1st Edition

Transforming Warriors The Ritual Organization of Military Force

Edited By Peter Haldén, Peter Jackson Copyright 2016
252 Pages
by Routledge

252 Pages
by Routledge

This volume offers an interdisciplinary study of how different cultures have sought to transform individuals into warriors. War changes people, however a less explored question is how different societies want people to change as they are turned into warriors. When societies go to war they recognize that a boundary is being crossed. The participants are expected to do things that are otherwise... Read more

1. Introduction. Symbolic and Mythological Perspectives on War and Peace join the Archaic with the Modern, Peter Haldén and Peter Jackson

2. A Portrait of the Warrior as a Beast: Hunter, Man, and Animal in Sophocles Trachiniae and Schwarzenegger’s Predator, Johan Tralau

3. Cycles of the Wolf: Unmasking the Young Warrior in Europe’s Past, Peter Jackson

4. "Laughing I shall die!" The Total Transformations of Berserks and Ulfhednar in Old Norse Society, Andreas Nordberg and Frederik Wallenstein

5. Professionalization of Transformation: From Knights to Officers in the Renaissance, Gorm Harste

6. Transformation into Manhood: Sex, Violence and the Making of Warriors, Women and Victims in Early Modern Europe, Maria Sjöberg

7. Japanese Warrior Transformations: Bushidō as the Continuation of Death by other Means, Dan Öberg

8. Mystical and Modern Transformations in the Liberian Civil War, Ilmari Käikhö

9. Transformation into Nature: Swedish Army Ranger Rites of Passage, Jan Angstrom

10. From Total to Minimal Transformation: German Oaths of Loyalty 1871-2014, Peter Haldén

11. The Warrior on the Edge of Tomorrow, Christopher Coker

12. The Haunted Road: Failed Transformations and the Return from War or, A Historical Sociology of War Veterans, Gorm Harste

13. Conclusions. The Transformations of the Future, Peter Haldén

Biography

Peter Haldén is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Swedish Defence University (SDU) in Stockholm. He is the author of Stability without Statehood (2011), Geopolitics of Climate Change (2007) and co-editor of New Agendas in Statebuilding: Hybridity, Contingency and History (2013).

Peter Jackson is Professor at the department of History of Religions at Stockholm University. He is the author of The Transformations of Helen: Indo-European Myth and the Roots of the Trojan Cycle (2007), and editor of Philosophy and the End of Sacrifice: Disengaging Ritual in Ancient India, Greece and Beyond (2015).