![]() ![]() ![]() Standard lines of questioning about contemporary war’s ostensive roots, aims and effects often take for granted the expectations and limits surrounding how human life is exposed to, sheltered from and empowered to carry out violence and harm-features of contemporary life in liberal democratic states that take on especially acute and contradictory form in military institutions. This approach draws attention to the way that the institutionalized practice of war shapes and takes shape in the lives, bodies and feelings most directly bound up in its production and effects. This essay describes a critical approach to the study of military institutions through ethnographic attention to the predicaments of survival, endurance and the management of life exposed to death that are central to the embodied experience of military personnel. But for soldiers themselves, their training, combat environment, protective gear, and weapons are a rich font of both emotional and bodily feeling that exists in complex tension with the also deeply felt military imperative to carry on in the face of extreme discomfort and danger. I argue that modern military discipline and technology conspire to cultivate soldiers as highly durable, capable, unfeeling, interchangeable bodies, or what might be called, after Susan Buck-Morss (1992), anesthetic subjects. ![]() Hood, examines sensory and affective dimensions of soldiers’ intimate bodily relationships with the technologies that alternately or even simultaneously keep them alive and expose them to harm. This article, based on fieldwork among soldiers and military families at the U.S. But, as this article explores, soldiers themselves just as often associate the life-sustaining technology of modern warfare with feelings that range from a pragmatic ambivalence about exposure to harm all the way to profoundly unsettling vulnerability. soldiers are equipped present an image of lethal capacity and physical invulnerability. For many civilians, the high-tech weapons, armor, and military medicine with which U.S. ![]()
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