In this excerpt from a conversation, Gina M. Pérez, author of Citizen, Student, Soldier: Latina/o Youth, JROTC and the American Dream, and Zoë H. Wool, author of After War: Weight of Life at Walter Reed, discuss the moral, political, and personal stakes of US militarism.
And this is one of the most challenging things about doing this kind of research. Throughout the process, I have thought a lot about how many anthropologists, including Catherine Lutz, Hugh Gusterson, and Roberto Gonzalez, have both called on anthropologists to engage with questions of militarism, but have also warned about the distinctions between an anthropology of the US military and an anthropology for the US military. As anthropologists, we are constantly confronted with the real lives and people we work with while simultaneously using our ethnographic practice to critique militarism and military power. As I was doing my research, I developed an incredible amount of respect for the young people I worked with, as well as the JROTC instructors, and developed a deep appreciation for how savvy they are and the incredible amount of work they are doing intellectually, emotionally, politically, and socially in navigating all these institutions, their schools, JROTC, their churches. And these young people are pragmatic because they recognize that things are pretty much stacked against them at every level. Talking to students made me realize how important ethnographic engagement is because, in the end, it is much more complicated and much messier than people might like us to believe.
Read the whole thing here: http://www.americananthropologist.org/2017/09/19/ethnography-and-the-militarization-of-the-american-dream-a-conversation-between-zoe-h-wool-and-gina-m-perez/.
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