P1: VENDOR/GDW/GCY/GCX P2: GDW

Qualitative Sociology [quso] PH035-301553 March 30, 2001 16:26 Style file version Nov. 19th, 1999

Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 24, No. 2, 2001

Prolegomena to a Paradigm: Narratives

of Surrender
Robin Wagner-Pacifici

This article seeks to develop a paradigm for understanding the sociological mean-
ing of narratives of surrender. Surrenders are boundary events in time and in
space. Coming at the end of conflicts, surrenders are transitional and transfor-
mative occasions during which the emotional and symbolic landscapes of power
are traced and highlighted. They mark the site of trauma and, depending on the
manner in which they are accomplished, can alternately emphasize the degrada-
tion of the vanquished or the magnanimity of the victor. Surrenders are analyzed
as simultaneously historical events, symbolic events, and political events.
KEY WORDS: surrender; violence; boundaries.

Hovering over the strained visage of Albert Gore, as he acknowledged defeat

in the November 2000 United States presidential electoral contest, was the question
of whether he would actually use the word “concession” in his speech or whether
he would simply say “withdraw.” After the heated, vexed, and highly partisan vote-
counting debacle of November and December, the media pundits made much of the
necessity for Gore to actually concede, lest the legitimacy of the Bush presidency
be forever in doubt and Bush’s power be viewed as brutal and provisional. In
the terms of this article, the question was whether, in the story that the speech
was to tell about the conflict and the contest, Gore would actually surrender.
And indeed, he would, with the following words: “I accept the finality of this
outcome, which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College. And tonight,
for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer
my concession.”1

Correspondence should be directed to Robin Wagner-Pacifici, Department of Sociology and

Anthropology, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania 19081; e-mail: rwagner1@
swarthmore.edu.
1 Albert Gore concession speech, printed in The New York Times, December 14, 2000, p. A26.

269
°
C 2001 Human Sciences Press, Inc.
P1: VENDOR/GDW/GCY/GCX P2: GDW
Qualitative Sociology [quso] PH035-301553 March 30, 2001 16:26 Style file version Nov. 19th, 1999

270 Wagner-Pacifici

The uncertainty and anxiety about Gore’s lexical choices suggest a question
about the contemporary relevance of surrender. In spite of the felt need for Gore to
concede, many might claim that surrender is actually an archaic concept, no longer
relevant to the ways that we now end conflicts, conflicts that don’t, and shouldn’t,
have clear winners and losers. These conflicts end with “peace accords” or they may
merely peter out.2 One might recall the muddled end of the Vietnam War (where
the shape of the table at which the parties to its conclusion were to sit became a
contentious issue—no one willing to have any hierarchy spatially produced) or of
a Gulf War that left Saddam Hussein in power despite his military defeat, of wars
that have ended—but not really. In matters of social and military conflict, then, have
we outgrown surrender, no longer needing clear winners and losers, exquisitely
keyed in, as we are, to the pragmatic impulses associated with a pluralistic world
or to relativized notions of right and wrong, aggressor and innocent? Does it seem,
in fact, politically and philosophically sophisticated to see the exaggerated clarity
of surrender as archaic, unproductive, and unnecessary (with those in the field of
dispute resolution avoiding the term altogether)? If this attitude prevails, as I think
it does, what can an analysis of the forms and meanings of surrender offer us? What
can we learn from them? How has the “doing of” surrender halted or staved off
the violence of the conflict and its aftermath? I would argue that surrenders, their
ceremonializations, and their aesthetic representations are events inhabiting and
marking the sharp conceptual edges of political time and space. They are boundary
events that reconfigure the world in dangerous moments of transformation. They
mark ends and beginnings and map the symbolic landscapes of power in a way
that “peace accords” often obscure. They still have much to teach us. But first we
have to know what surrenders entail.
To begin, I need to ask if surrenders are really historical events par
excellence—capping and congealing a definitive end to something and setting his-
tory off on a new path? Surrenders do temporarily halt the war, hostility, friction,
resistance, or violence that has been, up until that moment (and, one might add, may
well again be, after that moment) full of competing frames and meaning—corpses
from a battle that is only named retrospectively, once the winner has been declared.
Surrenders seem to be extreme acts of giving up, of self-abnegation—seemingly
all and nothing in their stopping of the action. Surrenders are interstitial acts as
well—for in themselves they are all about the time of the present. And yet the
narratives of the past and the terms of the future must enter into this present of the
scene somehow, to give it meaning and to redirect it. Surrender as a rendering up of
meaning over time, then? And how does one represent the rendering up of mean-
ing? How is that defining moment to be rendered, when the present is summoned

