GOOD SOLDIER/BAD SOLDIER Soldiers are trained to kill, and they are expected to engage in forms of violence civilians cannot legally attempt. Against the standards of normal morality, all soldiers are exceptional—a status announced by their tendency to wear uniforms—but this liminality does not exempt soldiers from being judged as good or bad. Clearly, soldiers who lose stand a greater chance of being labeled “bad” soldiers, both in their technical abilities and in relation to the causes and peoples in whose name they fight. But there are multiple kinks in this pattern. There are good enemies, and bad allies, and peace itself can sometimes turn good soldiers into bad ones, erasing the political legitimacy they enjoyed during more hostile times and rendering them suspect in civilian life.
Luise White examines the respect white Rhodesian soldiers had for the shooting skills of their guerrilla opponents during the Zimbabwean Liberation Struggle. ZANU and ZAPU rebels used Russian AK-47 automatic rifles, which were simpler in design and easier to use than the Belgian FN used by Rhodesian security forces. There is little evidence to prove that rebels were especially good shots, but there is ample evidence that black soldiers in the Rhodesian army were better shots than white officers thought they were. This respect for the enemy, and disdain for the friend, White argues, was related to assumptions about Russian and Chinese training that most ZAPU and ZANU rebels did not actually have. Rebels made Soviet weapons part of their local worlds, whereas Rhodesians saw AK-47s as links to powerful external enemies. Communist political loyalties, not the innate abilities of black soldiers, determined which blacks were deemed better shots by whites. The “good black,” who fought for the Rhodesians, was routinely dismissed as the “bad soldier.”
Andrew Bickford inspects the ranks of the Nationale Volksarmee, the army of East Germany, which was disbanded immediately after unification with West Germany in 1990. The National People's Army (NVA) never fought a war with West Germany and peacefully assisted in the dissolution of the East German state, but most of its officers were removed from the military, their careers effectively ended, and adjustment to life in the new Germany has been difficult for them. Bickford shows how these men have become the unwanted human residue of unification, portrayed as the Cold War's losers, stigmatized for their support of a communist dictatorship, and systematically excluded from the Bundeswehr and from “the German military tradition.” As Nazi era veterans receive military burial, officers of the NVA are denied the same privilege and can no longer use their military ranks and titles. Bickford argues that NVA officers, like other functionaries of the former East Germany, have become second-class citizens. Once in the vanguard of an anti-fascist regime dedicated to socialist ideals, they are now Germany's “bad soldiers,” carrying the peculiar burden of Germany's modern history of militarism and authoritarianism.
LABOR OF LIFE The biotech industries and genomic research are growing rapidly, and they have an almost religious appeal. Far more than a successful merger of big science and big business, this body of knowledge (or knowledge of bodies) provides crucial ideological support for new understandings of human society in which biotechnology holds an ever more central place. It promises us healthier and longer lives; it answers questions about human origins once left to historians and sacred texts; and, as any watcher of forensic crime shows will affirm, it can help us catch murderers and identify the decayed bodies of their victims. All in all, a nearly irresistible package.
Gísli Pálsson opens up this package to study its contents and to test the analytical categories scholars will need to understand them. Working through Rabinow's concept of “biosociality,” Pálsson suggests that recent developments in bioscience are pushing us toward a new episteme, one in which the familiar dichotomy between nature and culture makes less sense. New models of production, of bodies, commodities, and persons, are needed, and powerful analytical toolkits can be built, Pálsson argues, out of older versions of Marxian thought. Ideas of estrangement, embodiment, and the externalization of labor, though anthropocentric in Marx's original formulations, are especially apt to new bioindustries in which body parts are exchanged and physically reproduced across species, human tissues are separated from bodies and commodified, and animals, from bacteria to pigs, are used to generate human body components. Pálsson's attempt to adapt Marx to a more expansive terrain of “living labor” is the latest in a series of CSSH essays dealing with bioscience and the uses (and abuses) of body parts; others include Morgan (CSSH 50-1) and Palmié (CSSH 48-4).
