Sociology

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Sarah Wagner

A half-century since its conclusion, the Vietnam War’s ‘work of remembrance’ in the United States continues to generate, even innovate, forms of homecoming and claims of belonging among the state, its military and veterans, surviving families and the wider public. Such commemoration often centres on objects that materialise, physically or symbolically, absence and longed-for recovery or reunion – from wartime artefacts-turned-mementos to the identified remains of missing war dead. In exploring the war’s proliferating memory work, this article examines the small-scale but persistent practice of leaving or scattering cremains at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington DC, against the backdrop of the US military’s efforts to account for service members missing in action (MIA). Seen together, the illicit and sanctioned efforts to return remains (or artefacts closely associated with them) to places of social recognition and fellowship shed light on the powerful role the dead have in mediating war’s meaning and the debts it incurs.

Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal
Spiritual care and memory activism at the former Republic of Vietnam military cemetery
Đạt Nguyễn

Following the end of the Vietnam–American War in 1975, the commemoration of the fallen soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) remains a difficult issue. The post-war Vietnamese state has marginalised ARVN dead from its national commemorative practices, while it has destroyed or neglected former South Vietnam memorial sites. This article provides an examination of recent efforts by local ARVN former combatants, living relatives of fallen soldiers and young Vietnamese to attend to the upkeep of the former ARVN cemetery in southern Vietnam. Based on participant observation and interviews, I explore how people care for the dead through regular acts of grave maintenance and religious rituals. I show that, through these persistent practices of care, southern Vietnamese engage in a form of memory activism to ensure the continual existence of the cemetery and lay claims to the right to mourn for the marginalised dead.

Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal
The enigmas of empty graves, encrypted archives and porous bones
Tâm T. T. Ngô

This article details the remarkable involvement of the Vietnamese population in finding and naming half a million Vietnamese missing-in-action (MIAs). The secrecy that characterised Vietnam’s military operations during wartime, and the overlapping claims and therefore control of the MIAs by the army and civil administrations in the aftermath of the wars, are the reasons behind unsolvable quagmires in Vietnam’s current war-accounting effort. The myriad of state actors involved who often work at cross purposes raises the public’s awareness of the incompetence of the state and calls for the participation of non-state actors. The latest potential avenue to solve the MIA problem, DNA forensics, is facing all kinds of challenges, such as the quality of the bone samples and the scale of the effort. War accounting has therefore become an open arena of public engagement and popular dissent, while significantly transforming the cult of the dead in Vietnam.

Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal
Mariam Motamedi Fraser

Chapter 4 is organised around two connected parts. The first analyses two popular scientific books – one by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, the other by Clive Wynne – in which the authors seek to explain to their readers what dogs are. The second part explores some of the implications of those explanations, for dogs. The chapter draws on Jocelyn Porcher’s theory of animal labour to do this. Its argument in essence is that dogs’ species story – exemplified in these two books – actively militates against an understanding of dogs as labouring subjects. And because dogs are not perceived to be labouring subjects, it is difficult to identify, let alone challenge, the ongoing exploitation of companion and working dogs, or to recognise their forms of ‘resistance’. As for the creative potentiality that Porcher claims to exist in labour, dogs’ species story allows no leverage for this at all. Although the chapter draws on Porcher’s theory of animal labour to make this case and to explore its implications, the particularity of dogs’ species story, as it is described, for example, by the scientists explored in the first half of this chapter, also constitutes a critique of it, and of Porcher’s implicit assumption that her account of labour applies equally to all domesticated animals. Debates about animal labour are complex and multifaceted, as the conclusion of this chapter acknowledges and discusses.

in Dog politics
Open Access (free)
Scientific research with dogs
Mariam Motamedi Fraser

Previous chapters have addressed the serious trouble that dogs’ species story makes for dogs. Chapter 5 turns to the trouble that the story makes for scientists – for the very scientists who are writing it. It puts three related, but differently charged, issues into conversation with one another: dogs’ perceived relationality, as it is defined as a methodological problem in science; relationality, as it is defined as the foundation of animal capability, agency and resistance in nimal studies; and the contested place of singular individuality in both. This chapter shows how Vinciane Despret’s model of ‘polite research’ is differently relevant to those scientists who support dogs’ species story (and who are therefore obliged to grapple with the methodological quandaries that are perceived to be raised by dog–human relationality) and to those who contest it (and who foreground dog individuality in contrast). It also argues, however, that neither polite research, nor the responses of these scientists to the problems posed by dogs, offer much in the way of the undoing of dogs’ species story, nor can they wholly account for how dogs might be enabled to object to the questions that are posed to them by science. The final section of the chapter analyses Martin Seligman’s ‘learned helplessness’ research, the brutality of which served, inadvertently, to draw attention not only to the relevance of intersubjectivity, but also to the dogs’ irreducible singularity, which had the power, at least momentarily, to interrupt, perhaps even to disrupt, the demands of the experiments.

in Dog politics
Open Access (free)
Mariam Motamedi Fraser

This final chapter returns to the ‘problem’ of the individual. It explores how a particular version of the individual is connected to the establishment of modern science, and how contemporary science – and especially evolutionary developmental biology – is today posing challenges to it. It finds in Alfred North Whitehead’s concept of an ‘enduring concrete percipient’ a way to navigate a path between the notion of the individual modern subject on the one hand, and relational entanglement on the other. This concept also offers something of a ‘rough guide to relevance’, a guide to anticipating whether and how an event might become relevant from an individual’s ‘point of view’. Chapter 7 uses this guide to begin to answer Lynda Birke’s question as to ‘what’s in it for the animals?’, which it brings to debates about the individual and relationality in the social sciences. The second part of the chapter addresses again how species thinking, in erasing the significance of animals as individuals, simultaneously erases a most important source of evidence of violence against them: their very ‘selves’, their bodies, their lives, their deaths. It concludes with a reflection on the value of different ways of challenging species, and on what this book’s understanding of ‘species stories’ offers in this regard. Dog Politics closes with a discussion of how the relations between dogs and humans might be reconstructed, and on the problems that the human love of dogs poses for dogs.

