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A
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B
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Hello, welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Hi, my name's Elena Sabrina. Welcome back to New Books Network. I'm a host on the New Books and Anthropology Channel. And today I'm talking to four co editors and authors of a forthcoming anthology from Anthem Press called Demilitarizing the Future. And this is coming out in mid October. And we're very lucky to have all four collaborators on this anthology and there's other authors. But we're gonna hear from the editors today about this book and we'll start. The first thing I'd like to ask each of you is how you came to this project. But before we jump into that, I just wanna briefly introduce who they are. So we have. Leah Zetti is a public anthropologist and author and poet based in Oakland, California. Josh Reno is a sociocultural anthropologist working at Binghamton University. Rebecca Castleman works in Columbia University's Department of English and Comparative Literature specializing in modern drama theory and performance. And Darcy d' Angelo is a medical anthropologist working at University of Alberta. So could we start by hearing how you got interested in this topic of demilitarization and what led you, first, sort of individually, to be interested and then to collaborate on this anthology?
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D
Sure.
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E
So this is Darcy speaking, and Josh, Leah and I are part of a military scholar group of anthropologists, and we have worked together because all of us are interested in military wastelands. I specifically work in Cambodia on minefields. And they can introduce what their research topics are as well. And we recognize that this was an inherently interdisciplinary topic, and we really wanted to bring in another perspective. So we were welcoming Rebecca Castleman to our co editor team, because introducing literary approaches is also a very important thing for us in this speculative anthology.
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D
And hello, I can just add to that. This is Rebecca Castleman speaking, and thank you so much, Elena, for having us. We're really excited to be with you today. Yes, I was really thrilled to be able to get on board with this existing conversation, in part because my own research in performance in particular, was interested. I've for a long time been interested in the intersections between anthropology and performance studies as a discipline, starting in the late 19th century and going into the 20th. And so it had been something that I was desiring to do, to be in closer conversation with anthropologists in general, but particularly with those thinking about structures of demilitarization, which is a concern to me in my literary work as well. And so it really was a generative team and set of discussions from the beginning.
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F
Hi, this is Leah Zeni, the military waste studies group that Darcy and Josh and I started. I was trying to think in my head when we started that group, and I think it was 10 years ago, like a really long time ago. So this is something that the three of us have been thinking about for a really long time. And in a sense, this book is the culmination of the work that we've been doing together. And as Darcy mentioned, part of doing that work is realizing how multidisciplinary military waste is in practice. And the three of us have, in our own ways, explored other disciplines. And it has been a great pleasure of this project to bring in Rebecca and to bring in other thinkers from other disciplines to create a project that spans all of the complex messiness of militarization.
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G
Yeah, this is Josh. I just want to add to what other people have said that we have been having this conversation for a while. And one thing that, you know, as anthropologists, all three of us coming to this, we were already kind of outsiders to conversations about the military. Anthropologists have been involved in military things for quite some time, not always openly. And we were part of conversations with lots of other people, Catherine, lots, most obviously a number of other scholars who were saying anthropologists should look at these issues. But doing so as anthropologists usually means we're looking at it as, you know, when looking at infrastructure in your own work and teaching. That means like, making the things seem unfamiliar or helping us see them in new ways. So that as an anthropologist studying the military or militarization or militarism, we all three of us, I think, had a shared sense of finding an unexpected or unfamiliar or other places where it's not expected. So not necessarily in a battlefield, not necessarily in a military base, but how does it seep into other aspects of our lives, landscapes, and stories? And this book is also a culmination of that.
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C
Yeah, that's fantastic. Thank you for that background. And it really does come across that there's so many different disciplines and also styles of writing, which I will ask you a bit about later on. But you mentioned this idea of military waste and kind of the future or afterlives, or this more expansive idea of militarism and militarization. And I wonder if each of you could talk a bit about how you're thinking about that diversity and temporality and the extent of militarizing and demilitarizing these kind of landscapes. And one thing that stood out to me in this anthology is there's a lot of emphasis on ecology and infrastructure. And I think it seems to me you're doing something a little different than talking only about, you know, like, I know in the first chapter there's some talk of, like, sort of PTSD and these somatic parts of living after war. But it seems to me that chapter and all the chapters in their different ways, are trying to think beyond just individual bodies and really think about environments and ecologies after war. So perhaps you could talk a bit about that, how that manifests for each of you or for your vision for this book as a whole. Yeah. Maybe we can start with Leah.
