The Veterans Eclectic

Početna stranica – Faqja kryesore – Почетна страница – Domača stran

This online (work)space was designed & initiated in 2020 by Charlie Warner, a doctoral researcher in Belgium and an American combat veteran. The space offers insights into my anthropological research and ethnographic fieldwork exploring the eclectic voices and visualities of combat veterans in Southeast Europe and beyond. In essence, my research strives toward more nuanced relationships between war veterans and the social sciences while interrupting / challenging dominant narratives emerging from the North Atlantic region. Pursuing these relationships allows for new narratives and solutions from the margins – the margins of Europe, the margins of memory, the margins of society, the margins of academia – and agitates for re-imagined futures shaped by new approaches to the politics of peace and legacies of war.

In moving through the different sections of this site and the posts I share from “The Field”, you are invited into my fieldwork; to examine the questions being asked, to view the project’s influences, and access the digital material informing this doctoral research. As reflected by the Surrealist collages, Abstract portraiture, and Impressionist paintings selected for display across The Veterans Eclectic site, this online space and its texts are works of composition, collision, and collaboration. Collaboration with veterans and veteran collectives across Croatia, Serbia, BiH, and Kosovo…to Western Europe and across the Atlantic…and East, toward generations of veterans on all sides of (post)colonial narratives, empire-building, and national histories.

_{^{Montage #1: Assembled over a background that is cut from the work modenshau (1935) by German Dadaist & Feminist Hannah Höch.}}
_{^{Montage #2: Frontispiece by the Surrealists Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore for Aveux non avenus (1929) National Gallery of Australia.}}

“The objective of ethnography is fundamentally descriptive or documentary, whereas…the objective of anthropology should be transformational” – Tim Ingold (emphasis added, interview with Ferrández, 2013)

This interview and research discussion was held at the thoughtful invitation of the Carpe Diem NGO in Karlovac, Croatia. During the course of the talk in July of 2021, we discuss my military background, research interests, and my ethnographic fieldwork with combat veterans in Southeast Europe. Shared here with thanks to Carpe Diem. (In English with Croatian subtitles – Snimka uključuje titlove na hrvatskom/srpskom/BiH – Duration: 45 Minutes)