Listening to War

Abstract

Abstract This book studies the centrality of listening to the experience of modern warfare. Based on years of ethnographic interviews with US military service members and Iraqi civilians, as well as on direct observations of wartime Iraq, the book reveals how these populations learned to extract valuable information from the ambient soundscape while struggling with the deleterious effects that it produced in their ears, throughout their bodies, and in their psyches. The book examines the dual-edged nature of sound—its potency as a source of information and a source of trauma—within a sophisticated conceptual frame that highlights the affective power of sound and the vulnerability and agency of individual auditors. By theorizing violence through the prism of sound and sound through the prism of violence, the book provides a productive new vantage point for examining these strangely conjoined phenomena. Two chapters dedicated to wartime music in Iraqi and US military contexts show how music was both an important instrument of the military campaign and the victim of a multitude of violent acts throughout the war.

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