Embodiment and the Body Count: Scales, Military Geographies, and Praxis

Angela R Cunningham, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

It has been argued that war is a story that can only be truthfully told at the level of the individual: only the soldier with embodied experience can speak authentically, only the soldier’s death instills the reality of war’s cost. Rech et al (2016) and Tyner (2009) contend that geography, with its dualistic interest in discourse and materiality and its emphasis on scale, is well-placed to contribute to telling the story in context, while recent work in critical phenomenology promises conceptual frameworks to think beyond what Romanillos (2014) calls the field’s “normative vitalism.” The increasing availability of big historical microdata enables new ways of applying these interests and frameworks empirically. Yet there are persistent challenges at the core of these endeavors. Here, I use official American First World War military records to study patterns of present-absence emergent from individual movements and mortality, building up from single soldiers' data to the population geographies they composed. I create maps and diagrams to make what is missing visible. But in using state-compiled data (a biopolitical technology that worked in tandem with the anatamopolitics of disciplining soldiers bodies) from what kinds of slow violence is my scholarship benefiting? In manipulating these data to make them legible to software, what silences am I perpetuating or introducing, even as my daily engagement with these archival traces of soldiers’ lives gives me a (false?) authority to speak about – though never for – them? This paper is an example of grounded theory but also an autoethnography, reflecting on how knowledge cannot be divorced from the sources and methodologies that produce it. Using critical geographic practice to grapple with the legacy of the war that failed to end all others, I attempt to productively and conscientiously engage with armed conflict while reflecting on my own scholarly positionality.

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 Presented in Session 36. Geographies of Politics, Conflict, and Segregation