Breaking bad? Down and Dirty with Military Anthropology

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Critique
• embeddedness
• empathy
• ethics
• perpetrators

Acknowledgements

This work originates from the collaborative research project Soldier and Society: Anthropological Perspectives, University of Copenhagen. I owe the guest editors Sebastian Mohr, Birgitte Refslund Sørensen and Matti Weisdorf a debt of gratitude for inviting me to contribute to this special issue. For their helpful and encouraging comments, my heartfelt thanks are due to my two anonymous reviewers as well as to Marion Näser-Lather (University of Marburg) and to Rikke Haugegaard and Thomas Vladimir Brønd (both at the Royal Danish Defence College).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Safeguarding the anonymity of the mentioned professors and students, the names listed are pseudonyms, and all faculty members are referred to as ‘professors’, whether they are full, associate or assistant professors.

2 The Danish photographer Maria Giørtz-Behrens was injured by a ‘roadside-bomb’.

3 ‘Breaking bad’ is not merely the title of Vince Galligan’s American crime drama television series (2008–2013). ‘To break bad’ is an idiom with many connotations. Here, I use it in the sense of ‘going bad’ (Rothman in Time, 23 September 2013), that is, to ‘become rotten, undesirable, evil’ (McGraw-Hill 2002).

4 Including the author as of 2018.

5 Including the author from 2010 to 2017.

6 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) Cougar – a heavy armoured infantry mobility vehicle.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark [grant number 0602-02345B].