Even if he knows that “ethnography comes with a price,” the author is well aware of his own privileges as an academic: the lives he’s writing about are precarious and desperate to the utmost degree, while he gets to return to the “ivory tower of academia.”

Many passages will stick with me, but this one where the author wonders if he has gone too far, if ethnographic fieldwork is taking a toll on him, is haunting

@jasondeleon.bsky.social Jason de León’s “Soldiers and Kings” is so relentless I could hardly breathe while reading it

“The earth is not just a rock. In fact, a rock is not just a rock” - Thomas Nail

Photo: rock formations from the Cretaceous period in Purmamarca, Argentina