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F
Yeah. So in thinking about this book, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what we meant by militarization and demilitarization. And I'll talk a little bit about militarization. And then Rebecca has some comments about demilitarization, which I look forward to hearing. So there are a lot of. It's like, inherently a very big idea. But the definition that we settled on is that militarization is a political process. It's a social and political orientation towards war, to the exclusion of all other goals. Which doesn't mean that the society doesn't have other goals. It's just that those other goals are always subsumed beneath military aims. And what this means in like an anthropological sense is that all parts of a society are contributing towards military aims. Even parts of society that feel very far from, from anything directly war related, which is why there's such a breadth of content in our book. One of the other key things that we've been thinking about together with regards to militarization is the way that militarization is a process of future making. It projects certain futures which we then collectively sort of move towards without even necessarily knowing that that's what we're doing. And in this regard we've been especially inspired by the work of Chloe Amon, who talks about future making as a field of practice. And militarization is like that. It's a field of practice for creating certain futures. But one of the amazing powerful things about qualitative research methods and ethnography in particular, and creative research metrics such as the ones that many of us use in this volume, is that when, when we're researching the, the ongoing liveliness and durable everyday reality of just being human, what we're discovering is that there are a lot of potent possibilities in everyday life that gesture towards futures that are very different from those that are imagined by the military, broadly conceived. And so that's the power, I think, of a research project like this, that's the power of anthropology, is that we can really focus on what's actually happening in the present and then kind of imagine other ways of being human that don't orient so strongly towards the military.
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D
So just to pick up on that, on Leah's really helpful discussion of what we were thinking about when we thought about militarism in our title, obviously is the word demilitarizing. So what does that mean when we end up with this really capacious idea of militarization? What does it mean to put a D in front of that, the prefix, and to try to undo it? What would that even look like? And you can tell from the tenor of our title, Demilitarizing a Future, that on one level it's an injunction, it's almost like a manifesto. Implicitly, the future ought to be demilitarized, but it's also a description of things that are already happening, of work that's already occurring, that's being tracked by our contributors and their field work and their creative practice. And so as we thought about the D in demilitarization, we thought about it not only as a prefix that can cancel out the term that it precedes, as in deescalate, for example, but also one that sometimes means to put down, or as in to put down on paper, to describe, to depose, or to lessen, and also one that can mean to be logically alongside, for example, to deduce. So we were thinking about all of these ways of loosening militarism as it lives conceptually and materially in our lives. And we find that those different approaches to living with, living against, living alongside militarism are documented in the contributions that we've collected here.
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E
Yeah, Darcia.
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C
Yeah.
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E
And I just want to, you know, just point out, like, some of the chapters that are doing this specifically thinking about humans as part of the ecosystem and thinking about the afterlives of a kind of demillitized, aspirational future despite military wastelands. We have, like, Un Nguyen's artistic essay, his photo essay, which is a very moving piece where he explores how military ha. Bomb craters become, you know, watering holes and places where people, like, cultivate lotus in Vietnam. And this is like, right around the time of the, you know, where he's, like, seeing one of his relatives be memorialized in death. And so it's really a very moving piece. And one of the frameworks for the original frameworks for the ontology was thinking through his idea that dat nuoc, which, forgive my pronunciation in Vietnamese because I don't know the tonal language very well, but that the word for homeland in Vietnamese is dat nuoc, which is actually a kenning of earth and water. And how despite the military waste that's embedded in the ground of Southeast Asia, it still is people's homeland and they are implicated in the ecology there, the kind of post war ecology.
