On Movement: The Matter of US Soldiers' Being After Combat

Using ethnographic vignettes of three American soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, this article proposes an analytics of movement through which to apprehend experiences of ontological transformation brought about by the many violences of service in a combat zone. I juxtapose a range of expe...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Ethnos 2013-09, Vol.78 (3), p.403-433
Main Author:	Wool, Zoë H.
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Afghanistan Afghanistan War America Americas Ethnographic research Ethnography Ethnology Iraq Iraq War Military Personnel movement Ontology Pathology Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Social relations. Intercultural and interethnic relations. Collective identity Social structure and social relations Soldiers Space Stress the body U.S.A United States of America Violence War
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Summary:	Using ethnographic vignettes of three American soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, this article proposes an analytics of movement through which to apprehend experiences of ontological transformation brought about by the many violences of service in a combat zone. I juxtapose a range of experiences of movement to explore the subjective experience of certain kinds of bodies as they move, see, and are seen to move in certain kinds of spaces. In the case of American soldiers who have been marked by their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, this approach is a displacement of post-traumatic stress disorder, the dominant frame for understanding soldiers' post-combat transformations. In its stead, the analytics of movement offers a sense of the vertiginous new worlds soldiers inhabit, which suggests ontology, rather than pathology, as the ground for understanding the matter of US soldiers' being after combat.
ISSN:	0014-1844 1469-588X