'It's a Man's Life!': Soldiers, masculinity and the countryside

Abstract

This article explores the relationships between soldiers, masculinity and the countryside. It draws on a variety of published materials ranging from army recruitment literature to military autobiography. It is located primarily in conceptual frameworks suggested by feminist and rural studies literatures. Follow ing a brief discussio n of the historical contribution of the military to ideas of rurality, the relationships between soldiers, masculin ity and the country side are explored. First, the ways in which the army constru cts a particular view of the country side are discussed. This view accords the army rights of control over space, dictates a particular way of seeing rural space, and develops a quasi-environ mentalist interpretation of the impact of army activity on the landscape. Second, it is suggested that this conceptualisation of the country side contributes speci cally to the construction of particular (hegemonic) notion s of masculinity. The ideas of adventure and danger are particularly important in this respect. T hird, the role of the body of the soldier in this process is examined. The con struction of a speci c gendered identity through a process of transformation from civilian to soldier is discussed. T he article con cludes by suggesting how the body of the soldier is used to signify particular senses of place.

Seeing the way: visual sociology and the distance runner's perspective

“…Thus, police have a particular vision of the beat they patrol (Bittner 1967), airport workers see airplanes in a particular task-relevant way (Goodwin and Goodwin 1998), and infantrymen have a specific way of seeing the terrain they traverse (Woodward 1998). What is actually seen in these situations is dependent upon the knowledge which has been accumulated via previous experience of the activities themselves.…”

Running the Routes Together

“…Particular communities and groups, however, are found to view and assess landscape in distinct ways; for example, it is argued that women view public space in a certain way (Brooks Gardner 1980), as do soldiers with regard to countryside (Woodward 1998). When training, distance runners evaluate terrain on the basis of their subcultural knowledge (Hockey and Allen Collinson 2006), visually interrogating the terrain in a highly focused way in order to facilitate movement, maintain momentum, enhance performance, and importantly, to avoid injury.…”

An Anthropology of Landscape

“…This is what makes them distinctive from other parts of the British armed forces and gives them a unique identity. Woodward (1998), in a discussion of the UK military as a whole, asserts a generalized 'rural' identity for military people, as manifested in the manner in which they present themselves. This effectively ignores the particularities and effects of the different landscapes in which training takes place.…”

“…Moskos et al 2000;Sookermany 2011). Other studies have focused on ethical and moral issues, such as how states convince young people to go to war (Sasson-Levy 2007), issues of gender and sexuality and the construction of masculinities and their consequences: how values and norms of masculinity are structured by military training in models of military socialization, and how they in turn play their part in shaping discourses of masculinity in society as a whole (Barrett 1996;Morgan 1994;Newsinger 1997;Woodward 1998). Other studies have considered the social and psychological effects of particular military training programmes (Lande 2007;Cohen 2011;Samimian-Darash 2012) involving rites of passage and group bonding (Winslow 1999).…”