Cognitive Models of Soldiering
This paper explores the central assumptions about, and images of, “conflict,” the “enemy,” and the “use of military force” that characterize the thinking and reasoning of members of an elite battalion of Israeli infantry reserves.
My aim is to uncover the assumptions, images, and interpretive schemes that ground common sense military knowledge. By “common sense” I do not mean that this knowledge is simplistic, nor do I imply that it is unimportant. Rather, these terms refer to the unquestioned knowledge that “everyone knows,” to what Geertz (1988) has termed the “of-courseness” of common sense understandings. These models are of great importance because they are the basic points of reference for “what we are” and “what we are trying to do,” through which military reality is constructed.Seen against the background of previous studies, my project suggests a subtle shift in focus, from military “traditions” to one on the culture of military organizations. The advantages of such a shift rest in widening the subjects of military-related research to hitherto little explored areas, such as how military knowledge is organized and used. Based on a number of years of participant observation (I was an officer in this unit), this study is basically ethnographic in its approach.
The study of cultures or “meaning systems” has long been one of the primary subjects of anthropological inquiry. I will use analytical tools of cognitive anthropology, which begins its inquiry by asking what one needs to know in order to function as a member of one's social group. This school of thought came to stand for a view of culture as “shared knowledge”: what people must know in order to act as they do, make things they make, and interpret their experiences in distinctive ways (Quinn and Holland 1987: 4). Since the early 1980s cognitive anthropology has begun to inquire about “cultural” or “folk” models—those taken-for-granted models of the world that are widely shared by members of a society, and that represent and explain the way the “world” (or parts of the world) is ordered. These models—which predicate certain simplified causal chains and may be characterized by contradictions—serve pragmatic purposes such as describing, explaining, or justifying the tangible, the probable, and the experiential (Keesing 1987: 374).
Accordingly I suggest that an examination of the “folk” models—the metaphors, reasonings, and propositions—that officers and soldiers in this battalion use in order to “make sense” of what they do and who they are, may be a good entry into the meaning soldiering holds for them. And furthermore, that this kind of analysis may lead us to understand how concepts like “conflict,” “force,” or “the enemy” are part of the causal schemes posited by these models. My aim is thus one of reconstructing the cultural understandings of military life in this unit of infantry soldiers.