ANTH3021 DISCUSSION PREPARATION GUIDE
Name________________________________ Date___________________
Reading: Author / Title__________________________________________
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1. What was the reading about? State in one complete sentence the theme of this work.
2. How did the author get the information? How did they put together and present this information? Was there a particular structure to the work? Was it qualitative, quantitative, and/or comparative? Was it based on textual research, observation, and/or participation? Etc.
3. What did you learn from this reading? Be specific and concrete.
a.
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4. Note words that are unfamiliar or seem to be used in a special manner to create a particular impression. Define the word in the context of the phrase where you found it.
a.
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5. What questions does this selection
ing up for you? Write one or two questions that open the space for discussion about key points in the articles, gaps in the knowledge, new research questions raised. Avoid "yes/no" questions, try to open the space for people to share opinions without trying to lead them to particular conclusions.
a.
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6. (To be filled out in class during discussion)
What are some of the best ideas that you heard from other people in your discussion group?
Untitled
Chapter Three
Becoming a Man, Becoming a
Citizen
Toward the end of 1999, at a dinner gathering with friends, someone told me a
story: A friend of his—who happened to have an anthropology undergraduate
degree—had done his military service in Western Turkey, in what he called ‘‘a
iza
e unit where there were a lot of lunatics.’’ On one of his first days in the
a
acks, this young man’s commander gathered all the soldiers and asked the ones
with university degrees what they had majored in. Upon hearing that this man had
an anthropology degree, he said: ‘‘It would have been better if you were a psy-
chologist or a sociologist, but anthropology will do.’’ For the rest of his days in the
a
acks, this young anthropology graduate was ordered to operate his own office fo
consultations with soldiers who had psychological problems. His orders were to
make sure that no one hurt themselves (e.g., by cutting their arms with razors) o
committed suicide. Suicide was the commander’s major concern. He was waiting fo
a promotion and did not want anyone to kill themselves under his command. That
is why he had decided to seek the ‘‘professional’’ help of this anthropologist.
From the perspective of the anthropologist, not having to partake in the daily
chores of life in the ba
acks and to have a private office in the camp made this orde
an attractive one. Moreover, he was given a week off to go back to Istanbul and get
whatever he would need to set up a ‘‘consultation office.’’ According to the friend
who told me his story, after this one week, he went back to the camp with a few books
and some pictures to hang on the walls, excited about the prospects of spending his
military service in an office of his own. However, it did not take him long to become
disillusioned and, in fact, afraid. First of all, consulting the soldiers who came in with
all kinds of problems had proven to be much harder than he had imagined. He did
not know what to say to a man expressing a desire to kill someone just for the thrill of
it, or a man wanting to commit suicide. The problems of these men weighed heavily
on him and the constant warnings of the commander that he did not want to see any
form of self-injury or suicide added to the pressure. Moreover, everyone in the camp
started viewing him as an important person. He held the key to their refe
als to the
hospital, which would allow them to escape from the ba
acks, at least temporarily.
Soldiers, when they saw him, tried hard to convince him that they needed to go to the
hospital for this or that reason. The combined pressures of the commander and the
soldiers made his office begin to feel like a prison.
As I listened to the story of the young anthropologist/psychologist/doctor, I
eflected on my own research experience. On the one hand, I would have loved to
have been in the shoes of this young man, ‘‘being there’’ and talking to other soldiers
about their experience on military grounds. Not having access to the ba
acks has
een a major limitation of my research and, perhaps, of my analysis in this chapter.
On the other hand, I knew that it was not a coincidence that I was not in his shoes.
First, as a woman, the ba
acks are off-limits to me, a ‘‘reality’’ I seek to unravel in
this chapter. Second, my project is not about ‘‘the military’’ as an institution. We
would learn tremendously from anthropologists of the military doing ethnographic
work inside the ba
acks. Yet, ethnographies of military service and militarism need
to look into other sites in which ideas about the military are naturalized and con-
tested. This chapter will explore some of these sites in an effort to (1) examine
military service as a disciplining, nationalizing, and masculinizing citizenship
practice, (2) highlight the contradictions and silences it embodies, and (3) inquire
into the recent changes in its conceptualization and experience.1
Discipline
In 1910, British General Sir Ian Hamilton wrote of compulsory military service as
‘‘the greatest engine the world has yet seen for the manufacture of a particular type of
human intellect and body’’ (1910, 44). It was a machine that turned out:
sealed-pattern citizens by the hundred thousand; backs straightened, chests
oadened,
clean, obedient, punctual, but on the other hand, weakened in their individual
initiative. Yes, conscription is a tremendous leveler. The proud are humbled; the poor-
spirited are strengthened; the national idea is fostered; the interplay of varying ideals is
sacrificed. Good or bad, black or white, all are chucked indifferently into the mill, and
emerge therefrom, no longer black or white, but a drab, uniform khaki. (Hamilton
1910, 44)
Almost ninety years later, in 1999, a young man I interviewed in a small town nea
Istanbul, defined his view of military service in very similar terms:
[In military service] you learn all about discipline, you learn what discipline means,
how to respect someone and all that. [After you come back], even if you don’t show
espect to a civilian friend or a total stranger, you at least think about it. If you haven’t
een through military service and learned about paying respect, you simply don’t care.