- [14:02]
G
And that's just a great example, too, of what Rebecca was saying about how seeing demilitarization in relation to militarization is not like opposites or like a clear binary. There's a way in which there is like a more capacious, as was said, like, broadening, spiraling, sense of demilitarization, so that living ecologically, like Rebecca was just describing in Vietnam with the afterlives or the remains of military waste, is itself can be thought of demilitarily in sort of as a. As a way of engaging with the world and imagining futures where at one time, in the midst of bombings, there might seem like there is no future. And so there is that kind of, like, unexpected forms of demilitarizing as a field of practice or a form of practice the way that Lee was saying. And that also you see that in other chapters where it's a little more. Where it's more directly like activist in its application. So the chapter that I co authored with Chelsea Simony, Peter Little and Jen Sare looks more at people who are veterans. So they're more directly involved in the costs of war and the toxic after effects of war, but they are themselves thinking about that critically and acting as citizen scientists, some of them, to organize and collect information that's otherwise being neglected or being ignored by the VA and by the Department of Defense. So there you see people who are taking demilitarization in a more active sense of using it as part of their imagining and their collective work, whereas in other places it's a little more implicit or it's more part of everyday life. So, for example, in the chapter you already referenced, Solana, the one by Sofia Stamatopoulou Robbins, looks at occupied sleep in Gaza and reflects on her experiences there, where, you know, people learning to rest or learning to live with sleeplessness and the kind of destructive health impacts of that or how that destroys their psyches, yes, can be related to something like ptsd, like you were saying. But also in that chapter, Sophia talks about how PTSD can be almost too limiting as a category to think about it. And that to really take into account what the effects of war are in in Gaza, of constant threat of, of death, and how that makes it impossible to sleep for people, means having more relational idea of where these effects of suffering come from and who they involve than occurs if you have a kind of overly medicalized category like ptsd, which seems to only exist in one body, as opposed to being part of infrastructure and being part of having a home you can sleep in and feel comfortable in, or having a community, having a family that allows you to rest as opposed to demanding that you work all day. So these things also are part of the anthropological lens that some of the chapters focus on. But that's not all. The chapters and other chapters take an even more kind of creative, even artistic kind of approach to those questions.
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A
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C
Yeah, it's really interesting to see all the variety and. Yeah. And within your answers as well. And something you just mentioned, Josh, I wanted to pick up on. Cause I really wanted to know a bit for each of you. There's a relationship to activism and sort of on the ground thinking about these things in a very grounded way and whether or not you collaborated maybe or co authored very directly with a set of activists or people who were sort of outside of the academic, you know, process. Yeah. I wonder if each of you could say a bit about what the relationship in this book and the goals you had were to activism. You know, who's the audience you're hoping to reach or the different audiences that you want to be thinking with and speaking to. And yeah, I think it'd be really interesting for people to hear a bit what that process is like. I think speaking from my own experience and talking to other anthropologists in this sort of world of studying toxicity and environment, it can be a very long and very it takes a lot of time and effort to build those kinds of relationships in whatever form they take. So. Yeah, it'd be interesting to hear. Yeah.
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F
Leah, One of the interesting and troubling and inspiring things about studying military waste is that it has this transcendent quality to it which is simultaneously really gritty and rooted in the actual problems that people are facing in their lives. That means that it doesn't really stick to any particular political platform. It kind of it's the ground upon which all of the platforms are being built. And so I think that this gives a collection. That's one of the reasons the collection is so broad, but it also gives the collection a kind of political relevance that is bigger than any individual claim for activism while simultaneously supporting those individual claims. So we've already mentioned the chapter about occupied sleep. We also have other people in the chapter who are talking about politically relevant things. Jasper Puar, who wrote our afterword, has comments about Gaza as well. So that's in there. There is a lot of political engagement. But the benefit, I think, of this approach is that we're looking past that to the very conditions of life and death that shape the sorts of political claims that people are making in the first place.
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C
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
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F
Yeah.
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D
Just building on that, I would say that a question I think about that's raised in the collection is also who does the knowing in a community and what structures of knowledge are produced through their everyday actions and how are they encoded? And that becomes a particularly relevant question when we're thinking about systems of militarization that are often deliberately and strategically preserved as clandestine and removed from epistemology, that the visible removed from public disclosures, et cetera. And so when you ask about activism, I also think about that as a question of who's involved in the structures of knowledge making. And that's something that comes up, for example, in my contribution where thinking about how knowledge of this one particular covert military site that's sort of a known unknown gets circulated within the community. And it's often those who are involved as construction workers or local journalists who are perpetuating systems of not always recorded or documented knowledge about a place. And you might think one of the things our collection does is to recover those voices as, or celebrate those voices as knowledge producers around demilitarization. And to think of their work in circulating knowledge as a kind of activism as well.
