Historical Reenactment: New Ways of Experiencing History 9781800735415

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
INTRODUCTION Approaching Historical Reenactments
Part I NEW THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES
CHAPTER 1 On Motives for Reenactment: The Kindertransport
CHAPTER 2 Conceptualizing the Period Rush: Ludic Dimensions of Immersive History in Historical Reenactment
Part II REENACTMENTS AS TOOLS OF CULTURAL AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES
CHAPTER 3 Historical Reenactments in Spain: A Critical Approach to Public Perceptions of the Iron Age and Roman Past
CHAPTER 4 Reenacting the Reconquista Myth? Some Refl ections on Moros y Cristianos Festivals in Spain
Part III POLITICS OF REENACTMENT Troubled Pasts, Colonialism, and Democratic Prospects
CHAPTER 5 Statue Wars and Reenactments: Reinterpreting the Colonial Past in Australia
CHAPTER 6 From Yogyakarta to Independence: Negotiating Narratives in the Historical Reenactment of Recolonization in Indonesia
CHAPTER 7 Memory Sites and Reenacting State Terrorism: The Museum at Argentina’s Naval Mechanics School
Part IV REENACTMENTS AS EDUCATIONAL DEVICES IN FORMAL AND INFORMAL CONTEXTS
CHAPTER 8 Reenacting the Past in the School Yard: Its Role of Reenactment in Civic and History Education
CHAPTER 9 Inside Historical Reenactment
EPILOGUE What Is the Task of Reenactment?
Index

Citation preview

K Historical Reenactment L

MAKING SENSE OF HISTORY Studies in Historical Cultures General Editor: Stefan Berger Founding Editor: Jörn Rüsen Bridging the gap between historical theory and the study of historical memory, this series crosses the boundaries between both academic disciplines and cultural, social, political and historical contexts. In an age of rapid globalization, which tends to manifest itself on an economic and political level, locating the cultural practices involved in generating its underlying historical sense is an increasingly urgent task. Recent volumes: Volume 44 Historical Reenactment: New Ways of Experiencing History Edited by Mario Carretero, Brady Wagoner, and Everardo Perez-Manjarrez

Volume 39 Postwar Soldiers: Historical Controversies and West German Democratization, 1945–1955 Jörg Echternkamp

Volume 43 Dynamics of Emigration: Émigré Scholars and the Production of Historical Knowledge in the 20th Century Edited by Stefan Berger and Philipp Müller

Volume 38 Constructing Industrial Pasts: Heritage, Historical Culture and Identity in Regions Undergoing Structural Economic Transformation Edited by Stefan Berger

Volume 42 Transcending the Nostalgic: Landscapes of Postindustrial Europe beyond Representation Edited by George S. Jaramillo and Juliane Tomann Volume 41 The Geopolitics of Rudolf Kjellén: Territory, State and Nation Edited by Ragnar Björk and Thomas Lundén Volume 40 Analysing Historical Narratives: On Academic, Popular and Educational Framings of the Past Edited by Stefan Berger, Nicola Brauch, and Chris Lorenz

Volume 37 The Engaged Historian: Perspectives on the Intersections of Politics, Activism and the Historical Profession Edited by Stefan Berger Volume 36 Contemplating Historical Consciousness: Notes from the Field Edited by Anna Clark and Carla L. Peck Volume 35 Empathy and History: Historical Understanding in Re-enactment, Hermeneutics and Education Tyson Retz Volume 34 The Ethos of History: Time and Responsibility Edited by Stefan Helgesson and Jayne Svenungsson

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: http://berghahnbooks.com/series/making-sense-of-history

HISTORICAL REENACTMENT New Ways of Experiencing History

Edited by Mario Carretero, Brady Wagoner, and Everardo Perez-Manjarrez

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2022 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2022 Mario Carretero, Brady Wagoner, and Everardo Perez-Manjarrez All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Carretero, Mario, editor. | Wagoner, Brady, 1980- editor. | Perez-Manjarrez, Everardo, editor. Title: Historical reenactment : new ways of experiencing history / edited by Mario Carretero, Brady Wagoner, and Everardo Perez-Manjarrez. Other titles: New ways of experiencing history Description: [New York, New York] : Berghahn Books, 2022. | Series: Making sense of history : studies in historical cultures ; volume 44 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022016549 (print) | LCCN 2022016550 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800735408 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800735415 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Historical reenactments--Case studies. | Collective memory. Classification: LCC D16.163 .H573 2022 (print) | LCC D16.163 (ebook) | DDC 907.2--dc23/eng/20220601 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016549 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016550

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-80073-540-8 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-541-5 ebook

https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800735408

Contents

List of Illustrations Introduction. Approaching Historical Reenactments Mario Carretero, Brady Wagoner, and Everardo Perez-Manjarrez

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Part I. New Theoretical and Methodological Approaches Chapter 1. On Motives for Reenactment: The Kindertransport Bill Niven Chapter 2. Conceptualizing the Period Rush: Ludic Dimensions of Immersive History in Historical Reenactment Robbert-Jan Adriaansen

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Part II. Reenactments as Tools of Cultural and National Identities Chapter 3. Historical Reenactments in Spain: A Critical Approach to Public Perceptions of the Iron Age and Roman Past David González-Álvarez, Pablo Alonso-González, and Jesús Rodríguez-Hernández Chapter 4. Reenacting the Reconquista Myth? Some Reflections on Moros y Cristianos Festivals in Spain Ignacio Brescó and Floor van Alphen

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Contents

Part III. Politics of Reenactment: Troubled Pasts, Colonialism, and Democratic Prospects Chapter 5. Statue Wars and Reenactments: Reinterpreting the Colonial Past in Australia Stephen Gapps Chapter 6. From Yogyakarta to Independence: Negotiating Narratives in the Historical Reenactment of Recolonization in Indonesia Lise Zurné Chapter 7. Memory Sites and Reenacting State Terrorism: The Museum at Argentina’s Naval Mechanics School Marisa González de Oleaga

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Part IV. Reenactments as Educational Devices in Formal and Informal Contexts Chapter 8. Reenacting the Past in the School Yard: The Role of Reenactment in Civic and History Education Mario Carretero, Everardo Perez-Manjarrez, and Maria Rodriguez-Moneo

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Chapter 9. Inside Historical Reenactment Tyson Retz

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Epilogue. What Is the Task of Reenactment? Vanessa Agnew

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Index

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Illustrations

Figure 3.1. Location of the case studies considered in this chapter: (1) Festival Astur-romano de Carabanzo (Lena, Asturias); (2) Fiestas de Astures y Romanos (Astorga, León); (3) Festival Luna Celta (Solosancho, Ávila). © David González-Álvarez, Pablo Alonso-González, and Jesús Rodríguez-Hernández.

