Soldier, Structure and the Other

CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Helsingin yliopiston digitaalinen arkisto SOLDIER, STRUCTURE AND THE OTHER SOCIAL RELATIONS AND CULTURAL CATEGORISATION IN THE MEMOIRS OF FINNISH GUARDSMEN TAKING PART IN THE RUSSO- TURKISH WAR, 1877-1878 Teuvo Laitila Dissertation in Cultural Anthropology, University of Helsinki, Finland, 2001 1 ISSN 1458-3186 ISBN (nid.) 952-10-0104-6 ISBN (pdf) 952-10-105-4 Teuvo Laitila 2 ABSTRACT SOLDIER, STRUCTURE AND THE OTHER:SOCIAL RELATIONS AND CULTURAL CATEGORISATION IN THE MEMOIRS OF FINNISH GUARDSMEN TAKING PART IN THE RUSSO-TURKISH WAR, 1877-1878 Teuvo Laitila University of Helsinki, Finland I examine the influence of Finnish tradition (public memory) about the ’correct’ behaviour in war and relative to the other or not-us on the ways the Finnish guardsmen described their experiences in the Russo-Turkish war, 1877-1878. Further, I analyse how the men’s peacetime identity was transformed into a wartime military one due to their battle experiences and encounters with the other (the enemy, the Balkans and its civilian population) and how public memory both shaped this process and was reinterpreted during it. Methodologically I combine Victor Turner’s study of rituals as processes with Maurice Halbwachs’s sociologial insights about what he termed mémoire collective and what I have called public memory, and Eric Dardel’s geographical view about the meaning of space in remembering. My sources are the written recollections of the Finnish guardsmen, both volunteers and professionals. I have broken each recollection (nine together) down into themes (military ideals, views of the enemy, battle, the civilians or Bulgarians, etc.) and analysed them separately, letting every author tell his story about each thema. My conclusions suggest that the identity and public memory, which the men had internalised before the war did not as a rule essentially change. The reason is that the peacetime Finnish structure contained elements that facilitated the adoption of a wartime military identity. These may be summarised by the concept ’honour’, which became manifest in the men’s different social relations. These included loyalty to the Russian emperor, the fatherland and the Finnish Guard, hatred of the enemy and the men’s mutual relations. Briefly, ’honour’ was linked with the men’s social status and identity; and what war experiences and encounters with the other taught the guardsmen was either to firmly stick to the pre-war strategies in establishing honour-increasing relations or to develop new ones to improve one’s social status. 3 4 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS THIS STUDY examines accounts of ordinary people’s experiences in an extraordinary situation, in this case, wartime. The war studied is the Russo-Turkish one of 1877-8, and the people are the Finnish guardsmen who participated in that war as members of the Russian army (Finland being part of Russia from 1809 to 1917). Applying Victor Turner’s terminology, I see the guardsmen’s wartime experiences as a process which affected their social relations and caused these to be reinterpreted. When speaking of social relations I have in mind especially the men’s mutual relations and their attitudes towards the army institution as well as those vis-à-vis the foreign or other (the enemy, Bulgarian civilians, the Balkan space and Islam). My point of departure is that certain aspects of the men’s peacetime culture, or, more exactly, what I have termed ‘public memory’ (roughly customs, conventions, clichés and patterns of behaviour and thinking pertinent to a given institution, for example, the army), formed the context within which the guardsmen interpreted their wartime relations and actions to make them coincide with what was considered socially or culturally ‘normal’ by the army, the Russian emperor or the Finnish public at home. This approach is hardly a new one. Related work in anthropology has been carried out by Ruth Benedict, Mary Douglas, Clifford Geertz, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marshall Sahlins, Victor Turner and others. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his concept of ‘habitus’ notwithstanding, I feel that not enough has been done to take individual, superficially ‘trivial’, narratives and events and render them meaningful by seeking to understand them in relation to, and as a reflection of, an institution’s or group’s public memory. I mean that, as Turner partly showed, the concept of ‘process’ (he spoke of ritual process) covers not only short ‘sacred’ or ‘off-structure’ rituals or phases in human life (for example, marriages and funerals) but also prolonged, structurally initiated or supported series of events (such as wars, imprisonment or hospitalisation, or periods in monasteries or concentration camps) and, in fact, the whole course of a society. Prolonged periods have been studied by various scholars (for example, Michel Foucault and Tzvetan Todorov), but not so often as processes which, on the one hand, reshape one’s identity and relation to structure and, on the other, create means