Well, hi, everybody. I was here today with Dr. Mario Rashied.
Welcome to the seminar today at the Oxford South Asian Studies Seminar Programme, and this is, I think,
the second seminar off the term, and we're here with Dr. Mario to talk about her outstanding book Dying to Serve.
I really, really enjoyed reading this book, so I'm sure the presentation will be really interesting,
and I'm sure we have a great discussion at the end of it. Just to tell you a bit.
Dr. Cheese is a research fellow at the UCLA Social Research Institute previously.
Dr. Archer did a Ph.D. exercise in, I Think, in 2018,
and her book I think probably a product of that research eventually was it called Dying to serve militarism,
affect and the politics of sacrifice in the Pakistan Army?
It's a really interesting ethnographic study of sort of this idea of militarism and the politics of sacrifice.
And it was also shortlisted for the IOC to national political sociology book The War A Section's Book Award.
So it comes highly acclaimed. It's a great read, and it's going to be a very exciting presentation.
So we'll have Dr. Ratchet present her work and talk about her project, her book, and that will have opened it up for a Q&A after that.
So I guess we can probably get started now.
Oh yeah, and I think there'll be slides coming up as well for you to report to see.
So okay, so should I take it from here?
I think so. We're just just making sure that the slides come on.
But yeah, yeah. And ask Nora to put on the slides as I speak and I want the presentation.
So let me just start there. OK, thank you.
Thank you, Dr Yasuda, and and thank you to the Oxford Ageing Study Centre for this invitation to talk about my work,
which is which came out last year. And what I'll be doing today is really presenting certain sections of specific material within the book and
hopefully present to you a somewhat old argument that all affect and centrality of ethics within militarism.
And I draw specifically upon two sections within the book, one that deals with military commemorative politics.
And so. So I talk about a certain dead body, dead body politics, if you may.
And I argue that this ritualistic practise of mourning acts as an effective technology,
a pool that constructs the apparently willing soldier and the complicit families that also be sent as cannon fodder for wars.
And I was representing an ethnographic exploration of military depth, and through that,
I try to present to you that the gap that I I contend that exists between the everyday experiences of families that mourn the
dead and in rural Pakistan and the very idealised image of the marker that saturates national representations in Pakistan.
And since I have about, you know, for 40 minutes or so to talk to you and we do signpost, I talk because and please let me know my voice becomes,
you know, there's a lag or if I freeze up because we I know we have some internet issues going on.
So I look to you for pointing that out. I'm just talking into a void and nobody can hear me.
We're all good so far. Great. So, so let me for us to talk a little bit so that you know what's coming up.
So I first speak about military commemorations, specifically in the context of the more recent unpopular war that the Pakistan military fought
within its own borders in its northwest region as part of the war on Terror and a war that,
as you would be aware, that has escalated after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and escalation that is likely to continue.
And my interests lie in how spectacular ritualistic military practises of grief are
made possible and why they are deemed important by the institution of the military.
And I'll follow this up with a tracing of grief and how it explodes in the world today
and where the bulk of the soldier class in Pakistan is drawn has historically been gone.
And so really the rituals of mourning within the open spaces and then I'll continue to talk and present my broad arguments around what it
means to use affect as an analytical lens and what this lens adds to our understanding of what militarism and our potential to challenge it.
So again, this is a South Asian studies sort of group.
I'm assuming most of you are familiar with the context within which I speak.
So the Pakistan military specifically very briefly, has fought for cross-border wars with India and has fought many,
countless counterinsurgency operations within the country. It is a volunteer force and has never had to resort.
Of approximately one hundred and thirty thousand two hundred and forty thousand apply every year until we study to 40000 selected,
and this sort of desire to enlist me is has been explained as a function of economic desperation and lack of alternative
livelihood opportunities and has also been attributed to historical sort of good politics of these which are tied into race.
The hangover of the Pakistan Army so close to 50 years after partition, we continue to draw from these areas.
This is changed to some extent now, but of yes, so so.
