Fellow, SCAS.
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT:
This talk will explore how and why conceptualizing soldiering as a form of gendered labor is crucial to our understanding of contemporary militarism. What does soldiering as work mean to the individuals who join and to their families and communities? Drawing on ethnographic research with India’s Border Security Force personnel, families, and popular cultural production, the talk traces the sites where militarism embeds (e.g. barracks, training centers, and homes) beyond narrow conceptions of the frontline and explores how it entrenches through social relations, institutions, and norms both inside and beyond state security institutions. In this talk I will discuss a few of these sites and relations to show how fundamentally the provisioning and policing of social reproduction scaffolds soldiering. It reframes militarism as dynamic social formation, contested in surprising ways, rather than solely in terms of overt forms of state violence.