2 Politicalscientist and legal scholar Quincy Wright wrote that “since World War II, hostilities have
terminated less conclusively than in the past. Armistices, cease-fire lines, suppression of insurrection,
acquiescence in de facto territorial changes, or a contested status quo have been provisional, and
hostilities have often been renewed.” (1970, p. 61)
P1: VENDOR/GDW/GCY/GCX P2: GDW
Qualitative Sociology [quso] PH035-301553 March 30, 2001 16:26 Style file version Nov. 19th, 1999

Narratives of Surrender 271

by a particular rendering of the past to declare a future, with all of its realignments?
How do we capture and navigate the pause in the action of war or conflict, see it
as a time in itself: History at a (temporary) standstill, frozen in its poses.
I want to examine this moment of surrender, as a moment of history rendered
by participants, witnesses, and correspondents, specifically as it took ceremonial
and symbolic root in the modernizing European West. As failed or inconclusive
surrenders suggest (thus the anxiety around Gore’s speech), surrenders are much
more than the mere ceremonial reflections of the obvious facts of victory and loss.
First, it is useful to look into the very word “surrender” itself.

THE ETYMOLOGY OF SURRENDER

The Oxford English Dictionary, in its entry for “surrender” as a noun, lists
“sure render” and “surrendre” as other incarnations of the word. The etymological
roots of the word are given as the Anglo-French “surrender” and the Old French
“surrender.” The first meaning given is that which pertains to law: “The giving up
of an estate to the person who has it in reversion or remainder, so as to merge it in
the larger estate . . . specifically the yielding up of a tenancy in a copyhold estate
to the lord of the manor for a specified purpose.” Thus, surrender is immediately
linked to space, by way of its territorial referent and to the accumulations of power
(“so as to merge it in the larger estate”) and to time (reversion or remainder). The
second, more general, meaning is given as “The giving up of something (or of
oneself) into the possession or power of another who has or is held to have a claim
to it; especially (Military, etc.) of combatants, a town, territory, etc. to an enemy or
a superior. In a wider sense: Giving up, resignation, abandonment.” Several things
are striking about these meanings. First, the persistent suggestion of a prior claim
in the essential meaning of surrender—there are always those who are held to have
a claim to the self or thing surrendered. And second, that the concept “enemy”
is linked, and yet also distinguished from “superior,”3 suggesting an ambivalence
about the nature of the relationship between victor and vanquished. Finally, the
emotional resonances associated with surrender can be resignation or abandon-
ment emotions that seem to be about finality or finitude and imply the loss of a
world.
A clue to the first issue can be found in the etymology of the root word
“render” in surrender. The OED presents “render” as a verb with the Old French
root “rendre,” the popular Latin root “rendere” (an alteration of prendere), and the
classical Latin root “reddere,” meaning “to give back.” In fact, the very first of
some seventeen meanings for render that are provided in the OED is “To repeat
(something learned); to say over, recite.” Repetition is, then, at the very linguistic

3 The earliest examples provided for both of these meanings come from the fifteenth century.
P1: VENDOR/GDW/GCY/GCX P2: GDW
Qualitative Sociology [quso] PH035-301553 March 30, 2001 16:26 Style file version Nov. 19th, 1999

