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Linguistic Anthropology Colloquium | “Military Chimeras: Iconic Resonance in a Nervous Semiotic System”

Janet McIntosh, Anthropology Professor & Department Chair, Brandeis University
Friday, February 7, 2025
3:00-4:30 PM
411 West Hall Map
The United States Military defines itself as an institution governed by exacting rules and discipline, dedicated to producing upstanding super-citizens. Yet Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, openly rejects the relevance of international law in combat, asserting that American power is best sustained through unrestrained violence. This talk examines the semiotic and linguistic reverberations in military training and discourse that reveal a persistent tension between the honorable and the transgressive. I argue that this tension forms a semiotic infrastructure with the potential to reinforce the necropolitical strategies Hegseth champions.

Janet McIntosh, professor of anthropology at Brandeis University, is a sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist whose work in Kenya and the U.S. has explored essentialism, personhood, religion, colonialism and race, right-wing ideologies, and militarization. Her first book, “The Edge of Islam: Power, Personhood, and Ethnoreligious Boundaries on the Kenya Coast” (Duke University Press, 2009), won the 2010 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion. Her second book, “Unsettled: Denial and Belonging among White Kenyans” (University of California Press, 2016), received Honorable Mention in the 2018 American Ethnological Society's Senior Book Prize, and Honorable Mention in the 2017 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing. She is the co-editor, with Norma Mendoza-Denton, of “Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies” (Cambridge University Press 2020). After fieldwork and writing support from the NEH and ACLS, she is currently finishing a book titled “Kill Talk: Language and Military Necropolitics” (Oxford University Press).
Building: West Hall
Website:
Event Type: Lecture / Discussion
Tags: AEM Featured, Anthropology
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Department of Anthropology