EASC’s colloquium speaker series this fall focused on East Asian perspectives on violence from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Besides our very own prof. Nick Vogt, who gave the concluding lecture on . . . ancient Chinese attitudes towards state violence and war, we were fortunate enough to be able to invite four distinguished experts to our campus. First one up was prof. Don Wyatt from Middlebury College who treated us to a talk (Ritualized Violence vs. the Mitigation of Punishments) about the interconnectedness of slavery and punitory mutilations and how these connections over time were embedded in the Chinese script system. He was followed a couple of weeks later by prof. David Spafford from UoPenn who presented a riveting account of vendettas and how people and authorities came to terms with individual acts of self-redress in his talk Law-Abiding Feuds in Medieval Japan. In October, prof. Akiko Takeyama from University of Kansas guested us and opened our eyes to other, structural, types of violence with the talk Involuntary Consent as a Form of Structural Violence: A Case Study of Japan’s Adult Video Industry in which she exposed the coercion and exploitation taking place under the guise of formal consent forms. Finally, prof. George Kallander from Syracuse University opened up for post-anthropocentric studies by introducing us to the spectacle of royal hunts and their social, political, and ethical significance with his talk Violence Unleashed, Violence Restrained: War, Animals, and the Hunt in Premodern Korea.
In addition to these fascinating lectures, I had the great pleasure of sitting down with each of our guests for a little ‘fire-side chat’ about the significance and potential of violence studies. After a little more editing, the recordings of these talks will be available as a podcast series on our EASC website, so stay tuned!
Violence will never go away, and neither will the need to study it. My good colleague and co-conspirator in violence studies, Dr. Nick Vogt, and I will over the next months and years embark on an interdisciplinary project Meanings of Violence in which we hope to bring together scholars and students interested in exploring violence studies to create a larger and enduring program. First thing will be a two-day symposium on March 22-23 with the title Ethics of Violence which will include several invited speakers as well as roundtables with IU faculty from broad geographical, temporal, and disciplinary backgrounds. Everyone is of course welcome.
Morten Oxenboell
Director, EASC
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