Pakistan Army itself has ruled directly or indirectly since Pakistan's creation and so boundaries being civil between the military
and civil political institutions are potent but shifting and and very rarely do they shift in favour of civilian dominance.
So and there is there is considerable scholarship on the Pakistan military, specifically on military civil relations.
And so what? My role is slightly different from that.
So in a sense, it's trying to understand Pakistani militaries, holdover imagination and the loyalty of Pakistani society.
And I'm sort of arguing my work that it's also this sort of pushes us to address our look beyond policy power of the military and
try to identify the more insidious ways that the military and its norms and its tactics make their way into Pakistan's side.
So Joseph Mazar.
So this question of is, is it time to look at how the military produces a certain politics rather than how it it's just related to it?
So my what I think lies in that sort of in that kind of view.
So in terms of again, another context which might be relevant is this particular one that I speak about in the book,
which is kind of the time period in which I did my research.
So 2006 onwards as military operations, which were part of the global war on terror intensified in northwest Pakistan,
practises of commemoration took on a new political salience.
So new ceremonies to commemorate the soldiers dying in these wars were instituted largely in
response to the growing nervousness around this war that was being waged against the Muslim enemy,
and fatwas were issued by religious and political parties that soldiers dying in
these wars were not shaheed or martyrs because they were fighting America's war,
and that these bodies should not be buried in Muslim graveyards. And so much of Pakistan's history,
even though ethno nationalist conflicts within its borders have resulted in multiple military operations and casualties.
This was the first sustained water effort against an enemy that claimed religion as its primary identity.
So the military declared a separate day of marking the war dead and the military public relations being instituted.
What with all the yarmysh of the Martyrs Day ceremony. So 2010 onwards, as this unpopular war reached on.
We saw these annual national mega ceremonies apprehend within the general headquarters in India,
and the Amish orders were presided over by the chief of Army staff attended in large numbers by the next of kin of the dead,
civilian government officials, media representatives and foreign dignitaries and and so on.
And they were being live across the nation on all private and state-run channels.
And the visibility of wives and mothers of soldiers, which is already a focus of nationalist and military symbolism,
was accentuated further as military PR strategies struggle to amplify grief and sympathy for the casualties of this war.
So what I'm going to do is read a short portion of the book,
which describes the sort of the ambience of these ceremonies and its product your day if you put your the first and second slide,
and I'll just read through this short section to give you an idea what these ceremonies are like.
And this is a reading of ethnographic reading of the ceremony that I attended.
Yeah, so what's happened with what you've just done is that I've lost my spleen, which I was going to read from.
Let me see. Can you just give me a second?
Yeah, and back. Yes. So, OK,
so it was a pleasant balmy evening with thunderous rows of chairs laid out in particular cemetery
on the green expanse of a perfectly manicured lawn at the Pakistan Army general headquarters.
The Green Pakistan Army emblem nestled between the majestic white marble triangles of the Scottish monuments national colours of the evening.
The monument rests on a massive state surrounded on all sides by giant elevated screens.
Familiar patriotic anthems blared from loudspeakers by smartly dressed men and women in uniform,
ushered in an audience of a couple of thousand people to do 2015 on my shoulder.
And now the military commemorative ceremony is about to commence. I see it in the next of kin enclosure during the programme.
Seated here was the group from the village of Panopto,
which had lost five young men in military service, three in the ongoing war in northwest Pakistan.
Near the end of the ceremony, the colourful stage and larger than life screens went dark.
The music stopped playing and the master of ceremonies announced to the hushed
audience that the next on stage would be the mother of a shaheed father's widows.
Daughters and sons of dead soldiers had already appeared on stage,
and the finale in this commemorative ceremony had been reserved for the destiny of the mother.
She walked onto the stage, stood confidently at the dais. Eyes glisten with tears as she spoke lovingly of her son.
At times, she stopped, took a deep breath and visibly steadied herself.
But when she spoke, her voice did not favour. She spoke with pride and points ahead.
Hentai, her grief hung in the air,
but more touching to watch with the resolve ability to stand firm and resolute against the overwhelming loss that this death had brought.
