Finding Gallipoli: Battlefield Remembrance and the Movement of Australian and Turkish History

287 Pages·2022·3.606 MB·English

by  Brad West

CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY
Finding Gallipoli
Battlefield Remembrance
and the Movement of
Australian and Turkish History
Brad West
Cultural Sociology
Series Editors
Jeffrey C. Alexander
Center for Cultural Sociology
Yale University
New Haven, CT, USA
Ron Eyerman
Center for Cultural Sociology
Yale University
New Haven, CT, USA
David Inglis
Department of Sociology
University of Helsinki
Helsinki, Finland
Philip Smith
Center for Cultural Sociology
Yale University
New Haven, CT, USA
Cultural sociology is widely acknowledged as one of the most vibrant areas
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Brad West
Finding Gallipoli
Battlefield Remembrance and the Movement
of Australian and Turkish History
Brad West
Justice & Society
University of South Australia
Adelaide, SA, Australia
Cultural Sociology
ISBN 978-3-030-98878-4 ISBN 978-3-030-98879-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98879-1
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For Paxton and Blake
May your travels be ‘fatal to narrow-mindedness’.
P
reface
This book is about how Australian and Turkish national identity has been
shaped by travel to the World War I Gallipoli battlefield for the purposes
of commemoration. The title, Finding Gallipoli, refers to two different
but interconnected ways that this travel has been consequential for
Australians and Turks to comprehend and associate themselves with the
national past. In one sense, finding relates to the distinctive embodied and
emotional experience attained by visitors to the battlefield. As explored
throughout the book, this has encouraged history to be imagined and
interpreted in ways that often disrupt and symbolically pollute as well as
re-create and enchant historical narratives, remembrance genres and the
carriers of tradition. Finding is also used in the book title to acknowledge
the emergence of pilgrimage to the battlefield as a popular form of official
and tourist-based remembrance from the late twentieth century, with this
place not having previously been commonly visited or having been a site
heavily used for Australian and Turkish war remembrance.
The research outlined in the book has been carried out over a signifi-
cant period of time. It was 1998 when I first visited Turkey to undertake
fieldwork for my sociology PhD. The research for the thesis examined the
rise of Australian travel to the Gallipoli battlefield as a new form of national
remembrance. At the time, there was little scholarly research on the topic,
with fellow students and colleagues frequently questioning whether I have
an ancestor that fought in the war or if I had served in the military. Such
enquiries, in part, reflect the tendency for research topics in sociology after
the ‘cultural turn’ to be chosen based on personal experience and interest.
vii
viii PREFACE
Yet, as I have written elsewhere, the nature of these queries is also likely to
reflect sociologists having largely side-stepped the study of war, preferring
instead to see capitalism and material forces as the engines of change.
When war is accounted for by sociologists, it is typically seen as a mere
mirror or outcome of the system, rather than armed conflict events being
understood as actively shaping the world in enduring and distinctive ways,
including through its remembrance.
It would often come as a surprise to those asking about the origins and
motivations of my studies on Gallipoli that not only had I no prior con-
nections to the military—family or otherwise—before studying the topic,
but that I had also not previously attended any Anzac (Australian and New
Zealand Army Corps) Day war remembrance services. Instead, the study
of Gallipoli had come about to theoretically extend my prior research on
national rituals as they related to natural disasters, heroic outlaws and
heritage tourism. Given this motivation to study Gallipoli, it would have
been hard for me to imagine that, following the completion of my doctor-
ate, I would spend the next two decades continually returning to the
topic. This enduring empirical concern can be explained in two ways.
Firstly, it reflects the centrality of Gallipoli remembrances to social and
political developments in Australia and Turkey. Secondly, Gallipoli is good
to think with, a strategic case for novel social theorising about the world.
Given my long-held intellectual interest on the social memory of
Gallipoli, in writing the book, I inevitably draw in part upon my previously
published scholarship. The data and analysis presented in the following
pages, however, are both a more thorough account than I have previously
written, and differ by its application of a historical and comparative
method. The historical frame of study begins with examining how cultural
conceptions of travel influenced the experience of those fighting in the
1915 Battle, and ends with the way that new global insecurities and the
withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan in September 2021 is
reflecting and influencing Australia and Turkey’s social memory of their
military past. This wide historical lens allows for an in-depth exploration
of the ways in which cultural patterns of social memory develop over time.
Rather than merely identifying the way in which history is imagined in
reference to the present, the cultural historical method utilised allows for
a mapping of how specific cultural representations in the past are reclaimed.
This points to the influence of precedent in the shaping of social relations
in a way not possible through a snapshot analysis of social memory. The