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Figure 3.2. Participants and public at the 2017 edition of Festival Luna Celta during one of the parades along the streets of Solosancho (Ávila). © David González-Álvarez, Pablo Alonso-González, and Jesús Rodríguez-Hernández.

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Figure 3.3. Reenactors drinking and feasting at the local bullring in Astorga (León) during the 2012 festival while attending one of the main theatre plays. © David González-Álvarez, Pablo Alonso-González, and Jesús Rodríguez-Hernández.

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Figure 3.4. Every summer the tribes of participants at the historical reenactment held in Astorga build up an indigenous village with wooden huts (top figure) and a Roman camp with tents made out of cloths (lower figure). There, reenactors perform some of the public acts comprised by the official program, and also hang out, feast, and even sleep. Spatiality and the material displays we can observe there naturalize some of the cultural and historical traits perceived by participants and the public. © David González-Álvarez, Pablo AlonsoGonzález, and Jesús Rodríguez-Hernández.

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Illustrations

Figure 3.5. Battle between indigenous warriors and the Roman army at the 2009 edition of the historical reenactment celebrated annually in Carabanzo (Lena, Asturias). © David GonzálezÁlvarez, Pablo Alonso-González, and Jesús Rodríguez-Hernández. 56 Figure 3.6. Folk Celtic concert prior to the theater play on the Ulaca altar during the 2016 Luna Celta Festival, with thousands of people attending. © David González-Álvarez, Pablo AlonsoGonzález, and Jesús Rodríguez-Hernández.

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Figure 3.7. Tribes contest at the 2016 edition of the Festival Luna Celta, with the Solosancho mayor dressed up as a Vetton warrior in the center, surrounded by local and regional politicians from a rival party in casual clothes. © David González-Álvarez, Pablo Alonso-González, and Jesús Rodríguez-Hernández.

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Figure 4.1. Moros y Cristianos celebrations in Alcoy (Valencia region). Author: Pacodonderis (November 5, 2019). Wikimedia, public domain.

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Figure 4.2. Christian fila in Valencia City. Author: Rafa Esteve (October 6, 2016). Wikimedia, public domain.

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Figure 4.3. Moorish fila in Alcoy (Valencia region). Author: Enrique Blasco (May 3, 2014). Wikimedia, public domain.

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Figure 5.1. Evans statue at Bathurst. © Stephen Gapps.

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Figure 6.1. Re-enactment of meeting between Sultan Hamengkubuwono X and Suharto. © Lise Zurné.

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Figure 6.2. Re-enactors celebrating victory. © Lise Zurné.

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INTRODUCTIO N

Approaching Historical Reenactments Mario Carretero, Brady Wagoner, Everardo Perez-Manjarrez

Reenactments as Historical and Cultural Tools At first glance, historical reenactment looks like an amateur hobby, in which people dress up and perform an idealized past to audiences.1 The term has usually been applied to the activities of minority popular history groups operating outside of formal education. However, beyond its marginalization within the field of history, historical reenactments have significantly increased in number and become popular with the public (de Groot 2016). The diversity and complexity of historical reenactments have also drawn the attention of scholars in many disciplines worldwide. This trend of increasingly complex reenactments is a relatively new development that puts into question the belief that historical reenactment is simply about entertainment and a mere trivialization of history. Recent research has shown its potential in providing a meaningful way for people to experience history. This is especially true in relation to those events relevant to the construction of the nation and national identity, as well as the dramatic historical facts that mark the collective imagination of a national community. Historical reenactment is broadly defined as a social and personal recreation of history, based on an exercise of historical imagination and bodily mimicry of certain historical circumstances. It allows people to experience history by creating a close relation with their past in people’s act of producing the reenactment. It is sometimes argued that this enables people to Notes for this section begin on page 15.

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approach the mental, emotional, and spiritual experiences of those living in past times. Reenactors do not contemplate the past from a distance but must step into the postion of historical persona in their speaking, dressing, moving, and relating to objects and the environment (Brescó and van Alphen, this volume). In this way, it privileges an affective relation to the past over a cognitive one. In the past two decades, different focuses of interest in historical reenactment have been developed. Schematically speaking, these can be divided in two main groups of studies: on the one side, early research discusses the epistemology and internal dynamics of historical reenactments, posing explanatory frameworks, definitions, and key constructs with which to conceptualize the past (Agnew 2004; Cook 2004; Daugbjerg 2014; Gapps 2009). These studies explore reenactment in terms of content authenticity, historical accuracy, forms of simulation and mimicry, experience, and performativity. A more-recent set of studies have drawn attention to the effects of reenactments in society, from reenactors, onlookers, institutions, and communities (Magelssen and Justice-Malloy 2011; Thompson and Suzuki 2014). In this respect, ethnographic and historical studies have enhanced the knowledge of its internal logic—that is, its instrumentation, participants, and social effects. In other words, the focus is here on the dynamics of reenactment within society at large. Within these studies it has been shown that the impact of reenactment has crossed the barrier of academia and reenactors’ associations and affinity groups. This phenomenon has caught the eye of culture and entertainment companies, leading to a considerable growth of these practices across social fields in recent years. They have been integrated in different contexts devoted to cultural production and consumption in museum displays and tours, governmental cultural programs, tourism, TV programs, and the entertainment industry (de Groot 2016). This situation has been motivated by the acknowledgment of the efficacy of historical reenactments in catching people’s attention, and the opportunity they provide to put oneself in someone else’s shoes through the participation in or witnessing of an ephemeral re-creation. Due to space limitations in this introduction we report on the first group of studies, concerned with the epistemology and internal dynamics of reenactments; many chapters of this book contribute to the second group. This research has also proposed the reflection in terms of trends of thought, such as the affective turn (Agnew 2007), postcolonialism (Agnew and Lamb 2009), and disciplinary analysis more akin to the cultural studies theory (Daugbjerg 2014). Studies from anthropology, sociology, and linguistics have brought insights into historical reenactment’s characteristics, functions, and impact worldwide (Agnew and Lamb 2009), which has brought attention to reenactments in a broader range of contexts and how these practices are related

