The placing of the military dead of modern wars abstracts (physically and/or symbolically) the soldier from their peacetime identity and social networks in order to integrate them into a community of those who died for a higher cause. This article considers the case of military burials within a 'civilian' cemetery to argue that in this case, military dead stay connected to their families and communities, who remain involved in the post-mortem transformation of their identities, sometimes over the very long term. This unsettles the idea of a temporally and spatially finite funerary sequence completed by the burial and/or commemoration alongside other soldiers. Military cemeteries are designed to convey a sense of enduring permanence, whereas Histon Rd shows how war graves are sites of active change and memory work. Looking at cemeteries as places through which survivors forge a heartfelt and embodied relationship with 'their' dead shows that the post-mortem 'life' of the military dead is not reducible to that envisaged by the nation state. In particular being placed within a 'civilian' space, soldiers' identity as 'kinned' persons is made more visible. If burial in a military cemetery enshrines the nature of the soldier's body as a token of necropolitical sacrifice, placing soldiers' remains and names in a civilian cemetery locates them within alternative relationships of care and memory that reclaim them from the state to the reciprocities of family and community.
By drawing on press coverage, archival material, and early post-war accounts, this article examines 'war grave diplomacy' in Britain connected to the First World War-era American Expeditionary Force. It begins by establishing the details of US burial policy before identifying where exactly in Britain American service-personnel were laid to rest. The article then turns attention to the two maritime disasters responsible for a significant number of American war dead in Britain (the sinkings near Islay in 1918 of the Tuscania and the Otranto), it uncovers the impact on British-based AEF personnel of the influenza pandemic, and it identifies one of the key occasions during which American war graves drew significant local attention: Memorial Day. The article concludes by recounting the GRS-led process of exhumation, removal, and reburial which by 1924 had ensured that most American war dead had disappeared from Britain. This history challenges long-established ideas about where exactly First World War-era diplomacy took place, and it highlights the important role played in Anglo-American relations by diplomatic actors in the parishes and provinces. Equally important, this history suggests that we would do well to pay greater attention to the on-going role of war grave diplomacy in twenty-first century transatlantic relations.
On the eightieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, memories of wartime pollution resurfaced. This study examines & Omacr;kunoshima, a former Japanese chemical warfare site, through memory studies and tourism. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted over a decade including in-depth interviews, observations, research dialogues, symposia, and analyses of visitors' comments and historical documents. Three pairs of dualities emerge from our analysis: the blending of dark history and contemporary tourism, ambivalent roles of victim and perpetrator, and the blurring of authenticity and (com)modification. We argue that the spatial and temporal transformation of the historical site into a tourist destination risks severing the site's violent past from its commemorative function, encouraging willed amnesia and complicating Japan's war memory, particularly the victim-perpetrator binary. Recasting the former military chemical factories on & Omacr;kunoshima as a haven for cute rabbits aligns with a Japanese reactionary ecology mindset, which carries remnants of imperial wartime ideology. These dynamics continue to sustain Japan's century-long silence regarding the environmental consequences of chemical warfare. Derived from ethnographic fieldwork, the researchers elaborate the concept of memory seduction to explain how constructed authenticity - shaped by tourism narratives - replaces direct historical experience at war sites.
In 1919, African and Caribbean seamen and sailors with war service in the Royal Navy and Merchant Navy, found themselves scapegoated for post-war economic problems in Britain. In disturbances around British seaports, five people were killed and thousands injured as seamen, racialised as black, were violently attacked by mobs of local men including ex-service personnel. Government officials, as well as community leaders, suggested 'repatriation' of colonial seafarers as a solution. Repatriation, as government policy, was enacted through emergency legislation such as the 'Alien Orders' of 1919, 1920, and 1925 which stripped colonial seafarers of citizenship, transforming their status from British to 'Alien' or 'Asiatic'. The change in nomenclature was consequential for cultural commemoration. The names of deceased colonial Caribbean sailors and Asian merchant seamen were not inscribed onto memorials in Britain, instead, their names were 'repatriated' to Mumbai. In this study, the intersection between post-war official policy on colonial sailors and seamen and their representation on memorials to the missing will be examined. I will argue that official commemoration policy was guided by a combination of factors, but ensuring the racial hierarchy of empire was maintained was high on the agenda.
In the past decade, anthropologists have been seduced by methods that explore human and more-than-human relationships. This trend echoes an early pattern of cultural relativism in the discipline, with 'culture' replaced by 'species' as primary seduction. Yet species is a capacious term, and species themselves are complexly multiple, so multispecies ethnography risks blurring important distinctions. Attending to animals' interactions requires approaches tailored to their shared histories, specific traits, and cultivated behaviours. In war-torn sites, anthropological attention must focus on the horrors of violence and its material aftermath shared with more-than-human others, as well as on the imperfect multispecies collaborations that seek to repair landscapes and dismantle war ecologies - albeit partial and fraught. Drawing from ethnographic research in Cambodia and Colombia, we complicate the allure of multispecies ethnography by extending the 'art of noticing' to species-specific attributes and post-war recovery labour. Comparing two explosive-detection animals, namely rats and dogs, we consider how each creature reorients, in terms of direction and tailoring, humanitarian mine clearance and ethnographic encounters. We also reflect on how landmine detection in contexts of (post)war is animated by aspirational imaginaries in which animals are recruited for decontamination, even as they and their human companions must confront inequalities and violence.
