Citation

MacLeish K. Ethnos 2021; 86(4): 654-675.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, National Museum of Ethnography Stockholm)

DOI

10.1080/00141844.2019.1687546

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The experientially remote, ethically problematic, and 'unthinkable' character of military violence, entrenched in stereotyping and reductive figures of the soldier and veteran, is often taken to represent a fundamental crisis of ethnographic empathy and critique. I argue that this presumption of unbridgeable otherness should itself be a primary target of ethnography, a co-produced interrogation of truth in which ethnographer and subject alike have prior investments. I relate two instances in which unexpected veteran interlocutors challenged the 'truth' of stereotypical figurations that I also aimed to critique in my work. Exploring these confrontational co-productions of critique, I argue for an ethnography of military sociality embedded in informants' own capacities as critics, in which anthropology is accountable for its enmeshment in imperial geopolitics and militarised modes of care. © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Language: en

Keywords

PTSD; care; military suicide; US military; ethnographic critique