the fate of no human group can be irrelevant to humankind” (Trouillot).
Arguments against gun control are rooted in shoddy anthropology: ideas about human nature, culture & history which anthropology does not support.
Wonderful recent volume shows how views of human nature as inherently warlike stem not from the facts but from cultural views embedded in Western thinking.
As the US was in limbo about gun reform, the American Anthropological Association issued an important statement on gun violence and need for research.
Can gun violence ever lead to new gun control resolve or just to new guns? Anthropology can push for sanity on gun violence and gun control.
What does anthropology reveal about gun violence? Reflections between tweets from the American Anthropological Association and the NRA gun defense.
In our urge to understand complexity, anthropologists can make things more complicated than necessary. The guns matter. The U.S. needs a semi-automatic ban.
Gun reform is important, but the U.S. needs to reduce the weaponry, buying back 50 million semi-automatic weapons. Australia did it. We can do it too.
An analysis of “gun culture” provides lessons for talking about culture in anthropology at a time when culture–and guns–are everywhere.