Lethality focuses on various social and cultural situations and conditions in which humans tend to kill other humans. We also question the role of killing in the construction of our relationships with each other-in building our own identities and those of others as well as in constructing our communities and interpersonal relationships. A goal of this course is to familiarize you with various ways in which those who study homicide try to explain it (and suggest how it can be controlled). I hope to encourage your thinking about these approaches and the development of your criticisms. I also favor materials that retain the lives of the people and bring to life the situations that are part of homicidal relationships. The readings consider a range of factors that are part of homicidal relationships, including frameworks that emphasize the interaction between biology and society, the roles of history in contemporary relationships, social reciprocity and interdependency, prejudice, the use in culture of killings and killers to organize relationships to the world, and politics (among other aspects of our participation in society and culture). Our stance in relationship to analytic frameworks for explaining homicide is that understanding killing in our own societies and elsewhere is very much work in progress-that this course is part of that process through questioning how we interpret homicide and through relating it to our lives.