TY - JOUR

T1 - Breaking bad?

T2 - Down and Dirty with Military Anthropology

AU - Pedersen, Thomas Randrup

PY - 2021

Y1 - 2021

N2 - This article revisits the debate around the frequent problematisation of anthropological research on ‘our troops’ within the wider anthropology community. Engaging my research on Danish expeditionary forces and my fellow anthropologists’ disheartening responses to that research, this study examines controversies over military anthropology as a fundamental question of the apparent tension between empathy and critique. Drawing upon my uneasy experiences of ‘breaking bad’, in terms of becoming an ‘embedded anthropologist’ in a Danish combat unit, I argue that one answer as to why military anthropology tends to be frowned upon is to be found in failures to empathise as well as in different (mis)conceptions of empathy and critique. I show that ‘our troops’ and ‘their anthropologist’ are subjected to processes of othering at the limits of empathy, and I reflect on the trouble with empathy as a research tool and its consequences for a twenty-first-century military anthropology.

AB - This article revisits the debate around the frequent problematisation of anthropological research on ‘our troops’ within the wider anthropology community. Engaging my research on Danish expeditionary forces and my fellow anthropologists’ disheartening responses to that research, this study examines controversies over military anthropology as a fundamental question of the apparent tension between empathy and critique. Drawing upon my uneasy experiences of ‘breaking bad’, in terms of becoming an ‘embedded anthropologist’ in a Danish combat unit, I argue that one answer as to why military anthropology tends to be frowned upon is to be found in failures to empathise as well as in different (mis)conceptions of empathy and critique. I show that ‘our troops’ and ‘their anthropologist’ are subjected to processes of othering at the limits of empathy, and I reflect on the trouble with empathy as a research tool and its consequences for a twenty-first-century military anthropology.

KW - Critique

KW - embeddedness

KW - empathy

KW - ethics

KW - perpetrators

U2 - 10.1080/00141844.2019.1687550

DO - 10.1080/00141844.2019.1687550

M3 - Journal article

VL - 86

SP - 676

EP - 693

JO - Ethnos

JF - Ethnos

SN - 0014-1844

IS - 4

ER -