272 Wagner-Pacifici

heart of surrender—but not just rote repetition, for the second, though noted as now
somewhat rare, definition of render is “To give in return, to make return of.” Here
repetition is return, as one renders thanks for some prior gift. And thus notions of
recompense and proportionality are brought to bear as render gets drawn into the
modality of the gift and gift-giving.
Meanings seven and eight of “render” are actually synonymous with “surren-
der” itself: “To hand over, deliver, commend, or commit, to another, to concede”
and “To give up, surrender, resign, relinquish.” But another meaning, located be-
tween render as return and render as surrender, meaning six, is “To reproduce
or express in another language, to translate.” Translation turns out to be key for
surrender scenes by acknowledging the hazards of claims of return that have suf-
fered the necessary lapses of time. As time passes between the so-called originary
time of the prior possessor and the so-called fallen time of the pretender possessor,
something happens to that which is possessed (be it land or title or women or
legal system or language). The interim time is viewed as a time of violation. And
thus, even with the successful assertion of the “giving back” of the rendering up
of surrender, the surrender participants and structure must also engage in an act of
translation as one system repossesses the alienated object.
The Dictionnaire de la langue Francais carries forth a similar constellation of
meanings for “rendre,” the French root of “render” and “sur-render” (sur rendre),
as does the Oxford English Dictionary. Key meanings are: 1) to make someone
become; 2) to give back something to the one to whom it belongs in the first
place; 3) to bring something, to transmit; 4) to have respect; 5) to represent; 7) to
witness and certify. There is the clear sense of transformation in so many of these
meanings, and yet of transformation understood as return to something essential.
It is that which gets to the essence either by returning to a prior, truer, state or, as
in the concept of rendre as “witness and certify,” by the impositions of consensus.
Jacques Derrida, in his intricate meditation on the world of “the gift,” works
through Marcel Mauss’s classic text, The Gift, to notice that the French word
“rendre” carries within itself the idea of this temporal pause, or gap, as well as the
idea of repetition. He quotes and comments on a passage from Mauss: “The notion
of a time limit or term is thus logically implied when it is a question of paying
or returning visits [rendre des visites: an interesting expression in the French
idiom: a visit is always repaid or returned even when it is the first], contracting
marriages and alliances, establishing peace, attending games . . .” (Derrida 1994,
p. 39; emphasis in the original). If even that which appears as the first visit or the
first surrender is actually a return of a prior visit or a prior surrender, there can
be no real first occasions of this sort within human history. One needs to come to
terms, then, with the essential mythos of return in the linguistic and symbolic roots
of such situations of social exchange as surrender. With all the assumed glory of
the victor in a surrender, it is puzzling that the very terms of the scene themselves
(“sure render,” “surrender,” “sur render”) do not allow the victor the claim of
P1: VENDOR/GDW/GCY/GCX P2: GDW
Qualitative Sociology [quso] PH035-301553 March 30, 2001 16:26 Style file version Nov. 19th, 1999

Narratives of Surrender 273

first mover. Such an embedded cyclical notion obviously suggests ideas about the
temporal order of eternity and the divine (to whom all objects of human exchange
are ultimately referred and returned) as well as the annexing of these ideas into
human projects of conquest. These projects then become re-takings (Greenblatt
1991).4
Similarly, there is also no last mover or final surrender—even as each new
victor hopes to have put the matter to rest with each surrender received. By their
very cyclical natures, surrenders cannot be definitive.5 Today I surrender to you—
tomorrow you will surrender to me. As the wheel of history turns, the idea of re-
taking is too much at the heart of the surrender, and the vanquished must, of
necessity, be drawn back into the cycle. Thus, while the emotional resonance of
resignation is the most obvious one for the defeated to experience, the cyclical view
of return may insinuate another stance—that of revenge. What all of this suggests
is that any analysis of surrender must explore the complex and deeply existential
relationships between events and repetitions. As a first parsing of these issues
it is useful to think of surrenders as simultaneously historical events (occurring
within a linear notion of time and history), as symbolic events (occurring within
a metaphorical frame of competing sovereigns and hierarchical systems), and
as political events (occurring within the strategic frame of the victor’s vision of
rightful return and mythological cycles).
Etymological archeology is extremely valuable, partly for connections dis-
covered and partly for connections that are given a lie. One might assume that the
roots of “render” are somehow linked to the roots of “rend” and that both provide
some of the meaning to the word surrender. Were this commingling indeed to
be linguistically “natural” it would somehow manage to complicate “surrender’s”
meaning further. For, as we have seen, “render” means to give back, to restore
to wholeness. And “rend” means to “tear or pull violently or by main force, to
tear off or away” (OED). So it appears at first that there is a dynamic contra-
diction at the heart of the surrender. Surely it marks the site of a fissure or tear
as the vanquished loses that which was previously possessed. But surrender also
announces the restoration of peace, the end of hostility, the merging together
again of that which was torn asunder. And yet, “render” and “rend” actually in-
habit different etymological families. They are not related, though they look alike.
“Render” has its roots in the Latin “reddere,” and “rend” has its roots in the Old
Frisian (Friesland, Netherlands) “renda” and the Old English “rendan.” So this

4 Stephen Greenblatt develops an analysis of this weaving together of the religious and secular im-
peratives of what he calls “Christian imperialism” in his discussion of Columbus’s acts of taking
possession of the New World for the Spanish crown.
5 It is interesting to note here that contemporary theorists and practitioners of “conflict resolution”
never use the term “surrender.” According to political scientist Marc Howard Ross, it is not in their
vocabulary—partly for its imperialist loading and partly because surrender is, even if implicitly,
understood not to ever really resolve things.
P1: VENDOR/GDW/GCY/GCX P2: GDW
Qualitative Sociology [quso] PH035-301553 March 30, 2001 16:26 Style file version Nov. 19th, 1999

