Affirming the arctic outdoors: reading norrland ranger memoirs of becoming through outdoor training

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article contributes to literature in IR and critical military studies on embodied experiences, military geographies, and research on rangers. Despite being a common feature of military training, little research exists on how the military uses outdoor training to shape soldiers’ identities, emotions, and embodied dispositions. In contrast to existing scholarship’s emphasis on using and constructing outdoor environments in military training to transmit values and skills to make soldiers tough, I argue that outdoor training should be examined from its wealth of embodied experiences and the becoming it gives rise to. Exploring written memoirs by Swedish Norrland Rangers in annual ranger journals on their embodied experiences of extensive outdoor training in north Sweden, the article traces how these rangers represent outdoor training as an assemblage of challenging and pleasurable experiences of being entangled with the northern geographies. The findings indicate that Norrland rangers actively nurture an affirmative orientation to the outdoors and Arctic geographies through their representations of outdoor training, making the challenging ranger formation a rewarding becoming. By developing how rangers constitute and foster this affirmative orientation through their writings, the article provides a better understanding of how pleasurable feelings and experiences of the outdoors are nurtured and drawn upon to socialize rangers.