Catherine Lutz (Anthropology, Brown)

Getting to No in War

Recorded video

The United States has an all-volunteer military force, one that public opinion polls regularly show is the most respected institution in U.S. society. Nonetheless, numbers of those who enlist sooner or later say no to some or all of what they are asked to do, think, or represent. This has been especially so for those who participated in the war in Iraq, as it was for those who volunteered during the Vietnam War.

This talk explores that paradox, asking how and why those service members walk their path from yes to no. It explores the roots of both their volunteering and their objecting in the rhetoric of choice and in the masculine ideals to which they aspire.

Brown bag lunch discussion

Friday, February 24
12 noon, Curtin 939
Reading: Catherine Lutz, “The U.S. Car Colossus and the Production of Inequality” American Ethnologist 41, no. 2 (2014): 232–45.

Catherine Lutz is Thomas J. Watson, Jr. Family Professor of International Studies, and Professor of Anthropology at Brown University. Recent books include Schooled: Ordinary, Extraordinary Teaching in an Age of Change (with Anne Lutz Fernandez), Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives (with Anne Lutz Fernandez), and Breaking Ranks: Iraq Veterans Speak Out against the War (with Matthew C. Gutmann). She is also a co-director of Brown University’s Watson Institute’s Costs of War project, which seeks to calculate the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the related violence in Pakistan and Syria.