274 Wagner-Pacifici

assumed linguistic dynamism is actually a false linguistic consciousness, and we

are left with the notion of restoration devoid of the fissure. There is no fissure
in “sure render” and therefore no first mover allowed. Yet there is something
uncanny about the accidental encounter of these terms that mirrors the uncanni-
ness at the heart of the surrender—that which marks a breach, a loss, a rupture
of war and conflict becomes a return, a repetition, a giving back, a translation
to make legible. The opposed meanings of “render” and “rend” shadow each
other in ways that are nevertheless meaningful for our general understanding of
surrender.

RECOGNITIONS

My own misrecognition of the (false) doubled meaning in the word “sur-

render” (“render,” which does link etymologically, and “rend,” which does not)
points to the question of recognition and misrecognition more generally. For, in
rendering something, in representing it as that thing it is claimed to be (a vic-
tory, a return of a prior possession, a rightful claim), various layers and types of
recognition must occur. The situation must be recognized as that which it has been
named to be. The parties to the surrender must recognize each other (render each
other well and accurately), and must perform this recognition in their gestures and
their words.
How, for example, do we recognize an action as a surrender and not as some-
thing else? Some might view the collective suicide of a group a form of surrender
to an enemy that the group knows it cannot defeat (though it denies the enemy the
“gift” of the possession of themselves as subjects or slaves). Some might view this
action as a form of resistance, rather than as a form of surrender. Some might
contest the very terms of suicide and surrender themselves. Yael Zerubavel has
traced precisely these historically contingent recognitions and misrecognitions in
the case of Masada where, in AD 70–73, a group of Jews holding out against the
conquering Romans on a high plateau overlooking the Dead Sea and Judea killed
each other rather than face the prospect of slavery, torture, or death at the hands of
the Romans (Zerubavel 1995).
A more contemporary example is the standoff between the forces of the FBI
and ATF and the religious group, the Branch Davidians in Texas in the early 1990s.
At points, this standoff appeared to be moving in the direction of a surrender of the
group, but that movement was propulsive, intermittent, and difficult for the FBI
negotiators to precisely recognize as a surrender. The FBI maintained a literalist,
quantifiable idea of surrender, as evidenced in this post-standoff interview with
two agents:

Jeff Jamar: We worked out a surrender plan in minute detail . . . See, you want a plan, you
want a surrender plan, because you put that in their heads.
P1: VENDOR/GDW/GCY/GCX P2: GDW
Qualitative Sociology [quso] PH035-301553 March 30, 2001 16:26 Style file version Nov. 19th, 1999

Narratives of Surrender 275

Byron Sage: If they can visualize—and you actually use those words—“Can you picture
this? Can you . . . can you visualize . . . okay, you’re going to come out the front door. You’re
going to turn left.”6

Within another interpretive frame, religious scholars claimed that David

Koresh, leader of the Branch Davidians, had a very different sense of surrender,
one mediated and made possible through Biblical hermeneutics: “What the au-
thorities never perceived was that Koresh’s preaching was precisely such to him,
the only matter of substance and means through which to work out a ‘surrender’”
(Tabor 1995). Both sides were theoretically searching for a gestural and discursive
language by way of which to effect a surrender. Translation problems of an episte-
mological sort prevented mutual recognition—with all the tragic consequences of
misrecognition in this case. Incommensurable world views can stymie surrenders
as effectively as any last-minute treachery.
Returning to the issue of mutual identification and recognition that emerged
in the discussion of the etymology of the word “surrender,” we discern several
types of anxiety about identity and recognition in surrender scenes. One is an
anxiety about recognition and betrayal or treason. Quoting from the terms of the
surrender agreement of an eighteenth-century garrison siege, John Wright reveals
the following provisions for the vanquished’s retreat from the garrison: “The gar-
rison commander may bring four covered wagons which under no circumstances
will be examined. Six masked men may accompany the troops who will under
no circumstances be molested and whose masks will not be removed” (Wright
1934, p. 641). Wright notes that those in the wagons and the masked individuals
were actually deserters from the victorious side who, had they been recognized by
the victors, would have had to be shot or hanged as traitors. Here, recognition is
precisely deferred as the overriding goal is to navigate the surrender with as much
honor intact on both sides as possible.
The theme of honor indicates that recognition in surrenders raises issues
about hierarchy and equivalences. Recalling the definitional linking and parsing
of “enemy” and “superior,” it seems necessary to have both animosity and respect
for one’s enemies. Of course, this is true in varying degrees in diverse situations.
Thus all surrender ceremonies have varying elements of both recognition and
degradation in them. With recognizably grand vehemence, Nietzsche writes about
the love for one’s enemy in The Genealogy of Morals: “How much reverence has a
noble man for his enemies!—and such reverence is a bridge to love. For he desires
his enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction; he can endure no other enemy
than one in whom there is nothing to despise and very much to honor!” (Nietzsche
1969, p. 39). Most conflicts won’t meet these passionate intensities of mutual love.
Nevertheless, the necessary recognitions of social positions in “conclusions of the
peace” seem to call for some system of contingently shifting equivalences.