Introduction

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to larger structures. Of particular interest here is the reflection on historical reenactment from its core—that is, historical science. In the words of Vanessa Agnew, reenactment “apparently fulfills the failed promise of academic history . . . [and] deals with the crisis of authority” (Agnew 2004, 330–31). While it may at first seem that history has banished historical reenactment from its field of studies, it is clear that the phenomenon of historical reenactments has not gone unnoticed by the discipline. As a scientific discipline, history has engaged in interesting debates on the construction of historical knowledge and its impact on society, especially in the twentieth century (Iggers 2005). Schematically, these debates have been marked by tensions between traditional history—that is, the nineteenth century positivist and historicist approaches to history—and the new history represented by historiographic trends of the mid-twentieth century, such as the United States’ new social history, Italian micro-history, the neo-Marxist history of the Frankfurt school, or the French history of ideas (Collingwood 1946; Iggers 2005; Lorenz 1999). Traditional history results in studies with economic and military perspectives on history, stressing the role of historical leaders, battles, and the constitution of the nation-state. In contrast, the new history is a product of the social changes of the twentieth century, focusing more on the sociocultural processes and subjective variables of human evolution (Ankersmit and Kellner 2013). As Tyson Retz elaborates in his chapter, historians such as Collingwood had approaches to what historical reenactments might offer, and most interestingly to the concepts reenactment is related to. For Collingwood, the idea of reenactment is intimately related to historical imagination and empathy, essential skills both in the method of the professional historian and for students of history; for a thorough debate on this, see Tyson, this volume. On the other hand, taking distance from historical meta-narratives, and attending to the new history studies of daily life, cultural rituals and festivities, among others, gave flesh to history in the eyes of the public. History studies of the second half of the twentieth century were underpinned by these cultural and social perspectives; from the end of the 1960s the linguistic turn strongly impacted the way history was understood within the discipline. Are historical reenactments a reaction to new history approaches from conventional history, or vice versa? Our preliminary answer is that historical reenactments have characteristics of both traditional and new historiographies trends, and that it may be said that it is a response to the claim of more experientially close and cultural history, but at the same time it is used to maintain narratives of foundational heroes and live-changing battles. This tension is most evident if it is approached from the pedagogical lens. Schools have struggled to balance the need for creating an imagined community through affective links to the past (where all seem to speak as one, through a

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single voice) and the formation of critical, democratic citizens with the tools to challenge accepted (or preferred) versions of the past, which is essentially multi-voiced or dialogical. Historical reenactments are powerful tools for creating affective relationships but are also more dynamic than more traditional forms of history in that the historical narrative is created anew at each reenactment and can thus quickly respond to social changes (Gapps, this volume). Institutional constraints can also inhibit this responsiveness. It is also important to consider what type of historical reenactment is being analyzed. In other words, under the umbrella of this term we can find very different and even oppositional activities. Paraphrasing Agnew’s (2018) idea that reenactments are a big church, it makes sense to think that there are very different activities under this label—some even opposing each other. Let us take an example of this through the comparison of two apparently similar activities. Both are based in Argentina, but similar examples can be found in other countries. In the first case, students celebrate a national day related to the country’s independence in school (see Carretero, PerezManjarrez, and Rodríguez Moneo, this volume). This is to say, the students are following a closed ritual where the nation is viewed as an almost sacred matter with few possibilities to generate an alternative script (see also Connerton 1989). To some extent it could be said that the students do not speak by themselves: it is the nation-state who speaks for them and of course there is just one voice. In the second case, eight former soldiers in the Falklands War (also called the Guerra de las Malvinas) (1982) perform a theater play called Mined Field by Lola Arias (see also her film about the same topic, Theatre of War) based on their battlefield experiences. As is well known, this war was initiated by Argentina—ruled at that time by a military junta—as a desperate political maneuver to garner political support by occupying the island. The United Kingdom reacted immediatly, showed its military superiority, and recovered control over the islands. This war produced 905 victims on both sides and its main political impact consisted in an increase of the popularity of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and the fall of the dictatorship in Argentina.The eight actors in the play were at the same time soldiers in the war (four British and four Argentinian). As such, they went through a great deal of suffering and, even though they survived, the war procuced an enduring psychological trauma on all of them. Of course all this appears in the play but they are not just remembering literally what they did in the war. In other words, the play does not consist of a series of monologues. Instead, it is multivoiced in its approach. In other words, this play is a performance carried out according to the procedures of the documentary theater where the stories and the actors are based on real experiences, while offering an important transformation through a dialogue with the other. Thus, the actors say

Introduction

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the text is written by the author of the play but this does not correspond to a closed script: its content is full of an intense experience of re-elaboration, where the individual experiences have been reconsidered through a very profound process of reflectivity. In sum, in both cases what is taking place is a reenactment experience. In one case a national independence day, obviously related to war and military conflict, is reenacted inside the school, and in the other case a morerecent war is reenacted in a theater. In both cases nationalistic issues play an important role. Therefore, there is a clear similarity in terms of what is being reenacted but there is also an enormous difference in how it is being reenacted. We can speculate that the resulting effects on participants will diverge in these two cases. As a matter of fact, the commemoration of the Falklands War is carried out every year in all the Argentinean schools through diverse reenactment activities because it is a mandatory piece of the national curriculum. Thus, these reenactments are very much related to the promotion of nationalism (Benwell 2014). In our opinion this difference between what is being reenacted and how it is being reenacted deserves further theoretical and empirical attention. Any reenactment has its roots in two very old cultural practices. On the one hand, theatrical experiences and, on the other hand, liturgical ones. Concerning the first experiences it is easy to see how the same theater play could be a very different meaning according to the final mise-en-scène defined by the director as well as by the actors. The interpretation of the original text carried out by both of them could finally produce very different versions of the same events. And something similar could be said of liturgical rites, as indicated by Agnew, Lamb, and Toman 2020), comparing Catholic and Protestant rites.

The Importance of Collective Memory Another particularly important concept to mention in this context is that of memory. For years history and memory have been treated as two separate fields, but now they are receiving growing attention as interrelated fields; this change situates reenactments as an object of study that could be fruitfully studied by this interrelation (Carretero, Berger, and Grever 2017). Historical reenactments can be seen as an embodied and performative form of memory, tightly connected ways of giving meaning to a group’s past. Memory studies have been a growing area of interest in the social and cultural sciences for several decades now and encompass a broad range of phenomena to which a subset is relevant for reenactments. Memory studies has emerged as a field separate from but linked to history. Reenactments present an interesting phenomenon to mobilize and integrate ideas from both fields. Central to

