Military trophy-hunting as an interstitial practice
Introduction
At least since the establishment of professional standing armies in the
seventeenth century, it has been deviant under the prevailing social and religious
norms of Western societies for soldiers to mutilate or desecrate the dead bodies
of the enemy. When international humanitarian law began to develop in the
second half of the nineteenth century, it prohibited ill-treatment of the remains of
the enemy dead. Military authorities tend to view this type of misconduct among
their personnel as counterproductive in almost all circumstances, compromising
the war effort and putting their own side at risk of reprisals. So, for example, it
would seem malicious and reprehensible to most people, including military
personnel themselves, to collect and keep the body parts of enemies, as some
indigenous societies practiced in the form of scalping or headhunting. Together
with other stereotypically primitive practices such as cannibalism and human
sacrifice, such trophy-taking has long been part of the stock Western image of
savagery.
Nevertheless, this sort of aberrant collecting behaviour seems to have occurred
occasionally over the past century or so in European and North American armed
forces, under certain circumstances which I want to try to identify
Bambata head: Photograph published in 1925 in the magazine of the S.African police.
According to the photo's caption, it is the skull of a Zulu chief called Bambata, who was
killed leading the last Zulu rebellion against the British in 1906. After his death, someone
(either in the S.African army or with connections to it) somehow obtained his skull and had
mounted it on a plaque, as if it were a hunting trophy. Note the small nameplate just below
the skull. This is common on hunting trophies, and would typically give the date and place
of the animal's death, the name of the species, perhaps the name of the hunter who killed
it. Note the damage around the orbit of the left eye; Bambata was shot in the back of the
head, with the bullet exiting through his left eye, so this trophy object seems intended to
commemorate more than just Bambata's death but the manner of his death.
Gallipoli head: this is a mummified head brought back from WWI by an Australian soldier.
The head still has skin and some hair, and also an entry and exit wound from a bullet. It
had been kept in a pine box lined with red velvet, suggesting perhaps a miniature cofiin.
The box, with the head inside, was handed in to a police station near Melbourne in 2002 by
a member of the public who no longer wanted it in his family. After an investigation the
authorities concluded that the head had mummified naturally and was most likely the head
of a Turkish/Ottoman soldier from the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, who had been shot with
a 303 calibre bullet, the standard ammunition used by British Empire forces. It was handed
over in an official ceremony to the Turkish government, who had it buried at Gallipoli with
military honours later in 2002. [May seem abnormal but is consistent with WWI Australian troop
behaviour: they were encourage to collect things (AWM website); other examples of collecting skulls
etc. while in Egypt. See also Kapferer on the myth of mutual respect between the Turks and Anzacs
at Gallipoli]
The Papas skull. This skull was discovered in 2003 by the police in a city in Colorado, who
found it by chance when raiding a house for drugs. The householders told the police it was
a family heirloom passed down from their greatgrandfather, a man called Julius Papas,
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who had been a sergeant in the Marine Corps in the Pacific in the Second World War.
Papas had brought it home with him from the war, and had told his family it was the skull of
a Japanese soldier he had killed during the battle of Guadalcanal (Solomon Islands) in
1942. The US authorities took the view that a human skull was not a lawful family heirloom,
and they returned it to the Japanese government, despite the family's protests.
[Side view]. The lower jaw has been attached in place by some sort of pin or wire staple.
The skull has also been varnished or lacqured at some stage. Papas had kept the skull on
view on a shelf in his living room until his death in 1960. When the police discovered it, it
was being kept in the small wooden trunk, with a brass nameplate carrying a skull
decoration, in which Papas had brought it back from the Pacific.
If we look at the graffiti on the skull, seem to be four basic elements. The skull is inscribed
with a place and date (Guadalcanal SI, 11 November 1942); an ironic motto (This is a good
Jap); the name Oscar, which seems to be some kind of nickname or pet name given to the
skull itself; and the name J.Papas, and many autographs, signatures of about thirty other
servicemen up to the rank of LtCol. [Same elements as on a hunting trophy. The signing of their
names and ranks is significant because it shows we are looking at evidence of social or group
behaviour, not the behaviour of a single disturbed or pathological individual acting in isolation, [but a
group, perhaps some of the members of a military unit such a company or platoon]].
The Sledzik skull. Move forward in time thirty years to the Vietnam War. This is one of a
collection of six similar skulls at the AFIP in Washington (crania actually). All six were
confiscated in the early 1970s by US military authorities from Am servicemen in Vietnam
during the VietWar, who were trying to take them home with them, or send them home.
The forensic analysis of these skulls indicated that they are all the skulls of Asian men of
military age (though one of the six is possibly female).This particular skull was confiscated
in the autumn of 1971 from a soldier in Vietnam who was trying to mail it home. It may not
look like it at first glance, but it actually has the same four decorative elements as the
earlier skull from WWII. Has name 'Big Art' on forehead. Above that, 'Chucky'. It's possible
that these are nicknames given to the skull. Chucky was one of the US military slang terms
for the VietCong, VC, Victor Charlie, Charlie or Chuck. So it is possible it is the skull of a
member of the VietCong, and was therefore given the nickname Chucky.
Over the eye sockets are the words (though you can't easily read them): 'Chu Lai trip skull'.
I.e. skull collected on the trip to Chu Lai, a large US military base.