6 Frontline, “Waco: The Inside Story,” ABC, October 17, 1995.

P1: VENDOR/GDW/GCY/GCX P2: GDW
Qualitative Sociology [quso] PH035-301553 March 30, 2001 16:26 Style file version Nov. 19th, 1999

276 Wagner-Pacifici

Ceremonies of surrender alternately stress magnanimity and degradation in

establishing power ratios between victor and vanquished, and surrenders can be
singularly decorous and honorable or disheveled and humiliating. On one hand,
there is a clear winner and a clear loser. On the other, depending on the manner in
which the surrender takes place, the winner can actually be made to feel humiliated
and the loser can feel that his or her social persona has come through the situation
intact. These counterintuitive reactions reveal the degree to which the rituals and
ceremonies of surrenders draw the grammar of a situation into reconfigurations of
character.
When there are clear asymmetries of status between the two sides, genre prob-
lems result. Stephen Greenblatt describes a study designed by Albrecht Durer for a
monument to celebrate an imagined sixteenth-century victory of German nobility
and princes over rebellious peasants. These peasants, one might guess, would not
be given the option of surrender with terms (advantageous or not), and thus Durer’s
drawing shows a peasant slumped atop a tall column of agricultural products with
a sword stuck in his back. Greenblatt writes: “The princes and nobles for whom
such monuments were built could derive no dignity from the triumph, any more
than they could derive dignity from killing a mad dog . . . Indeed in the economy
of honor [the peasants] are not simply a cipher but a deficit, since even a defeat
at the hands of a prince threatens to confer upon them some of the prince’s store
of honor, while what remains of the victorious prince’s store can be tarnished by
the unworthy encounter” (Greenblatt 1983, p. 10). That which cannot be recog-
nized (i.e., the peasant) might suggest that which cannot be represented. And yet
it is the victor that becomes the impossible subject of the rendering of the (forced)
surrender and victory here. The noble and the prince are ironically vanquished from
the scene.
Alternatively, the scene of surrender can, by imposing its own terms of recog-
nition, actually elevate the vanquished to a position of equality with the victor.
Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at George McLean’s house in
Appomattox in the closing weeks of the Civil War approached the ideal of medieval
chivalry among honorable foes. Lee, his officers, and all of the soldiers under Lee’s
command were allowed to keep their personal arms and their horses and could re-
turn to their homes in time to plant their crops. Certainly, Robert E. Lee already
had a reputation as a great and vaunted soldier. Nonetheless, one might have ex-
pected that, as the vanquished general of a lost (and traitorous) cause, Lee might
have undergone status degradation after the war. To the contrary, it was the widely
reproduced lithographic representation of the surrender scene at Appomattox that
assisted Lee’s resurgent popularity: “By showing the Confederate commander in
the same scenes, more or less as Grant’s equal—even if only to bring added luster
to the Union victor—these graphics present Lee in surrender, but not humiliation,
suggesting that reunion could be accomplished without subjugation” (Neely et al.
1987, p. 5). Recalling the etymological suggestion of prior claims on all surrenders,
P1: VENDOR/GDW/GCY/GCX P2: GDW
Qualitative Sociology [quso] PH035-301553 March 30, 2001 16:26 Style file version Nov. 19th, 1999

