Finding Gallipoli

This book is about how Australian and Turkish historical understanding of the First World War Gallipoli Campaign has been shaped by travel to the battlefield for the purposes of commemoration. Utilizing a cultural historical method, the study begins with examining how cultural conceptions of travel influenced the experience of those fighting in the 1915 Battle, and ends with the way that new global insecurities and the withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan in 2021 is reflecting and influencing Australia and Turkey’s social memory of their military past. This wide historical lens and the author’s original fieldwork and analysis of documents allows for an in-depth exploration of the ways in which cultural patterns of social memory develop over time and mapping of how specific cultural representations in the past are reclaimed.  The book argues that travel is a key factor influencing social change by providing distinctive ritual experiences that afford unique, discursive opportunities and empowering particular carriers and custodians of social memory. 

 

 

By bringing past and current modes of travel to bear on how pasts are being reclaimed and transformed, Brad West demonstrates how meaning is never just made but always in the making. Here pilgrimage does not merely represent or reproduce national memories but reflects a cultural disruption that can be generative of new meaningful tropes. The book is an important corrective to the pervasive juxtaposition of the national and the global.

Daniel Levy, Stony Brook University

 Brad West offers a compelling account of how Australian and Turkish identities have been shaped through commemorative visits to the First World War Gallipoli battlefield. In doing so he also offers a fresh look to travel as a symbolically meaningful act of mobility in time and space. Finding Gallipoli is a fascinating window into the touching histories and presents of two distant countries.

Esra Ozyurek, University of Cambridge

 Finding Gallipoli is an erudite and original inquiry into social memory. By seeing Gallipoli commemoration in both countries through the lens of travel, West breaks new ground in our understanding of the whole business of Anzackery.

Richard White, University of Sydney

In Finding Gallipoli, Brad West offers an authoritative account of the remembrance of the Battle of Gallipoli by Australian and Turkish citizens from World War I to the present. His comparative analysis offers important insights into the politics of memory in each country, and brilliantly demonstrates that their commemoration practices are deeply intertwined. The result is a highly original work that is a must-read for anyone interested in ritual, travel, militarism, and social memory.

Ateş Altınordu, Sabancı University, Istanbul, Turkey

Brad West is a sociologist at the University of South Australia and Faculty Fellow in the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. He is the author of Re-enchanting Nationalisms (2015) and co-editor of Militarization and the Global Rise of Paramilitary Culture (2021).