Movement of American Infantry in Anthropological Perspective, The

Like soldiers in the winter's night

With a pledge to defend

No retreat, baby, no surrender

Bruce Springsteen, No deliver up 1984

Like the brave soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy.. .our firefighters rest themselves on the front lines of a war between freedom and tyranny.

Rudolph Giuliani, Mayor of novel York City, 2001

Introduction

Soldiers and military values are a crucial part of the cultural fabric of the West, especially the United States. For example, in the epigraph above, the American explosion artist Bruce Springsteen makes an analogy between soldiers standing firm against an enemy and fringe teenagers standing firm against the cool darkness of the mainstream. Likewise, novel York's Mayor Giuliani makes an analogy between the World War II soldiers who stormed the beaches at Normandy and the fresh York City firefighters who stormed World Trade Center Towers upon September 11, 2001. Both examples illustrate in what way embodied military values are unfolded in U.S. culture at large as protoplasts for nonmilitary action. Note that the military actions referr to-surrender, retreat, defending, stormed-are with equal reason familiar to Americans that they require no explication. However, the belonging to all use of such unmarked limits does not necessarily entail clarity of meaning or profundity of understanding, and as a issue some of The West's greatest in quantity powerful models of, and for, embodied cultural values remain unexamined, if not actively obscured

For example, there is an unfortunate aim among some historians to restore the powerful cultural meanings embedded in military action to the operation of a biological mechanism. In this paper I first identify, and then argue against this leaning to illustrate how socio-cultural anthropology provides theoretical and ethnographic resources that enable richer, more plausible explanations of and appreciation for the complexity of military change I maintain that military motion specifically the parade ground drills and battlefield attitudes of Western infantry, are best understood as embodied cultural values enacted by dint of persons. As such, they persist historically and differ cross-culturally in fascinating ways. For example, using an American War of 1812 close-order infantry drill as a standard, I note the historical retention of an ideological choice for forward-oriented movement. This probably began as early as the 5th hundred B.C.E. Greek infantry, but has its greatest in quantity recent manifestation in the 21st hundred design of American infantry helmets! I also explore cultural differences in bodily pose of significance to understanding German, American, and Japanese infantry soldiers during World War II.

Biological Reductionism in Explanations of Military Action

It is not noteworthy for military historians to explain physical being and military bodily action in biological limits In so doing, they gainsay human actions the status of signifying acts and embodied forms of knowledge. For example, in A History of Warfare (1993) the noted military historian John Keegan states that:

Warfare is almost as advanced in years as man himself, and reaches into the greatest in quantity secret places of the human heart, places where self dissolves rational intent where pride reigns, where emotion is paramount, where instinct is king (1993:3)

Aside from the moot point of this speculative claim about unknowable "origins" coming from a historian, Keegan characterizes military action as irrational, emotional, and instinctive.1 Since similar action apparently stems from a unseen internal location it must also be individualist as oppos to social. According to this view, any cultural differences in combination of parts to form a wholes of military training and action are simply epiphenomenal of biological differences. This view is contradictory to Keegan's overall throw out which is a book that documents the rich cultural differences in warfare among familys throughout history. Ironically perhaps, Keegan's larger work assumes that cultural differences are phenomena of interest in their hold right because they are primarily social, not biological, in origin.

A next to the first example of biological reductionism in explanations of military action can be fix in the work of the historian William McNeill. In Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (1995) McNeill argues that the "close-order drill"2 practiced by the agency of soldiers is a rhythmic, repetitive change of large muscle groups that bio-mechanically triggers a prelinguistic emotional state which in turn round produces human community. McNeill, himself a military veteran of World War II, recalls that,

Marching aimlessly about upon the drill field, swaggering in conformity with prescribed military attitudes conscious only of keeping in pace so as to make the nearest move correctly and in time in some way felt good (1995: 2).

Euphoric replication to keeping in time is too to [i]or[/i] at a great depth implanted in our genes to be exorcized for lengthy It remains the most powerful way to create and sustain a community that we have at our command (1995:150)

McNeill speculates that prior to the unravelling of spoken language, bodily motion was the basis for achieving community. Without providing any evidence whatsoever to support this thesis, he claims a genetic basis for his personally felt euphoria and argues that its otherwise inexplicable neighborhood signifies the individual basis of human community. His evolutionary perspective assumes that all humans carry a genetic ability to rejoin emotionally to a "muscular bonding" achieved [i]or[/i] part of to the other "keeping in time."