Basic Training

Abstract

This chapter adds to an increasing body of work on the embodied sociology of war and militarism by detailing the affective experience of basic training and the insights this provided into the nature of habitus formation within the British Army and how bodies react to and are transformed by military training. Unlike more dramatic insights into the embodied experience of soldiering, however, this account of basic training mainly focuses on the banal, everyday ways that recruits learn what Stephen Atherton calls the domestic element of soldiering – the embodied routine and rhythm of barracks life. The chapter is a reflection on a centrally important part of the author’s own enactive ethnographic research into life in the British Army reserve and the ‘enduring modification of the bodily schema’ (in Loïc Wacquant’s words) that basic training entailed.