The Warrior's Beauty: The Masculine Body and Self-Identity in Bronze-Age Europe

Abstract

The concept of ideology has figured centrally in recent accounts of the fundamental social transformation sweeping Europe from the mid-fifth to second millennia BC. In particular, many have focussed on the human body as a principal medium of ideological expression, notably in terms of a growing 'prestige goods ideology'. This paper endeavours to expose the deficiencies of this model, which lie in its overly cynical nature and its disregard for the specific socio-cultural contours of status expression. Specifically, by linking the 'ideological' transformations of this Period to the development of a distinct institution, a male warrior status group, and its package of expressive themes - individualism, warfare, bodily ornamentation, horses and wheeled vehicles, the hunt, the ritual consumption of alcohol - I seek to demonstrate that the changing treatment of the human body in mortuary rites and in everyday life is more than ideological. In particular, it is implicated in the development of a coherent life style, and as such is fundamentally bound up with changing notions of Personhood and self-identity. Running through the fabric of this life style, through its embodiment of the subject in both life and death, is an equally distinctive notion of male beauty, unique to the warrior.