Why would anyone value and display an old shell, bullet, or piece of shrapnel from a battlefield? Is it just morbid curiosity or a polished souvenir of someone who died in conflict? Anthropologist Nick Saunders from London鈥檚 University College says it鈥檚 all that and more. From Guatemala or Gallipoli, he reckons that every culture is attracted to brilliant or shiny objects. Maggie McDonald asked him to explain what he means by this 鈥渁nthropology of light鈥�.
What started you off on these ideas?
When my grandfather died twenty years ago, I inherited a lovely piece of brass from a shell case that had been worked into a metal matchbox cover. It was dated 1919 and had come from my grandfather鈥檚 time in the First World War. I didn鈥檛 really think too much about it, but one day I looked at it as an anthropologist, as an archaeologist, as opposed to a grandson. I thought this might be interesting, and I wondered who the experts were. I phoned up everybody I could think of as an expert in the First World War. They told me that 鈥渢his stuff鈥� was called 鈥渢rench art鈥�, and nobody knew anything about it. It was seen as commemorative war junk with no significance. I had a look at other pieces, and most of them were much more elaborate than my grandfather鈥檚 matchbox cover. It turned out that thousands of soldiers had made trench art souvenirs during the war. Afterwards, people who had lost their livelihoods because of the war carried on the tradition, making and selling trench art.
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What else have you found?
One of the most interesting pieces was another First World War shell I came across in Sarajevo, which I had a local Muslim metalsmith make into a piece of trench art. He decorated it with his family design, which goes back to Ottoman times. The shell had been found in the mountains above Sarajevo鈥檚 battlefields. It was a piece of the Great War made into trench art commemorating the Bosnian war of the 1990s.
Is looking for these shells dangerous?
Sometimes. When I was in Bosnia, I went up to the front-line trenches through a minefield. We had to have a local ex-militia man to guide us through the minefield.
What鈥檚 so inspiring about trench art?
Trench art is an attractive and unstudied topic in its own right with connections to art history as well as cultural memory. But even more than that, it鈥檚 a chisel to open up the First World War and 20th-century war in general to an anthropological, archaeological, material culture approach. The art covers such a lot of ground. There are the worked and decorated artillery shell cases, which have been fired like my grandfather鈥檚, the empty brass shell cases decorated in Arabic fashion if they were made in Gallipoli, in Palestine or Egypt, or in European Art Nouveau style if they were made in Belgium or France. Then there are the objects such as beadwork snakes made only by Turkish or Arab prisoners of war and internees. So the messages that the trench art carries-the designs, the cultural attitudes that they embody-reflect the soldiers鈥� religions, ethnicity, language.
Who was trench art made for?
A lot of this material, particularly the decorated artillery shell cases, were bought as souvenirs by the widows who went on battlefield pilgrimages after the First World War. Their husbands, fathers and brothers hadn鈥檛 come back, so they visited the grave or the monument to the missing. They bought souvenirs. These were the only material objects which they could bring back with them from the battlefields.
Who made it?
Trench art was unsigned. Made from shell cases and bits of armament, the raw material was seen by the authorities of all sides as stolen from whatever army was involved. You couldn鈥檛 polish up a nice shell case, inscribe a design and put your name on it without risking punishment. No one signs stolen goods. Most of it was made by working-class soldiers, then kept by their families as the only reminder of the father or husband who never came back. So it didn鈥檛 attract the interest of art collectors.
What happened to trench art when it was brought home?
The objects were ornaments placed in the hallway or on the mantelpiece. Most of them were made of brass, so they needed constant cleaning. Widows polished those trench art objects for what could be upwards of 40 years. But the prized gleam also meant that the message, the decoration, would eventually be lost.
So they were simply mementos?
Trench art really isn鈥檛 just a body of things, it鈥檚 a state of mind about how you embody things and feelings and experiences in objects. Wherever there is or has been conflict, you have objects made for warfare recycled into other things. So the kind of things which were made in the First World War are also being made today in Bosnia or Rwanda. That鈥檚 because these objects are a conceptual way of dealing with loss, grief, war, extreme experiences. A gleaming souvenir showed proper respect to someone鈥檚 memory.
Did this link to your work elsewhere?
It seemed to me that there was something there which suggested a wider notion of spirituality and shininess. Not that I want to draw a direct analogy between the First World War and Aztec sacrifice, but rather to a broader analysis of why people are attracted to bright things and why they polish things and why they buy and ornament their houses and their bodies with shiny things. Any religion, any time, anywhere will contain the notion of brilliant objects, brilliant knowledge, brilliant light. Our liking for brilliance seems to me to be linked to the way our brains make sense of visual stimuli. It鈥檚 something that I鈥檓 not an expert on but which I hope others will think about. The important thing for me is that it鈥檚 a big part of what could be called the anthropology of light.