[From above]: 'My prayer deck'. I.e. this is what I pray on, this is my talisman, my religious
icon, my good luck charm. A date: 1971. And names, Frank, John, Pat, Prince. [Again, we
are dealing with social/group behaviour. What we have to assume is that a group of servicemen,
members of some relatively small, low level military unit, a platoon or section of a platoon, acquired
this skull on a journey to Chu Lai in 1971, and some of them decorated the skull with their names and
other graffiti to commemorate this event. Later, one of the men tried to send the skull home at the
end of his tour of duty.]
The Seaforth Highlanders skull. Part of a display in a regimental museum in Scotland.
This regiment served in the Malaya Emergency of the 1950s and 60s, when the British
fought a counter-insurgency war against a guerilla organisation called the Communist Party
of Malaya (CPM). The skull was brought back to Scotland as a souvenir of that campaign,
along with many other captured objects such as CPM flags, which are also on display in
the museum. The skull is heavily stained, suggesting that it had been exposed to the
elements for a long time. According to the display caption the skull was 'found' in an old
CPM camp. Most likely it is the remains of a CPM member who had died there. Perhaps a
British servicemen took it from a shallow grave or found it lying on the surface. The CPM
guerillas wore a communist red star badge on their caps. Someone, perhaps the
serviceman who took the skull, incised a red star into the bone just where the badge would
be, presumably to signify that this was the skull of a CPM fighter. [Reflects the assumption
that museums are places in which skulls, even those of dubious origin, can be displayed acceptably
and legitimately. ]
2
A common feature of many of these objects is that they have undergone some
sort of defacement, or what one might call aggressive modification at or after the
time of death. For example, some show obvious injuries; some carry mocking
inscriptions or graffiti. Besides signs of violence or aggression, they may also
show signs of care and preservation, such as attempts to conserve or curate
them; labels; special storage boxes or mounts for displaying them; all suggesting
that such objects can have a long-lasting value to their possessors.
Skulls and heads are far from the commonest human body parts taken as war
trophies by twentieth century military personnel. [The most common are probably ears and
fingers. They are usually true kill trophies, meant as evidence of killing. These seem usually to be kept only
for a short time, long enough to be shown as proof, and then discarded]. But I want to focus on
them because they seem to be the only human trophy objects originating in
twentieth century warfare that have outlived the wars in which they originated,
and survived to come to public or official notice, and enter the forensic record [and
are able to be analysed as objects]. Some have survived long enough to have acquired
complex post-war histories, serving at various times as gifts, family heirlooms,
museum objects, and tokens of international diplomacy (e.g. Mkwawa). [and
controversies over their ownership and repatriation]
This sort of collecting behaviour raises a number of questions:
1. The first question, perhaps, concerns the motives for such acts, and the
meaning of these objects for the servicemen who acquire them.
2. Secondly, the apparent persistence of practices so exceptionally transgressive
in the military raises the question of how they have been reproduced across time
and space.
3. A final question I want to consider is whether they can be usefully compared
anthropologically with the trophy-hunting, or 'headhunting', practices of
indigenous peoples such as the Maori or Iban.
To the extent to which this type of misconduct has been studied, or even
acknowledged as occurring, it has generally been assumed to be a type of
deviance, or perhaps even evidence of a psychological disorder, brought about
by the stresses of battle. [Also other sorts of serious misconduct, such as torture or the killing of
prisoners; these probably occur with about the same frequency] When these stresses are
prolonged and intense they can lead individuals to make abnormal choices, or to
engage in acts which appear unusual in peacetime. Servicemen who refer to
such behaviour in their memoirs (e.g. Sledge) often account for it in this way in
retrospect, explaining it ‘away’ as a regrettable aberration due to the extreme
psychological pressures of warfare.
There are, however, some problems with this type of explanation:
1. Firstly, let us take the servicemen's names or signatures on some of the skulls.
Papas=30; Sledzik=>4. Clearly, we are dealing with evidence of social behaviour,
carried out by a group or in a group context, and not with the behaviour of a
single, disordered individual acting in isolation. In all the cases I've come across,
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of trophy-hunting among military personnel, it is almost never carried out by
individuals, but by small groups. A more recent example:
[[The Bild photos]] In October 2006, the German newspaper Bild published a number
photographs which German soldiers in the NATO peacekeeping force in Afghanistan had
taken of themselves in 2003. They had come across what seems to have been an old
burial ground, where human skulls and other bones were lying on the surface. The soldiers
picked up the bones and took photos of themselves posing with them. In one photo, a
soldier had exposed his penis and was mimicing oral sex with one of the skulls. In another,
shown here, the soldiers mounted one of the skulls on the top of some sort of winch (lifting
arm or towing arm) on the front of their vehicle. The newspaper has blacked out the
soldiers' faces to protect their anonymity. [The publication of the photos caused a major scandal
in Germany, because it raised all sorts of historical sensitivities about the Germany army, and led to
the servicemen being suspended and eventually (I think) dismissed from the army.]