MIXTURE AND MATURATION IN THE COLONIES The links between European colonialism, racial hierarchies, and racism proper are now so firmly established that it is difficult to speak of one without invoking the others. Equally strong is the link between colonial authority and the imputation of childlike qualities to colonial subjects. Two of the most potent threats to colonial power, it follows, would be racial mixing and political maturation. Indeed, the seamlessness of this political worldview is evident in the fact that, under conditions of colonial racism, people of mixed race and politically mature (or prematurely political) subjects are very likely to produce each other and to be viewed as a real or potential threat.
David M. Pomfret explores these themes in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong and in French Indochina, where “Eurasians” were plentiful and inspired on both sides of the color line feelings of shame, affection, and dread. Among the British, separation and denial were standard responses to Eurasians, who were zoned out of white residential areas. Segregation produced a local mixed-race society that mirrored British society, including an elite stratum that encroached on (and occasionally bought into) British turf without attaining full Britishness. Among the French, Eurasians were considered a vulnerable, politically corruptible class; they might become revolutionaries or, with proper care, good French citizens. To produce the latter, French authorities separated Eurasians from indigenous society, educating them in private schools and even sending them to France for rural upbringings. In all of these instances, Pomfret argues, Eurasians were treated as persons in whom race and minority were diluted, allowing age to shape the languages that described them. They were children at risk, a corrupting influence on white youth, unstable adolescents who might run wild, or avuncular brown gentlemen who understood the value of colonial order. Age was the template on which policies of inclusion and exclusion were developed to control these Eurasian types and guide them safely through their politicized life cycle.
DISSECTING RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE It is easy to attribute religious violence to irrational forces: hatred, racism, ignorance, a desire for revenge. But turning a community of believers into a mob of ruthless killers is likely to require elaborate planning, a shared agenda, political protection, and the laying of ideological groundwork. The enactment of religious violence usually has a predictable choreography, rules and prompts, and stopping these performances, once they start, can be very difficult. The devilish force at play is more often momentum (and method) than madness, a state of affairs that explains why massacre, in the two papers that follow, is followed not by remorse and shame, but by self-justification, denial of wrongdoing, and the sense that, through violence, a proper order has been restored.
Selim Deringil sifts through Ottoman archival accounts of the massacres of Armenians carried out by Kurds in 1895–1897, trying to assess the government's role in them. More specifically, his concern is official response to Armenian mass conversions to Islam, in which grown men circumcised themselves, and entire villages renounced Christianity, turned their churches into mosques, and performed the five daily prayers. Turkish authorities were reluctant to recognize these conversions, since they were made under duress, and because Western observers were critical of anything that smacked of forced conversion. Yet this refusal left Armenians open to further attack. Deringil argues that Turkish authorities wanted to win the solidarity of Kurdish tribes and to terrorize Armenians into submission. Mass conversions would have complicated both agendas; the need for these conversions, and the Sublime Porte's unwillingness to accept them (until social order had been restored), was a deadly predicament for Armenians, and the weight of evidence, Deringil maintains, suggests that Sultan Abdulhamid II was personally responsible for it.
Norbert Peabody enters the arcane world of Indian traditional wrestling to examine its role in the anti-Muslim violence that broke out in the Rajasthani city of Kota in 1989. The rioting started during the festival of Anant Chaturdashi, an event closely associated with kushti, a form of wrestling whose practitioners are devotees of Shakta tantrism. This Hindu tradition gives special emphasis to blood sacrifice, and its values and esoteric physical disciplines are central to the training of kushti fighters. Peabody discusses not only the preferred weapons and wrestling styles of kushti, but also how the central tenets of Shaktism are expressed in ritual sacrifice and in the very particular forms of violence Hindu wrestlers unleashed on their Muslims victims. The latter was accomplished with an arsenal of distinctive weapons and conformed to, or paralleled, beliefs about the efficacy of blood sacrifice. For Peabody, the most troubling aspect of the Kota riots was the quick return, on the part of Hindus, to normal sociality with Muslims. This lack of trauma, he argues, is in large part a consequence of Shakti principles, which pose sacrifice as a mode of incorporation, not annihilation. Anti-Muslim violence, for kushti wrestlers, is a way of domesticating their opponents and bringing them into the body politic as rivals who are dangerous, but “not wholly other.”