Narratives of Surrender 277

it might be correct to say that the ideal typical surrender would be precisely that—a
reunion.
But the problems of recognition at Appomattox show just how complicated
these calibrations are. For, if Greenblatt’s nobles evacuate the scene because of the
ignobility of their enemies, Ulysses S. Grant effectively erases the scene of the
Confederate surrender because of the obverse dilemma—it is precisely the rec-
ognizability of the enemy that makes the scene impossible. The family-likeness
problem will cause the later President Grant to reject a Congressional commit-
tee proposal to commission a painting of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox for the
rotunda of the United States Capitol. Grant refused: “He said he would never
take part in producing a picture that commemorated a victory in which his own
countrymen were the losers”7 (ibid., p. 6). The surrender, in essence, never hap-
pened because the middle, lapsed time of the war could not be officially, historically
recognized. This was because the convergence of the categories “vanquished” and
“countrymen” was understood as impossible.
It is not only at the level of representation that the surrender scene can be
emptied out of participants and action when recognition is thwarted. The central
figures to surrenders have, at times, absented themselves from the very perfor-
mance of the act. Indeed, it is a difficult act to perform, with challenges and threats
to identity and autonomy that will be discussed at length in the larger study of
which this essay forms a part. In the surrender ceremony at Yorktown in 1781,
during the War of Independence in the United States, General Cornwallis was to
have rendered (hand over, transmit) his sword directly to General Washington.
The sociologist Barry Schwartz writes of this scene: “As the victorious comman-
der, [Washington] was entitled to receive the sword of surrender directly from
Cornwallis, his vanquished counterpart. Cornwallis never showed up; instead, he
delivered his sword to Washington through an aide. Refusing to accept the instru-
ment himself, Washington instructed Cornwallis’s aide to present it to his own
aide, General Lincoln” (Schwartz 1987, pp. 140 –141). In these absences and de-
flections, away from the first-line representatives and drawing the seconds into the
action, the transmissions of the surrender scene skate around the space of exchange
in the center rather than attempt to cross it.
We find resistance to appear and/or to be recognized on both the parts of the
victors and the vanquished, to be sure, but there is also a key move here that makes
participants of witnesses. Witnesses are crucial to surrenders, as they are to all of
history. One might go so far as to say that witnesses are the unsung heroes of history.
Without the official painting of the Appomattox surrender, there are no official state
and public witnesses (spatially situated in the Capitol and temporally located in

7 One might view such an action as being all of a piece with a general reconstruction of the Civil War
and its aftermath as being exclusively a conflict between and about whites and vanquishing its real
subject, the black slave (cf. Kirk Savage 1994).
P1: VENDOR/GDW/GCY/GCX P2: GDW
Qualitative Sociology [quso] PH035-301553 March 30, 2001 16:26 Style file version Nov. 19th, 1999

278 Wagner-Pacifici

the future) and thus, apart from the documents, no historically perduring vouching
that the surrender ever transpired in a particular manner. If the key participants
perform the action syntactically, witnesses anchor the action semantically.8 They
consolidate and subscribe to their meaning. Without them, the renderings are
untranslated and untranslatable. In the public realm, particularly in the realm of
politics, witnessing spectators attest to the success or failure of the performing
actors.9 With or without their actual signatures, they subscribe to the scene.
Of course, with all of the problems and dilemmas of translation of language
(“concede” or “withdraw?”) and world views, witnesses to the same surrender
may end up subscribing to different events. In the fascinating case of one of
only two surviving bilingual Christian-Islamic surrender pacts from the thirteenth-
century crusades, the Arabic text and the Castilian texts of the surrender treaty are
intercalibrated on the same page. Both al Azraq on one side and King James and
Prince Alfonso on the other (to whom al Azraq surrenders) sign the treaty. And
yet the meanings of the two texts are quite divergent—they are not simply one
text translated into two languages. The Castilian text makes reference to Alfonso’s
receiving al Azraq as his “honored and loyal vassal” (Burns and Chevedden 2000).
The Arabic text does not mention vassalage or fidelity. Rather, “the surrender is
rendered as an alliance” (p. 523). Only the shifting contingencies of relative power
would, as they played out over time, indicate which translation was the more
accurate. Nevertheless, we cannot underestimate the impact of each side’s going
about their business of codifying relationships with each other after signing the
treaty with very different understandings of what had been transacted. An important
caveat in the analysis of the meaning of surrender is exemplified in this case. That
is, the assumption that both sides belong to the same tradition of honor, power,
hierarchy, and so forth, is one that must be tested in situations where foes do not
necessarily share the same world views.
Translation turns out to be a complicated business on many levels. Incom-
mensurability of world views is just one of them. These questions about trans-
lation become all the more critical when we remember that scenes of surrender
harbor contradictory claims within themselves. On one hand there is the claim
that surrenders serve to definitively end a conflict and begin anew social relations