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C
Yeah, so I want to get to something that we have gestured a bit to already, but there are some really interesting creative forms of writing in a lot of the contributions to this. And we have, for example, I think, Leah, you have this sort of format of a walking tour and there's are kind of these speculative modes of writing and there's photography, there's discussion of photography, there's some very personal kind of first person narratives in here. And I was struck by just how poetic many of these contributions were in this volume. And I would love to know what that process was like. What were your goals with that? Did you know all along you wanted to write in this kind of way? Or was this something that materialize later in your thought process? And yeah, maybe it would be helpful just to hear a bit about how this combination of poetry, broadly speaking. Poetry, poetics and ethnography. Do you find there's something really suitable about turning to that form when you're discussing this topic of demilitarization?
- [24:08]
F
So when I first started studying this, which was way back so long ago, I was doing preliminary fieldwork in a part of Laos, which is arguably the most bombed part of our planet. It had been massively bombed for almost a decade. There had been cities, there had been forests there before the American bombardment, and they were all destroyed. And then the entire place had had to rebuild in the decades after the war without the benefit of significant post war assistance, because the war, America's bombing, and Laos was a secret war. So then I show up a couple decades later to do preliminary fieldwork, and this area was still massively contaminated with explosive military waste left over from the war, which had never been meaningfully dealt with or cleared. So people were rebuilding their cities on top of ground that was extremely dangerous. And when I started studying this community, I found myself intuitively writing poems in my field notebook. And the initial push towards poetry was motivated by my own limited capacity to understand and process what I was experiencing. I think that for me personally, creative methods kick in when I'm at the extremes of what I know how to study because they offer a wider toolkit for understanding the human experience. So that's how I initially began doing creative ethnographic work. I also had an existing practice as an artist, so this was a natural thing that I already did. I just hadn't connected it with my academic work until I was in that one place in Laos and was confronted with how do I deal with all these conflicting things that are happening in this community at the same time? But I'd love to hear from other contributors, like, Rebecca's piece is a beautiful work of creative writing, speculative work, and I'd love to hear her thoughts on that.
- [26:21]
D
Thank you, Leah. I really love your contribution as well. And in a way, our two contributions are playing with each other because they're both sort of deep investigations and in a personal kind of meditative voice about a specific place with which we're deeply acquainted. And how do you transmit that acquaintance with this knowledge of history? And so, yeah, my own piece is a speculative performance, as I describe it, that's linking with traditions of modernist closet drama, which are dramas that were written never to be performed. And so I wondered when I was thinking about this clandestine site, about what it might be to imagine it as a theater or imagine a play for that space that could rematerialize its hidden architectures and perhaps recondition us to the claims on our sensoria that it's making, even when we don't recognize that that's the case. But I also want to speak here about Nomi Stone's chapter, which is another of those that's using creative approaches to think about fieldwork and field sites. And Nomi is thinking with Leah's own term, field poem, and thinking about how to receive that tradition and use it in new ways. And her contribution is about the rehearsal of military preparedness in training camps, in military training camps. And she talks about sort of the props and paraphernalia of the world, the war game, thinking about the technologies of making humans into a kind of war fighting machine. And as she's thinking about that constructedness of the war preparedness environment, I think it leads her naturally to a different kind of fiction, which is the field poem, making poetry on site as a way of, you know, processing the kinds of knowledge that are not already circumscribed by the goals and the language and the knowledge systems that are part of militarism.
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C
Yeah, Josh?
- [28:35]
G
Yeah. I just want to add, I think that's. That's absolutely right. And what Rebecca, Leah, Naomi, and other people who aren't including our volume are doing sort of with an aesthetic or sort of poetic or other kinds of interesting creative ways of writing is partly, I think that idea of knowledge and practice being circumscribed by militarism, I think, is really important because there is a way in which there's something seductive, there's something about militarism or militaristic practice, ideology that can sort of capture things that even are meant to be demilitarized. You know, you can recapture Hemingway, you can recapture Kurt Vonnegut, you can recapture Apocalypse now for like, which are ostensibly kind of demilitarized or anti military creative projects historically that then become used to revalorize it or to, you know, see a kind of postmodern militarism. So that part of the reason that it's useful to have moving targets for demilitarizing practice is because they are in a sort of struggle with attempts to otherwise justify or continue supporting militarism. I don't mean to be paranoid about it, but I think this is sort of the history of what you see with conversations around the military.