It was a powerful moment. The camera lingered on it and then swung to the audience, with some watching, all while others sobbed, cried side.
I sat with Yasmeen, the mother of a young soldier who had died in South Waziristan in 2009.
As Yasmeen watched the mothers speaking on stage, I remember the conversation we had back in her village about these testimonies.
We had been sitting in a courtyard, a house filled with money received as compensation for her son's death,
and Yasmeen had said to me, the army leaves after the funeral.
It doesn't look that it was innocents into battle and says we'll fight.
How would they know what happens inside the walls of the home? It is not so easy to accept this.
Women will say we must send another son into the army. And then she paused.
I don't know who these women are. So when the mother on stage made the predictable offering of another son,
Yasmeen turned to me with a raised eyebrow and the shape of my head and said, Look how easily, she says.
A smile was rueful, and I wondered,
if you do remember the earlier discussion within the hush of the case and to hear the rhetoric of continued sacrifice for the nation.
The section of the show that had the most resonance for the rest of the audience seemed to reverberate, reverberate the least and invokes cynicism.
I felt surprised. A sense of canon is heightened by the dramatic affective register on stage and the response it seemed
to invoke within spectators in other interviews that watch these performances and wars from afar.
The surprise was directed not at what was initially unfolding before me,
but days of glory and heroism and willing sacrifice woven around the dead in
battle are nothing new and common to all national militaries across the world.
What intrigued me instead, was not just the recognition of the force like nature of the spectacle,
the force within the role upon ceaseless rule of families of military soldiers.
But the impulse of these families to lend themselves to these orchestrations around death.
So, yeah, so if I can, you can switch the presentation off if you like that.
So so the figure of the mother on the magnificent stage that I just spoke about offering at the son to the nation and the
overflowing mass of people in the next of kin enclosure at these ceremonies fairly obviously hint at the tragedy of death in words.
But more importantly, I believe it tells us something about the almost casualness of life, the apparent ease with which it is offered to the military.
These are subjects of violence that are willing to endure violence not only on their own bodies, but also on the bodies of the ones that they love.
And for any definition of militarism world, it must consider the complicity of large numbers of soldiers and their families
in these projects of war and their apparent willingness to suffer violence.
And this attention to the complicity of subjects of militarism is important for obvious reasons because
standing armies are integral to the ability of many militaries to survive and they will be forced.
Time to come, despite all the technological advances that we see, so understanding this complicity is also necessary, I believe,
for grasping the symbolic significance of these relationships and the associated themes for the need to sacrifice and die for the nation.
Because these ceremonies also hold thousands who watch as spectators and to their affective responses,
I believe become locked in a emotive relationship with war, violence and the military.
And these soldiers and the families stand at the centre of war. And they make war not only possible, but they also make war seem worthwhile.
So what I am proposing in my work and what I'm presenting today is that aspect is not just a ruse or propaganda or an embellishment for me,
but is the substance of governing projects where statecraft is not opposed to the objective, which is more concerned with its mastery.
So a notion similar to usual proposed notion of government can do with so the military sort of concerns itself
with the distribution of sentiment and seeks to control both its excessive expression and the absence of it.
So it wants a certain amount of grief, but it does not want too much.
So acquisition aspect and not as inconvenient facts of war that need to be managed by the central domenici's in Pakistan.
And I examine these stages of mourning as sites with complicity to the project of militarism is created and I borrow from.
Those of you might be familiar with it who speaks about the political appropriation of dead bodies
and who suggests that dead bodies are great symbolic because one bodies cannot speak for themselves,
which can be spoken for. And this ambiguity makes them very useful.
And second, the bodies by dead bodies inspired or as they bring to surface questions of fears about the meaning of life and death,
something we relate to. And they allow for an engagement with everyday afflicted emotions.
And I extend these claims in my work to include the families of dead soldiers who was grief acts as a powerful symbolic capture
and remains central to how the narrative of sacrifice service to the nation is kept alive by the Pakistani military that state.
