War craft

The embodied politics of making war

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5769745
AutoresJoanna Tidy (0000-0002-9723-0819, University of Sheffield, autor de correspondencia)
Año2019
Volumen50
Número3
Páginas220-238
Fecha de publicación2019-04-09
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSecurity Dialogue (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0967-0106 • E-ISSN: 1460-3640
EditorialSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0967010619834111
OpenAlexW2914491630
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas15
Referencias citadas41

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

Craft · Crafts, Textile, and Design · Fashion and Cultural Textiles