This article is a reflexive engagement on the politics of ethnography on the US home-front in violent contexts of US empire-building and death dealing. Specifically, my concern is with reconciling ethnographic accountability to the populations home-front ethnographers ‘study’ locally while remaining accountable to the geographically and subjectively distant lives that are ‘over there’—out of sight, out of mind, so to speak. It is suggested that the home-front is not separated from distant battle-fronts, but linked through relations of violence, hence problematizing notions of ethnographic responsibility and loyalty. To do this, I draw from my experiences conducting a near two-year ethnography of the US home-front, particularly a rural county in southern Indiana that is both a research ‘fieldsite’ and my childhood ‘hometown’.
Adorno T. ( 2005) Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. London and New York: Verso.
2.
Benjamin W. ( 1969) Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books.
3.
Butler J. ( 2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence . London and New York: Verso.
4.
Clifford J. ( 1986) Introduction: partial truths. In Clifford J, Marcus G (eds) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. University of Southern California Press, 1-26.
5.
Fine GA ( 1993) ‘Ten lies of ethnography: moral dilemmas of field research. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography22(3): 267-94.
6.
Gibson WJ ( 1994) Warrior Dreams: Manhood and Violence in Post-Vietnam America . New York: Hill & Wang.
7.
Gill L. ( 2004) The School of Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
8.
Gilroy P. ( 2002) Raise your eyes. Open Democracy , URL (consulted Oct. 2008) http://www.open-democracy.net/conflict-911/article_249.jsp .
9.
Gregory D. ( 2004) The Colonial Present. Oxford : Blackwell.
10.
Gusterson H. ( 1996) Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War. Berkeley: University of California Press.
11.
Haraway D. ( 1988) Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies14(3): 575-99.
12.
Hodgson D. ( 1999) Critical interventions: dilemmas of accountability in contemporary ethnographic research. Identities6(2-3): 201-24.
13.
Kaplan A. ( 2005) The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
14.
Lutz C. ( 1999) Ethnography at the war century’s end. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography28(6): 610-19.
15.
Lutz C. ( 2001) Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century . Boston: Beacon Press .
16.
Lutz C. ( 2006) Empire is in the details. American Ethnologist33(4): 593-611.
17.
Masco J. ( 2006) Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
18.
Mbembe A. ( 2003) Necropolitics. Public Culture15(1): 11-40.
19.
Nordstrom C. ( 2004) Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press .
20.
Rosaldo R. ( 1989) Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis . Boston: Beacon Press.
21.
Said EW ( 1994a) Orientalism. 25th anniversary edn. New York: Vintage Books.
22.
Said EW ( 1994b) Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures . New York: Vintage Books.
23.
Scheper-Hughes N. ( 1982) Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland. Berkeley: University of California Press.
24.
Scheper-Hughes N. ( 1995) The primacy of the ethical: propositions for a militant anthropology. Current Anthropology36(3): 409-20.
25.
Scheper-Hughes N. ( 2000) Ire of Ireland. Ethnography1(1): 117-40.
26.
Scheper-Hughes N., Bourgois P. ( 2004) Introduction: making sense of violence. In: Scheper-Hughes N, Bourgois P (eds) Violence in War and Peace. Oxford : Blackwell Publishing, 1-31.
27.
Taussig M. ( 1992) The Nervous System. New York : Routledge.
28.
Wall T.(2009) School ownership is the goal: military recruiting, public schools and fronts of war. In: Monahan T, Torres R (eds) Schools Under Surveillance: Cultures of Control in Public Education. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 104-19.
29.
Weiss M. ( 2001) ‘Writing culture’ under the gaze of my country . Ethnography2(1): 77-91.
