The Anglo-Argentine War of 1982. The Uncomfortable Self-Imposed Limits of a Conformist Anthropology

This paper analyzes how the reflexivities raised during anthropological research are shaped by the values of each historical era. This analysis can teach us social researchers to understand the ways in which academic work tends to exoticize the alterities that we wish to know, even if these exoticizations are supported by reasons of political affinity and/or humanitarian conscience. The author presents her own trajectory between 1989 and 2022 as a researcher of the armed conflict between Argentina and the United Kingdom of 1982, known as the Malvinas War (eng. Falklands), a war carried out, on the Argentine side, by officers, non-commission officers and conscript soldiers. Through a dynamic characterization of her own trajectory, she shows us the ways in which political-moral climates during the Argentine postwar have authorized academic perspectives, based on supposedly ahistorical moralities that erase the historicity of the Argentine combatants’ experience. To restore these environments to their historical dynamics, the author describes the reflexivities put into play between Argentine academics and military personnel, throughout three decades of anthropological research, crossed by global, national, and personal processes that have forced successive reworkings of a social fact unique in the entire 20th century for the Argentine Republic: its involvement as the main contender on an international battlefield; the involvement of conscript soldiers together with their Armed Forces; and the political and civil society’s support to the military initiative of a harsh military dictatorship.

Keywords:
Knowledge; Malvinas/Falklands War; Argentina; Armed Forces; Ethnography