Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied
Stanford University Press, 2013; 328 pages.
Scholars of social and cultural memory in the post-Soviet space are well aware of the Memory at War project—the international collaborative effort to understand battles over memory as they were waged in postsocialist Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. …
In today’s “Top of the heap,” Ken MacLeish, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University, takes us into the world of war (and post-war) memoir, fiction and ethnography, also introducing us to some conceptual texts he’s been thinking with.
Danny Hoffman, The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia…
Fields of Combat: Understanding PTSD among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan
Cornell University Press, 2012. 240pp.
Finley’s portrayal of the difficulties of soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq elegantly interweaves narratives and analysis. Drawing on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in San Antonio, Texas, involving 133 study participants (62 of which were veterans), Finley conveys …
“Every kind of religion produces its own kind of secularism,” (Harding 2014).[1]
“There were two classes of citizens: those that had won the war, and those who had lost. It was like in India—do you know of the caste system? It was the same here,” explained Cecilia[2] at an exhumation of mass graves from the Spanish Civil …
Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community
Princeton University Press, 2013. 280 pp, US$ 29.95 (Cloth)
“They didn’t get into the details of real life, the little things,” a troubled U.S. war veteran criticizes a PTSD primer for returning soldiers in Kenneth MacLeish’s ethnography Making War at Fort Hood. …
During the recent government shutdown, denial of the “death gratuity” to families of recently deceased veterans of the war in Afghanistan allowed people on both sides of a glaring political divide to condemn an unacceptable form of abandonment. Even in a climate of austerity, war deaths and injuries carry unquestioned obligations. It would seem that determining which fatalities fall into …