1, I set out to interview an amateur astronomer and instead was surprised to learn that he had much more to teach me about the curious ways that waste is conceptualized by military manufacturers. This moment of ethnographic surprise led me to look more into the history of the greater Binghamton area and its reliance on defense contracts, from the city’s origins to the present day. When I started my affiliation with amateur astronomers, I had intended to learn only about distant and generally demilitarized space junk, but it led me somewhere else, somewhere a lot closer to the functioning of military industry than I ever thought I would get. Similarly, I started this research with the intention of tracking disused and decaying military objects, like ships and planes, to see what had become of the military built to fight World War III after this conflict never came to pass. Instead, I ended up following forms of waste as they traveled from tests of military product quality to art projects and coral reef regeneration, to orbital debris pageants, mass shooting incidents, and atolls covered with seabird guano.27
I follow waste in these various directions largely in order to collapse the distance between military and civilian worlds, complicating how these two seemingly distinct “realms” interrelate. War preparation can contribute to background conditions of social life that fade into invisibility even and especially to the degree that we depend on them. As Deborah Cowen (2014) documents, for instance, the logistics of global trade and travel that are now taken for granted were directly shaped by twentieth-century war and war preparation. To take one example, at one time, the shoes people wore all over the United States were unknowingly connected to a factory near Binghamton, New York. At critical times in its history, that factory benefited from wartime and postwar military contracts, without which those civilian shoes would not have been produced, sold, and worn, The industrial ruins left behind bear witness to these past connections. The shoes we wear now are no different. As Cynthia Enloe writes, global trade is often premised on militaristic associations:
Threaded through virtually every sneaker you own is some relationship to masculinized militaries. Locating factories in South Korea was a good strategic decision in the eyes of those Oregon-headquartered male Nike executives because of the close alliance between male policymakers in Washington and Seoul. It was a relationship—unequal but intimate—based on their shared anticommunism, their shared commitment to waging the Cold War, and their shared participation in an ambitious international military alliance. (2007, 28)
Given the size and scope of US empire, these kinds of connections are unsurprising. But Americans do more than passively consume products that have military origins. It is also important to note how many continue to profit in unexpected ways from the permanent war economy.
The production of shoes is not so different from the production of knowledge. It would be wrong to imagine a divide between my research and writing process and its object, that is, between ethnography and war preparation. Historically and in the present day, these are not opposed endeavors. For as long as there has been a military industrial complex in the United States, ethnographic research has been a part of it. Anthropological practice has been just as complicit in war preparation as has any other science, in some cases even more so, as ethnographic data has served as important information for war planning and counterinsurgency operations. In many cases, key global areas of concern to the US government were investigated with funding from the CIA through dummy organizations, though anthropologists did not necessarily know this at the time. As David Price’s (2008, 2011, 2016) extensive research has uncovered, some did know, some suspected. But even those anthropologists who were not funded directly (or might have rejected such funding had they known) could still produce usable intelligence simply by doing what anthropologists do best. This Price calls “dual-purpose” anthropology, since it could both serve academic interests, careers, and agendas and also help inform the US security state and military (cf. Paglen 2009: 8–9). This is not some relic of the Cold War, moreover. To this day, American anthropologists are [mis]taken for CIA agents when they work abroad, which can impact the relationships they form and what they end up knowing and writing about, whether or not it is true (see Borneman and Masco 2015; Verdery 2018). Ethnographic research has recently been treated as war preparation in another sense, specifically by supposedly helping prep potential recruits of counterinsurgency efforts. A good ethnographer with the right linguistic and cultural knowhow became an asset to the US war effort during the short-lived and controversial Human Terrain System (2007–14).28
I am no more removed from the legacy of the permanent war economy than my informants. I too am living with its consequences, unknowingly citing or gaining enrichment from anthropological research that was backed with CIA funding or has been useful to war preparation and global securitization. It occurred to at least some of my would-be informants that my research might be valuable to the military as well, in some way neither I nor they could yet imagine. My point is not to attack the value of anthropological research and writing, but to challenge the possible assumption that I am detached from the permanent war economy under investigation in this book. In the very same way that some of the amateur astronomers I met have a bond beyond their passion for astronomy, one that links them to military manufacturing, more than a few of the academics I know have a relationship to war preparation, though it might seem the furthest thing from their everyday lives and personal values. It is not only ideas and methods that are implicated in this system, but the very substance of academic life, which for many means living at a distance from the potential consequences of knowledge production.
Thinking about my position as an academic and how that impacts how and what I research involves a form of what is known as reflexivity. Reflexive approaches in social science normally consider subjective “identity” (for instance, my race—white, gender—male, class—upper middle, and so on) as well as personally held beliefs and values that are something of a filter through which researchers perceive and engage with the world. As a white, male, leftist pacifist, I no doubt had different interactions with my informants than if I were, if I perceived myself to be, or if I were perceived by others as a different kind of person. This is also true for Priscilla Bennett, who assisted in some of the research for this book and coauthored two of the chapters. Like me, she was born and raised in the US, but she is a white woman and wife of a US military pilot. All of these factors no doubt have influenced this book. But this kind of reflexive attention to categorical type (race, gender, political identity, etc.) only makes up part of the story. There are also broader power relations that connect any ethnographer to the context they investigate and the people who appear “already there.” The apparent divides of ethnographic fieldwork (before and after, the already there and the newly arrived) are not given. As Jennifer Robertson argues, “A major problem with ‘writing as a [name the category]’ is that the ethnographer’s positionality either precedes the fieldwork experience or is deployed after the fact, during the write-up phase, to locate oneself in what might be termed the ‘topophilic’ academy” (2002, 788). Put differently, certain kinds of positionality are considered more worth talking and writing about than others. Roberston also describes the importance of new experiences in the field, not simply the a priori categories one inhabits, for providing opportunities for reflexivity (790). In a complementary way, it can also be productive to reflect on how one ends up with specific opportunities for new encounters in the first place.
Somehow, I ended up being employed in the vicinity of amateur astronomers with connections to military manufacturing. I did not seek out and find employees of Lockheed Martin through sheer pluck and determination; I stumbled upon them while trying to recruit amateur astronomers, which they also were. This ethnographic serendipity was not a matter of dumb luck, but reveals something about how the permanent war economy can unknowingly thread its way through many people’s lives. My employment as a tenure-track professor at Binghamton University, beginning in 2012, was a professional goal I finally attained after years of worrying it would never happen. And for quite some time I imagined that there was nothing further from what I was being paid to do there than what engineers at Lockheed Martin were doing in a neighboring town. On the contrary, I told myself that I was promoting a cosmopolitan respect for human difference that in some small way might make the world more peaceful, rather than more violent. Given how difficult the academic job market can be,