- [29:48]
C
Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah. It makes me think of some of this idea of anthropological or ethnographic refusal. And this idea, your work, your relation to the idea of militarization and demilitarization and almost trying to find a new language that doesn't just sort of mimic or reproduce this kind of performativeness that I think you all are describing in certain ways that the military presents itself as hyper powerful, hyper effective and sleek. And there's a way to kind of destabilize that itself by emphasizing the wastelands and the breakdowns. And that's sort of captured in some of these creative choices which are so interesting to hear about. And I guess another question I have building from that is for any of you in whatever modality you were writing, but I know a lot of our conversation now, even I'm hearing some resonances with the study of environmental justice or toxicity and the challenges of that. And I know you all have different disciplines and different geographies you're contending with. And I'd love to know just briefly, but what are scholars or writers or artists, anyone, any communities that you're inspired by or influenced by as you approach your writing and this anthology?
- [31:17]
E
I can speak to the various artist groups in Cambodia that I'm not really a part of, but adjacent to. And part of this is some of the scholars I cite in my creative nonfiction speculative biography of a S21A, a prison torture place during the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. It's referencing this group of artists who used to be in the White Building. But the White Building is another Van Mollevan building, which I talk about in the piece, like this French Cambodian architect who made these really beautiful pre wars buildings that then became destroyed eventually by the current government. And so you have this artist, an artist collective that used to live in some of these buildings along with a lot of residents, poor residents who couldn't afford anywhere else. And this is featured in the piece that I write. But the art group are involved in like a speculative kind of understanding of forgetting to remember, which is the idea of a Buddhist memorialization of war and loss and suffering. And so it's really just about allowing the so one of the examples Ashley Thompson writes about this is, you know, when there were bodies found in S21, which is the prison that I write about, there was a controversy of what to do with them and how to memorialize them. Should they be used as evidence, or should they be used in a kind of. Or should they be memorialized in a Buddhist way? Should they be cremated in a proper way? And so they settled on this compromise where the skulls were eventually put in glass cases that would then be covered by a scarf with a little space underneath to allow I'm Using my hand to gesture just underneath the chin to allow the souls to move in and out of the skull. And many memorializations have settled on this uneasy compromise in Cambodia because the crime and the atrocity feels like you need justice. But then there's also the thoughts of how the souls can then return back to the earth. And really there's this Buddhist practice of allowing a kind of negligence and anthills to form over the buried dead. And that is in contrast with the idea of evidence. And so the artist group put together a whole, all people from the Royal Art Academy of Phnom Penh, and they put together a series of paintings. And know the contemporary artists there, like Sakantevi Orr, who's a contemporary artist from Cambodia, really allows for the kind of way that people in the contemporary are memorializing, but also allowing war to be forgotten in a way, or allowing war not to be forgotten, but to be forgotten in the Buddhist way, which is that it becomes part of the cycle of samsara. So I think those are really inspiring to me when I think about practices and difficult dilemmas when it comes to the afterlives of this kind of militarization. So I think that that's sort of why I wrote that piece. It was highly influenced by this art.
- [35:26]
G
Group.
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E
Who literally takes as their framework for getting to remember.
- [35:33]
C
Yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah, Leah.
- [35:37]
F
So one of the things that we're trying to do is expand the way we think about these afterlives of war. There are some forms of military waste that the listeners probably already familiar with, like the idea of the war.
- [35:57]
B
Of.
- [35:57]
F
Military being, like, essentially wasteful, like the American military. Spending money inefficiently, for example, is often a form of wasting that is discussed in public media. Another common way of talking about wasting is as the bare destruction of war itself, like the salted earth left behind by a successful military campaign. So there are certain afterlives of war or certain consequences of war that we're familiar with talking about. But as Darcy is pointing out, there's this much larger horizon of afterlives of war that we're trying to get at. And many of us use definitions of military waste that are much more expansive than those two common definitions that I just shared. Like in my own work on high explosives, One of the things that really fascinates me is the way that these explosives have, the way that they're designed, the way that we manufacture them, the way that we use them. They have these. These intentional, predictable byproducts that are also disavowed in the way that the military uses these technologies. So you had mentioned throughout our conversation, toxic waste. This is one of those examples where high explosives have a known toxic waste profile. They're extremely toxic to the environments where they're deployed. And the United States knows this. It's part of the design of the weapon itself. But it's not something that's generally taken into account when the United States States manufactures, tests, deploys ships, use, sells these materials. And it has a hugely negative effect, not just in battlefields abroad, but also in the domestic United States. Like, I don't have this stat at my fingertips, but I think the EPA has registered somewhere in the range of 40,000 toxic military waste sites across the the domestic United States, which account for millions of acres of American land. That's land that we are destroying. That's American land that we are destroying with our own weapons against ourselves. It's a kind of design, self destruction. And that's this particular form of military waste that I find most fascinating, the kind of the ways that we sort of shoot ourselves in the foot, so to speak, with our own weapons.
