Forged in Matter: Materiality and Sensory Ethnography of a Commando Training Centre explores how military identities, resilient bodies, and operational habitus are developed via immersion in elite military training. The study is grounded in long-term ethnographic immersion at the Commando Training Centre Royal Marines (CTCRM). The book explores the transformation of human bodies through contact with lethal technologies and relentless landscapes.
Moving beyond previous sociological models and enculturation theories, Forged in Matter introduces a critical new materialist theoretical model, which allows the researcher to examine the agency of matter in a total institution. Using detailed ethnographic accounts based upon a wide range of sensory data and spatially focused research techniques, the book traces the somatic development of recruits as they move through a number of different environments. These include architectural spaces, environmental taskscapes, weapon systems and interfaces, textile degradation, and institutional temporalities. As such, it is demonstrated that the identity of Commandos is formed by being literally forged through the constant co-constitution of human flesh, steel, and terrain. The work provides an analysis of how extreme forms of institutional conditioning use assemblages of materials to create disciplined, tempered, and reconfigured human subjects into weaponised entities.
The target audience for this book includes academics, researchers, and students interested in the areas of material culture studies, sensory and military anthropology, sociology of the body, war and security studies, and institutional sociology. Defence practitioners would find critical value in using Forged in Matter as a basis for developing their own socio-materialised understandings of military acculturation, resilience, and somatic discipline.