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the field is the notion of collective memory. According to the concept’s founder, Maurice Halbwachs (1992), collective memory implies an affective relationship to the past that supports a group identity. In this sense, the fact that most in a group remember that pi (π) is equal to 3.14 . . . is not a collective memory, but Argentinians’ memory of the Falklands War is a collective memory. Halbwachs sharply contrasted history (the domain of professional historians) and memory (a group’s vital connection to the past). Memory in this sense is functional for a group’s present concerns and interests, including supporting its stability and solidarity among its members. In other words, it helps to construct a collective “we” through devices that allow group members to imagine and construct their shared past, present, and future. While more-recent scholarship has highlighted how history can also serve as cultural input for different groups, some distinction between history and collective memory is necessary to point out different ways of relating to the past (Wertsch 2002). This is rather different from the notion of memory typical in psychology and common sense as a storage container; instead, it implies a process of remembering in order to do something in the present (Bartlett 1932; Brockmeier 2018; Wagoner 2017a). The storage concept of memory continues to have its place—for example, in the form of an archive (Assmann 2011)—but it remains a subordinate concept within memory studies. With regards to individual memory, the notion of reconstruction has been key to bring to the fore its creative, adaptive, and cultural dimensions, in the place of the dominant emphasis on inaccuracy and distortion (Wagoner 2017b). Similarly, reenactments are a particularly dynamic form of collective memory in that they must be physically performed by people who take on the position of historical persons; thus, reenactments can be changed at each iteration (Gapps, this volume). Contrast this with an official memorial, which is literally set in stone, and must instead be transformed through recontextualization, surrounding it with new objects, rituals, and debates. In addition to their dialogical potential (often unrealized, such as when they take the form of ritual performances in schools—see Carretero, Perez-Manjarrez, and Rodríguez Moneo, this volume), reenactments also have a clear narrative form that not only sets events within a historical sequence that gives closure and a genre, but also assigns actors and presents a moral (White 1987). Consider the nationally scripted reenactment of the 1994 Rwandan genocide on its twentieth anniversary (Warner 2014). The genocide involved the brutal death of eight hundred thousand Tutsis and moderate Hutus with the goal of destroying the Tutsis ethnic group. Interestingly, the reenactment begins in the early twentieth century with the arrival of Belgian colonists, who measure noses to construct a racial hierarchy. These same actors (the only white actors in the performance, played by Russians) adopt the

Introduction

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role of United Nations (UN) peacekeepers when the killing begins, driving off through the fallen bodies. Finally, the Tutsi army arrives on scene and tenderly carries the bodies off the field. The promotion of an inclusive national identity against a foreign enemy is apparent in this reenactment. Such constructions are necessary for the nation to calm ethnic tensions and move forward as a unified national group. The performance was staged in a large stadium with thirty thousand people present. Counselors stood by to aid those who had traumatic flashbacks during the performance. The events are still very a living memory for Rwandan adults and thus have resonances at both the individual and collective levels. These events are part of what Jan Assmann (2011) has called communicative memory, which, in contrast to cultural memory, contains the memories of individuals who experienced the events concerned. As such, communicative memory is a moving boundary of eighty to a hundred years from the present. Afterwards, events become solidified in official symbols and narratives about the past that make up cultural memory, as one finds in many of the world religions. The Holocaust is an example of a case currently shifting over to cultural memory as all the remaining survivors age and die. This distinction clearly has relevance to the kinds of events depicted through historical reenactment. For distant events, historical reenactments can be seen as a powerful device for making the past vividly present and putting current group members in the shoes of their forebears, to instil either pride or shame. For more-recent events, reenactments can be used as a means of working through a difficult past and giving it narrative closure, as seen with regards to the Falklands War theater example above. Chapters of this volume present a wealth of diverse case studies that explore how reenactments can be an active and dynamic device of memory, and in other cases act to maintain a frozen repetition of the past. It is also important to consider that this repetition very often also has a social and political function, particularly in relation to nationalistic and patriotic objectives (Carretero 2011, chap. 4), as will be shown in the next example related to the American Civil War (1861–65).

Reenactments as “Real” Ties Among Past, Present, and Future Interestingly, reenactments of the American Civil War started even before the real fighting had ended, but they experienced a new impulse in the 1960s. In this case, we will present a short analysis through a scene from the well-known television series House of Cards, of enormous popularity in the past decade. It does not seem necessary to justify the decisive influence of current television series in the formation of historical representations of

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students and citizens. Furthermore, it is quite plausible to conclude that they could be even more influential than academic education, which includes numerous reenactments in both formal and informal settings (see Carretero, Perez-Manjarrez, and Rodríguez Moneo, this volume). It is very important also to mention that historical reenactments have been traditionally associated to patriotic rituals as the Pledge of Allegiance (Ellis 2005). The scene that we are going to analyze—which could perfectly be a real situation—reproduces the visit of Frank Underwood, vice president of the United States in the aforementioned series, to a place of memory, called living history in the United States, dedicated to the commemoration of the Civil War; all the action takes place in a historical reenactment. Certainly, it is enormously attractive to many people that history is not only studied but also turned into actions. There are hundreds of citizens—thousands in some cases—simulating military actions for several days as if they were the real soldiers of about one hundred and fifty years ago, and there are thousands of other citizens as spectators. In this case, Frank Underwood, due to his high political rank, is a privileged spectator of that reenactment, along with many other people. As is customary in these cases, a ranger, in charge of the activity, acts as the host of the vice president, and it is in this context that the following dialogue takes place: Ranger: Just imagine what it looked like back then, at the edge of the ridge there was a dense thicket which allowed the northern troops to come in and form on the Mule Shoe. The Southern regiments were entrenched in these areas at the apex of the line. As you can see, the topography forced the two sides down towards each other. Vice President: This is the Bloody Angle? Ranger: That’s right. Vice President: I was reading about it last night. Ranger: Close quarters, hand-to-hand combat. All told, about 15,000 Union and Confederate soldiers lost their lives here at the Bloody Angle on a battlefield that’s only about half a mile wide. Now, Mister Vice President, we have a surprise for you today. I’d like to introduce you to Corporal Augustus Elijah Underwood of the 12th Regiment of McGowan’s Brigade, your great-great-great-grandfather. Augustus E. Underwood: I died here, in this battle. Vice President: I think there’s been a mistake. My grandfather never mentioned any Underwoods in the war. Ranger: We did our research. He definitely fought and died here. Augustus E. Underwood: I was 24. And my son, your great-great grandfather, was two years old, I never met him. Vice President: It happened here? At the Bloody Angle? Augustus E. Underwood: At the edge of those woods, my skull was bashed in with a rock.

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Ranger: Thank you, now, over here, we’ve got something that’s very interesting as well. Vice President: Just a moment, tell me more. Augustus E. Underwood: It was the middle of the night, we were out of musket balls, just bayonets, and only half of us had those. I had nothing, just these hands. It was so dark, you couldn’t see nothing, but you could hear them, the Yanks running toward us, then you could smell them. First Yank that brushed up against me, I grabbed him by the throat, falls down on the ground, I bit him so hard I could taste the bone. Then he grabs a rock, brings it down right here, that was that. I was buried in a mass grave, no headstone. Violin scene, some minutes later Vice President: Did Augustus play? Augustus E. Underwood: I like to think I did. Vice President: What’s your name? Augustus E. Underwood: When I’m here, I’m Augustus Underwood. Vice President: What’s your real name? Augustus E. Underwood: Doesn’t this feel real to you? Vice President: Will you show me where he died? The exact spot. Augustus E. Underwood: I will, sir. Vice President: I’m gonna pay respects to my ancestor. I would appreciate a little privacy. Augustus E. Underwood: Just beyond those trees. Vice President: Thank you, I’ll be good from here. Final scene Vice President: Today we break earth on the Overland Campaign Visitors Center, so that the generations to come will fully absorb the importance of this hallowed ground, the wilderness where the campaign commenced. Augustus, would you do the honor? The vice president invites Augustus. And now a moment of silence and prayer for the dead. . . . Thank you, God bless the United States of America.