So, however, AFG does not mean. I also would like to present the affect is not coming a purely disciplinary technique of mentality,
but also has the potential to linger too long to have an afterlife and of being two things at the same time
of being produced and harnessed by disciplinary frameworks and yet having the ability to exist outside them.
So so for to understand the cynicism that I spoke about with regards to this mother earlier.
We need to acknowledge the spaces that may be populated by a range of subject positions, those that allow for both disengagement and complicity.
If not, I would ask you to put on the town tonight, so I'm going to speak a little bit about how these shows are made possible and this is.
So this is the third slide which has writing on it.
Yes. I could read it out as valid, but not sure what happened.
OK. Yeah. You come up. Yeah, yeah.
Thank you very much. So this is like an excerpt from an interview that I did with a military officer who was in charge in planning these ceremonies.
So he speaks about why these ceremonies are important and what they do.
So, he says in the show with the organisers, are talking about two things purpose and feeling the sentiment towards the nation
and the feeling towards those families from sacrificing their loved ones.
So you have to give these families space for expression of these feelings,
for these relations and space, for feeling that we, the audience have with these families.
And this is how we can see that the sacrifice was, but this was a purposeful thing.
And so and then he goes on to talk about that. It was speaking about a widow and state.
So he says it was a brilliant moment when she stood there with her three children, the youngest in their arms,
and she said she wanted my son to go into the military like his father, so attached to God.
It was a very emotionally charged moment and it is to be at such moments of these commemorations are done.
So this kind of speaks to the heart of what these events are about. So hear the sentiment of the family members towards their loved one.
His or her grief is central to the grieving body of the family member is becomes the conduit to which the military speaks to the nation.
So the widow is this image which is created for consumption of the nation and the appeal to the nation is made an effective active duty in sight.
So, so if you deconstruct the craft of these shows beyond the Strip, which is the script or the narrative is what is said, what must be said.
And so the script and the narrative speaks to discourses of kinship, gender and religion,
which is forces to which we know the national subject is imagined, right?
But it's what I pay more attention to is the craft or how it is to be said or
the creation of this ambulance that is critical for the script to be delivered.
And so maybe talking about the effect that is produced within these performance inspectors, if you could go on to the next slide.
Laura, thanks. So, so there's there's a fair amount of construction that goes on backstage for testimony by family members to happen.
And so I think Clara, could we have the next slide?
OK, so, so so this is another sort of short excerpt from another interview with another
military officer who's also in charge of looking at and developing these programmes,
we talked about prepping this father for or fought for this well, giving his testimony on steroids.
He says it is a hard job because this gets the Senate has died two years ago and we want him to relive it again.
We have to give the right dose injection because he can't continue to break down for two days at his father, who kept trying.
It's a delicate task, just the right emotion and some amount of acting. It has to be a mix.
We tell him his grief is not just his grief. His son is not just his son.
He needs to think beyond grief about beyond. Needs to think about grief beyond him.
He asked to share his grief so others can also breathe and know what it feels like.
So and then he speaks about a father who had been difficult to breath for Dawn State's testimony, and he speaks about what happened on stage.
So he says on the stage, you did a good job and spoke well and the whole audience was crying.
He didn't cry just a little bit.
And then as he walked back, he made a thumbs up sign with me, and it was a strange moment because it showed that he was acting.
It's a mixture of grief and two percent of acting. And that's the way it is done.
It is a performance that uses real emotions. So this is an exchange with a very raw and personal emotions become material for state
scrutiny and casting a testimony made possible to an integrity of the fake and the authentic.
And yet, even as the fake and the authentic life together,
the ability to recognise the fake remains the thumbs up sign that the old man speaks to that community.
So this is what's happening on stage and backstage, but I talk a little bit about the audience and then we move on to the next space.
So so this property of a political spectacle, which gives people a feeling of participation or inclusion without really being obligated to respond.
There's been work on this by and order. Adams and I agree with what obviously I've learnt and sort of build upon the work that they've done,
but I argue for a more fluid sort of relationship between the participant and the spectator.
