The Wounds That Never Heal

Transgression, Liminality, and Ethical Ruin in Battlefield Thresholds

Bibliographic Data

ID2143059
AuthorsChristopher M Webb (0000-0001-6840-9476, Duke University, Durham, USA, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume86
Issue3
Pages552-569
Publication date2021-05-27
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEthnos (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0014-1844 • E-ISSN: 1469-588X
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00141844.2019.1665568
OpenAlexW2974651333
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited19

For many veterans returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, homecoming is an encounter with an unrecognisable former homeland that has become a place of uncertainty and confounding moral landscapes. Within the liminal space of combat deployment, occupying soldiers cross thresholds which confound established moral worlds and problematise notions of purpose. Through acts of transgression, temporality and ratiocination are challenged and reconfigured. Applying the analytic of 'thresholds' to theorise about these encounters, this paper draws from 18 months of fieldwork with repatriated American veterans as well as my own experience as a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. As a concept, thresholds elucidate the intensity and permanence of the embodied phenomenological encounters that epitomise contemporary wartime soldiering

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Art history · Battlefield · Criminology · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Homecoming · Homeland · Liminality · Marine transgression · Militarization · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Somali · Temporality · Anthropology · Gender, Security, and Conflict · History · Law · Philosophy · Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Research · Torture, Ethics, and Law

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