We think this example shows very clearly the reasons why these types of re-creations are as effective as devices that generate a historical representation that, on the one hand, is vivid and realistic, but, on the other hand, does not seem to favor a critical understanding of the past. Perhaps the concepts that best synthesize the reasons for its great impact are emotion, identity, and realism. Undoubtedly these are three powerful weapons so that, as Vice President Underwood affirms in the excerpt above, “the generations to come will fully absorb the importance of this hallowed ground,” displaying, as is usual in political language, a certain type of secular religion. In other words, memory must be added to the three elements mentioned, since this understanding is intended to last over time. And for this it is intended that the people who visit the site in question identify with its protagonists and even see possible ancestors exercising a specific role in the battle, as is

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the case of Augustus. The excitement is provided by the whole context of shooting, even in salvos, and hand-to-hand fights for hours and sometimes days. And realism cannot be expressed in a better way than when Augustus enunciates that semantically impossible phrase, albeit with correct syntax, “I died here, in this battle,” and then challenged his own descendant by asking him, “Doesn’t this feel real to you?” In other words, the historical reenactment becomes even more real than reality itself. However, in re-creations of this type, which are enormously similar to the school events that go through the daily school life of millions of students in dozens of countries, central elements are absent, and without those elements historical understanding is practically impossible. Thus, it could be also said that the reenactment is insufficient to grasp a complex view on the historical events represented by these actions. This view would be based on the rational and critical elements that historiography provides us—that is, the social and political concepts that would allow us to fully understand that war event and its historical context. For example, what did each side of that contest represent? Which one defended slavery and which one sought to abolish it? In short, what model of society was at stake in that war and what did it mean in the context of that country? The answers to these questions, or other similar questions, tend to be totally absent from historical reenactments of this nature. Thus, what is being presented is basically an idealized and romantic narrative that the state itself offers, explicitly, as is the case with Vice President Underwood. Interestingly, he is also saying that this representation of the past, based on a supposed equivalence between the aims of the North and the South in the US Civil War, will last in the future. In other words, the fabricated reality of the reenactment in this case plays a clear educational purpose not only for students but also for citizens in general. And this purpose is clearly not just to provide an explanation of the past but also to formulate a specific tie with the present and the future, which also avoids any possible criticism of that past. On the contrary, probably a number of reenactments offer the possibility for citizens to generate a critical view of the past. In this spirit, the present book provides a variety of case studies of reenactments to explore the diversity of the phenomenon, and seeks unifying concepts to understand it.

Preview of the Book The book has been arranged into four parts to provide straightforward points of entrance to different thematized aspects of reenactments, such as theoretical and methodological issues, identity construction, its political dynamics, and educational functions. The book closes with an epilogue.

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Part I addresses some broad theoretical and methodological issues that characterize reenactments vis-à-vis other modes of representing history, including the elasticity of the term (chapter 1), and the significance of affective immersion in the activity (chapter 2). In chapter 1, Bill Niven asks if we are stretching the term “reenactment” to a breaking point, given the variety of activities we now classify with it. He explores the possibility of a typology of reenactment forms as well as principles by which it might be made. Reenactments take on much of the territory of collective memory and indeed seem to be our most contemporary form of commemoration, yet with a difference: they enable us to inhabit historical roles while at the same time not obliging us to commit ethically to lessons learned (the mantra of universal cosmopolitan Holocaust memory), which makes it possible to move from one role to the other in a free play of experiment with different identifications (see also chapter 3). These points are illustrated with the case study of the reenactment of the Kindertransport, the rescue of some ten thousand mainly Jewish children from Nazi Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, mainly to Britain, in 1938 and 1939. In chapter 2, Adriaansen focuses on historical reenactors’ thrill of being immersed in the past while reenacting a historical event, which has often been referred to as the “period rush.” He sets out to conceptualize this phenomenon in the framework of Huizinga’s (1949) and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s (2004) theories of play. By applying ludic theory, it is shown that the immersiveness of the period rush need not be understood as a being immersed in the past itself, but rather as being immersed in the play of the reenactment. Highlighting the play element of reenactments will show that they often function as historical simulations—operationalized models of historical reality and of the behavior of historical actors—rather than as mere representations of the past. In this way this chapter aims at constituting an analytical framework for the interpretation of immersion in the context of historical reenactment that acknowledges that we are not dealing with the past itself, but rather with its traces. Part II highlights how reenactments function as tools for cultural and national identities in Spain, at heritage sites (chapter 3) and annual festivals (chapter 4). In chapter 3, González Álvarez, Alonso González, and Rodríguez Hernández reflect on reenactments as sociopolitical contexts where the public engages with constructed notions of cultural heritage, and build bottom-up narratives about contemporary representations of the Iron Age in Spain. The intended purpose is to disseminate the results of historical and archaeological research, linked to museums and heritage centers, or ongoing archaeological excavations. However, these events can be also understood as popular culture, contexts where the public knowledge about the past is

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negotiated and reproduced by different stakeholders. The authors show how ancient colonial identities are outstanding referents for contemporary identitarian social movements underpinning political parties and social feelings, and thus are related to nationalism, regionalism, and the invention of traditions. Finally, the authors discuss how reenactment can be an opportunity for social scientists to explore contemporary societal perceptions of the past, and how contemporary issues can be uncritically naturalized through their projection on to the distant past in a form of naïve presentism. In chapter 4, Brescó and van Alphen analyze the Moros y Cristianos (Moors and Christians) festival, particularly to the extent that it re-creates different local episodes related to the Reconquista—the historical period spanning from the Islamic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula at the beginning of the eighth century until the takeover of the emirate of Granada by the Catholic monarchs in 1492. With a long and entangled history, and characterized by a carnivalesque and ludic atmosphere, these festivals are popular annual dramatizations of a battle between good and evil, heroes and villains. Drawing on Paul Connerton’s bodily approach to collective memory, this chapter sets out to analyze Moros y Cristianos as a performative version of the Reconquista master narrative and the degree to which this celebration contributes toward reinforcing a Spanish national identity in opposition to the Muslim other. Along these lines, the authors compare traditional ritual performances, based on a continuity with the past, and modern historical reenactments, where authenticity stands as a key element in the simulation of the past qua past. The chapter concludes by highlighting the importance of commemorative celebrations, like Moros y Cristianos, not only for the study of collective memory—in its affective and performative dimension—but also as a case study from which to analyze and rethink modern historical reenactments. Part III extends the politics surrounding reenactments to include coming to terms with troubled pasts of colonialism (chapters 5 and 6) and state terrorism (chapter 7). In Chapter 5 Gapps discusses reenactments of Australian colonial history and the cultural and political wars around statues and memorials that have dominated recent engagements with Australia’s Frontier Wars. The Australian Statue Wars are in many ways a reflection of the increasingly global nature of political contention. But they have significant local inflections that are driven by Indigenous Australians and their political allies. The Statue Wars erupted in response to protests over the constant reminders of the trauma of decimation and dispossession in a remarkably unchanged colonial commemorative landscape. When statues of Captain Cook were graffitied and paint-bombed in 2017, the Australian government’s Heritage Council was forced to look at the level of protections in place for monuments that relate to Australia’s early colonial history. Surprisingly, it found legislation was indeed adequate for the protection of colonial historic sites

