The New Republic posted a lovely little piece recently on “The Food of the Iraq War”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060710&s=diarist071006 which includes folk beliefs of soldiers like the fact that Country Captain Chicken can ‘make you gay’ and Charms candies bring disaster when consumed. So much for the Iron Cage of Rationality. At any rate it’s a great teaching piece to use in class and I like it because of the way it hearkens back to the anecdotal bits written by American anthropologists after WWII based on their experience serving in the military, such as Ralph Linton’s “Totemism and the A.E.F.”:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7294%28192404%2F06%292%3A26%3A2%3C296%3ATATAEF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H and George Homans’s “The Small Warship”:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-1224%28194606%2911%3A3%3C294%3ATSW%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A Sort of like “Baseball Magic”:http://www.dushkin.com/olc/genarticle.mhtml?article=27128 but with guns.

Of course today the ethnography of the military is an enormous field, ranging from “Homefront”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807055093/sr=8-1/qid=1152904409/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-7676725-6471050?ie=UTF8 to “Mastering Soldiers”:http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=Ben-AriMastering, but Country Captain Chicken making you gay really took me back.