language and war

[Bonnie McElhinny]

For anyone looking for materials that allow students to consider the role of
language in times of war, I can recommend COLLATERAL LANGUAGE:  A USER'S
GUIDE TO AMERICA'S NEW WAR.  John Collins and Ross Glover, eds.  New York:
New York University Press, 2002.  230 pp.

Below are the first two paragraphs of a review of this book which I've
written for JLA.  If you are interested in the longer version, please let me
know and I'll send it to you.

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"COLLATERAL LANGUAGE  is a timely primer on how political and mainstream
media discourse have been deployed to influence, and deceive, the American
public since September 11th, a primer which also serves as an introduction
to critical perspectives on U.S. diplomatic, political and military actions.
Each of the fourteen essays in this book analyzes a keyword or key phrase of
rhetoric used to explain, justify, or rationalize American political and
military responses in the aftermath of September 11th.  The complete list of
words analyzed includes:  ANTHRAX, BLOWBACK,  CIVILIZATION,  COWARDICE,
EVIL, FREEDOM, FUNDAMENTALISM,  JIHAD, JUSTICE,  TARGETS, TERRORISM,  UNITY,
VITALI INTERESTS AND THE WAR ON ____.  Though the book is pitched for a
general audience (the brief chapters are written more like essays than
articles, and citations are minimized), intellectual complexity is not
sacrificed in a bid for accessibility. The introductory essay  is a simply
written, sophisticated distillation of  insights  about the role that
language plays in shaping reality, manufacturing consent and enabling
violence, and the role that geneaological approaches to language can play in
creating the possibility of dissent.  It condenses the insights of scholars
like Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault, George Orwell, Raymond Williams, and
Benjamin Whorf. It would serve as a helpful introduction to the role that
language plays in political life for undergraduates and even for certain
graduate students, though graduate students would likely want and need a
more detailed citation trail than this essay provides.

Terry Eagleton has said that ideological discourse is best understood as ³a
network of empirical and normative elements, within which the nature and
organization of the former is ultimately determined by the requirements of
the latter² (1991:23).  Ostensibly constative language is harnessed to
performative ends; truths are components of an overall rhetoric.  In each of
the keyword entries in this book, we begin to see how this done.  [A
discussion of the different ways different keywords work follows.]......

There is inevitably in a collection like this a certain amount of repetition
from essay to essay of certain themes (for instance, of the ways that U.S.
imperialism has helped shaped the conditions which led to the attacks on
Sept. 11th).   I found myself tolerant of this repetition, in light of the
super-saturation of mainstream media with the ideas these essays are meant
to critique, but I suspect that  those interested in using the book in class
will choose an essay or two in this collection which ties in with a course
which they teach rather than assigning the whole book‹and there is indeed a
chapter for nearly any class in linguistic or sociocultural anthropology:
³Anthrax² for a course in medical anthropology, ³Jihad² and ³Fundamentalism²
for anthropology of religion, ³Cowardice² for anthropology of  gender, and
most any chapter for courses on media or in linguistic anthropology or
sociolinguistics.  Linguistic anthropologists, accustomed to more exhaustive
analysis of larger numbers of examples of media discourse than most of these
essays provide, will still find much here to suggest further research
projects or classroom exercises.  All readers should be careful to recognize
that the book focuses on political and media discourse produced in the fall
of 2001, and although the insights and commentaries remain timely, subtle
shifts in usage and emphasis which deserve additional  attention may have
occurred in the intervening  months, and other words may have assumed
prominence.  There is no consideration here of the strengths and weaknesses
of a keyword approach to political events rather than, say, an approach
linked more to narrative analysis (though Philip Neisser who has elsewhere
considered the role  narrative plays in shaping political power raises a few
pertinent questions in his chapter on ³Targets²).  Some readers will be
frustrated that not  all of the excerpts from newspapers or political
speeches are traceable through the citations in footnotes, or that there are
not more examples of the keywords in use.  On the whole, though, the book
will entice most  readers to ask provocative questions of contemporary
political practices.  Of my students, I ask no more; of myself, I ask no
less.

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Bonnie McElhinny
Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology and
Institute for Women's Studies and Gender Studies
University of Toronto
100 St. George St.
Toronto, ON M5S 3G3
CANADA

phone:  416-978-3297
fax:    416-978-3217
email:  bonnie.mcelhinny at utoronto.ca