War ecologies and their seductions: An Introduction

Abstract

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.