The widespread use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War left indelible impacts on the people and environment of Vietnam. Since 2007, after a series of negotiations, the US has provided funding and worked with Vietnamese partners to address the legacy of Agent Orange. One central task is the remediation of dioxin hotspots on former US airbases. Two projects have been implemented thus far. While the & Dstrok;& agrave; Nang project concluded in 2018, the Bi & ecirc;n Ho & agrave; project is currently underway. The closure of the US Agency for International Development and the freezing of US humanitarian aid in early 2025, however, have made the future of US-funded Agent Orange programmes uncertain. This article critically examines the completed project at & Dstrok;& agrave; Nang airport. Based on a close reading of the project's final evaluation report, it examines the seductive qualities of dioxin remediation science and technology for US-Vietnam bilateral relations. I argue that remediation science and technology are seductive to governmental agencies because they render the Agent Orange issue technologically manageable, thus side-stepping the emotional intensity of the legacy and facilitating new ways for US and Vietnam to collaborate. Simultaneously, I show how remediation projects can perpetuate unequal power relations, privilege economic expansion, and engender dependency on the US.
How can we engage ethnographically with the often overlooked toxic and explosive effects of war and their harmful, frequently multi-generational, legacies? The oversight is notable because war waste insidiously contaminates and transforms entire environments, making them lethal for humans and non-humans alike at different scales and over different time frames. While anthropologists have critically examined the social, political, material, and emotional effects and experiences, ranging from militarism to large-scale armed conflicts, they have only recently turned their attention to 'the knotted inextricability of war and ecologies' (Guarasci and Kim). War ecologies is not simply a capacious concept, however. The concept can also become a seductive form of ethnographic knowledge. We build on the idea of ethnographic seduction (Robben) as a method for problematising the blind spots, omissions, and displacements that may arise in ethnographic research on war and its ecological legacies.
The landscapes of military infrastructure in Afghanistan reveal a stark asymmetry of toxic environmental exposure and systemic injustice. Scientific knowledge increasingly enables understanding of how war creates toxic environments and long-term health consequences, yet data is only selectively available: some victims become visible while others are rendered invisible. This selective recognition corresponds to an unequal system of knowledge validation and restricted access to justice, undergirded by technological seduction - the privileging of scientific practices over ethnographic perspectives. This article examines these dynamics through the NATO war in Afghanistan, focusing on the asymmetry of documented ecological and health effects of burn pits, ammunition residues, and PFAS contamination. It critically unpacks how scientific verification, combined with one-sided policy and media discourses - including misplaced focus on previous war periods, climate change narratives that sideline war's environmental impact, and the Colonial-Orientalist terra nullius view - marginalise local and indigenous ways of knowing, producing epistemic violence that extends beyond material harm. Technological seduction thus selectively directs knowledge production, relegating Afghan military personnel, contractors, and local civilians to the sidelines. This article contributes to the emerging field of war ecologies by challenging the hegemonic gaze that determines whose suffering is recognised and redressed.
This article analyses the enduring legacy of Agent Orange in Vietnam through the intertwined perspectives of 'biocitizenship' and 'drift'. Grounded in ethnographic and archival research, it reflects critically on the seductive pull of war ecology and the need to recognise how contaminated bodies give rise to contaminated categories of analysis. The plight of dioxin-exposed Vietnamese veterans and their kin as vessels of inherited trauma and contested citizenship shows how chemical exposure becomes a source of psychological torment, social stigma and uncertain claims to recognition and care. Scientific discourses and knowledge about the effect of Agent Orange on human and environment health are shaped by political constraints and epistemic instability, leaving Vietnamese veterans in conflicted space between exposure, denial, and fragmented justice. Tracing the slow drift of Agent Orange toxins, I argue, allows us to understand how exposure is embodied, interpreted, and passed down, both genetically and affectively, while practices of biocitizenship reveal both the possibilities of state compensation and transnational solidarity, and the limits imposed by stigma, silence, and political denial. This dual analytic frame highlights how Vietnamese veterans' lived experiences challenge universalist accounts of biocitizenship and foreground the moral, psychological and political stakes of toxic warfare.