in Dog politics
Open Access (free)
Species stories and the animal sciences
Series: Inscriptions

Everywhere dogs are found, they are stitched into human hearts. But are humans stitched into dogs’ hearts? Countless celebrations of ‘the dog–human bond’ suggest that they are. Yet ‘the bond’ does not always come easily to dogs. Dog Politics seeks to denaturalise, in different ways, dogs’ ‘species story’, the scientific story that claims that being with humans somehow constitutes dogs’ evolutionary destiny. This book asks what evidence exists for this story; what choices dogs have but to go along with it; and what expectations, demands and burdens it places on dogs, on a daily basis. In doing so, it offers an unfamiliar and discomfiting account of the lives of domesticated dogs’ today. Dog Politics is an empirical investigation of dogs in science that makes important theoretical contributions to debates of contemporary significance. It addresses how the connections between animal behaviours and species identities are established in theory and practice. It analyses the enduring entanglement of racism and speciesism, and how the interlocking relations between these prejudices are shaped by the different ways that the categories of ‘race’ and of species are conceived of in science over time. In the light of the reification and exploitation of dogs’ perceived relationality with humans, it looks again at the ethics and politics of intersubjectivity, becoming-with, entanglements. It disputes that species can be separated from storying. Above all, Dog Politics shows how species stories erase the singular individual animal as a figure of theoretical, methodological, ethical and political value, and with what dire consequences.

Open Access (free)
Mariam Motamedi Fraser

Chapter 2 addresses dogs’ species story. This is the story of ‘how dogs became dogs’ as it is understood, discussed and debated in the fields of genetics, archaeology, behavioural ecology and canine science. One of the most significant elements of this story concerns the relation between dog speciation and dog domestication: did dogs become dogs before they were domesticated, or by way of domestication? This chapter is an interrogation of how proof of dog speciation/domestication is established, what evidence exists to support it, and what role dogs themselves play in disrupting it. In all, the aim of the chapter is to illustrate that dogs’ species story is told with unwarranted confidence. But it is also to demonstrate, importantly, that it is a story that wields substantial power, authority and influence. The chapter is bookended by two interrelated topics that are important to Dog Politics as a whole: time, and the relations between species and ‘race’. It begins with a discussion of why Darwin’s presentation of his theory of evolution by natural selection to his Victorian public, which greatly relied on dogs, lends itself to such ongoing confusion with regard to evolutionary time, and ends by illustrating how easily, if not how inevitably, species and ‘race’ can come to be conflated, when the different temporal scales of biological speciation and political racialisation are not available to distinguish them.

in Dog politics
Open Access (free)
Senta’s howl
Mariam Motamedi Fraser

This chapter begins by introducing the driving concept of the book: the concept of a ‘species story’, and how it is relevant to dogs, who constitute the empirical focus of Dog Politics. It also introduces readers to what Dog Politics considers to be the central achievement of species stories, which is the erasure of the singular individual animal as a figure of theoretical, methodological, ethical and political significance. As such, this discussion also necessarily includes some preliminary reflection on the concept of ‘the individual’. Having established what the book is about in the broadest terms, the introduction then sets the scientific ‘scene’ for Dog Politics: first, by explaining what is meant by, and what in this book will constitute, ‘the animal sciences’; second, by exploring how these sciences have secured hegemony over the study of animals historically and with what consequences for non-scientific knowledges today (and especially for ‘ordinary’ knowledges and for social science and humanities knowledges); and third, by using contemporary debates about the relations between the classical ethologist Konrad Lorenz’s life and work as a case study through which to illustrate the potentially dire consequences of ‘species thinking’, and the urgent need for transdisciplinarity in the study of animals. The final section of the chapter outlines the content of each of the chapters that follow.

in Dog politics
Mariam Motamedi Fraser

Chapter 1 represents a first step toward the de-naturalisation of dogs’ species story by illustrating the considerable effort that is required, on the parts of both humans and dogs, to produce and secure the ‘dog–human bond’. It opens by briefly situating the elision between dog ‘intelligence’ and dog obedience in the context of a long European history in which the perception of dogs as useful animals had a part to play in colonial ‘civilising’ projects, and in scientific racism in the nineteenth century. The first part of the chapter ends by contesting the significance of the shift from obedience to an ‘affirmative biopolitics’ in contemporary dog training: when it comes to ‘the bond’, it argues, the difference between them is negligible. The second part of the chapter focuses on one topic in particular, as it is understood by canine scientists and canine behavioural professionals: human-controlled dog socialisation and the consequences that follow from inadequate socialisation (‘behavioural problems’). It uses the much-discussed socialisation (or not) of the COVID-19 pandemic puppies to argue not that the experiences of these puppies were exceptional, but rather that they shone an exceptionally bright light on the routine intolerability that characterises the conditions under which many domesticated dogs live in the Global North. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the roles played by canine behavioural professionals in highlighting, mediating and sometimes repairing the gap between the widespread fascination with dogs, and how dogs live in practice.

in Dog politics