Commandos' Hybrid Moralities, Army Memories of the Malvinaas/Falklands War in Argentina's early postwar

ROSANA GUBER

Oslo

Simposio; Masculinities, Hybridity and Modernity: A Symposium in memory of Eduardo Archetti (1943-2005); 2006

Department of Anthropology

Eduardo Archetti introduced the study of male moralities as a new theoretical and  empirical field of research in the Argentine social sciences. However, scholars have paid more attention to football—one of his favorite topics—than to any other areas of Argentine society and culture. Moreover, hybridity, another close related concept of Archetti’s contributions, has seldom been tackled by Argentine scholars. In this paper I try to compare and export Archetti’s findings on Argentine male moralities in football to the early Army memories of the Malvinas/Falklands war against Great Britain in 1982 shaped along the lines of the commando warriors. By focusing on the official memories of Malvinas in the postwar period 1982-1991 portrayed on books, lectures and declarations by Army middle- and high-rank officers, I discover a style of masculinity that mirrors Argentine football players on the battlefields, underscores individual manliness, imagination and will for combat, and also unravels deep ambiguities that result from the Argentine political history. As I try to show, memories of Malvinas offered by the Argentine Commandos of the 601 and 602 Companies, and also by other Army officers and intellectuals, portray a hybrid self that conflates the virtues of the military cadres and those of the “guerrilla subversives” those cadres had fought and defeated between 1974 and 1980 along the so-called “Dirty War.” Therefore, the moralities portrayed by the official memories of the Argentine Army come up, at one and the same time, as a critique to the Malvinas venture and to the antisubversive war on Argentine civilians, the two utmost legacies of the latest Argentine dictatorship.