James William Gibson is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at CSU Long Beach. His books and articles are written as “cross-over” works that are theoretically sophisticated, yet accessible to diverse publics outside of academia such as military veterans and political activists. He has written about the discourses helping form military strategy and tactics, warrior mythologies, and the fundamental cultural practices in the modern American environmental movement.
The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (1986) analyzes how senior U.S. military and political elites became war managers, conceptualizing the war as a high-technology, capital-intensive production process that could not fail against an underdeveloped peasant society. But the corpus of narratives by lower-ranking soldiers and free-lance journalists in the field illuminates the contradictions in this mode of warfare that caused its failure.
Faced with this incomprehensible defeat, many men blamed “self-imposed restraints” inflicted by liberal political elites. The only hope in winning victories and restoring a pre-Vietnam social order required men to leave the military and police, and become paramilitary warriors fighting outside the system. Warrior Dreams (1994) explores this culture of pulp novels, magazines, conventions, movies and a domestic gun market increasingly dominated by combat weapons and shooting schools.
His third book, A Reenchanted World (2009), looks at how the American environmental movement has sought to reverse what Max Weber calls “the disenchantment of the world” and restore feelings of natural wonder and transcendence. The formation of symbolic kinship ties with wild animals—such as the save-the-whales movement–reimagines totemism. Efforts to save undeveloped lands and waters involve consecration of places as sacred.
Gibson has also written about disenchantment, such as the demonization of wolves in the Rockies and their delisting from Endangered Species Act protection (“Cry, Wolf, “2011) and the manufacture of deer in Texas for canned hunts (“Hornography,” 2019). He is currently working on right-wing efforts to create a new frontier era with few gun control laws and records, a country for invisible men armed with invisible guns.