And so for more fluidity that the people move from one position to the other.
And I posit that the audience in these spectacles plays a distinct, if carefully, the whole role.
So the audience is often Indias,
and the camera captures this display of emotion and it shifts from the stage with remarkable and almost obsessive frequency.
And what is often mocked and typical in these spectacles is a composure, despite heavy grief of these families.
So families resonate with emotion that simmer on the surface bends over, and this emotion spills over into years.
And yet the speech never forces and the words never go off script.
And this composure is often at odds with the unbridled and jaded display of peers in the audience.
And there's a need, therefore, to project the devastation of loss and grief so that the nation can be better and worse can be justified.
And yet, the families do not fulfil that function because that destabilises the script of billing and people sacrifice.
And so to hit the audience, become the audience by becoming participants in the show fulfilled this function,
and the grief and sacrifice becomes a part of the Pentecost quote-unquote tropes through
which the military and the nation then communicate start to communicate with each other.
So this was the first section and move on to the role of space now, so we couldn't possibly turn off to slide it you or your dad.
And then I'll just continue. OK, so so are you been good with the sound, right?
As we know. All good so far, yes.
OK, so, so so this I talked briefly about the practises of belief in the landscape with most
of these families live and I trace grief around the death of the Soldier Infantry
Temple is marked by how the private movement shifts into the public space and yet retains
and interiority even as it moves in sync with the demands of military discipline.
The first is the news of the death. The point at which the body arrives in the house.
And the second is the funeral. And the time is when grief is infused into everyday, ceaseless, mundane existence.
So grief part one is the manner in which the death is announced.
And this is especially important for the military because it sets the tone for the relationship between the family and the military,
and that emerges at this particular moment. And it's an interesting relationship because for the military that the very normalcy of death
it's very expected and its own preparedness for it is in sharp contrast with the very intimate,
permanent structure that the families experience and to the military administrative machinery
doles out preordained standard operating procedures that include stuff like You know,
who who. And who in the military will inform this question, how many people will go to the funeral with unit being mobilised,
how the body will be transferred and so on and so forth?
What instructions will be given to the village cleric for the reading of the prayer and so on?
So at the same time, the military also plays. Somebody pays very careful attention to the emotional toll of this incident,
which is an almost negotiated stance that will discipline aspect and yet tolerate excesses and even superficial benevolence management on.
And management is very gendered with the masculine military,
manages the external business of dying and tolerating and tolerates the excess excesses of the naive feminine,
which are personified by the family, men and women. And the village was grief is must be met and.
They're doing good and tomato mourning for the shaheed is discouraged.
And this is a religious group that is defeated by the village clinic and actively appropriated by the military and especially discourage.
And yet, perhaps because of this, when mothers spoke about news and the funeral they spoke with.
In the terms of. Margaret, you've just frozen a bit, I think hopefully it'll come back soon in the second.
He might be worth turning a video of Maria. If you could just give it a minute, hopefully it be back home soon.
Might be the internet connexion or something just went down for her, so hopefully she'll be back on it in a minute.
So if you can just be patient? Sorry about that. I'm assuming there is rejoining the inner circle about this.
Yes. I think just coming back on this problem with, I guess, a connexion from, you know, remote connexion sometimes have these problems.
But hopefully it should be should work out. Yes, we can now you can on camera off to be on the safe side.
Sounds good. Yeah. Let's keep it off for a bit. Yeah.
Apologies for this, and I'll just continue, so I'm speaking about martyrdom and mourning and how that's discouraged.
So, for example, professional beepers, which are very much part of cultural practise of dying in Punjab,
are not allowed for this funeral because vans,
which which is like a Punjabi mourning ritual, are especially like an energy which is read out for the dead.
And it involves wailing and crying, especially discourage at this point in time.
And yet, in my encounters with women, especially mothers, many did sort of break into when they spoke about their sons and the choice of words.
And this energy was often one of deep anger and rejection of the narrative of meaning for death.
And I think it was one that is one of the book itself, and some expressed the wish the son had died when he was a child.