This case illustrates a number of points. Firstly, the taking and using of human remains
tend to occur in a group context, and is often unplanned, happening when a group of
soldiers come across some human remains by chance. These particular soldiers don't
seem to have kept the skulls; after taking the photos they discarded them. But soldiers who
have brought these sorts of objects home have often told their family and friends that they
are remains of people they have killed. But very few such objects seem really to be kill
trophies in this sense. The remains are often old, not necessarily even the remains of the
enemy, and as this case illustrates, the way they are obtained tends to be much more like
grave-robbing than headhunting. [Lastly: this case illustrates what seems to be actually one of the
most common uses of skulls by military personnel in the field: which is their use as ornaments or
mascots on military vehicles by the vehicles' crews. ]
2. Another indication that we are not dealing simply with a stress-related disorder
is that this sort of behaviour only seems to happen in certain kinds of armed
conflicts, and not necessary the most stressful ones. E.g. among Allied
servicemen in WW2 it occurred in the Pacific War:
[[US Army personnel with skulls on sticks]] Group of American servicemen returning
from a ‘souvenir-hunting’ trip to the scene of a battle. They have collected not just
Japanese rifles, helmets, some of them seem to be wearing Japanese army caps; but
they’ve also collected the skulls of Japanese soldiers from the battlefield as well. Either for
their own use as souvenirs, or to barter or sell to other servicemen. To these men, there
doesn’t seem to have been an essential difference between Japanese soldier’s weapons or
helmets, and their bodily remains. In the war in Europe, many Allied soldiers sought
trophies or souvenirs in the form of enemy helmets, weapons, etc. But what made the
Pacific War different was the tendency to extend these ‘normal’ souvenir-hunting practices
to the collection of body-parts. This simply didn't happen in the war in Europe. [The Korean
War: 'race' less emphasised than political ideology ('Communism') in the definition of the Chinese
enemy].
More recently, it has happened among NATO personnel in Afghanistan, but there
are no reports of similar occurrances in the NATO intervention in, for example,
Kosovo. These sorts of misconduct seem to occcur among servicemen not in
conflict situations in which they experience unusual stress, but in those that they
racialise, where they perceive the enemy as different racially from themselves. It
is a manifestation of racism. Almost all of the trophy-skulls that I know of,
collected over the past century and half by European and American military
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personnel, are either Asian or African (also Native American, and Australian
Aborigine).
3. In the West, these practices of military trophy-taking (specifically, the collection
and use of skulls and heads) have a definite history. They emerge in their
modern form in the early 19th century (before that, one has to go back to the
Middle Ages). And they coincide with the emergence of a scientific interest in
human heads or skulls, and in their systematic collection, particularly as evidence
of racial differences. They first appear at a time when significant human
differences – between the deviant and normal, the criminal and the law-abiding,
and between races - were understood to be expressed above all in the skull, in
variations in its shape [, proportions] and supposed degree of development. The
collection of enemy skulls in military contexts is actually connected with the early
history of psychology and anthropology, and has the same historical roots as
contemporary ideas of race.
[4. Does not happen in all cultures that make war, but only in those where men hunt.
5. Happens mostly among rear-echelon, noncombat personnel (hence most are not kill trophies).]
In other words, we are dealing with more than an abnormality of individual
servicemen, a pathological reaction to combat stress, but with organized social
and cultural practices, whose history is connected with the growth of science,
and scientific naturalism and rationality since the Enlightenment. [The notion,
originating in late eighteenth century science, that the locus of human 'racial' differences was the head or
skull became absorbed into folk consciousness]. Although this misconduct is rare, it is, in an
important respect, systematic and even predictable: over the past century and a
half, Western military personnel who have perpetrated such abuses have done
only in armed conflicts which they racialised, and against members of other
‘races’.
Interactional schemas and domains
The problem then is to discover the connections between these military trophytaking practices on the one hand, and ideologies of race on the other. I will argue
that the behaviour is an example of what I shall call an interstitial practice. These
can be described as transgressive practices that develop at the boundaries of
domains of social interaction. Let me explain. I’m assuming here that social life
appears, from the point of view of actors, to consist of recurring situations or
contexts which have their own (in many respects distinctive) codes of behaviour.
So, for example, different patterns of behaviour apply in church, on the sports
field, at the family breakfast table, and so forth. Social actors use these patterns,
sometimes called scripts, or schemas, to recognise, understand and predict
social behaviour in a given scenario, and also to generate it. Typically, schemas
are organised hierarchically and contain other, lower-level schemas, together
with rules regarding the circumstances under which they can be appropriately
activated.
[So, to use a well-known example, it is normal and appropriate to pay for one’s meal in a restaurant, but it
would be inappropriate to try to do so as a guest in someone’s home (Shank and Abelson’s 1977 ‘restaurant
schema’; also in Lakoff, Women, fire and dangerous things).]
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[As ways of generating social behaviour, they are similar to habitus. My difference with Bourdieu: to him, the
habituses that generate practice are group-specific, they belong to collectivities such as social classes, they
are something which people carry around inside their heads, with members of the same social class carrying
around the same or very similar habituses. To me they are domain-specific rather than group-specific; a
person carries around not just a single habitus, but rather a sort of portfolio, an organised repertoire, of
these more specialized generative schemas in his or her head, and switches between them according to
context. Much as a speaker might shift between different registers of his or her language according to the
social setting.]
What I mean by an interstitial practice, then, is a transgressive practice that
arises at the margins, or intersections, of two or more contexts of social action,
when an interactional script belonging to one of these settings is applied, or
rather misapplied, in another neighbouring setting. That is, a schema whose use
is normal and acceptable in one domain is transposed into another where it is not
normal.
[So, one example of an interstitial practice would be the illicit hazing and initiation rituals which can occur in
some occupational groups [such as the military or medical profession] as informal ways of inducting new
members. These practices seem to smuggle into the workplace models borrowed from the world of cults,
sects or secret societies. Occuring in one setting, they are informed or motivated by schemas belonging to
another.]
