The ‘museumification’ of the Scottish soldier and the meaning-making of Britain’s wars

ABSTRACT

Drawing on interviews with curators of Scotland’s military museums and fieldwork ethnographies, this article explores how the Scottish Soldier is enacted through curation and how, through artefacts and stories, curators (re)produce the Scottish Soldier within and through their museums’ spaces. This article identifies three intertwining curatorial practices: (a) Production of a Scottish warrior ‘dreamscape’ through a dual technique of displaying symbolic representations of Scots-as-warriors while simultaneously reframing the controversies of Scotland’s contribution to British colonial wars and recent conflicts; (b) Construction of classed, raced, and gendered hierarchies through the curation of war-informing artefacts (uniforms, medals, and weaponry) – all of which sustain the dominance of warrior-like masculinity deployed in the service of the British state; and (c) Humanization of soldiers via the disruption of stereotypical warrior codes and the making visible of personalized and locally based war stories working towards decontextualisation and sentimentalization of war. We argue that these curatorial practices enable the reproduction of a sacrificial Scottish Soldier and through this process they assist in the normalization of Britain’s wars.

KEYWORDS:

• Curation
• Scotland
• warrior
• military
• museums

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This article results from the research project, ‘War Commemoration, Military Culture and Identity Politics in Scotland’ funded by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities in Scotland, 2017–18 (RG13890/70560). As part of the whole project, we conducted 29 interviews in total, including with curators of military museums (13), government officials artists and art managers, representatives of the Royal British Legion Scotland/Poppy Scotland, and members of other war-themed projects based in Scotland. We would like to thank all those who spared their time for an interview with us.

2. The reorganization of regiments has had a direct impact on Scotland’s military museums. In 2017, the MoD provided a financial support for 67 museums across the UK, by 2030, the MoD will fund 36 museums, only those that are linked to active regiments. In Scotland, only the Museum of Royal Regiment of Scotland will receive the MoD backing.

3. In this paper, we describe museums in our sample as ‘military museums’, although the majority of museums which we analysed fall into the category of ‘regimental museums’. We recognise the problematic character of this generalisation, but we draw on the use of this terminology within a particular body of academic literature (e.g. Tythacott 2015, Winter 2012) and the wider public discourse (e.g. The Army Museums 2018). We also included in our sample the museum of King’s Own Scottish Borders regiment (KOSB) due to its association with Scotland.

4. The identities of curators were obscured during the coding process due to ethical concerns. In the article, we use a numeric identification to identify curators.

5. As Foucault (2003, 254–255) describes it, when power functions in the biopolitical mode ‘the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls’.

6. Although the MoD abbreviation for the Royal Regiment of Scotland is SCOTS, in this paper we use the abbreviation of the Royal Regiment of Scotland as RRS due to its prominence in the wider political and public discourse.

7. Although the SNP Youth wing has lobbied in coordination with Forces Watch (Scotland) to increase recruitment age from 16 to 18 years old, and in 2017, it received support from the SNP leadership, this debate focused on the rights of young people rather than on the positionality of Scotland’s towards Britain’s military policies (Forces Watch 2017), https://www.forceswatch.net/blog/making-it-18-%E2%80%93-snp-votes-yes-raising-age-recruitment (accessed 12/06/2019).

8. The name of the battle was reducted as part of anonymization process.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland [RG13890/70560].