"What makes the war" : everyday life in a military community

textThis dissertation investigates the various levels at which the multi-scaled dynamics of war take shape in the everyday, embodied lives of the people whose job it is to produce it—soldiers and their families and communities at and around Ft. Hood, in central Texas. As the largest military installation in the world and the single biggest point of deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan for all U.S. forces, Ft. Hood and its surround may represent the greatest single concentration of Americans directly involved in the production of global military force outside of Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan. The repercussions of war and routinized war-making extend throughout the lives of the people who inhabit, serve and surround the base. The length, scale and distinct character of the Iraq War have exposed these soldiers and their family members to new and chronic hardships and forms of vulnerability, including the stresses of longer and more frequent tours, unprecedented rates of posttraumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, overburdened institutional supports, and an abundance of extreme characterizations of soldiers in American public culture. These vulnerabilities are bodily and affective, intersubjective and shared, and bases for scrutiny and recognition. I base my analysis on the difficult and distinctive role that the soldier occupies as at once the agent, instrument and object of state violence. The soldier’s life is simultaneously shaped by discipline, empowered by the right to kill, and allowed to be exposed to harm and death. I use soldiers’ “exceptional” status as a starting point for understanding the dense sets of material, institutional, discursive, and social relations in which they are embedded. The dissertation chapters are organized around broad themes that emerged from my informants’ words, actions and experiences and that capture the impacts of war across diverse arenas of everyday life. I treat each theme as a field within which to explore not merely the effects of war, but its lived affects—-the “feelings” of war that are the variously sensory, psychic and emotional imprints of the everyday, organized production of military violence.Anthropolog

Culture of a Contemporary Rural Community: Landaff, New Hampshire

Excerpts from the report Foreword: This is a report on one of six communities which were studied contemporaneously by six different participant observers or field workers during the year 1940. Each study was sufficiently independent of the other five to make desirable separate treatment and publication but the reader will gain full understanding of the findings only when he has read the reports of the six studies as a group. Landaff, in New Hampshire, was selected because it is an old community which presumably had experienced a long period of stability which had been considerably disturbed, in recent years, by the penetration of the Boston milkshed into that area. The reader will note that the study throws some doubt on the assumption of a high degree of stability in the community in the past and will find that change has not been so great, recently as had been assumed

Anthropology and Agriculture: Selected References on Agriculture in Primitive Cultures

Excerpts from the Foreword: This bibliography is a selected list of references to general books and articles in the field of anthropology and to works on the culture of individual peoples and communities, particularly those in which their agriculture is discussed and the man-land relationship is brought out. Its purpose is to lead research workers to sources dealing with the total culture of these peoples so that they may see the part that agriculture and food-getting activities play in it. The bibliography falls broadly into two sections. In the first a general list of books, selected from the most widely known, is given as an introduction to anthropology, cultural anthropology, and primitive economics. The second, or main section, includes two types of material: ethnographies which are entirely descriptive in character, but which contain something on agriculture; and analytical works, which show the relationship between the various elements in a culture and indicate agriculture's place in it. Aside from the general section, the items are classified geographically. A subject and author index is appended

Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms

Four assumptions frequently arise in the aftermath of mass shootings in the United States: (1) that mental illness causes gun violence, (2) that psychiatric diagnosis can predict gun crime, (3) that shootings represent the deranged acts of mentally ill loners, and (4) that gun control "won't prevent" another Newtown (Connecticut school mass shooting). Each of these statements is certainly true in particular instances. Yet, as we show, notions of mental illness that emerge in relation to mass shootings frequently reflect larger cultural stereotypes and anxieties about matters such as race/ethnicity, social class, and politics. These issues become obscured when mass shootings come to stand in for all gun crime, and when "mentally ill" ceases to be a medical designation and becomes a sign of violent threat