That would have been less meaningful, perhaps, but more acceptable to them.
Then you have another way of managing aspect is the access the families allowed to the body, so the bodies mutilated as may.
Maybe in the case of the explosions, which was which were very, very common and still are in this particular context.
The coffin is nailed shut and the family is not allowed to touch it.
And the mothers often remember this moment and this helplessness of not being allowed to touch their son for one us for the last time,
and for some, it was a regret that they lived with, and for others it became a moment of defiance.
Of example, this one woman speaks about. And I write about this in the book, where she speaks about using a player to open,
sort of trying to put the lid on the glass lid and touch the face of her child before he was buried.
So, so that's sort of the various ways in which the military tries to control affect at the time of the arrival of the body in the village.
And then then there is the funeral itself, right? And if Klara, if you're there, would you put their two slides towards the two slides,
which will give some various cities give a glimpse of what consumers are like,
so and so these tightly choreographed ceremonies and I was not blessed to be able to see a funeral, but I was doing my fieldwork covered.
A lot of these families make phone videos or sometimes even professional videos of these very, very spectacular events that are held in villages.
So I was able to see a number of those.
And what I read out now is another small section of the book, which which is like a would sort of describe what I saw in these videos.
So this is one of the videos, and I just read that section.
So the first shot of the recording of the funeral for a soldier from the village is often a dead body, shall we?
It is not a sitting body. The face is mutilated with black sutures around the mouth, possibly to stop it from leaving.
The white shroud has two distinct bloodstains stains. The idea is discoloured, swollen and bruised.
The shot captures the body from all sides dragging over the disfigurement.
The lingering gaze of the camera is in direct opposition to how the military protocol demands of the body remain covered.
The persistence and recording the man's body that the army wishes to build defies the narrative of the glorious body dead in service.
It is a body of someone, not a beast, so possibly in much pain when he died.
It is no sound at this point. The bodies inside a coffin, but the lid has been opened hardly once the lid is closed,
the body's not too safe, with only a small portion of the face chewing through the glass section.
As if this distancing was not enough, a flag is draped over the coffin.
The second shot is of an all new crowd of villagers carrying the coffin to the uneven, dusty terrain of the village.
In the background is the sound of bitter, weeping, possibly from a woman standing close to the person filming.
There is no audio to this crowd of mourners, at least to the onlooker.
It seems it is not a central group holding the coffin while others swirl around it.
It is the sound of men chanting a verse from the put on a dull little sound and repetitive.
The coffins progress is not even it stops, apparently for no reason, and then starts again.
It almost meanders through the field,
giving the impression of a lack of weapons as though the group doesn't know where it's going and is in no hurry to arrive there.
The man in the front, or at least some of them are visibly distressed, even as they chant on by post from the eyes women follow at the back,
separated from the main crowd, hesitant and scattered yet very much there.
These women have come to see the gymnasium, which is a funeral,
and unlike the men who have come to lead the funeral and be part of the funeral procession.
Many women are perched on rooftops that dot the landscape, the more colourful floats providing relief from the rather gloomy,
drab and colourless procession that moves forward, seemingly going nowhere.
So there's a slide off of, I think of women sitting on rooftops, at funerals and at the graveyard.
At one point, the camera swerves and we acknowledge a new presence.
Men dressed in combat camouflage the Pakistan battle dress uniform and stand out different out of place on the fringes of the crowd.
They look deferential, almost hesitant. They downcast eyes and posture, totally at odds with what is to follow.
Another swell of the camera and we see three army vehicles one large truck and the other two motorbikes and small busts.
There is no metal road here, just dusty, marked unmarked trains.
The presence of these could stand up after the earlier chanting the silence follows.
The nomadic genocide is almost deafening.
The body has been handed over to the military after the scene repaired around the newly dug open gave the villagers are seated in an auditorium.
Watching and waiting for soldiers now carry the coffin to the graveyard from the large field with a few hundred families.
Gone is the studied nonchalance. These smartly dressed men are charged with toddlers as they march in unison,
pass the tombstones through a corridor of soldiers and dwarves to name a few.
