« Parents » et « affins » de combat
Abstracts
“Consanguines” and “Affines” in War: Thoughts about Wartime Letter-Writing, 1918-1923. – Based on material from the front lines, this article is part of a larger research project in history on the cognitive representations of Greek troops during the period of war from 1912 to 1923. It focuses on how certain terms of kinship and affinity were “metaphorically” transposed to the field of warfare. The two most significant examples involve battlefield metaphors based on consanguinity and affinity, respectively: the relation between soldiers and their letter-writing “war sisters” in the rear and the similarity that soldiers drew be-tween their relations with enemy prisoners and affinal relations. These metaphors, which aptly served to qualify relations with the outside, in particular with the enemy, can be interpreted as an attempt to bring, at least symbolically, the absolute violence on the front down to more acceptable, controllable proportions. By doubling lines of fracture and of aggressiveness and, too, lines of solidarity (enemy/affine, comrade/brother), Greek troops tried, through their metaphors, to reorganize combat and turn it into the more familiar, internalized kinship system.
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Bibliographical reference
Panagiotis Grigoriou, “« Parents » et « affins » de combat”, L’Homme, 154-155 | 2000, 481-488.
Electronic reference
Panagiotis Grigoriou, “« Parents » et « affins » de combat”, L’Homme [Online], 154-155 | avril-septembre 2000, Online since 18 May 2007, connection on 29 March 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/lhomme/44; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/lhomme.44
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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.
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