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The language used by American military personnel can be intense and confrontational, yet the relationship between language and military violence is rarely examined in depth. This groundbreaking book offers a unique perspective on how language facilitates the work of combat infantry-the state's killable killers. Through vivid ethnographic research, Janet McIntosh meticulously traces the nuances of military "kill talk" as it permeates the vast nervous system of the military, from the first exposure to yelling in Marine Corps basic training to the dark humor and nihilistic expressions found in war zones in Vietnam and the Middle East.
List of contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Content Warning and Notes on Language
- Section I. Entry Points
- Preface
- 1: Introduction to Kill Talk
- Section II. Training
- 2: "Yelling"
- 3: "Insults and Kill Chants"
- 4: "Broken Rules and Head Games"
- 5: "Mothers of America" and "A Woke, Emasculated Military"
- Section III. Combat
- 6: "Dehumanization in Combat"
- 7: "Language as a Shattered Mirror"
- 8: "Frame Perversion": The Twisted Humor of Combat
- Section IV. After War
- 9: "Poetry of Rehumanization"
- 10: "Combat Paper"
- Coda: The Nervous System
- Notes
- Work Cited
- Index
About the author
Janet McIntosh, Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University, is a sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist. Her work in Kenya and the USA has explored personhood, religion, colonialism, right-wing ideologies, and militarization. Her previous ethnographies received the Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion (2010), Honorable Mention in the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing (2017), and Honorable Mention in the American Ethnological Society's Senior Book Prize (2018). She is co-editor, with Norma Mendoza-Denton, of Language in the Trump Era (Cambridge University Press 2020). Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, the ACLS, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