8 Witnesses can be voluntary or involuntary. In her book analyzing the emergent conventions of photo-
journalists after the liberation of the concentration camps at the end of the Holocaust, Remembering
to Forget, Barbie Zelizer describes the development of the genre “witnessing photograph.” These
group photos were peopled with involuntary witnesses, implicated in the very scenes that they were,
in essence, validating. Zelizer writes: “German civilians were also frequently depicted witnesses,
and they too were photographed in various encounters with the atrocities: reburying the bodies of
Nazi victims, looking at cremation ovens,” or “being forced to gaze at stacks of corpses” (1998,
p. 102).
9 “[P]erformance utterances necessarily take place ‘in concert’ and require for their success the presence
of spectators in order to achieve their purpose, which is to bring something into being that did not
exist before” (Honig 1993, p. 206).
P1: VENDOR/GDW/GCY/GCX P2: GDW
Qualitative Sociology [quso] PH035-301553 March 30, 2001 16:26 Style file version Nov. 19th, 1999

Narratives of Surrender 279

between former enemies, thus inserting the surrender into a linear notion of his-
tory. On the other hand, surrenders may appear to participate in a mythos of return
and restoration, thus inserting the surrender into a cyclical notion of time. Do
surrenders, then, use a language and set of images of novelty or of restoration
and return? In either case, the necessary translations of understanding across lan-
guages, genres, and media of communication serve to shape the forms and contents
of the designated exchanges that are, despite diverse understandings, collaborative
acts (Dumm 1999).10 Translation and transfer are thus intricately tied together and
suggest that we need to pay particular attention to the literal and figurative spaces
across which these documents, weapons, keys, paintings, and so forth travel.
The literal and metaphorical space of the surrender marks the site of trauma
and, in the words of Thomas Dumm, “seeks to contain it” (ibid., p. 54). Because
it is a space that undergoes a transformation in the very process of “hosting” the
surrender, it also operates as a kind of vanishing point of history where participants
show up somewhere together (defiantly, reluctantly, ambivalently, arrogantly, mag-
nanimously) and effect a transfer across the divide. The literal sites of surrender
can be recent battlefields, the area around the entrances to fortresses or cities, the
decks of ships, the borders of nations, courthouses, and so forth. The requisite
proximity of the parties to each other for this transfer, however brief in duration,
pulls our attention to that space in the middle. It is also the case that so many
of the transfers and exchanges underwritten by the surrender treaties involve the
control over space or territory itself. Thus the space of the surrender becomes a
kind of temporary synecdochic condensation of what may ultimately be at stake,
and questions about the participant identities, identity transformations, and social
relations at scenes of surrender must be understood within the specific contexts
and meanings of the spaces of the surrenders themselves. In the limit case of a
total surrender of self, troops, and territory, the site of the surrender becomes a
literal vanishing point—the essentially annihilated vanquished party literally dis-
appears. I would argue that when surrender bleeds into violent annihilation, we
are no longer talking about surrender. Thus total surrender can be approached only
asymptotically.
Our conventional stock of predetermined forms and functions of surrender
inevitably encounters the contingent relations set into play during any given actual
historical situation. In developing a paradigm for surrender, it is important to track
both sides—the conventions and the variations. It is useful to think about some of
the recognized functions of surrenders: 1) to accomplish the cessation of hostilities
and the beginning of the peace (with resonant phrases here like “concluding the

10 This notion of collaboration holds true for acts of resignation as well, as Thomas Dumm indicates:
“The receipt of the letter is crucial to the resignation because it is a moment of communication, the act
of transmission of the sign of resignation. For both professor and president, the letter of resignation
becomes a collaborative act . . .” (p. 55)
P1: VENDOR/GDW/GCY/GCX P2: GDW
Qualitative Sociology [quso] PH035-301553 March 30, 2001 16:26 Style file version Nov. 19th, 1999

280 Wagner-Pacifici

peace” and “laying down of arms”11 ); 2) announcement of a hierarchy of victor and