Introduction

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and monuments, but not for the protection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islands cultural and historic sites. The concept of counter-memorials is discussed, as it has become the rallying cry for historians and others not willing to tear down colonial monuments. While most research on reenactments has been done in Western countries, Zurné in chapter 6 analyzes Indonesia’s reenactments of the Nation Revolution (1945–49) against the colonial powers, which has long been glorified. At the end of President Suharto’s thirty-two-year rule (1967–98) and monopoly over the production of history, there was an opening of new spaces to renegotiate Indonesian history and a loss in reenactments popularity. However, in 2013 a local historical society resumed the yearly event, seeking to realize an imagined reality centered around three particular values: authenticity, spectacle, and comradeship, rather than a re-creation of the past as such. This narrative emphasizes rather the power of ordinary Indonesian citizens in history-making, counteracting the state-centered nationalism under former president Suharto’s rule. This case study shows how reenactments can be considered prisms through which the politics of historical representations are negotiated, involving not only reenactors themselves but also the local municipality, ministry, and even the national Indonesian army. Reenactments have tended to focus on re-creating battles, geographic discoveries, and other historical events that affirm national identities. In chapter 7, González de Oleaga explores instead the different performative strategies employed at each of the secret detention, torture, and extermination centers that operated in Argentina between 1976 and 1984 and that are now open to the public. Although not reenactments in the strict sense of the term, they share with it the characteristic features of experience, subjectivity, and transmission. The idea of experience, understood as the possibility of allowing the subject to live past events, is fundamental to reenactments. Yet, in this attempt, the subjective distance between past and present is blurred, as if it were possible for the subject to relive the reenacted events without any distance. A better understanding of how these mechanisms are viewed and designed can provide insight into the problems associated with the generational transmission of traumatic memory. Finally, part IV explores the pedagogical functions of reenactments in both formal (chapter 8) and informal (chapter 9) educational contexts. In chapter 8, Carretero, Perez-Manjarrez and Rodríguez Moneo examine the effects of school historical reenactments in students’ identity construction and historical understanding, focusing on the case of Argentina. They examine the translation of historiographical knowledge into the school, with special attention to the widespread nationalistic approach to history education. This is followed by an analysis of students’ narratives of the Argentinian school historical reenactment of national independence. The findings sug-

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gest that historical reenactments are based on romantic and heroic narratives and nationalistic discourses that serve to exalt national identity and national values, as well as an invented common group destiny. In highlighting their relation to identity and psychological concerns, the authors discuss the findings’ implications for civic education and historical thinking development. In chapter 9, Retz thematizes historical reenactment’s attention to the details of physical, emotional, and psychological experience in the place of large-scale historical processes and structures, which have been the traditional modes of historical representation. Even if we grant that historical reenactment is more visceral, immediate, and creative than traditional modes of historical representation, can it claim to be a more insightful and productive means of gaining self-knowledge? Retz argues first that the educational potential of historical reenactment is restricted by its inattention to the structures that give rise to historical movements and events. Second, he suggests that an enhanced attention to such structures offers the potential for historical reenactment to be a more self-reflective and critical practice. Themes explored in presenting these two arguments include the relation of reenactment to empathy, where reenactment sits within frameworks of historical thinking and historical consciousness, as well as the primacy of critical techniques in historical interpretation and representation.

Mario Carretero is professor at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, where he was dean of the faculty of psychology, and researcher at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), Argentina. He has carried out extensive research on history education, and received the Guggenheim Fellowship to work on the construction of national identities (Constructing Patriotism. Teaching History and Memories in a Global World, 2011). His work has been translated to Portuguese, Japanese and Euskera. His last two books are Palgrave Handbook of Research in Historical Culture and Education (2017; coedited) and History Education in the Digital Age (2022; coedited). Brady Wagoner is professor of psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark, and Oslo Nye Høyskole, Norway. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and has been associate editor of the journals Culture and Psychology. His research focuses on the cultural foundations of mind, particularly in relation to memory and social change. His recent books include The Constructive Mind: Bartlett’s Psychology in Reconstruction (Cambridge University Press 2017), Handbook of Culture and Memory (Oxford University Press 2018), and Remembering as a Cultural Process (Springer 2019). He has received two American Psychological Association Awards and the Lucienne Domergue Award.

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Everardo Perez-Manjarrez is PhD in education, researcher at the National University of Distance Education, Spain, and visiting scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He investigates the intersections between citizenship and history in education. Recently he has been analyzing alternative ways of history production and consumption in digital platforms, historical reenactments, and civic commemorations, and has also analyzed the impact of these alternative historical narratives on people’s civic engagement. His research is based on qualitative methodologies, especially narrative discourse analysis and positioning analysis. His recent publications include two articles, “Facing History: Positioning and Identity Negotiation in Adolescents’ Narratives of Controversial History” (Qualitative Psychology 2019) and “‘Pragmatic, Complacent, CriticalCynical or Empathetic?’: Youth Civic Engagement as Social Appraisal” (2021), Teachers College Record.

Notes 1. The preparation of this book has been possible due to the MINECO-FEDER Projects RTI2018-096495-BI00 and EIN2020-112277 coordinated by the first author. Also, the project PICT 2019-02477 (ANPCYT-Argentina) made an important contribution. The International Seminar which was the base for the book was possible due to the generous help of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (IUCE) and FLACSO (Argentina).