One characteristic of such practices is a degree of social invisibility. It is not only
that the participants tend to try to keep these activities covert. But more than this,
there may also be official or public resistance to acknowledging their very
occurrence. As we will see, even when they do come to public attention they tend
to be rapidly erased from public consciousness. They represent ideologically
undercognised regions of social behaviour, the dark interstices of institutional
domains. [‘muted’ (Ardner)]
[The extension or creative borrowing of schemas across contexts is probably very common and in many
cases is viewed positively: e.g. 1960s Pop Art, which introduced into fine art schemata from the domain of
commercial advertising and American popular culture. Soon, Pop Art no longer seemed shocking or novel,
and became another mainstream art movement with its own conventions and traditions, which could be
taught and learned. I.e. a schema can be imported from one context into another and, as it were, become
domesticated there. But one factor which tends to limit or impede the transfer across contexts are cultural
taboos. ]
This is because interstitial practices conflate different social contexts in ways
which appear to threaten their boundaries, boundaries which may rest on the
most basic categorical distinctions: for example, between human beings and
animals, or between persons and things.
[Let us take slavery, for example, which of course does not exist officially in modern Europe. It violates
basic assumptions of a categorical distinction between human beings and property. But practices
describable as informal or de facto slavery certainly do occur, involving forced labour, debt bondage and
trading in domestic and sexual labour. Slavery arguably exists, then, in contemporary Europe, in the sense
of the treatment of people as property or merchandise (see Craig et al, Contemporary Slavery in the UK;
Ruggiero, Trafficking in human beings: slaves in contemporary Europe). But it exists only - to borrow an
expression of Louis Dumont - as a fact of behaviour and not as a fact of values. It occurs neither in a
culturally accepted domain of human social relations, nor in the normal sphere of human relations with
objects or things, but in a sort of shadowy region overlapping and confounding the two. ]
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[Other examples: political nepotism (which inhabits a region/exploit the threshold between public and private
life), child sexual abuse. Many have developed on the fringes of medicine, particularly where this connects
with the market (e.g. illegal markets in organs, body parts). The practice of boiling heads to obtain skulls for
display, acceptable in hunting and the Victorian medical profession, being borrowed by soldiers in armed
conflicts.]
I suggest that this is the case with military trophy-taking, which, I argue, is an
interstitial practice occurring on the margins of soldiering and certain other
domains, principally hunting. It disturbs us because it confounds (in fact
intentionally confounds) an inviolable distinction between animals and humans.
[[Marines on Guadalcanal boiling a head]]. Photograph taken during the battle of
Guadalcanal (1942/3). What's happened is that some Marines have come across the body
of a Japanese soldier, and removed the head, and are boiling it in order to remove the
flesh and obtain the skull as a trophy. Much of the difficulty of this image has to do with
classifying it: it is difficult to know whether one is looking at a scene of war or battle, or a
scene of hunting here. Two soldiers are doing something unpleasant with an enemy body;
but if they were boiling the head of a deer in the woods back home, this could be an
entirely normal hunting scene. What is happening in this photograph is an event which
belongs to a forbidden region on the boundary between the domain of warfare and the
domain of hunting. Or rather, the Marines are acting to open up such a region, and create
it. Within this transgressive micro-world, the dividing line between the human and animal
has been shifted so as to exclude the Japanese soldier from the category of the human:
the men in this photograph are using the idea of a species boundary, as it is manifested in
the activity of hunting, as a model for a social or political boundary, a boundary between
human groups. [Such scenes did not occur, and I think could not have occurred, among Allied
servicemen in Europe in WWII. Here too, combat was sometimes spoken of as a sort of hunting
activity. Perhaps hunting has often offered soldiers a familiar cognitive schema with which to cope
with the unfamiliar, chaotic and abnormal experiences of battle. But if so, in the European theatre of
WWII conceptions of ‘trophy hunting’ were acted upon only to the extent of seeking relatively
orthodox and acceptable war souvenirs such as enemy helmets or bayonets.] There are no trophy
photographs of Allied servicemen boiling the heads of German or Italian soldiers to use
their skulls as war mementos, because these enemies were acknowledged as human, and
there was no collective will to portray them as anything other than people (albeit misguided
and dangerous ones).
Metaphoric and metonymic adjacencies
Interstitial practices emerge, then, when schemas proper to certain social
contexts are employed in other contexts. They are a type of transgressive
behaviour which is not so much abnormal per se, but rather arises from the
application of a behavioural script perhaps quite normal in one setting to another,
unorthodox setting.
I said that these misapplied schemas are typifications of social interaction,
mental models with which to interpret and generate social behaviour. It follows
that the opening up of these transgressive regions of behaviour is an inherently
social or group enterprise. Typically, it seems to occur in small, cohesive face-toface groups within some larger, and perhaps more impersonal, collectivity (e.g. in
the military, a platoon, or section of a platoon). Again, then, we are dealing with
deviant or transgressive activities not of individuals, but of small primary social
groups.
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I want now to turn to the circumstances that make the tranfer of behavioural
schemas across contexts particularly likely to occur, or to occur particularly
readily.
1. One is when the same personnel play roles in two or more different settings.
[Let us take, for example, the case of bureaucrats, who must act in both the personal and the public sphere
while maintaining a strict boundary between the two, ‘code-switching’ between the ethical standards of
private life and of public life according to the context. To allow the standards of one sphere to influence his
actions in the other – as when a public official promotes the careers or business interests of his own friends
and kin – is, of course, deemed to be corruption.]
