Reflecting on the troubled relationship between anthropology and the military, we do so by discussing the underlying epistemological, methodological, and moral claims of the distinction between an anthropology of and an anthropology for the military. Through the term ethnography of things military, we propose to reposition military anthropology as intense engagements with militarisation through empathic immersion in things military. We develop this term through feminist critiques of militarisation and compassion, through discussions of critique and empathy as part of (critical) ethnographic scholarship, and through anthropological debates about the relationality of fieldwork and ethnographer-interlocutor relations. Suggesting that an ethnography of things military relies on empathic engagements with military lifeworlds, we argue that the relationship between empathy and critique in military anthropology should be understood as a continuous collaborative (and not always predictable) process of interrogating military lifeworlds' frames of reference without necessarily sharing compassion or sympathy for them.

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Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in and around a so-called War Hero Village (Ranavirugama) in northwestern Sri Lanka, this article traces the social (un)becomings of Sri Lankan Army veterans injured during the civil war with the Tamil liberation front. It argues that such veterans have long been able to draw on a materially rewarding narrative of sacrifice and carnal capital—epitomized in the honorific ranaviru (war hero)—in order to produce a particular kind of veteran citizenship, let alone subjectivity, and thus to pursue socially meaningful post-injury existences. In the eyes of the veterans themselves, however, this celebratory narrative is eroding and a “collective narrative” characterized by a kind of social forgetting of the injured veteran is emerging. Material benefits notwithstanding, this narrative contestation entails a “struggle for recognition” that threatens to leave them not only disabled but also with no one to be, or become.

Forord

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