Senior Research Seminar with Professor Janet McIntosh (Brandeis University)

The ancient practice of writing inscriptions on weapons has taken on new life in recent years, as social media has enabled countless civilians around the world to commission bespoke inscriptions on shells fired by Ukraine, Russia, and Israel. The practice of writing on these weapons, which I call “bomb mail,” has widespread allure and is, in the words of one practitioner, “kind of like casting a spell.” In this paper, I approach the question of why bomb mail has been so compelling by focusing on some of its uncanny and quasi-magical affordances. First, bomb mail fuses persons and munitions, allowing shells to serve as proxy animators for human voices while augmenting the bomb mail commissioner’s sense of agency and potency through a newly distributed personhood. Second, bomb mail enacts a peculiar relationship between language and violence, contributing to the practice’s spell-casting power: violence becomes a vehicle for amplifying verbal meaning, while the words’ meanings are inseparable from the violence that carries them. Third, bomb mail gives rise to an uncanny enemy other, a target framed through an uneasy simultaneity of humanizing and dehumanizing stances. Working in tandem, these three qualities make bomb mail particularly compelling, enticing civilians around the world to engage in not only kinetic destruction but also a form of semiotic perpetration.

Janet McIntosh is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Her ethnographies have received the Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion (2010), an Honorable Mention for the American Ethnological Society’s Senior Book Prize (2018), and an Honorable Mention for the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing (2017). She is the co-editor of Language in the Trump Era (Cambridge University Press, 2020, with Norma Mendoza-Denton) and is most recently the author of Kill Talk: Language and Military Necropolitics (Oxford University Press, 2025).