vanquished; 3) setting the tone and conditions for the new peace; and 4) with the
signing of documents by protagonists and witnesses, a first act of commemoration
of the victory. It is also useful to think about the variations in the forms of surrender
as they mark and seek to heal the sites of trauma, violence, and force. Some
surrenders exaggeratedly mark the degradation of the vanquished. Some provide
for face-saving, and some are overtly magnanimous. The meanings of victory and
loss are, then, highly contingent. Ultimately, in an age of skepticism about forms
and of sensitivity to ambiguity, we may be tempted to forego the apparent clarity of
surrenders altogether. Such diffidence does injustice to the subtle variations within
a theme of surrender. Rather, I would pose the question: What do we understand to
be happening when one party in a conflict is compelled or convinced to surrender
itself or its forces to another? How do we recognize a surrender and distinguish it
from such things as a deal, an armistice, a decommissioning (the term for the IRA’s
handing over of its weapons), a mass suicide, and so forth? What do surrenders of a
variety of types imply about the ensuing identities of and relationships between the
key parties? Reflecting on the heroes and battles of the Iliad, Jorge Luis Borges
wrote, “Men have sought kinship with the defeated Trojans, and not with the
victorious Greeks. This is perhaps because there is a dignity in defeat that hardly
belongs to victory” (Borges 2000, p. 63). While the main action in surrender
ceremonies takes place within the circle of the vanquished and the victor, the
resultant echoes of heroism, humility, pride, degradation, magnanimity, and so
forth necessarily involve a third party: the observer, the witness, the sovereign
authority, other sovereign authorities in a world system, or History with a capital
H. The gestures of surrender are those of a power that is attempting, for however
brief a moment, to suture the timeline where myth and history intersect. As we
seek to find endings to our own wars and conflicts, we might indeed pay heed to
the temporary clarity that surrender provides—over and over again.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to thank the following people, for their consultations and references
(of course, all errors are my own): Jean Vincent Blanchard, Michael Cothren,
Gerald Cromer, Miguel Diaz Barriga, Roger Friedland, Bruce Grant, Constance
Hungerford, Tessa Izenour, Suzanne Jablonski, T. Kaori Kitao, James Maraniss,
Barbara Mujica, Jeffrey K. Olick, Marc Howard Ross, Susan Schifrin, William

11 “In mid-1944, the State Department agreed that the term bedingungslose Waffenniederlegung (laying
down of weapons) should be used in American propaganda as the translation of the [unconditional
surrender] formula . . . Once a government’s armed forces have laid down their weapons, the
government becomes powerless to resist— except passively—any orders which the conqueror may
choose to give, while the ‘conditions’ presented to it or to its armed forces are better described as
‘requirements,’ since little or no argument is possible about them” (Balfour 1979, p. 291).
P1: VENDOR/GDW/GCY/GCX P2: GDW
Qualitative Sociology [quso] PH035-301553 March 30, 2001 16:26 Style file version Nov. 19th, 1999

Narratives of Surrender 281

Turpin, and Phil Weinstein. Earlier versions were presented at the Center for the
Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture at Rutgers University and at the 1999
American Society of Criminology meeting.

REFERENCES

Balfour, M. (1979). The origin of the formula: “Unconditional surrender” in World War II. Armed
Forces and Society, 5, 281–301.
Borges, J. L. (2000). The telling of the tale. The Atlantic Monthly, September, 63–65.
Burns, R., & Chevedden, P. (2000). A unique bilingual surrender treaty from Muslim-Crusader Spain.
The Historian 62, 510 –534.
Derrida, J. (1994). Given time: 1. Counterfeit money (P. Kamuf, transl.). Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Dumm, T. (1999). A politics of the ordinary. New York: New York University Press.
Greenblatt, S. (1983). Murdering peasants, status and the representation of rebellion. Representations,
1, 1–25.
Greenblatt, S. (1991). Marvelous possessions: The wonder of the New World. Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press.
Honig, B. (1993). Declarations of independence. In F. Dolan & T. Dumm (Eds.), Rhetorical re-
public: Governing representations in American politics (pp. 201–225). Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press.
Mauss, M. (1967). The gift: Forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies. New York: Norton.
Neely, M. E. Jr., Holzer, H., & Boritt, G. (1987). The Confederate image: Prints of the lost cause.
Imprint: Journal of the American Historical Print Collectors Society, 12, 2–12.
Nietzsche, F. (1969). The genealogy of morals (W. Kaufmann, Ed.). New York: Vintage Books.
Savage, K. (1994). The politics of memory: Black emancipation and the Civil War monument. In
J. R. Gillis (Ed.), Commemorations: The politics of national identity (pp. 127–149). Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Schwartz, B. (1987). George Washington: The making of an American symbol. Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press.
Tabor, J. (1995). Religious discourse. In S. Wright (Ed.), Amageddon in Waco (pp. 263–281). Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press.
Wright, J. W. (1934). Sieges and customs of war at the opening of the eighteenth century. The American
Historical Review, 39, 629– 644.
Wright, Q. (1970). How hostilities have ended: Peace treaties and alternatives. Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science, 392, 51– 61.
Zelizer, B. (1998). Remembering to forget: Holocaust memory through the camera’s eye. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.
Zerubavel, Y. (1995). Recovered roots: Collective memory and the making of Israeli national tradition.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.