and strategies to cope with the whole process of human life. Saying this is tantamount to stating that wars (or periods in monasteries or hospitals, for example) are not deviations from ‘normal’ structure; nor are they merely politics continued by other means or forms of social life outside society. To apply what Turner suggested in his Ritual process (1969): for individuals, periods of war, imprisonment or illness are occasions for re-reflecting on institutional and structural values, whereas for institutions they are ways of making ‘normal’ what is usually regarded as ‘extraordinary’, ‘abnormal’ or, at best, differing from the ‘ordinary’. Accordingly, processes within or between institutions are discourses and social practices in negotiating social relations among and between individuals and institutions, and, as such, phases in the struggle for power, social position and authority. Rather than studying it as a process bearing some similarity to ritual process, those emphasising the power struggle element in war have tended to trace its historical or political development over time or its effect upon individual persons from a psychological point of view. My approach has been somewhat different. In keeping with my institutional view I have attempted to combine anthropological and historical insights in order to see some eight months in the wartime Balkans as an effort to cope with a process (that is, changes in social relations) and to understand the Finnish guardsmen’s wartime experiences by interpreting their narratives of that time as signs of their structural ethos and social position and as means of upholding, improving or changing these both. 5 Although I speak of change, my opinion is that war seldom changes military institutions or structure at large in any total manner. Rather, it dramatises and highlights certain aspects of a society’s cultural logic. Hence, depending on one’s social position, previous experiences, recollections and internalised public memory, some of one’s structural values and notions are strengthened by war whilst others are challenged or ignored. Historians of the annalist persuasion may call this long durée and social scientists perhaps social inertia. Naming notwithstanding, this is, crudely, what Turner, in my opinion, meant when he talked about ritual process: continuity and change are intertwined. Accordingly, I have tried to show how different traditions of military heroism, structural authority, Finnish patriotism and attitudes towards Russians and other ‘foreigners’ in ‘our’ society were processed in the guardsmen’s encounter with the Turkish enemy, the Bulgarian ‘brethren’ and space, and Islam. Although nothing special seemed to happen relative to these during the war, most of the men became more conscious of the existence of, and differences between, these relations and their opportunities to use them in negotiating their military and social position. Thus, what is seen as conventionalism or a strengthening of the status quo is, in fact, often an individual’s ability or strategy to make concessions in return for institutional or social acceptance or awards. The guardsmen, for example, tended to despise the Balkans, not so much because it was somehow an awful region but because this was expected by the army, the emperor and the Finnish public, which took for granted that the enemy and his territory were ‘by nature’ dreadful (just as the Finns were ‘by nature’ heroic). To take another example, though not all were professional soldiers, the men did not question the waging of war, despite the fact that fighting, particularly against Turks, or for Bulgarian liberation, was almost certainly of no special importance for them. One main reason was that participating in the war was understood to enhance the men’s social prestige, or ‘honour’ as they put it, and waging war as such was generally considered a ‘noble’ rather than a ‘mean’ act. For the same reason, the men were willing to serve the Russian emperor, whether or not they wholeheartedly supported him, because imperial loyalty was esteemed as ‘ordinary’ (and also beneficial or profitable) social behaviour. Only after the emperor refused, in the late 1890s, to grant the Finns niches of personal and social reputation in return for their formal public loyalty did they revolt. AS REGARDS the ‘life history’ of my study, the idea was ignited by the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the subsequent Balkan wars. At that time I was an assistant lecturer at the Department of Orthodoxy and East European Church Studies at the University of Helsinki. By chance, I was asked to lecture, and later to write as well, on the background of what was going on in the western Balkans. I found the theme interesting, especially because I had written my licenciate thesis (in comparative religion) on the position of the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the Ottoman empire in 1453-1571. The realisation, however, that ‘on-line history’ was far too complicated for a dissertation prompted me to turn to earlier events in the Balkans.

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