The occupation as a subject of military anthropological studies
Gladyshev Andrey
The history of military conflicts in Modern times is closely linked to the subject of occupation: it’s difficult to find a power that was not familiar with this phenomenon in its past. In military history, an event-driven approach prevailed for a long time, and if the authors worked on the phenomenon of occupation, they were interested in its economic, legal or political aspects. At the same time, the concept of «occupation» was semantically ambiguous, and studies on the history of occupation were mostly concerned with World wars. The development of military anthropological studies has raised a number of new issues for researchers: mutual perception of the opposing sides, the reflection of war in humans’ feelings and mentality, the vision of war by the civilian population, the idea of occupation in the mass consciousness of contemporaries and in the historical memory. The subject of occupation has acquired a «human dimension». The cross-cultural approach is particularly fruitful in this respect, which includes the search for common cultural factors that determine the effectiveness of communication in the conditions of social and psychological stress and cultural shock caused by military occupation.