- [38:38]
C
Yeah, Josh.
- [38:40]
G
Yeah, I think that's a great. Those are really great examples. And in addition to the kinds of waste that Lee was just describing really vividly, you know, those kinds of waste and quite a number of kinds of wastes, when we call them toxic or we call them nuclear, like, it's clear that they're not good for any form of life. Right. You know, that they're going to be harmful to anyone. What some of the chapters also look at is how some of the exposure to harm can be uneven. We already know that from, like, histories of, you know, discussion of race, you know, environmental justice movements that look at, like, how environmental harms are racially, you know, unevenly distributed, but also it can be that. And this goes to Jasbir Puar's other work on debility, where you know that it's not just that different people are unevenly exposed to harm. It's also that people's bodies are kind of made, remade, formed, that in ways that can make them more vulnerable than other bodies, right. In that same situation because of the relational context of their growth and the way they live. And so again, going back to Sophia's chapter on occupied sleep, if you're not getting sleep, you're. You're at risk for other kinds of harms because of what it does to your body to be not getting rest and you're constantly being, you know, under threat of, in fear of death. And how that Just breaks down your body. You'll die fat, you know, I don't know. You'll die. You'll suffer health consequences faster from not sleeping than not having water or food. I mean, it's fundamental to your body. Similarly, Chelsea Simony in our chapter talks about how, you know, in a very, very different group of people, if you're an airline pilot or if you work in aviation side of the military, you're used to not sleeping and doing that. Also, it can, when you are exposed to a toxic burn pit, it might be minimally harmful according to some kind of objective standard, but because of what is done to your body, to be that kind of a service member like you are potentially going to have more adverse health risks because of how you've been debilitated by your own experience and by what. What's been done to you. So those uneven harms are not only unevenly, geographically distributed, they're unevenly lived based on people's different kinds of experience.
- [40:57]
D
To pick up on another aspect of that unevenly distributed harm that Josh is talking about, these harms are also distributed unevenly and in punctuated ways across time. So one of the things that this research on toxicity is revealing is that the temporalities of military wasting are not straightforward when we try to think about both their ecological and their human impacts, but also their impacts on everyday lives. And some of these contributions are thinking quite deeply about temporality, about wasting time as one of the forms of military waste that we should be most concerned with. Both very obviously in Sophia's chapter on sleep, the wasted time of sleeplessness. But also in Nomi's chapter that I mentioned before, she talks about the. With some recurrent temporalities of rehearsed mourning that happen in environments of war preparedness. So there's this sort of artificially produced recurrent mourning that it is an extension in time of a harmful effect. And this conversation around time is one of the reasons that I was interested in my own contribution in using the time bound medium of theater to try to think with these complex temporalities of wasting.
- [42:22]
C
Yeah, that's so fascinating. Thank you. Thank each of you for that. No, I've taken a lot of your time already. So as we wrap up, I would just love to know, do you have projects coming up that you would like to mention talk about briefly?
- [42:39]
E
Sure, yes. I'm actually pivoting from the things that we don't like to look at in terms of violence and war to a different war, a war on pests, which is what I'm currently moving to I have a new project on the other kinds of environmental disasters of colonialism which is the spread of the Norway and ship rat across the world. So I'm currently studying pest human relations and thinking about ecological disaster as a pest management problem, specifically our kinship with animals like rats and ticks and thinking through that in a multi species lens. In addition, I'm still working with Cambodian people on the ground. So we're currently co producing a film because I'm also a visual anthropologist. So I'm working with 3D miners to co produce a film on landmine detection rats.
- [43:41]
C
Very cool, Josh.