Villagers are in sight as the coffin moves forward through the corridor.
Soldiers salute by changing the position of their guns. The coffin is carried ceremoniously.
Each step is measured in marked contrast to how we had earlier.
Earlier, the men carried it, but carrying it without breathless, grief stricken, almost to the point of impotence.
But here it is said that is order and here there is meaning the coffin is placed on the ground.
The men carrying it mortuary and four other men walk up to untie the flag draped over the coffin, which is ceremoniously folded and put aside.
The coffin is now carried to debate the two men on itis on each side,
loading it with religious and family members join in the process and as the coffin is lowered to capture,
the camera captures it descending into the sound of someone sobbing and continuous, monotonous crying.
Someone says maybe, but you, my child. But these are inconsolable, disjointed sounds, almost as an aside.
No one takes much notice and no one joins in.
There's a brief shot of a man sitting next to an open meeting, steady crying sound, and there is a flash of colour.
A woman at the grave. Maybe the mother. Or maybe a sister. But the camera doesn't linger on and life on the national stage.
Women are conditioned to image. So and now briefly talk about phase three, which is what I spoke about once the army leaves how,
what, what, what, what, what is sort of unfolding, how that progresses.
And so, so villages are full of images of the states that seemingly set up by villagers themselves.
So there's a village crossroad, which are often named after the people who've died in the various wars they are boards at village
entrances that have pictures of these showed us that the graves themselves are very ornate,
and they're painted as they're painted buses from to put on their symbols of the state,
such as the flag off in the name of the unit, the back in the day, and also inscribed on the tombstone by seeds, which are annual,
sort of mourning the death anniversaries, which are very much part of cultural religious practises in Punjab,
but that they have a distinct military flavour. So these are sites and practises that vilify the state.
We are subject to subjugate themselves and will reduce is clearly gone through the music fields.
And yet once the army trucks leave, that is when Prince really starts to unfold and and side by side.
Reapplication, uncivilised, defiance and ambivalence, some of which I spoke about.
So there are many stories being added to speak of practises of driving that are not in sync with
military narratives of sacrifice and a threat that seems to surface in narratives of families.
It's one of the exact regrets that the son went into service regret.
Can you hear me? Is there a problem? You can, you know, you find this part.
OK, so, so sorry. So this is often what surfaces in these narratives is this sense of regret that the son went into service to get that
they didn't insist that he deserved them so that they can save him if and when the son did express a desire to leave.
So they spoke about it.
Some wistfulness, I mean, angered, some deeply saddened about his father continuing with the Amazon story and spoke about the mother earlier.
So he'd earlier expressed regret that he did not have the resources to take his son out of the army after his deployment to a combat zone.
And he told me, he told The Guardian reported him after his son's death that if he had done sons, he would give them to the army.
And so, you know, obviously I was trying to connect the two narratives and asked him why.
He said that when he'd expressed his regret at not being able to save his son.
So he expanded this compulsion to me. But through using this phrase, which other I found a lot of other family members also use,
which is gain upper hand, which is, you have to say it, it's your comfort that you have to do this.
So acknowledging almost that, what he said in this moment is almost rhetorical.
So the phrase Ganapathy up that high signifies an awareness very demystification.
So the question then becomes Why do these subjects and hold on to these masks?
And and one one sort of response to that is economics and material benefits is obviously
one way to explain the military's obvious an extraordinary hold on these populations.
The fear of the military apparatus is another and very practical repercussions of making the dissonance known.
But this is only half the story because in these villages, it is also about grief and the strong emotions of Genevieve's,
as well as a need to make meaning out what has been lost so that their loss can be justified.
So religious fluctuate between criticising the military and betraying annoying and seeing that they express to offend,
even as they actively perform the desired steps of jihad and for deletion.
So family attitudes and speak of and what I call affective affective residues that haunt them.
Regret about the inability to save the child. Violent death and guilt at their own insistence that they go into military service in the first place.
