Kates, SusanMcRay, Mandi2018-01-262018-01-262018https://hdl.handle.net/11244/54320The United States Marine Corps exists within American popular consciousness as a famed fighting force renowned for its unapologetic and well-earned reputation. Its recruit training process, colloquially known as "boot camp," remains the longest in duration of all United States military service branches, while also retaining the reputation of being the most physically arduous, the most emotionally, mentally intense. USMC Recruit Training, which takes place at Marine Corps Recruit Depots San Diego and Parris Island, serves as both generative place and enculturation process for creating new Marines from civilian recruits. Recruit Training, writ large in American public consciousness, has proved rich material for research and examination by various scholarly disciplines. Researchers in the social sciences have investigated this process of enculturation and new identity formation; however, an analysis of boot camp as a physical and temporal space in which rhetoric assumes a powerful role in identification moulding remains largely missing from the body of discourse surrounding Marine Corps Recruit Training. This work addresses the scholarly gap by using Kenneth Burke's frameworks of Identification and his (Symbolic) Action/(Nonsymbolic) Motion binary to examine three specific moments of embodied and spoken rhetoric. These moments include the memorization and group recitation of The Rifleman's Creed, recruits standing in their first formation on The Yellow Footprints outside each Recruit Depot's receiving barracks, and the act of marching and running in formation while singing lyric based chants. Each of these, I argue, operate as physical and temporal spaces in which embodied rhetorics help enact the process of building within recruits the shared group identity of Marine.BurkeKenneth BurkeUnited States Marine Corpsethosidentificationconsubstantialityidentity creationactionmotioncadencecall and responsecall-responseenculturationembodiedrhetoricembodied rhetoriccorporealcorporealitygroup ethoscollective ethosgroup identityidentityconsubstantialMarineMarinesMarine CorpsUSMCUS MarinesUS Marine CorpsmilitaryRiflemanRifleman's CreedYellow Footprintssymbolicnonsymbolicnon-symbolic