For example, at the time of the Pacific War a quarter of American men, and a
probably similar proportion of Australian men, were recreational hunters. They
would doubtless have found that many of the aptitudes, dispositions and patterns
of cooperative behaviour which they had acquired in the familiar context of
hunting back home (including practical skills such as knowing how to prepare
animal trophy heads or skulls) could readily be extended to the novel context of
war, even though this could lead to atrocities. In the case of military trophyhunting, then, I would suggest that such behaviour is particularly likely to occur
among soldiers who are also hunters, or who come from backgrounds in which
hunting is an important element in adult male identity.
[1a. Their personnel closely collaborate; the domains are connected functionally or instrumentally. E.g.
Victorian soldiers help doctors in collecting indigenous remains.
1b. When two contexts are alike in their objective conditions. E.g. jungle warfare is most like hunting (use of
trackers, dogs, etc.). The language of the Mau Mau war replete with hunting terminology: following 'spoor',
tracking the enemy to his 'lair'. Hence Vietnam and Pacific War were particularly amenable to being
imagined in the language of hunting, but less so the Korean War, which was fought more conventionally. ]
2. Another situation which tends to make it possible for schemas to cross
domains readily is when the domains are connected by powerful cultural
metaphors. [The market a rich source of metaphor in Western culture for many other aspects of social
life: mate-selection, health care. ]
In Western societies since at least the Middle Ages, and in many other cultures,
hunting has provided a metaphor for war. War is understood as a blood sport.
The metaphor is probably a strongly intrinsically motivated one, and may even
have an evolutionary basis. Theodore Roosevelt on the soldier and hunter.
Trophy collecting by pilots, and souvenir collecting by soldiers. Soldiering and
hunting.
Less commonly, the reverse: war a metaphor for the hunt: hunting as making war
on animals.
For a metaphor to exist, its terms must be conceived as similar but not identical.
[They must resemble each other and be different as well.] I.e. hunting can work as a metaphor
for war, [or the market as a metaphor for mate-choice,] only because (or for so long as) war
and hunting continue to be understood as separate and do not become the same
thing. [To put this differently, a metaphor is a sort of mild and harmless taboo violation. An Englishman’s
home is his castle, but [of course it is] not actually his castle, and anyone who attempted seriously to treat
his home as a medieval fort would probably find himself at odds with the law.]
[Often, then, the limits of acceptable behaviour seem to coincide with a distinction between thought and
action, or discourse and practice, between saying and doing: while one may speak of one’s home as castle,
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or think of it as a castle, it would not acceptable to try to act or live according to this metaphor, to live out its
terms in everyday practice.
A metaphor – such as that of war-as-hunting - is itself a (learned – or is it entirely?) schema. But it is meant
to be a discursive schema, motivating rhetoric (‘Let’s go and hunt the enemy!’), but not a behavioural or
action schema.]
Similarly, sex and eating are related metaphorically in many cultures, a
relationship which may be strongly motivated physiologically. But people are
allowed to explore the practical implications of this metaphor only so far. Those
who have attempted to pursue these implications [to their ultimate conclusions,]
to the extent of eating their sexual partners or (which amounts to the same thing)
having, or desiring to have, sex with their food, have been viewed as peculiarly
extreme deviants. [The German internet pair; the Japanese who ate his girlfriend; Geoffrey Daimler. ]
[Why these metaphoric relations form between certain domains: perhaps because both have schemas which
belong to the same higher-order schema. It may be that Western cultural models of both war and hunting
have a parent schema along the lines of ‘organised killing with weapons’, of which the schemas for war and
for hunting are specializations.]
Some domains of social behaviour are, so to speak, [siblings] ‘adjacent’ to each
other, sharing a boundary. One must imagine then that the boundaries between
such neighbouring regions of social behaviour are also protected by implicit
prohibitions which serve to ensure the domains remain distinct from each other.
This is perhaps especially so with domains related, as are eating and sex, or
hunting and warmaking, by powerful metaphors and symmetries. Many people
might accept that war can be likened in some respects to a blood sport/hunting,
but would not accept that the parallel should be pursued to the point of treating
enemy combatants as animals, as did the Mundurucu people of Brazil for
example, who classified distant outsiders simply as quarry to be hunted for
entertainment. Even the Marines boiling the Japanese soldier’s head probably
felt that the war should not be waged as a hunt to the extent, say, of eating the
enemy soldier's flesh. But while there might be general agreement that such
metaphors ought not to be taken too far in lived action, or too literally, what
constitutes too ‘far’ or too ‘literally’ is likely to be contested. Some people
disapprove of the most innocuous forms of military souvenir-hunting, such as
taking enemy helmets etc., as improper. Others, such as the Marines in this
image, perhaps drew the line at cannibalism. Interstitial practices emerge in the
tabood and ambigous regions between domains of permitted social action, but
these regions of indeterminacy may be broad, and the limits of acceptable
behaviour disputed and shifting. In war, it seems, the metaphor of the hunt may
be pushed further the more the enemy is categorised as racially different.
Cultural transmission and the reproduction of interstitial practices
One of the very few axioms of anthropology is that culture is transmitted by
learning. Interstitial practices are clearly cultural phenomena, but their
reproduction across time in recognizably the same, or similar, forms does not
seem to require, or depend wholly on, cultural transmission in the normally
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accepted sense (teaching or learning). Rather, it occurs by a different means,
which might be called ‘spontaneous recurrence’ (though ‘spontaneous’ here will
need to be understood in a special sense).