References Agnew, V. 2004. “Introduction: What Is Reenactment?” Criticism 46 (3), 327–39. Agnew, V. 2007. “History’s Affective Turn: Historical Reenactment and Its Work in the Present.” Rethinking History 11 (3), 299–312. Agnew, V. 2018. “Present approaches on reenactment studies”. International Seminar on Reenactments as New Ways of Experiencing History. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, October. Agnew, V. and J. Lamb, eds. 2009. Settler and creole reenactment. New York Springer. Agnew, V. J. Lamb, and J. Toman, eds. 2020. The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies. London: Routledge. Ankersmit, F., and H. Kellner, eds. 2013. A New Philosophy of History. London: Reaktion Books. Assmann, A. 2011. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bartlett, F.C. 1932. Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benwell, M.C. 2014. “From the Banal to the Blatant: Expressions of Nationalism in Secondary Schools in Argentina and the Falkland Islands.” Geoforum 52: 51–60. Brockmeier, J. 2018. “From Memory as Archive to Remembering as Conversation.” In Handbook of Culture and Memory, edited by B. Wagoner, 41–64. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Carretero, M. 2011. Constructing Patriotism. Teaching History and Memory in Global Worlds. Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Carretero, M., S. Berger, and M. Grever, eds. 2017. Palgrave Handbook of Research in Historical Culture and Education. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Collingwood, R.G. 1946. The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Connerton, P. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cook, A. 2004. “The Use and Abuse of Historical Reenactment: Thoughts on Recent Trends in Public History.” Criticism 46 (3): 487–96. Daugbjerg, M. 2014. “Patchworking the Past: Materiality, Touch and the Assembling of “Experience’ in American Civil War Re-Enactment.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 20 (7–8): 724–41. de Groot 2016, J. 2016. Consuming history: Historians and heritage in contemporary popular culture. London: Routledge. Ellis, R.J. 2005. To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Gadamer, H.G. 2004. Truth and Method (2nd edition). London: Continuum. Gapps, S. 2009. “Mobile Monuments: A View of Historical Reenactment and Authenticity from Inside the Costume Cupboard of History.” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 13: 295–409. Halbwachs, M. 1992. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Huizinga, J. 1949. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. London: Routledge. Lorenz, C 1999. Comparative historiography: Problems and perspectives. History and theory, 38(1), 25-39. Magelssen, S. and R. Justice-Malloy 2011. Enacting History. Alabama: The University of Alabama Press. Thompson, S. A. and R. Suzuki 2014. Reenactments in conversation: Gaze and recipiency. Discourse Studies, 16(6), 816-846. Wagoner, B. 2017a. The Constructive Mind: Bartlett’s Psychology in Reconstruction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wagoner, B. 2017b. “What Makes Memory Constructive? A Study in the Serial Reproduction of Bartlett’s Experiments.” Culture and Psychology, 23(2), 186–207. Warner, G. 2014. “Rwanda Honors Dead, Celebrates Progress 20 Years After Genocide.” National Public Radio, April 7, 2021. https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/04/ 07/300282310/rwanda-honors-dead-celebrates-progress-20-years-after-genocide Wertsch, J. 2002. Voices of Collective Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, H. 1987. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

Part I

NEW THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES

CHAPTER

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On Motives for Reenactment The Kindertransport Bill Niven

Introduction With regard to reenactments, it seems to me there are two fundamental questions that still remain to be addressed, despite outstanding recent publications (Agnew, Lamb, and Tomann 2020). The first relates to forms of reenactment.1 How do we define what types of re-presentation classify as reenactment? The restaging of history can occur in living history museums, on re-created battlefields, in theater plays, musical performances, novels, history books or works of art, to name but a few genres. One could argue, then, that wherever history is re-presented, reenactment takes place. This very broad definition, however, does not seem quite right, and so we could have recourse to a distinction between representation (or, as hyphenated here, re-presentation) as an (often individual) imaginative exercise that remains bound to the artistic production of historical images (verbal, pictorial, musical), and an exercise in which the past is physically acted out (often by more than one person). There are significant overlaps, however. A theater play, for instance, is, similar to a manuscript, an indirect evocation or verbal image of the past. But when it is staged, it is acted out. In historical documentaries, reenactments are designed to bring history to life, but in the moment they are filmed and integrated into the documentary, they become part of the cycle of artistic production of images of history. Perhaps a further refinement could be brought to bear, according to which reenactment is staged in Notes for this section begin on page 30.

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accordance with a collective and individual agency, and not according to a fixed script. Yet this refinement is not really tenable. Nor would it be tenable to argue that re-presentation in the form of art is governed by greater historical license than re-presentation in the form of, say, a living history museum. This might be the case, but it might not be. The past is never reproduced as it was. Claims to the contrary characterize museums, films, novels, and the activities of reenactment groups. Authenticity, where history is involved, is important for marketing. The second fundamental question we need to address relates to motives for reenactment. Why do we reenact? This question can only be fully answered, of course, in the context of the issues raised above. So, if we classify, say, a television documentary with restagings as a reenacted form, then we have to take the motives of such documentaries into account. But, for the moment, and for the purpose of this case study, let us assume that the essential or primary character of reenactment is the act of physical representation of a historical event by a group or groups of people. When people decide to reenact an event and gather together, they are, perhaps, doing more than “restaging,” a term I tend to use as a synonym for the term “representation.” It could be argued that, while actors in a play take on roles, reenactors become those roles; they seek a form of identification that goes further than good method acting. Reenactors, sometimes at least, might be terrible actors, but can nevertheless be good reenactors, in the sense that they fulfil the subjective impulse to become someone else. This is true even though, objectively, their effort might not be particularly convincing. An important motive behind reenactment, then, is embodiment. Understanding this enables us to solidify the distinction made above. Novelists, for instance, rarely seek to become the figures they represent in their works, at least not at the cost of the differentiation required to retain artistic control; and readers cannot identify with a novel’s characters in quite the way they can if they become historical figures themselves. In fact, it could be that embodiment is the principal motive behind reenactment—to get under the skin of historical figures, as a point of entry into historical experience. The question then poses itself as to why some people want to achieve such an embodiment.

Kindertransport Reenactment In the following, I propose some possible motives for reenactment by exploring contemporary Kindertransport reenactments. The Kindertransport was the rescue of some ten thousand, mainly Jewish, children from Nazi Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939. The majority of these children were taken to Britain by train and boat. Many of them went

