Material Cultures of Childhood in Second World War Britain

Material Cultures of Childhood in Second World War Britain How do children cope when their world is transformed by war? This book draws on memory narratives to construct an historical anthropology of childhood in Second World Britain, focusing on objects and spaces such as gas masks, air raid shelters and bombed-out buildings. In their struggles to cope with the fears and upheavals of wartime, with families divided and familiar landscapes lost or transformed, children reimagined and reshaped these material traces of conflict into toys, treasures and playgrounds. This study of the material worlds of wartime childhood offers a unique viewpoint into an extraordinary period in history with powerful resonances across global conflicts into the present day. Gabriel Moshenska is Associate Professor in Public Archaeology at University College London, UK. Material Culture and Modern Conflict Series editors: Nicholas J. Saunders, University of Bristol, Paul Cornish, Imperial War Museum, London Modern warfare is a unique cultural phenomenon. While many conflicts in history have produced dramatic shifts in human behaviour, the industrialized nature of modern war possesses a material and psychological intensity that embodies the extremes of our behaviours, from the total economic mobiliza- tion of a nation state to the unbearable pain of individual loss. Fundamen- tally, war is the transformation of matter through the agency of destruction, and the character of modern technological warfare is such that it simulta- neously creates and destroys more than any previous kind of conflict. The material culture of modern wars can be small (a bullet, machine-gun or gas mask), intermediate (a tank, aeroplane, or war memorial), and large (a battleship, a museum, or an entire contested landscape). All share one defin- ing feature – they are artefacts, the product of human activity rather than natural processes. In this sense, for example, the First World War’s Western Front is as much a cultural artefact as a Second World War V2 rocket, a cold war early-warning radar station, wartime factories and bombed buildings, as are photographs, diaries, films, war souvenirs, and a host of conflict-related art forms. Similarly artefactual, though not always understood as such, are people – the war-maimed (sometimes fitted with prostheses), war refugees and their camps, collectors of memorabilia, and the post-conflict ‘presence of absence’ in towns and cities of large numbers of missing men, women and children. Each in their own way – through objects, memories, attitudes and actions – perpetuate different engagements with conflict and its painful and enduring aftermath. The material culture of conflict offers a field of study which is both rich and fiercely relevant to the world which we inhabit. Wars and other forms of conflict have formed that world. Today we still live in the shadow of two world wars which set new standards for extremes of violence, and violent conflicts remain in progress across the globe as this series of books is inau- gurated. These events have created a truly massive volume of material culture. The ways in which people engage with it is conditioned by society’s equivocal attitude to violent conflict itself. As John Keegan wrote, ‘We are cultural animals and it is the richness of our culture which allows us to accept our undoubted potentiality for violence but to believe nevertheless that its expression is a cultural aberration’ (Keegan, A History of Warfare 1994). Keegan himself knew that the reality was not so clear cut as this reassuring vision. The relationships which people have with the material culture created in a context of violence add weight to this assessment, for they are simulta- neously capable of supporting or undermining the perception of warfare as an aberration or exception. Now as never before, we perceive unfamiliar but underlying truths in the way in which these artefacts reveal infinitely varied interactions with people: a ‘social life’ created by human engagement with objects. Although over- whelmingly inanimate, they are not merely passive signifiers, reifications or receptors of ‘meaning’, but can exercise positive agency in forming and embodying human thoughts and emotions. In short, objects make people as much as people make objects. The behaviours provoked by conflict illustrate how an individual's social being is determined by their relationship to the objects that represent them – how objects are a way of knowing oneself through things both present and absent. This is as true for First World War battlefield pilgrims (often widows), survivors of the Holocaust, and Second World War civilian internees and prisoners of war, as it is for uniformed ser- vice personnel who took part in both world wars, the Vietnam War, the Sar- ajevo militia of the Bosnian Conflict, and the war-maimed from Afghanistan and Iraq to name just a few. A further incentive to focus on this subject lies in developments in the academic world. For decades, anthropologists and historians have devoted increas- ing amounts of effort to the study of conflict. Until recently their studies have followed discrete paths, but change has been afoot since the closing years of the last century. A slow-burning revolution in academic engagement with warfare (not to say a ‘rebranding’) relocated historians of conflict from the unfashionable suburb of ‘military history’ to uptown locales like ‘war studies’ and ‘First World War studies’. Everyone now accepts that what we call ‘peace’ cannot be understood without knowing what happens in wars, any more than wars can be com- prehended in isolation. Furthermore, ground-breaking work began to appear in which historians addressed wars from the perspective of their material and cultural milieus or manifestations. Parallel advances have been occurring in the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology. The re-appraisal of materiality has been at the forefront of these developments. The ways in which we view and think about the things we make, their complex volatility, and their elusive meanings have been brought under academic scrutiny. The transformative quality of the material culture of modern conflict, and its ability to move across disciplinary boundaries, demands a robust interdisciplinaryresponse.Focusedonmaterialculture,suchanapproachoffers to revitalize investigations into the physical and symbolic worlds that conflict creates, and that defines us as subjects through memory, imagination, and technology. Since the turn of the millennium the editors of this series have taken a lead in focusing the gaze of both disciplines on the material culture of conflict. More- over, they have opened the discussion out to practitioners of the widest possible range of disciplines and vocations, including historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, museum curators and artists. For this growing international group of collaborators, the material culture of conflict represents the nodal point at which their disciplines can meet and cross over. This series of books seeks to build on this foundation and to offer a platform for those wishing to publish new research on the subject. The series adopts a genuinely interdisciplinary approach to re-appraise the material legacy of twentieth and twenty-first century conflict around the world. By conceiving and studying the material culture of conflict, it helps to construct biographies of objects, and explore their ‘social lives’ through the changing values and attitudes attached to them over time. The series aims to show how objects can survive as expressions of ‘war beyond conflict’, revitalizing meanings and creating new engagements between and understandings of people and ‘war things’.Itoffers new perspectives on the intricate web of connections that bind and separate people and places in times of conflict and beyond. In so doing, the series offers a radical departure in the study of modern conflict – proving a truly interdisciplinary forum that draws upon, but does not privilege archaeology, anthropology, military and cultural history, art history, cultural geography, and museum and heritage studies. The complexity of modern conflict demands a coherent, integrated, and sensitized hybrid approach which calls on different disciplines where they overlap in a shared common terrain – that of the materiality of conflict and its aftermath. This approach has extraordinary potential to bring together the diverse interests and expertise of a host of disciplines to create a new intellectual engagement with the understanding of conflict. Material Cultures of Childhood in Second World War Britain Gabriel Moshenska First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Gabriel Moshenska The right of Gabriel Moshenska to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Moshenska,

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