At any rate, esas duruş [the main military posture] is the position that shows the highest
level of maturity in a soldier—spiritually (ruhen) and bodily. In other words, during
military service you [change] your spirit/soul and your body; you learn a lot.
Although these two utterances by Sir Hamilton and this young man I will call
Ali,2 share a particular amazement with what Michel Foucault (1979, 137) defines
‘‘the art of the human body,’’ their basic assumptions about military service are quite
different. To the extent that Sir Hamilton recognized this ‘‘great engine’’ as a recent
innovation in human and military history, which Britain might or might not con-
sider using in the near future,3 for Ali, compulsory military service was a rite of
passage to citizenship and manhood, an aspect of his ‘‘culture’’ that he took fo
62 / the myth of the military-nation
granted. He believed that the saying that ‘‘you become a man only after you have
done your military service’’ had much truth to it and that people did indeed change
as a result of having completed that service.
Ali liked the changes he recognized in himself. When I asked him: ‘‘So you are
saying that you are glad you have done your military service?,’’ his answer was
straightforward: ‘‘First of all it is an obligation that has been given to you. You have no
other choice but to do it. But you also learn a lot there.’’ I will come back to the links
etween military service, citizenship, and manhood in the later sections; for the
moment I would like to concentrate on Ali’s recognition of the changes in the soldiers’
minds and bodies and expand on the disciplinary aspect of military service, that is, its
connections to the development of the ‘‘art of the human body’’ in modern history.
I agree with Sara Helman (1997, 309) that military service ‘‘should be con-
ceptualized as an a
ay of disciplinary practices constituting the subjectivity of
participating individuals.’’ Contemporary theorizing on the body and discipline,
including Helman’s, draws heavily on Michel Foucault. In his works, Foucault
attempts a critique of the modern forms and techniques of power that work not ‘‘on’’
ut ‘‘through’’ bodies. Foucault’s discussion of ‘‘docile bodies’’ in Discipline and
Punish, starts with a description of the changes in the body of a soldier from the
seventeenth century to the eighteenth:
Let us take the ideal figure of the soldier, as it was still seen in the early seventeenth
century. To begin with, the soldier was someone who could be recognized from afar; he
ore certain signs: the natural signs of his strength and his courage, the marks, too, of
his pride; his body was the blazon of his strength and valour . . .By the eighteenth
century, the soldier has become something that can be made; out of a formless clay, an
inapt body, the machine required can be constructed; posture is gradually co
ected; a
calculated constraint runs slowly through each part of the body, mastering it, making it
pliable, ready at all times, turning silently into the automatism of habit; in short, one
has ‘‘got rid of the peasant’’ and given him ‘‘the air of the soldier’’ (ordinance of
20 March XXXXXXXXXXFoucault 1979, 135)
In Foucault’s analysis, it is through the new microphysics of power, the new art of
the body and the development of disciplines as general formulas of domination that
this change occurs. Along the lines of what he calls ‘‘relations of docility–utility’’
(137), ‘‘discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies. Discipline
increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these
same forces (in political terms of obedience)’’ (Foucault 1979, 138). What we have,
then, is a productive body that is obedient. Foucault’s discussion of discipline and the
making of docile bodies abound with references to two institutions: education and
the military. In other words, the schools and the ba
acks, for Foucault, are the main
sites where modern disciplinary techniques were developed and perfected.
In my conversations and interviews with ex-soldiers, I was given different
interpretations of discipline in the ba
acks. One recu
ent theme had to do with the
‘‘i
ational’’ character of the ‘‘military rationale.’’ According to this approach,