Required Readings
Smuts, Barbara. “Male Aggression Against Women: An Evolutionary Perspective.” Human Nature 3, no. 1 (1992): 1–44.
Smuts, Barbara, and Robert W. Smuts. “Male Aggression and Sexual Coercion of Females in Nonhuman Primates and Other Mammals: Evidence and Theoretical Implications.” Advances in the Study of Behavior 22 (1993): 1–63.
This assignment is to analyze and critique these two seminal papers by Barbara Smuts on the evolutionary origins of male aggression toward females in human and nonhuman primates. Barbara Smuts is a renowned feminist physical anthropologist who wanted to bring an evolutionary and cross-species approach to understanding male sexual coercion in humans, and the reception she has received has been mixed. This is a topic of much interest within evolutionary anthropology, but, for reasons that will become clearer as you progress through the course, attempts to approach the topic through an evolutionary perspective and to use a cross-species comparative method with nonhuman primates have provoked much controversy.
In this assignment, you are expected to do two things:
- Read, understand, and present the hypotheses and arguments (and supporting evidence) presented in the two Smuts articles in order to demonstrate that you fully grasp the details of her proposals.
- Evaluate Smuts’s arguments from one perspective other than an evolutionary one. For example, you may wish to discuss the implications of Smuts’s proposals through the lens of feminist theory, a cultural anthropologist, a Freudian psychologist, a social policy maker, or a forensic (legal) practitioner, all of which have both historical and current perspectives on male aggression that differ from, or indeed run completely contrary to, Smuts’s evolutionary approach.
In sum, this assignment requires that you clearly present Smuts’s arguments first, then evaluate and critique the implications of her arguments from the perspective of one other disciplinary theory or area of practice (such as the examples listed above). This latter task will necessitate researching materials in addition to the articles provided in the DRR.
The first half to two-thirds of the essay should be dedicated to presenting a detailed summary of Smuts’s papers; the latter part of the paper should contain an analysis of the implications of her arguments for another area of theory, practice, or policy. A minimum of five(5) additional sources should be used for this analysis. Again, examples include feminist theory, psychology, sociology, criminal justice, or cultural anthropology.