“Non-places” as a Concept of Military-Historical Anthropology

Abstract

This paper analyzes the current state of military-historical anthropology and the methodology of its development and outlines the areas for further research in this field. One of the most important problems facing military-historical anthropology today is the development of a new scientific vision. The new system of methodological principles will update the military-anthropological discourse and generate specific (military-anthropological) knowledge to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of a human as a special bio-psycho-socio-cultural phenomenon. The authors of the work believe that military-historical anthropology has the potential to overcome the limitations imposed by its “predecessor discipline”—historical anthropology and gain its own theoretical and methodological status. An important condition for achieving these goals is the integration of the modern philosophical anthropology and other philosophical disciplines into the system of military-anthropological research. Currently, there is a need for improvement of the methodology of military-historical anthropology. Having taken shape in the late 1990s as an independent branch of humanitarian knowledge, military-historical anthropology combined various aspects of military and “near-military” knowledge (corresponding sections of psychology—psychology of post-traumatic conditions, sociology, and ethnology/cultural anthropology—ethnological foundations of military culture). This integrative-synthetic stage is now completed. This paper analyzes the validity of some concepts of philosophical anthropology such as the concept of “non-places”. It also describes the features and heuristic prospects of applying this concept in the field of military-anthropological knowledge and determines the areas for further development of the methodology of military-historical anthropology.