(a) Mounting skulls on vehicles.
[[WWII]]. The skull of a Japanese soldier mounted as mascot, or figurehead, on a motor
torpedo boat off the coast of New Guinea.
[[Vietnam]]
[[Iraq skull tank]].
I want to ask how this particular military practice has been reproduced over time.
One possibility is that it has been passed on from one generation of servicemen
to the next by learning. It is evidence of a subterranean and deviant tradition
within the military (e.g. see Wertsch, Miitary Brats). But if this were so, there
would seem to be many obstacles to the transmission of this practice: wars occur
only episodically, soldiers have to hide these sorts of illicit mascots away when
officers are around because the military authorities punish soldiers who engage
in this behaviour if they discover it (see the Vietnam sergeant). Perhaps most
importantly of all, the majority of servicemen would strongly condemn it and
never engage in it anyway. If there has been, since WWII or earlier, a submerged
‘tradition’ of displaying human skulls as ornaments on the front of military
vehicles it must have been a highly discontinuous and tenuous one, constantly
broken and interrupted by attempts to suppress and outlaw it. The history of this
practice would be a case study in the persistence of a cultural practice under the
most [adverse and] unfavourable conditions.
An alternative explanation of this practice: namely, that it originates from outside
the world of the military altogether. For example, it may refer to a practice
common among hunters:
[[Kills displayed on vehicles]]. When trophy hunting began in the nineteenth, hunters
carried game back from the field on their backs, or on the backs of horses. With the
introduction of the car, the carcases would be brought back from a hunt tied to the bonnet
or to the front fenders of a vehicle. And the vehicle would be used as a platform for
displaying hunting trophies. Often trophy photographs taken. (After African safaris too). Out
of fashion now among sports hunters, who consider it to be poor taste, but persists in the
use of animal body parts (real or imitation) such as horns etc. to decorate vehicles in sports
hunting communities. [Also: animal skulls, as well as human skulls, used to decorate military
vehicles (e.g. goat or cow).]
I assume that these conventions mong sports trophy hunters have themselves
been reproduced across time by cultural learning. They are, quite
simply/essentially, a tradition within the sports hunting community. But we don’t
have to assume that the use of human skulls as mascots on military vehicles has
also been transmitted culturally in the same way. Another possibility is that
servicemen have repeatedly improvised it; they have repeatedly borrowed a
certain schema from the domain of hunting - a schema to do with the display of
animal remains on vehicles - and, again and again, applied it creatively in military
contexts. The display of a human skull as a military vehicle mascot is meant to
proclaim, in effect: ‘Our enemies are animals, and we are hunting and killing
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them for sport.’ The behaviour is neither an accepted part of soldiering, nor of
sports hunting, but rather a transgressive hybrid of elements of both. [What about the
skull as an ornament/mascot on motor-bikes?]
I would suggest that groups engaging in this practice - in this case, crews of
military vehicles - may do so without having explicitly learnt it from others. In fact,
the group's members may believe the practice is novel, peculiar and unique to
themselves, and be unaware that others are engaged in the same activity. [For
comparison: examples of independent invention in science.] It is ‘spontaneous recurrence’ in
this special sense: the small groups that generate such practices will often
appear to themselves to have done so independently and spontaneously.
Of course, it may also sometimes happen to be learned as part of some
submerged tradition in the military. But I would argue that it would keep
spontaneously recurring even if it were not being learnt, so long as certain
conditions held: (a) conflicts periodically arise which some of the servicemen
involved in them perceive as racialised; (b) that the servicemen tend to frame
these conflicts in imagery of hunting or predation; (c) the practice of sports
hunters displaying parts of animals on vehicles continued to be learned and
remain meaningful; [and (d) human remains are readily available to them]. Here we have a
practice reproduced across time in identifiably the same form not necessarily
through direct learning but rather through recurring reinvention. ['In parallel' rather than
'in sequence']
In other words, [I would suggest that there has been just one continuous stream of cultural
transmission (to do with the display of animal trophies by sports hunters) and that the display of enemy
remains on military vehicles is for the most part an adaptation and modification of this practice.] It is as
if
the domain of warfare has been colonized periodically by cultural representations
originating in the domain of hunting, with strongly racialised wars being the most
susceptible to penetration in this way by imagery of predation.
[(b) The two helicopter assault companies improvising rituals
Both elaborated the idea of hunting as a rite of passage for boys into adult manhood, but one which pushed
the war-as-hunting metaphor further than the other. In both cases innovation, but innovation structured by
the terms of a powerful metaphor. In many cases quite independently, they creatively improvise rituals which
share common features because they are being generated from the same underlying trope.]
Besides spontaneous recurrence, another characteristic of an interstitial practice
is that can also just as suddenly disappear, once the conditions that give rise to it
no longer hold. By disappear, I don't just mean that it stops occurring, but that it
can also vanish from social memory. I want to give an example that has to do
with the collection of enemy remains by soldiers as offerings or gifts to their
families.
