Abstract
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.
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