War craft: The embodied politics of making war

Abstract

This article makes the case for examining war from what Stephanie Bunn calls a ‘making point of view’. Makers and their material production of and for war have been neglected in our accounts of war, security and international relations. An attention to processes of making for war can reveal important things about how such processes are lived and undertaken at the level of the body. The article focuses on the particular phenomena of martial craft labour – the recreational making of ‘stuff’, including hats and pillowcases, by civilians for soldiers. To explore embodiment within this social site, an ethnographic method is outlined that enables the reading of objects as embodied texts, the observation of others in processes of making, and the undertaking of making by the researcher. Analysing embodied registers of aesthetic expression and the social values that attend such crafting for war reveals how this making is a space through which intimate embodied, emotional circulations undertake work for liberal-state and military-institutional logics and objectives, obscure violence, normalize war, and produce the military as an abstract social cause. Beyond the immediate empirical focus of this article, a much wider political entanglement of violence, embodiment and material production necessitates a concerted research agenda.