[[The Rebel Lady's Boudoir]]The Civil War. A satirical cartoon from the American Civil
War, called The Rebel Lady's Boudoir. Published in a Northern newspaper, and is an
attack on Southerners, or at least the Southern aristocracy. It shows a woman of the
Southern slave-owning class at home in her boudoir, reading a letter from her husband
who is away fighting in the war. All around the room are the war trophies that her husband
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has been sending her. The implication is that the Southern aristocracy are really just
savages under the skin, despite their pretensions to gentility. What it refers to were reports
which began to circulate widely in the North from the very start of the Civil War, that
Confederate soldiers had the habit of collecting body parts of dead Union soldiers after
battles - mostly skulls and other bones - and sending them home as souvenirs to their
wives and families. Despite the enormous publicity given to these allegations during the
war (even the subject of a Congressional Enquiry), they seem to have disappeared from
public discourse almost immediately afterwards. They are not referred to in what one might
call official versions of the war. Historians have tended to assume that they were simply
wartime propaganda. And yet, there is much evidence that Confederate soldiers not only
did collect these sorts of souvenirs, but that they were responding to a demand for such
objects among the civilian population in the South, particularly women.
[[Life Magazine]]. References to similar practices re-emerge in WWII. Servicemen offering
human remains as gifts to people back home, and particularly to women. In some cases,
we have servicemen departing for war, pledging or promising enemy remains. 22 May
1944, Life Magazine 'Picture of the Week', with the caption: 'Arizona war worker writes her
Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the Jap skull he sent her'. The following commentary
accompanies the photograph:
PICTURE OF THE WEEK: When he said goodby [sic] two years ago to Natalie Nickerson,
20, a war worker of Phoenix, Ariz., a big, handsome Navy lieutenant promised her a Jap.
Last week Natalie received a human skull, autographed by her lieutenant and 13 friends,
and inscribed: 'This is a good Jap - a dead one picked up on the New Guinea beach.'
Natalie, surprised at the gift, named it Tojo. The armed forces disapprove strongly of this
sort of thing.
As the Life Magazine photo suggests, the practices of sending home gifts of enemy body
parts was common knowledge at the time, and for a period during the war was a significant
public issue (see The Faraway War). But once the war was over, it seems to have been a
part of wartime experience that many people simply wanted to forget. Again, this is an
aspect of the second world war that has simply vanished from social memory. [They soon
became an uncomfortable topic and were rapidly erased from social memory.]
[[Trussoni]]. These practices come back again during the Vietnam War. A man called
Daniel Trussoni. Taken at Christmas 1973 in their home in Michigan. This photo sent to me
by his daughter, who is the child in the photo. Trussoni had been a soldier in Vietnam, and
had brought home a number of mementos which shocked and disturbed his family. One
was a photograph of a dead Vietnamese soldier. Another was a human skull. Here, it's on
the mantelpiece. His daughter remembers it, as a child, being kept most of the time on top
of the television. Trussoni used to invite his brothers round to watch football, and they'd
forced to endure this ordeal of having to sit there very uncomfortably watching TV with this
skull staring back at them.
Trussoni said little to his family about how he obtained the skull, and his family don't seem
to have asked too many question, but the unspoken implication -- and certainly the
implication that his family drew -- was that it was the remains of a person he had killed.
What disturbed Trussoni's family wasn't the thought that he'd killed during the war, but that
he had brought the remains back with him - relics of someone he had killed, as it seemed
to them - and as it were enshrined it in the heart of the family home. His family loathed the
skull, and his daughter believes that her mother eventually threw it out.
From the condition of the skull (no lower jaw, seem to be no teeth, heavily stained happens when a skull is in contact with the ground for a long time) it is old. I.e. like Papas
in the Pacific War, this is someone who came across an old weathered skull lying around,
took it home, and passed it off as a kill trophy once he was back home. Like Papas, he
seemed to be trying to misrepresent himself to his family as something he almost certainly
wasn't: namely, some sort of headhunter. These are men who seem to have wanted to act
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out -- in front of an audience of family and friends back home -- some fairly standard
Western cultural fantasies or stereotypes of savagery, using skulls as theatrical props.
[[Image: Patterson skull and bones]] Dereyk Patterson, a furniture maker in New
Hampshire. His stepfather was a helicopter pilot in the Vietnam war. And had brought
home with him the skull and both femurs of a NVietnamese soldier. These were kept in the
garage, and Patterson remembers that when he was growing up his family had a pet name
for the soldier: they called him Stringbean. He remembers enjoying getting his father to tell
the story of how he acquired Stringbean's bones. He was flying everyday over a certain
ricepaddy, in one part of which was the body of a NV soldier. As time went by the body
decayed, and when there were bones left he landed his helicopter and took the skull and
two femurs. The only reason I can think why he took these particular bones is that he must
have had the intention of making a skull and cross-bones. Note the skull and cross-bones
in the Rebel Lady's boudoir. When Patterson became a teenager he began to find the story
of Stringbean increasingly disturbing, and he began avoiding the garage. And eventually,
as an adult, after his stepfather's death, he moved the remains to his workshop, where he
now keeps them. For almost ten years now, he has been writing to the Vietnamese
embassy, and more recently to the US government, to try to have these remains returned
to Vietnam. So far without success. His view is that the US government expends huge
resources locating the remains of US servicemen killed in action overseas, and repatriating
the remains, and that the remains of this Vietnamese soldier ought to be given the same
respect. [This raises a topic just as interesting and important as the taking of trophy skulls: the
efforts of families to give these objects back.]
