Dean's Lecture Series: Jill Leovy on The Iliad and Gang Violence

War and Beefs: Gang Violence in The Iliad by Jill Leovy The Iliad supplies a detailed and recognizable description of what the Italian mafia scholar Maurizio Catino has dubbed “horizontal” governance -- that is, lateral rule by peers rather than top-down rule by a centralized authority. The same style of order is found the world over -- in feud societies, bandit cultures, and the various small-scale and “stateless” societies studied by anthropologists. It’s also the surprisingly uniform ordering principle of street gangs, criminal groups and paramilitaries in contemporary urban societies. What can we learn about horizontal orders by reading Homer? To what extent can his descriptions shed light on this seminal form of social organization, also known as the protection racket? By the same token, how can an understanding of urban street violence illuminate The Iliad? Jill Leovy is a nonfiction author. Much of Leovy’s work explores the decade she spent as a crime reporter in South Los Angeles. Leovy has worked for several daily newspapers, including the Seattle Times and the Los Angeles Times. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the American Scholar. She is a senior fellow at the University of Southern California’s Center on Leadership and Policy and was a Harvard Sociology fellow from 2020 to 2022. https://www.sjc.edu/ Annapolis | 60 College Avenue | Annapolis, MD 21401 | 410-263-2371 Santa Fe | 1160 Camino Cruz Blanca | Santa Fe, NM 87505 | 505-984-6000