Making Sense of Communities of Arms

This project is an ethnographic study of the everyday deployment of firearms and their societal impact.

It examines and compares the various ways firearms produce communities, and focuses on groups that are overlooked in the field of gun studies, such as gun owners associations and hunting clubs. ARMIES hypothesises that these communities are disruptive and transformative ones that exert tremendous power.

For an accurate understanding of firearms, these communities must take centre stage.

ARMIES spearheads a new research agenda that centralises these communities of arms as material, affective, and political ones that profoundly shape everyday life.

It asks: How do firearms produce communities, how do these communities relate to one another, and what is their societal impact?

This question will be answered through a comparative and multiscalar analysis of such communities and their members in Brazil, Germany, and South Africa, and global communities, such as international disarmament organisations.

Due to the highly embodied, sensational, and affective nature of firearms, ARMIES will use a multisensorial ethnographic approach that comprises ethnographic methods that explicitly target the senses. This approach prioritises embodied experiences, perceptions, and processes of knowledge making.

The team of four researchers – the PI and three PhDs – will be steered by an ethos of team ethnography that stimulates collaboration, reflection, and ethnographic imagination. ARMIES is innovative in terms of its theoretical, methodological, and contextual approach to firearms.

It will benefit the fields of (political) anthropology, material culture studies, sensorial scholarship, and gun studies.

The high gain of this research is threefold: 1) it reconsiders existing theories of human-nonhuman interactions, 2) it creates a novel methodological approach, and 3) it will be ground-breaking science-based evidence for our public understanding of the role of firearms in our society.