Decoding a Royal Marine Commando by Mark Burchell

Decoding a Royal Marine Commando by Mark Burchell

With a heritage dating back to the mid-seventeenth century, the Royal Marines have accrued a rich history of rituals, artefacts and material culture that is consciously deployed in order to define and shape the institution both historically and going forward into an uncertain future. Drawing upon this heritage, Mark Burchell offers a unique method of understanding how the Royal Marines draw upon this material culture in order to help transform ordinary labour power to political agency comprising acts of controlled and sustained violence. He demonstrates how a barrage of objects and items - including uniforms, weapons, landscapes, architecture, personal kit, drills, rituals, and iconography - are deployed in order successfully to integrate the recruits into the Royal Marines' culture. It is argued that this material culture is a vital tool with which to imprint the military's own image on new recruits as they embark on a process of de-individualisation. Having been granted unprecedented access to the Commando Training Centre at Lympstone as an anthropologist, Burchell observed an intake of recruits throughout their demanding and exhausting year-long training programme. The resulting book presents to the academic community for the first time, a theorised in-depth account of a relatively unexplored social community and how its material culture creates and reifies new military identities. This path-breaking interdisciplinary analysis provides fresh understanding of the multiple processes of military enculturation through a meticulous revision of the relationships that exist between disciplinary and punishment practices; violence and masculinity; narratives and personhood; and will explore how these issues are understood by recruits through their practical application of body to physical labour, and by the cues of their surrounding material culture.

Mark A Burchell is a former Royal Marine Commando who received his PhD at the University of Bristol. He is appointed as professional anthropologist at Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (MOD), Porton Down, UK.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780367585334
ISBN 10	0367585332
Titel	Decoding a Royal Marine Commando
Autor	Mark Burchell
Serie	Material Culture And Modern Conflict
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Paperback
Verlag	Taylor & Francis Ltd
Erscheinungsjahr	2020-06-30
Seitenanzahl	148
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.
Hinweis	Nicht verfügbar