Few historical studies systematically consider the nexus of war and environment and society. Conventional military history and the field of environmental security focus on the environment as a weapon and cause of war, respectively. The 'war and society' literature pays little attention to the environment. Environmental history takes the environment-society nexus as its premise. An overview of how war, environment and society have been perceived to interact highlights why and how these gaps persist. Two major factors that shaped and continue to shape the relationship between humanity and environment bear much responsibility for the omissions. First, the nature-culture dichotomy paradigm segregates human society from the (natural) environment. And second, a long tradition casts the relationship between humans and nature in terms of a war-like zero-sum game. In less than a century 'nature' has transformed from a God-given wild natural resource for human development through domestication and dominance, to a hapless victim of unbridled human progress, exploitation and greed, to a monstrous threat to humanity's survival. Thus, the dominant view of the relationship between human culture and nature has moved from the death of nature to death by nature. Yet, what has remained virtually unchanged is that the relationship between human society and 'nature' is largely depicted as war.
Whereas New Zealand men who served in the armed forces during the Second World War have been written about at length, their counterparts who remained in civilian occupations are largely absent from the historiography. This article begins the recovery of the wartime experiences of civilian men by analysing why several thousand of them appealed against being directed into new employment. It finds that some approached their appeal hearings in a defiant manner: raising conscientious objections, alleging victimisation, or refusing to perform the mandated work. Yet a much greater number accepted it was an essential masculine imperative to serve the state in wartime. Their claims were instead motivated by a concern that direction should not imperil their ability to meet competing masculine imperatives - as fathers, husbands, and breadwinners. As a result, most appeals were an attempt to negotiate a compromise that would enable men to sustain all facets of their masculine identity by bringing them into balance.
This article focuses on the commemoration and care of war dead buried in the United Kingdom by the Imperial (later known as Commonwealth) War Graves Commission (CWGC). Whilst the CWGC cemeteries on the Western Front have become emblematic of Britain's war dead, there is less public awareness of the Commission's work on UK soil. The case study will be the creation of the six RAF regional cemeteries during the Second World War. In the years following World War II, some of these British war dead were exhumed and reburied in local cemeteries at the request of their families. These exceptions challenge the idea that there were no exhumations and reburials of British service personnel. The creation of the RAF regional cemeteries enables an analysis of the CWGC's changing approach to burial and commemoration between the two World Wars. The RAF cemeteries both conform to, and contrast with, the legacy of the British military cemeteries globally. An evaluation of these commemorative spaces demonstrates how these sites are shaped by the differing experiences of the two World Wars.
The concept ethnographic seduction referred originally to the conscious and unconscious ways in which interviewees lead fieldworkers away from their research objectives by having them accept their discourse as a truthful interpretation of the reality under study. Seduction disengages researchers from the dialectic of empathy and reflective detachment that enables ethnographic understanding. The editors and authors of this special issue argue that paradigms, classifications, texts, mass media, and biomedical and technological models can also be seductive. They demonstrate that this seduction can be overcome by restoring the dialectic of detachment and empathy by situating themselves affectively and cognitively in people, animals, and natural environments.
When the Far Eastern Prisoners of War were liberated, there was initial optimism concerning their psychological state. In the months and years following the euphoria of release, however, a significant portion of the FEPOWs did develop psychoneurosis due to their time in captivity. While some effort was made to mediate their adjustment to civilian life, there was a reluctance to award a pension for psychoneurosis.
This article examines the phenomenon of gambling and the composition of the gambling population in wartime Shanghai, with a focus on how war-induced social turmoil reshaped gambling behaviour and the demographics of its participants. Drawing on police reports, newspaper articles, and quantitative data, the study analyses the basic demographic characteristics of gamblers and, through an examination of these dynamics, provides a deeper insight into the broader social impact of war on urban crime.
The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) mobilised Chinese communities overseas, even in countries located thousands of kilometres from Asia. This article explores the actions of the Chinese community in Chile in their efforts to support China, collect donations, and influence public opinion in favour of their cause and against Japan. Focusing on the city of Iquique during 1938, the most intense year of solidarity activities, we argue that the Sino-Japanese War allowed the Chinese community to unite and garner sympathy in a local context previously marked by nationalism and hostility toward Asian immigrants. Therefore, we estimate that the Chinese overcame the Japanese in the 'local war' between these two Asian migrant communities, shifting public opinion in their favour.
This article aims to address similarities and differences in military aid provided by the Soviets to China and Spain in their war against imperialism and fascism respectively, considering the influence that one had on the other, given that the occurred at the same time. Operation X and Operation Z had both material (military supplies) and human components (advisers and volunteers) that played fundamental roles in the defence of these republics, which until now have been studied independently. Incorporating recent works on the particular historiography of both conflicts together with personal research work, this article intends to approach a comparison of both aids and their relationship with Soviet foreign policy.
This article argues that British fighting character was shaped by the use of poisonous gas in the First World War. Despite numerous efforts to the contrary, British soldiers came to see themselves in a vastly different light - a light that was not desirable nor wanted - due to their use of a demonised 'German' weapon. This article addresses a gap in the literature and shows that gas should not solely be examined through the lens of suffering or technological development, but also on its wider impacts to character and identity, and the consequences it had for a nation that felt under constant pressure to justify its actions in using this contentious weapon. Official responses shifted from shock and condemnation to acceptance and development.
