Dying to Serve
Subtitle: Militarism, Affect, and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2020
Language: eng
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9781503610415
Subjects: Pakistan, armed forces; Soldiers, family relationships; War and society
Description: "State armies around the world commemorate their fallen soldiers through ceremonies of remembrance and ritual memory-making. But these "spectacles of mourning" are careful manipulations of affect, gendered and structured by the military to both acknowledge lives lost and reinforce its own omnipotence in the lives of its subjects. In Disciplining Narratives of Pain, Maria Rashid examines such practices in the Pakistani army in order to explore the state of modern militarism. She makes the case that the continued thriving of the Pakistani military apparatus is contingent upon its successful repurposing of emotion. Grounding her study in the famed martial district of Chakwal, she draws on ethnographic accounts to show how historical recruitment practices of the colonial army forged lasting cultural narratives about the military's claim on the bodies of its would-be soldiers. Rashid brings the reader through various, mundane facets of the soldier's life (and that of his family), including training, compensatory policies after a family's loss, and military funerals. The emotions of the widows and mothers of dead soldiers are mediated and leveraged to further establish the debt of sacrifice owed by citizens to the Pakistani army. Laying bare this strategy in its lived complexities, Rashid contends, is crucial to understanding and challenging the appeal of the military institution globally"--