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Annual Review of Anthropology

Volume 50, 2021

Language and the Military: Necropolitical Legitimation, Embodied Semiotics, and Ineffable Suffering

Abstract

This article augments and complicates Nelson's claim that “we talk our way into war and talk our way out of it” (Dedaić & Nelson 2003, p. 459). Military endeavors require verbal legitimation, but militarizing participants and wide swaths of the civilian population requires more than just a stated rationale. It requires the complex construction of acquiescent selves and societies through linguistic maneuvers that present themselves with both brute force and subtlety to enable war's necropolitical calculus of who should live and who can, or must, die (MacLeish 2013, Mbembe 2003). War also involves vexed, stunted, and deadly forms of communication with perceived enemies or civilian populations. And those who are victims of military deeds, including civilians and sometimes service members themselves, are often left with psychic wounds that they cannot talk their way out of, for such wounds resist semantic expression and may emerge through more complex semiotic forms.

Keyword(s): discourse, language, military, necropolitics, violence, war
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2021-10-21
2025-04-24
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