Salih Can Açiksöz
University of California, Los Angeles
I am honored by the Society of Medical Anthropology’s recognition of Sacrificial Limbs with the New Millennium Book Award. My gratitude goes to Erin Durban, Joel Ferrall, Seth Holmes, and Rania Kassab Sweis for their thoughtful responses to my book, and also to Daisy Deocampo and Hanna Garth for compiling this book forum and giving me a chance to expand the work’s resonances.
Sacrificial Limbs was born out of a scholarly desire to offer an ethnographic vantage point from which to understand how the gendered bodily and psychosocial effects of wars and political violence generate lasting ripple effects for combatants. This desire was itself a product of the work’s biographical and ethnographic context. I spent my formative years in Turkey, witnessing the ravage of the counterinsurgency against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK. Being “both a child and scholar of war” (Khayyat 2023), I wanted to write a politically engaged book that foregrounded the experiences of disabled former conscripts who, despite literally embodying the costs of war, nevertheless became the poster boys of chauvinistic militarism. Writing against the objectification and instrumentalization of their losses and pain, I wanted to show how these veterans negotiated their masculine political subjectivities within an antinomic political system that created the fraught conditions for their injury, then sacralized their bodily losses but failed to deliver on its biopolitical promises of care, and continually channeled their anger and resentment back into the affective constraints of a militarized nationalism.
The unique strengths of ethnography lie perhaps in its stubborn resistance to easy closures and its ability to convey the nuances of the lived complexity. This is why I appreciate Rania Sweis’ discerning emphasis on paradox as a key organizing feature of the book: only by attending to the paradoxical forces that shape disabled veterans’ subjectivities, livelihoods, communities, and access to care can one understand the processes that make ultranationalist actors out of working-class young men with disabilities.
These paradoxes are built into the title of the book, Sacrificial Limbs, a phrase that draws on a nationalist propaganda that habitually refers to disabled veterans as altruistic heroes who willingly sacrifice their bodies for the perpetuity of the state. It also pararhymes with and thus evokes the Abrahamic notion of the “sacrificial lamb,” intentional on my part given that conscripts are affectionately called sacrificial “hennaed” lambs in Turkey’s religiously inflected nationalist political culture. It also resonates with the lesser-known industrial term “sacrificial leg” denoting the cheap and easily replaceable section of a warehouse storage system. With such polysemic resonances, the phrase “sacrificial limbs” neatly captures the multiple and often contradictory ways in which the bodies of conscripted young men get snared up in webs of meanings, and practices, power/knowledge nexuses, and institutions, including those of military expendability, neoliberal disposability, politico-religious veneration, and nationalist biopolitics.
Joel Ferrall and Seth Holmes’ generous and insightful response also succinctly captures the dynamism arising from contradictions in the symbolic, affective, and political registers traversing disabled veterans’ bodies. Ferrall and Holmes underline Sacrificial Limbs’ ethnographic theorization of how such gendered and classed contradictions are articulated and mobilized by right-wing politics. Rather than leading to the questioning of nationalism and militarism, the experiential quandaries of militarized and disabled masculinities affectively fuel veterans’ demands for the fulfillment of the state’s failed promises and then broker them into right-wing affect and ideology that textures veterans’ everyday lives. As they suggest, this is the chilling power of reactionary politics—and, I hope, the potential of this work to help us think through and beyond it.
I further appreciate how, as socially engaged physician-anthropologists, Ferrall and Holmes extend the book’s reach to other geographical, political, and institutional contexts to think about, for example, the affective politics in post-Trump America or the ethical dilemmas of medicine during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. What are the political and biopolitical processes through which certain bodies are folded into circuits of care and intimacy while others get abandoned in times of national crisis? How do bodies become sites of promise or vengeance for one’s injuries? How does the political right weaponize social suffering, broken promises, ressentiment, and resentment in the service of revenge against imagined tormentors, be they Muslim, Black, immigrant, or transgender? I hope that Sacrificial Limbs offers its readers theoretical and methodological insights into the pursuit of such burning questions.
Erin Durban’s queer disabled feminist reading of the book underlines the resonances of Sacrificial Limbs across different publics. I am thankful for and humbled by their intimate voice and their account of the book’s intersectional feminist approach to questions around disability and masculinity. As a non-disabled cis man working in the context of the Middle East, my studentship as a disability, feminist, queer, and trans ally thoroughly informs my scholarly and pedagogical practices but may not necessarily be readily legible to my differently positioned audiences. It is therefore heartening to read that my indebtedness and modest contribution to the intersectional feminist theorization of the interrelations of gender, nation, militarism, ethnoracialization, and embodiment comes through the pages of Sacrificial Limbs.
The discontents of translation across epistemic, political, and sociohistorical boundaries highlighted by Durban present not only challenges but also opportunities for rethinking the normative frameworks deployed in our knowledge regimes. The politics of disability I describe in the book is starkly different from the one mainstream Euro-American disability studies scholarship centers on. Viewed through a decolonial and transnational disability justice lens, it resonates both with the experiences of diverse populations across the Global South and with embodied practices that are overdetermined by structural and racial violence and thus pose questions about the limits of disability politics based on rights, citizenship, inclusion, and pride. Like Durban, I have in mind Jasbir Puar’s work (2017) on the mass debilitation of Palestinian bodies or Laurence Ralph’s work (2012) with disabled ex-gang members in Black Chicago, populations who, like my disabled veteran interlocutors, publicly exhibit their injuries to make claims about the forms of social violence shaping their bodies. I am delighted to see that Sacrificial Limbs is now part of these conversations that work to pry open a space for a broader understanding of what disability is and what it does.
This broader understanding requires an ethnographic attention to the untold stories that fall through the cracks of hegemonic narratives and affective frameworks. In my new research on the politics of disability and humanitarianism in the war-torn Turkish/Syrian borderlands, now further devastated by the recent double earthquake, I am guided by the aspiration to surface such stories of loss and suffering, creativity and waste, biopolitical investment and abandonment, resilience and resistance. I hope that readers of Sacrificial Limbs will join me in this future journey.
References
Khayyat, Munira. 2023. “War, from the South.” Public Culture 35(1): 113–34.
Puar, Jasbir K. 2017. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ralph, Laurence. 2012. “What wounds enable: The politics of disability and violence in Chicago.” Disability Studies Quarterly 32(3). https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3270/3099.