So ideology or the belief in the narrative of sacrifice operates not to help the families evade social reality, which is the death of a loved one,
but helps to build a social reality that is seen as meaningful to escape from this traumatic realisation of their implications of this death.
And that is what I believe makes the discarding of the mask almost unthinkable.
So it is the substance that makes militaristic narratives come alive and to attention to it, to its afterlife and residues.
We can also become a bit of the disjuncture that exists between hegemonic projects and its reception within its subjects.
So affect not only makes these fantasies possible, but it also makes them forever fragile and never at ease and in need of constant reaffirmation.
So this very phrase, the number that he speaks in the sense of constant doing a perpetual fixing of meaning.
So these moments that hold the potential for challenge moments that that affect them,
whether it's contestation, paradoxically become the very gestures that allow for the consolidation of powers.
So the next of kin recognises the utility of wars and the use of blood to serve a construct that they may not believe in yet,
except this violence of themselves and on the bodies of those that they love.
They stayed because they know the military is watching and the desire is continued.
Patronage is saved because otherwise the son's death would be futile and the brief to great sense of the.
It's dream of a nation in glory. And they say, because they need to say to avoid the realisation and get that the risk taken was perhaps too great.
And I'm not going to thank you. I just have a couple of comments to make.
So, so, so really, so what does it affect? Events add to understanding of more militarism.
And so, so so I propose that I look at the experiences and motivation of foot soldiers of those who die and lose their loved ones.
Die opens up a more intimate place which to study militarism and the work of communities of focus on the affective domain enables an
understanding of how ethic associated with military that can act as a formidable deterrent to any challenge of the militarism project.
This ability of epic to stifle dissent within a month the direct subjects of militarism or within
citizenry is important to recognise because if you investigate anti-war at anti-war activism,
you'll see that criticism is often weakened by a desire to show respect for the families of the deceased and the sentiments of soldiers.
So even when state policies have led that have led to combat have been challenged,
limits are placed on these critiques by an emotional appeal that demands that protesters might support soldiers.
It's not the war. And we see this time and time again in anti-war protest or activism, be it Pakistan, be in the UK,
US specifically in the context of the recent, somewhat, you know, quote-unquote Unpopular War and then at lunchtime.
So the question then is does any challenge to the war project becomes sealed inside the epic attached to the grief and suffering of death?
And I have outlined in my work the many times that despite overt compliance with ethics unit regulation,
the ethics of soldiers and families escapes discipline, and it's expressing itself through emotion that feeds it to challenge regimes of power.
So I think it's being so appropriate for consolidating militarism all over its subjects
becomes a very medium that allows subjects to express discontent specifically to,
you know, various to the troops through grief.
And although these ambivalent acts of protest are very much ambivalent because they are now subverting to exist alongside complicity,
they nonetheless reveal an interesting trajectory that allows subjects to escape subjection.
And regarding these dissonances therefore becomes an important exercise to understand power.
So it's an important theoretical exercise, and it can also be become a deeply political one to understand resistance against these projects.
So, so I offer that more militarism operates to a blending and mixing of spaces.
The line between civilian and the military are constantly drawn. Events that commemorate Wal-Mart does represent an abandoned civilisation of
military spaces opposite to what is normally studied in military military studies,
which is a militarisation of civilian spaces.
And this mixing of the civilian with the military creates a powerful engine of participation, compliance and support.
And this alliance between the victims of war and its perpetrators therefore goes unquestioned because to challenge
these spectacles is to refute or dishonour the very genuine aspect of families on display and the Pakistan military,
for example. This is the case study that I'm presenting, and other militaries do this as well create a false equivalence.
Just as painted grief and loss cannot be questioned, the state also becomes unquestionable.
So if you are to understand militaries ability to establish reparation for what is normal and necessary and to demand second phase,
it is important to expose the mechanisms through which it makes sense to me that I've argued in my book and today,
hopefully that it is deliberately entangled with the bodies of the dead and the ethic that is associated with it.
So I'll stop here. And yeah, and I hope you all stay here.
We can then continue to talk.