Abstract
This paper discusses the crafting of trustworthy knowledge about war as tensioned between ideals of distance and proximity. I draw on field material assembled at the Danish Arsenal Museum in Copenhagen over the spring and summer of 2013. In an exhibition entitled The Distant War, set up in close cooperation with the Danish armed forces and with actual involvement of Afghanistan veterans, the museum immersed visitors in a three-dimensional, hands-on experience of ‘being there’ in the midst of the on-going conflict in the troubled Helmand Province, the main area of the Danish military engagement. This ‘approximated Afghanistan’ clearly appealed to visitors and involved them in ways that more conventional exhibitions often fail to do. At the same time, it relied on certain and, I argue, reconfigured renderings of authority, sidelining or even actively hiding academic (‘distanced’) expertise, instead relying on the first-hand accounts and experiences of the war witnesses themselves. Its gripping cinematic communication styles served to underpin particular knowledges and specific kinds of expertise that depend on getting ‘as close’ as possible to the ‘distant war’. The article contextualizes and scrutinizes the crafting of war knowledge in Copenhagen, including its experiential foundation. I argue that in the celebration of (particular forms of) proximity, cultural mediations such as this one may also serve to install new distances and cement a number of existing ones.
| Originalsprog | Engelsk |
|---|---|
| Tidsskrift | Critical Military Studies |
| Vol/bind | 3 |
| Nummer | 1 |
| Sider (fra-til) | 50-68 |
| Antal sider | 19 |
| ISSN | 2333-7486 |
| DOI | |
| Status | Udgivet - 2017 |