book also differs from my early publications on battlefield pilgrimage at
PREFACE ix
Gallipoli in the late twentieth century in that these were relatively naive
about the potential of Islamist historical narratives to significantly
challenge the then dominant secular Kemalist comprehensions of the
Battle. In contrast, understanding how Islamist accounts of Gallipoli have
moved from the periphery to the centre of historical understanding in
Turkey is a key concern of this book.
The book is primarily based on my own fieldwork and analysis of his-
torical documents. However, I am also indebted to the numerous other
investigations that have now been undertaken on Australian and Turkish
travel to Gallipoli. In employing a cultural sociological analysis, however,
my research and conclusions are markedly different from most of this
scholarship that has been undertaken by historians and critical cultural
scholars. At times, this is an outcome of employing different methodologi-
cal approaches, with my analysis of travel relying to a much greater degree
on ethnographic research, whereas this other work tends to examine tex-
tual representations. However, the differences are also related to episte-
mology. The primary aim of the cultural sociological analysis I utilise is not
an accounting of history for its own sake or a debunking of the truthful-
ness of historical representation. Rather, the goal of this book is to attain
deep understandings and develop theories on the nature of social change
and the mechanisms by which meanings are made. This analytical frame
sees the book as less concerned with engaging in national political debates
as they relate to the political manipulation of history. Instead, it is centrally
concerned with the ways in which the interactions and flows between
nations influence historical interpretation and national identity. From this
perspective, I argue that travel is a key factor influencing social memory by
providing distinctive ritual experiences that afford unique, discursive
opportunities and symbolic representations, while establishing and elevat-
ing new carriers and custodians of national historical memory.
Employing a comparative analysis in the book also substantially expands
on my earlier scholarship on the remembrance of Gallipoli. While I have
previously argued that contemporary Australian and Turkish social memo-
ries of the battle are dialogically constructed in relation to each other, I
have not analysed the two cases side by side in a methodologically disci-
plined way. To achieve this comparative endeavour, this book draws on a
rich history of qualitative comparative analysis in cultural sociology. Yet
previous scholarship in this area has largely involved identifying cultural
differences in nations that otherwise seem to have many shared character-
istics, thus highlighting the way in which nationalities are typically taken
x PREFACE
for granted. In contrast, the social memories of Australia and Turkey are
national cases with quite different cultural and political contexts. However,
the central analytical theme of this book is not the cultural divergences
between these nations. Rather, the book profiles the similar ways in which
travel has influenced Australia and Turkey’s comprehension of the past.
This has occurred not only through travel rites resulting in each nation
having to increasingly account for the interpretation of the past by the
other, but also via the travel as a remembrance form affording certain ways
that history is understood in both nations.
Yet Australian and Turkish nationhood defy simple characterisation,
and comparative analysis as such is no easy task. As an Australian scholar, I
have had to be particularly careful in my analysis of Turkey. As Edward
Said and others have highlighted, discursive representations of Muslim
countries such as Turkey have both implicitly and explicitly been done in
ways that reinforce notions of Western superiority. Even to speak of the
West carries with it a certain political baggage. While I have attempted to
account for any such bias, this has not seen me shy away from drawing
conclusions about the distinctive nature and directions of Turkish national
identity, including Turkish notions of authenticity as it relates to historical
remembrance. I have also been critical of the way in which many scholars
have understood current Turkish social memory politics in binary ways in
relation to the utopian draw of modern secularism and the primordial
allure of religion in Republican Turkey. While the Turkish nation is shaped
by the tensions between a future-focussed republicanism and an orienta-
tion towards its imperialist past, my research points to the blurred bound-
aries between these divisions in how ordinary Turks think about their
country’s history. This is particularly evident through the increasing role
that consumerism plays in shaping how Turkey remembers its Ottoman past.
While the comparative approach used in the book differs from the
scholarship typically characterised as being methodologically nationalist,
given its concern with national identity, it will most likely be critiqued by
certain scholars as representing a sociology engaged with fixed geographic
and political entities. My primary defence in this regard is that I am led by
empirical realities into how social actors speak and engage with collective
identities and symbols. By being concerned with meaning-making in this
way, Finding Gallipoli avoids an empirical analysis being determined by
how scholars might like the world to look like rather than how it is. By
prioritising how social actors talk about and comprehend the past, this
book also avoids a reductionist approach to comprehending the influence