STATE-SOCIALIST CONSUMERISM The collapse of the Soviet Union and its allied regimes in Eastern Europe has produced elaborate, mythical accounts of demise. Cobbled together from the spare parts left behind by Cold War propagandists, stories of “the fall of communism” tend to emphasize the virtues of Western societies, giving special emphasis to political freedoms and their greatest creation and correlate: a vibrant consumer society. Russians, Poles, East Germans, and Hungarians abandoned socialism so eagerly, the story goes, because they wanted Western material culture and the wondrous, high quality products capitalism would bring. The common assumption underlying these stories is that state socialism had no consumer society of its own, no “good life” to speak of, no “pursuit of happiness” that ever led to happiness. Two of our authors present subtle analyses of consumer culture under state socialism that show how superficial these regnant mythologies can be.
Diane Koenker offers a guided tour of vacation culture in the Soviet Union of the 1950s and 1960s. The “right to rest” was guaranteed to Soviet citizens in 1922, but from the start, vacations were a tense blend of leisure to be enjoyed by individuals as they liked and time dedicated to the recuperation of the worker's body. The state encouraged individuals to vacation alone, but demand for family vacations grew steadily in the postwar period. Koenker introduces us to the diverse vacation options available to Soviet citizens: health spas, campgrounds, summer youth camps, bus and train tours, hiking excursions, and foreign travel. The state was reluctant to allow children in most of these settings, and married couples were expected to vacation separately. Koenker argues that these trends reflected state socialism's ambivalence toward sex and the conjugal family, sites of private pleasure and kinship obligations that threatened loyalties to the producer state. In the postwar period, Soviet authorities encouraged consumption and relaxed their resistance to family vacations. Their inability to meet the demand for new types of family-oriented leisure, Koenker suggests, was rooted in the command economy, which had for decades built the infrastructure of vacationing on the assumption that the “right to rest” should be enjoyed by the individual worker.
Krisztina Fehérváry delves even deeper into the contradictions produced by state socialism's fateful embrace of consumption and consumer culture. Taking exception to the ubiquitous portrayal of socialist Hungary as “gray,” in color and mood, and likewise suspicious of recent nostalgia for the communist era, Fehérváry insists on a careful re-engagement with state-socialist material culture. The world of Hungarian consumer goods was not simply one of shortage and inadequacy (although both were real); instead, Hungarians made and consumed a wealth of products, some better and more desirable than others. Féherváry describes dominant trends in Hungarian advertising, shopping culture, fashion, and architecture, showing how a confident and appealing modernist style gradually fell out of favor with the people who created it. This trend toward dissatisfaction had its origins in Hungarian state policy itself, as the state hitched its legitimacy to its ability to provide a modern standard of living comparable to that prevalent in capitalist societies. Western goods and lifestyles, Féherváry argues, figured prominently in socialist languages of consumerism, and their prominent location within socialist models of consumption, not their location outside them, created a politicized standard of comparison against which state socialism could only appear second rate. The obvious favor state officials gave to goods produced in and for Western markets led Hungarians to conclude that their own government held them in low regard, and that democratic governments had greater respect for their citizens.
KUDOS We are delighted to report that Sheilagh Ogilvie's article, “ ‘So that Every Subject Knows How to Behave’: Social Disciplining in Early Modern Bohemia” (CSSH 48-1), has been awarded the 2008 Stanley Z. Pech Prize by the Czechoslovak Studies Association.
