Kill Talk

Janet McIntosh, Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University, is a sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist. Her work in Kenya and the USA has explored personhood, religion, colonialism, right-wing ideologies, and militarization. Her previous ethnographies received the Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion (2010), Honorable Mention in the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing (2017), and Honorable Mention in the American Ethnological Society's Senior Book Prize (2018). She is co-editor, with Norma Mendoza-Denton, of Language in the Trump Era (Cambridge University Press 2020). Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, the ACLS, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

• List of Figures Acknowledgments Content Warning and Notes on Language Section I. Entry Points Preface 1: Introduction to Kill Talk Section II. Training 2: "Yelling" 3: "Insults and Kill Chants" 4: "Broken Rules and Head Games" 5: "Mothers of America" and "A Woke, Emasculated Military" Section III. Combat 6: "Dehumanization in Combat" 7: "Language as a Shattered Mirror" 8: "Frame Perversion": The Twisted Humor of Combat Section IV. After War 9: "Poetry of Rehumanization" 10: "Combat Paper" Coda: The Nervous System Notes Work Cited Index

A remarkable and highly readable exploration of a phenomenon that is commonly represented in movies and popular media but seldom analyzed in any detail ... Kill Talk includes a trove of empirical data, a rich and varied theoretical framework, and wonderfully clear prose ... Overall, this is an immensely important book, deeply humane and humanizing, as full of insight as it is empathy