- [43:43]
G
I'm doing a bunch of different projects but the one that most connects to what Darcy was just describing is I decided that, I decided I've been like doing a project on chickens and I have no idea what it was about really. I just find chickens look weird because they're like walking footballs of food that can't get away and that everything wants to kill. So they're just. Anyway, I just find them fascinating and sad I guess. And so I've been interviewing people including like my parents because they raised chickens when I was a kid and I wasn't, I was too young to raise of go near the chickens. That creates even more mystique for me. But then since COVID and also because of all the egg prices we keep hearing about in the US certainly more and more people are raising chickens as a hobby who have no business. Sorry, I shouldn't say that publicly. Who it's a challenge for them to do animal husbandry. There we go. That's what I should say. So I find that fascinating. But so many of the stories I'm getting because I thought, oh, this will be a nice break from studying things like military waste or whatever. So many of the stories are about death, about the vulnerability of chickens and about people's relationships to that vulnerability and sometimes having to harm and hurt chickens but also having to protect them and save them. Those are the stories keep getting over and over again. So the only thing I know about the book is what I'm going to call it, which is to get to the other side, which is my like little chicken chicken joke. But that's a project I, I'm hoping to keep working on and start writing next year because I'm still doing the research.
- [45:05]
C
Cool. And Rebecca, Yeah, it's really hard to.
- [45:08]
D
Follow Josh's account of his research on chickens or Darcy's of her dog rats for that matter. But yeah, I'll just say that. So broadly speaking, my work is on Modern drama and performance and its intersections with social thought. As I mentioned before, I'm interested in the intertwined histories of performance studies as a discipline with anthropology. And one of the projects in which that twinned history is emerging is a book called Profaning Religion on the Modern Stage, which is forthcoming with Cambridge next year in 2026. And that tells the story of how this idea that theater came out of religious ritual, which was a story told by early anthropologists in the late 19th century, shaped the way that the aesthetic forms of theater developed. So that's one thing that I'm just at the tail end of working on. Then I'm also in the midst of a new project thinking about theatrical choruses, another kind of collective thinking about broadly chorality, beyond the sort of classical inheritance of the Greek chorus, what it looks like on the modern stage.
- [46:15]
C
Wow. Awesome.
- [46:16]
F
And, Leah, all of those projects sound absolutely fascinating. The chapter that I contributed to this volume is a bridge between two different projects, between my previous work on explosive military waste in the old battlefields of the secret war in Laos, which is the subject of my previous two books, and the new book project that I'm working on, which is a history of American dynamite. And the title of that book is Dynamite Empire. And it's an exploration of how high explosive power is a key part of American power more broadly. And the chapter that I contributed to this volume is about the dynamite district, which was the. The very first dynamite manufacturing zone in the United States, which was in my hometown of San Francisco, California. And one of the things that I'm trying to do in Dynamite Empire is to do a similar kind of demilitarization project where I'm going through all of these different sites throughout the United States that have been heavily shaped by high explosive power. And I'm going there and doing interviews and doing field work and collecting artifacts and photographs. And I'm looking at the ways that people's everyday lives deal with this incredibly fraught and volatile power, both of destruction and creation. And that book is gonna come out. I'm submitting the final manuscript at the end of this year, and it's gonna be released by Johns Hopkins University Press, and it's called Dynamite Empire. But on that note, I would love to read a quote from Jas Fear, who wrote our afterwards about demilitarization. Cause I think it really. It's a beautiful quote, and it nicely conveys what we were trying to do in this volume and my own thoughts about demilitarization.
- [48:08]
C
Yeah, please.
- [48:09]
F
Yeah. Okay, so here's the quote from the Afterword to our book. To demilitarize the future, then, requires a radical shift in what we believe is possible. It requires a turning away from the logics of dominance, extraction and surveillance. It requires recovering forms of life and relations that have long been buried under the ruins of empire, as well as honoring forms of life arduously, crafting different modes of material being and becoming to survive genocide. It demands the nurturing of practices that affirm rest, care, memory and transformation. And it is increasingly clear that that shift is underway on an unprecedented scale. Demilitarization is not only imaginable, it is already here.
- [48:52]
C
Thank you so much. That's a really great way to end this interview. And again, I encourage everybody to read the book when it's out in October. There's a so many rich contributions that we didn't have time to touch on all of them today in detail. But thank you so much to you for it's really been amazing to hear the work you've done and what you're doing. Thank you.