Tracing the affective relationships cultivated between the Pakistani armed forces and their soldiers and families—where dead, maimed, and grieving bodies serve as conduits for drumming up national sentiment—Maria Rashid delivers a deeply felt and sharply critical indictment of Pakistani militarism. Unlike other works that have treated the macropolitics of Pakistan's long-standing military hold, Rashid locates the affective and material weight of the institution to understand how it maintains its hold.Footnote ¹ Rashid presents a highly original intervention into studies on the Pakistan Army, offering the only ethnography to foreground the soldiers and families who are folded into, and sometimes feel resistance to, the powerful militaristic scripts of sacrifice. In so doing, she carefully untangles the intertwined religious, nationalist, and masculinist narratives, and the economic drivers behind them, exposing the institution's affective machinery as a powerful technology of rule.

This well-crafted monograph opens on the elaborate rituals of National Defense Day commemorations, as Rashid weaves between the backstage celebrities and the onstage spectacle that glorifies militarism and sacrifice, finally settling with the families of the dead soldiers in the audience—setting up her own affective orientations for this important work, and getting behind the more visible tropes of honor and sacrifice. Her rich and thoughtful ethnography gets intimate with the grief and loss of the soldiers and their families at homes in the Punjabi district of Chakwal, which has served since colonial times as fertile recruitment ground for the army.

She also engages with the disciplinary regimes of officers and generals in their candid accounts of training new recruits, through to their stage-managing the emotionality of the deceased's next of kin. A young major explains the backstage preparations of grief on display from the family members of deceased soldiers for a national commemoration event: “It is a hard job because we pull at their scabs . . . We have to give the right dose . . . It is a delicate task, just the right emotion and some acting. It has to be a mix. We tell him his grief is not just his grief; his son is not just his son” (p. 38).

Rashid powerfully and persuasively demystifies the religio-nationalist narratives of martyrdom to analyze “the discourse, policies, and practices of the military that tie soldiers, their families, the nation, and the army together in a narrative that channels affect and their sensibilities” (p. 4). She fulfills this through a multisited ethnography in the homes of the grieving, national commemorations, offices of the Inter-Services Public Relations, funerals of dead soldiers, offices that manage financial compensation to families of the deceased, prosthetic hospitals that fix maimed bodies, and meetings with religious scholars employed under the watchful gaze of officers. Rashid sets up a broad context of the shifting military narratives from colonial to postcolonial contexts and unpacks the impact of 9/11, entailing its wars against fellow Muslims, which has posed significant public challenges to the military's religio-nationalist narratives of martyrdom. Despite the ambivalence of the ideological apparatus, Rashid argues, the affective, disciplinary, kinship, and economic drives of the military complex keep soldiers in compliance.

The book offers particular insight into the gendering of Pakistan's militarism, examining the disciplinary regimes of soldiers, in the creation of automatons, where emotion is rendered feminine and abject (chapter 4). Perhaps the most visceral and moving section of the book is Rashid's analysis of the military's micromanagement of grief in the funerals of dead soldiers, where white holy shrouds cover up the angry wounds of war and women's Punjabi vaeen (mourning songs) are contained by military officers—as the death of a martyr is a cause for celebration, not mourning (chapter 5). Such control of women's bodies is extended through the military's monetized compensation regimes, which commonly go to wives or mothers of the deceased, caught up in the narratives of sacrifice; this leads to a cycle of obligation and responsibility, often sparking familial feuds, which are subject to further militarized intervention in civilian space. While such payments are masked on the commemorative stage, Rashid argues, the figuring of the vulnerable woman fulfills the military's paternalistic contracts. If the families are bound by the affective bonds of military kinship, sacrifice, and economic rewards, at the same time, they frequently express grief, regret, and anger—affective excess—that stubbornly refuses compensation and pose a challenge to the military's scripts.

Dying to Serve is essential reading for anyone involved in studies of Pakistan—military, government, international, political—and a valuable contribution to the bourgeoning scholarship around martyrdom. It also promises far-reaching impact in the fields of affect, gender, anthropology, performance, media, and cultural studies. Rashid offers vast scope for further examination of the Pakistani military's affective technologies of rule— opening up a plethora of sites for study in media production, or, as she lists in her introduction, the text books, songs, literature, physical monuments and parades, and the many other slippery interfaces between civilian and military spaces in Pakistan.