At several points in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a practice of making
offerings of enemy remains to family and friends seems to have emerged in
certain wars. Again, I suggest the practice probably has its roots in the domain of
hunting; specifically in the practice, of course perfectly normal and expected
among hunters, of bringing home the kill or parts of it to their families. After each
of these wars, the practice then disappeared from public consciousness for a
long period of time, until it reappears in a later war in much the same form. Such
processes of erasure, or partial erasure, are consistent with evidence from
cognitive psychology, which suggests that schemas exert a powerful influence on
memory: in particular, the less an experience conforms with some established
schema, the more likely it is to be recollected poorly, or forgotten.This pattern of
episodic recurrence followed by historical amnesia suggests, again, that the
practice has not required learning in order to persist but is, as it were, a
secondary effect, deriving from certain other [longstanding, historically enduring]
cultural practices and representations, especially (a) male hunting practices such
as presenting the kill, or parts of it, as gifts or offerings to womenfolk or family;
and (b) a metaphorical equation of hunting and war. In combination, these have
been a prescription for repeatedly generating wartime behaviour in which the
bodies of the enemy are equated with game animals or quarry, behaviour which
would come to appear in retrospect too disturbing and anomalous even to be
publicly recollected. It is not so much these patterns of misconduct themselves,
then, that have been handed down over the past century and a half, but a kind of
formula or algorithm for reconstituting them, even after long periods in abeyance,
whenever conditions were favourable -- and for then systematically forgetting
them afterwards.
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Conclusion
Wherever human trophy-taking occurs in war, I suggest, it is closely connected
with the hunting of animals. More precisely, it seems to occur wherever hunting is
important in two ways: as a symbol of adult male identity and as a model for
warfare. This is the basic point of similarity between the military trophy-hunting I
have discussed, and the trophy-hunting of indigenous peoples such as the Iban,
Jivaro or Mundurucu. The distinctive headhunting practices of these peoples
were a prescribed, formally instituted part of their culture, transmitted from one
generation to the next through socialisation. But I would argue that human trophy
taking of some sort will occur almost inevitably in any society which conceptually
links war, hunting and masculinity - even if is not explicitly taught or learned, and
indeed even if it is prohibited.This is the case with the sorts of impromptu, illicit
trophy-hunting that seem to have recurred consistently among a small minority of
Western military personnel. In Euro-American culture these are interstitial
practices, forbidden improvisations on a widely shared and historically enduring
cultural theme. [A logical consequence of certain cultural representations, but declared forbidden. As
in medieval music, certain combinations of notes, which could be generated by this system, were forbidden.
Perhaps much of social life has this improvisatory quality; but most of this improvisation takes place, as it
were, within socially acceptable limits. This steps well outside these limits]
Interstitial practices:
1. are transgressive practices unofficially (and independently) developed in small
social groups through the misapplication of interactional schemas. Schemas
belonging to one social context are caused to interfere with behaviour in another,
or rather are misapplied in creative ways.
2. can be reproduced over long periods of time, not necessary by direct learning
but through a pattern of episodic spontaneous recurrence 'from below'.
3. can undergo long intervals of ideological erasure between these recurrences.
4. in one culture, or at one point in history, may be mainstream in another (e.g.
the taking of body parts as war trophies, male initiation rituals). To put this
differently, what is mainstream/conventional/standard/focal/normal and what is
interstitial may be contested (see for instance, the history of the abolition of
slavery and the slave trade). Interstitial practices are potential mainstream ones.
Practices cease to be interstitial, and become socially approved and mainstream,
when they start being passed on by learning.
5. What may differ then between one culture and another is not so much the
actual practices themselves, which may in fact be similar, nor even their actual
relative frequency or incidence, but most of all the ways in which they are socially
cognized and valorized as perspicuous or dark, permitted or proscribed, visible or
invisible, classified as real or nonexistent.
Hence interstitial practices occurring in one society can sometimes closely
resemble the mainstream cultural practices of another. E.g. the [[174th and
Mother Musket; parallels with boys’ initiation in New Guinea, with perverse
nurturance and maternal feeding behaviour by older men]].
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6. One symptom of a practice being interstitial forbidden – besides a tendency to
deny its very existence of these practices in one’s own community or society -- is
the systematic attribution of these violations to others (their projection on to other
cultures, to primitives, disparaged and rejected groups, etc, understood as the
antithesis of one's own). This is perhaps origin of the longstanding Western
preoccupation with practices such as headhunting and cannibalism as markers of
savagery. A central characteristic imputed to savages is hyper-predation: the
improper treatment of other people as if they were animals or prey. They are
imagined as human beings who hunt and kill one another as if they misperceived
humans as animals, or were unable to distinguish humans and animals properly.
Such images of primitives as inherently over-predatory, unable to confine their
hunting, killing and consumption activities solely to animal victims, as civilised
people do, seem constructed so as to throw into relief some important
discontinuities of Western culture, forbidden regions between some of its key
domains, and so mirror it in reverse (see, e.g. Kuper).
Just one more quick update on further recent developments in the saga of my
application for promotion to Professor:
From a meeting I had yesterday with the VC, it seems that his office were finally
able to track down some of the mislaid documentation supporting my application
- in particular, the reports sent to him by my academic referees. Apparently,
much of this paperwork had accidentally ended up at the bottom of an old skip on
a building site near Cullybackey. Anyway, by a stroke of luck, several paragraphs
of the referees' reports had survived the ravages of time and inclement weather,
and some were even still partly legible. After careful scrutiny of these textual
fragments, the VC has therefore decided that I should be given the benefit of the
doubt, and has approved my promotion after all (to be awarded posthumously, if
necessary).
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