Gerald F. Murray
Department of Anthropology, CLAS
Killing for God: the Anthropology of Religious Violence
This new course will offer a comparative anthropological overview of the practice of killing, enslaving, maiming, expelling, or threatening others in the name of God. Though religion is a force for healing, mystical serenity, social solidarity, and generosity to the poor, it is often kidnapped into the service of lethal aggression. Focusing on Abrahamic monotheism, we will examine Jewish, Christian, and Muslim texts endowing violence with divine legitimization. We will begin with the divinely mandated violence of the Hebrew scriptures, examine the Crusades, the Inquisition, and Christian rationalizations of slavery, then turn to the question of Islamic jihad, Al Qaeda, and beliefs concerning celestial reward for suicide bombers. Sacred texts alone, however, have limited causal power and should not be invoked as the dominant explanatory factor. Religious violence is intensified or mitigated by shifting historical factors that the course will analyze.
Among the learning objectives, students will (1) Devise an operationalized taxonomy of varieties of divinely mandated violence which religions have encouraged. (2) Carry out comparative content analysis of sacred texts to identify the incidence and frequency of different types of violence encouraged in each corpus. (3) Analyze contemporary news accounts of religious violence, identify reporter bias, and reformulate the same events in neutral anthropological language.
To assist in course design, the instructor will spend several weeks in Jerusalem’s Old City interviewing Jews, Christians, and Muslims about conflicts between and within religious groups.