Making gifts from contracts: symbolic resources and resanctification in officers’ language

Abstract

Officers of the Irish Defence Forces have studied at civilian university since 1969, with the introduction of a policy referred to as the University Service Academic Complement (USAC) scheme. In attending university through USAC, officers are obliged to sign a contract stipulating that they will repay the full costs of their time at university. This paper draws on a study of 46 retired and serving officers, to analyse how they discussed their career and the military officer’s experience of civilian higher education. While the agreement officers are obliged to sign is a legal contract, interviewees consistently characterised their experience of the USAC scheme in terms that omitted this economic reality of the financial implications of attending higher education. Instead, they favoured terms that almost exclusively excluded such a perspective, and instead made the USAC scheme appear to be a ‘gift’ in Marcel Mauss’s terms. This paper illustrates how and why this is the case, in that the use of ‘gift language’ is a type of ‘resanctification’ of the military profession by individual officers in the face of the threat to cohesion and their symbolic universe. Beyond and at the societal level, resanctification through gift language also implies a political 'double-bind' for officers in terms of their relationship with civilian military authorities and the military organisation itself. This paper concludes with an overview of some of the implications of a gift analysis for militaries and their surrounding societies.

Keywords:

• Irish Defence Forces
• gift
• contract
• Marcel Mauss
• symbolism

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their critical reading and suggestions, and especially for their ideas regarding this argument’s implications. I would also like to thank the editor, Dr Victoria Basham, for further guidance and suggestions that helped me considerably in my approach to this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Pre-modern here can be problematized by Latour’s (1993) observation that in many respects ‘we have never been modern’, i.e. that a transition to what is generally understood and referred to as ‘modernity’ was not the world-historical break that it is often assumed to be. Recognizing this is integral to this paper’s analysis.

2. Consider, for instance, former U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron’s notion of a ‘big society’ in the United Kingdom following decades of his own party unpicking the fabric welfare state.

3. This hegemonic picture is common to Marxist interpretations, and has been compellingly critiqued from an anarchist perspective (Day 2005).

4. Charles W. Mills (1997) has clearly demonstrated, however, that the ‘equality’ in this purported social contract was only ever for some white Europeans, and not extended beyond this. This wasn’t simply a question of ‘not living up to ideals’, but of those ideals being exclusionary at the moment of their inception (see also Park 2013).

5. It may not be prudent to generalize however. In the world of non-commissioned personnel in the British Army, there was considerable disapproval of ‘heroics’, and a middle way between ‘hero [and] fuckup’ was held as the ideal by privates (Hockey 1986, 125–126; see also Burke 2018, 101). A very similar point is made of US enlisted personnel, whereby once ‘the unit is tempered by combat, definitions of manly honour are not seen to encompass individual heroics. Quite the opposite, the very word “hero” was used to describe negatively any soldier who recklessly jeopardises the unit’s welfare’ (Moskos 1970, 155).

6. There is a relationship with cohesion as found in the work of Anthony King, but note that his work refers to combat experiences (thus the functional relevance of communication in unit cohesion). My focus is on cohesion in the symbolic interactionist sense of identity and how a group identity is a resource for military personnel in non-combat setting.

7. Jenkins (2000) critiques Weber for assuming that the process was uni-directional in the latter’s related concept of ‘disenchantment’. Bruno Latour (1993) makes a similar argument in discussing the popular view that the advent of science marks some kind of irrevocable break with the past, and counters this by arguing that the ‘pre-modern’ endures, which should lead to a reconsideration of our categories of ‘modern’ or ‘modernity’.

8. Caillé (2018) in critiquing Bourdieu’s conceptualization of this realm describes the gift as political rather than economic, but he arrives at this from a direction different to mine. See also Schuilenberg and Peeters (2017) for another political interpretation of the gift.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Irish Research Council through a Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship [GOIPG/2010/3105], and a Trinity College Dublin Postgraduate Studentship.