An anthropology of US gun culture: The productive tension between ideology and embodiment

This article will argue that guns carry material and symbolic meanings that together act as markers of identity for both individuals and a collective American culture. Guns are powerful sensory objects that allow an embodied, physical participation in abstract ideologies and particular conceptions of history. This lends the weight of the past to contemporary formulations of American identity and to what it meansto be part of a ‘gun culture’. Building on anthropological literature on embodiment, this analysis will focus on the tension between the reified gun, as contained within cultural institutions such as the Constitution, and the subjective, perceptual experience of shooting. These two factors form a self-fulfilling prophecy that perpetuates and renegotiates the central importance of the gun to American society.