The social sciences, history, and cultural studies have made significant progress in attending more to the processes and meanings of everyday practices. However, anthropologists and other cultual researchers have yet to persuasively engage the social object that may indeed be the most significant, highly charged register of material culture in the world today: guns. Certainly, ethnographers have worked with populations whose members variously desire, witness, own, sell, trade, fear, and indeed shoot guns. Save for an occasional mention of the presence of such weapons in fieldwork settings or historical monograophs, most studies attend rather to the larger scale processes of conflict, including state and ethnic politics, displacement of peoples, diaspora, and refugee experiences. What is called for now, perhaps more so than ever before, are works that engage the material realities and the social meanings of firearms, in so far as they have impacted every cultural space in the world.

Collection will highlight the materiality/thingness of the firearm, generating new economies, complex sets of social relations, embodiment, wealth and poverty. Seeking studies of the gendered features of gun (dis)use and (mis)use; the classing and racializing of guns and access to guns; the visual culture(s) of guns; the social-psychological-sexual dimensions of using s and killing with guns; gun ‘play;’ gun taboos. Especially welcome are ethnographic analyses of the political and affective economies of guns, as practiced in local spaces but articulating with and along global vectors; gendered features of gun (dis)use and (mis)use; the social classing and racializing of guns and access to guns; the visual culture(s) of guns; the social-psychological-sexual dimensions of using guns and killing with guns; the cultural; history of guns; ‘playing’ with guns, real and imaginary; guns and taboos; and, pro and anti-gun activism.

Authors should submit [via email] a 2-page abstract describing a potential chapter for the collection and a one-page CV by November 15, 2004. Full-length manuscripts will be due in September 2005.