Tell me more . . .
I had worked on brilliant objects before, in the Caribbean and the Americas. There, one of the clich茅s about the contact between Europeans and indigenous Americans was that 鈥渢he natives were stupid鈥�-that they made worthless exchanges with the visitors or colonisers. The Europeans following in Columbus鈥檚 wake recorded trading cheap metal junk and glass beads for wonderful treasures of gold, silver, pearls and emeralds. They were amazed that they could swap bits of broken glazed pottery for bags of pearls. This doesn鈥檛 just hold for these cultural exchanges-if I鈥檓 right, these ideas could be applied to any field or country where colonial contacts are being investigated.
But you didn鈥檛 buy this 鈥渟tupid native鈥� explanation?
I thought we hadn鈥檛 tried to explain what was really going on. You had to look not just at the gold and pearls that the ancient Amerindians were trading, but at what lay behind these shiny objects. And what lay behind the objects were ideas about the sacred values, meanings and the power of light. Once you began to look at what these people thought about light, then you got a handle on how light was transformed into brilliant objects. You could then get a grip on a whole body of knowledge about the value of light, meteorological phenomena, astronomy and objects that embodied light. This is what the Amerindians were trading: cosmic power, cosmic knowledge and religious significance.
What are you working on now?
I鈥檝e just finished a first book on trench art. I am also putting together what, as far as I can tell, will be the first conference on material culture in the Great War. This will be held in September 2001 at the Imperial War Museum in London. So I hope people will be talking about archaeological excavations of First World War battlefields. It opens up a brand-new kind of archaeology.
You are also interested in landscape as a whole, as more than just a blank space?
That鈥檚 right. An anthropological approach to landscapes sees them as dynamic spaces where things happen because of a whole process. The Western Front is the most famous of the First World War battlefields, but it is far more than an empty backdrop to horrific battles. This has been a Celtic, a Roman, a medieval landscape. Then it became a vast, industrialised slaughterhouse, an extension of factories where the generals of the First World War automated killing. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were killed but never found. They are still there today, alongside the shells that blew them to pieces.
Can you ever see different historical landscapes superimposed on each other?
I saw this for myself a couple of weeks ago. A medieval village high on a hill near Verdun in eastern France had been completely undermined, then blown to pieces by both the Germans and the French. The hill had disappeared into a group of overlapping bomb craters. Every single trace of the village had gone, but on the margins of the damaged area were the remains of German trenches and underground bunkers carved into the limestone. Two local people took me down a stairway carved by the Germans that ended in an oddly shaped chamber. I identified it as an Iron Age storage pit. It must have lain beneath the fringes of the settlement upon which the medieval village was then built. That was totally destroyed, so nothing remained of the Celtic village nor any of its successors. Yet here was this clue as to its archaeological significance because of a single storage pit in the forest on the flanks of the disappeared hill.
And is this area still dangerous?
Yes, many of these First World War battlefields still have to restrict access because they have millions and millions of unexploded bombs, bullets and grenades and every other kind of ordnance lurking in the ground. The First World War battlefield landscape can only truly be viewed as a palimpsest of levels and layers of meaning still changing today. It can never just be a place where many people died 85 years ago because people are killed every year in those areas. In an odd way the conflict continues. Many of the experts who have to go around defusing these First World War munitions have become so expert that they are sent to Cambodia, Bosnia and Kosovo to deal with the unexploded armaments of those conflicts. In Bosnia, you鈥檒l find demining experts who travel from Flanders in Belgium, where the First World War was fought, to Sarajevo where it was triggered.
Is this history or archaeology?
That question fascinates me. Exactly when does a discarded object transform into an archaeological object? Right away? Five years, a hundred years or a thousand years? Most people wouldn鈥檛 think about a brass souvenir shell as a bit of archaeology, particularly if it has been in the house for 80-odd years. And there鈥檚 a fascinating dilemma when you find things like these in archaeological excavations of First World War trenches. A piece of trench art found here is defined as an archaeological object. But what happens if it is identical to the souvenir your family has treasured, polished and displayed on a mantelpiece for years? Is there a fundamental difference between the two objects?
If these souvenirs are archaeological objects, then doesn鈥檛 that make the collectors looters?
Yes, I think it does. This hasn鈥檛 been broached before because nobody thought that such artefacts had historical, archaeological or anthropological significance. They were family heirlooms or junk bought in car boot sales or seen occasionally in a museum. I think that we are beginning to prove that that is not the case.
Could you also say they were recyclers?
In a way. Interestingly, at the end of last year I discovered that Oxford鈥檚 Pitt-Rivers Museum was putting on an exhibition of recycled objects. I talked to the curators about trench art, and they asked me to put together a representative collection of trench art. So a modern exhibition about recycling will include trench art ignored for 80 years.