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on to become British citizens, and still live in Britain today. Recent reenactments of the Kindertransport form part of the enormous commemorative activity around significant anniversaries connected to World War II and the immediate prewar period. Thus, in September 2009, to mark the seventieth anniversary of the Czech Kindertransports, a train set off from Prague to reenact the train journeys undertaken by the 690 Jewish children rescued from Czechoslovakia in 1939. Sir Nicholas Winton, who organized the 1939 Czech transports, was there to welcome the train when it pulled in to London’s Liverpool Street Station (Hasson and Lahav 2019). As such, the first and most important motive we can identify here is commemorative (and often anniversarial) reenactment, a motive informing much contemporary historical reenactment. For instance, a flotilla of small ships set sail for Dunkirk in 2015 to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the evacuation from France in 1940 (BBC News 2015). In fact, commemorative impulses characterize most of the Kindertransport reenactments here discussed: people come together to remember. Added to these impulses, however, are other motivational factors. More research needs to be done into the gradual evolution of commemoration from a purely contemplative activity, marked by collective retrospection in a spirit of remembrance (often around a memorial), to one that is at least partly performed through reenactment. According to Jan Assmann, communicative memory of an event—in other words its transmission through everyday communication—comes to an end after about eighty years (three generations) (Assmann 2008). Then, cultural memory—the transmission of history through cultural representations such as films and museums— takes over. Could it be that, precisely at the moment where World War II passes from communicative to cultural memory, new generations without a lived family connection to World War II are seeking to create their own connection through the experience offered by reenactment? Reenactment bridges a gap between communicative and cultural memory by generating an indirect experience that, in turn, can be recommunicated. Of course, indirect experience is framed by the cultural understandings that underpin reenactments. The point remains that, today, commemoration can no longer rely for its appeal on the evocation of collective values supposedly rooted in the past: now, and forever more, it depends on the best available experiential approximation to that past. Feeling validates commemoration (Agnew 2007). For those who do have a lived connection to a historical event, however, commemorative reenactment can have a different function. When, in September 2009, a steam train pulled out of Prague station to begin the reenacted Kindertransport to Britain, twenty-two of those on board were Kinder who had experienced the transports themselves. They were accompanied by diplomats and members of the public (Hasson and Lahav 2009). It

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was Sigmund Freud who developed the concept of Wiederholungszwang (repetition compulsion) to designate the involuntary acting out, among other things, of a repressed past (Freud 1914). The now well-established term “traumatic reenactment” captures this notion. Yet Freud also believed that, under the influence of psychotherapy, reenactment could help to overcome the trauma. In this connection, Michael S. Levy has written of an adaptive process where victims “more actively reenact a traumatic situation from their past” in an attempt to achieve some kind of resolution (Levy 1998, 228). For former Kindertransportees, the 2009 commemorative train journey in carriages from the 1930s simultaneously represented the chance of an adaptive reenactment—meaning a chance, decades later, to confront and perhaps come to terms with the traumatic childhood experience of separation from their parents. Also on that same train were 218 relatives of the children saved by Winton (Miskin 2009). Similarly, in 2018, descendants of Jews who arrived on the Kindertransport took part in a commemorative cycle ride from Berlin to Harwich. In one case, a former Kindertransportee, Paul Alexander, was accompanied by his son and grandson (Sherwood 2018). Here, we are dealing, potentially, with what might be termed “postmemorial reenactment.” Marianne Hirsch distinguishes between her concept of postmemory, and Toni Morrison’s rememory: while rememory is a memory that, “communicated through bodily symptoms, becomes a form of repetition and reenactment,” postmemory works through “indirection and multiple mediation” (Kindle Location 1461). For Hirsch, reenactment (rememory) occurs when the children of Holocaust survivors, for instance, transpose themselves into the past in such a way that they lose all sense of themselves. Postmemory, by contrast, opens up the possibility of “a form of second-generation remembrance that is based on a more consciously and necessarily mediated form of identification” (Hirsch 2012, Kindle Location 1461). A historical reenactment of the kind here, though, need not represent a rememory in Morrison’s sense, but instead might represent a postmemorial experience as understood by Hirsch. Remember: the Berlin–Harwich reenactment was not an act of repetition. After all, the children, in 1938, did not travel on twenty-first-century bicycles. The reenactment was at one level metaphorical, and at another level it constituted a sporting activity clearly situated in the present as a gesture of thanks to those who rescued the Kinder. Overall, of course, it was a media event. The children and other relatives of Kindertransportees could thus reenact the original journey, but in a manner and with a purpose that prevented them from slipping into a past that was not their own. The commemorative reenactments involving second-generation Kinder can be seen as one of the forms in which past family experiences can be “integrated—however uneasily—into a historically different present,” creating the potential for that

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“more consciously and necessarily mediated form of identification” (Hirsch 2012, Kindle Location 1461) to which Hirsch refers. An interesting facet of the Berlin–Harwich cycle ride was that it used Kindertransport memorials—all of them created by the Israeli sculptor and former Kindertransportee Frank Meisler—as staging posts: the journey began at the Berlin Friedrichstraße memorial, passed by the memorial at the Hook of Holland, and ended at London’s Liverpool Street memorial. This alone must have served to remind the participants of one key purpose: to honor the memory of the children, a process that discourages absolute identification, as one cannot honor a person by becoming that person; the subjectposition as the one honoring needs to be maintained. There have been other examples of connections between Kindertransport memorials and reenactment. Beginning in 2008, the street theater production Suitcase began its tour of British stations, acting out scenes from the Kindertransport to audiences who had bought tickets, but also to sometimes bemused passersby. Notwithstanding the fact that all forms of reenactment are in some respect performative, Suitcase was, first and foremost, a performative reenactment in the stricter sense. Here were, at least in part, professional actors whose express wish was to communicate their roles and text to an audience, or to interact. The production used busy stations to lend actuality to its depiction of arriving children. Suitcase, according to its website, was created as the place “where the past and present collide” (Suitcase 2013). This was certainly true at Liverpool Street Station when parts of the play were performed at Meisler’s memorial. For a moment, the events the memorial recalled unfolded dramatically around it in another of those mixtures of experiencing and remembering that is the hallmark of reenactment. Viewers were even drawn into the action. Dora Apel coined the term “counter-memory reenactment” to designate forms of reenactment whose overall message critiques that of official commemoration (Apel 2013, 253–54). But one can also use the term “reanimating reenactment,” which does not so much critique official commemoration as shake the dust off it. History is rendered contemporaneous, which in turn infuses commemoration with relevance, not least because such renderings invite comparison to present-day issues. Reenactment is, of course, not the only form of artistic expression that can reanimate in this way. In 2017 Wrap Up London, with the support of World Jewish Relief and the Association of Jewish Refugees, placed “bright red coats on the iconic Kindertransport statue at Liverpool Street Station to help encourage Londoners to donate their old coats to those in need” (Association of Jewish Refugees 2018). In large measure, the campaign was designed to help refugee children. The physical re-dressing of memorial statues spelled out the message: these figures were, for a while, turned into representations of present-day needs, rather than past sufferings. If this rearticulation

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seemed rather blunt and unsubtle, the methods used by Germany’s Center for Political Beauty near the site of Frank Meisler’s Berlin Kindertransport memorial were little short of drastic. The Center set up a container asking passersby to select one out of a hundred Syrian children for rescue to Germany, implying that the others were doomed to their fate in Syria (BR Bayern 2015). In a sense this was a kind of enactment, if not reenactment, and was designed to expose the futility of memorials such as Meisler’s if the message they convey is not acted on in the present. The Center, which in recent years has become known for its memory agitprop, was not critiquing the memorial as much as it was critiquing the fact that the memorial remained inert if not responded to. Kindertransport reenactments, however, do not really need to be quite so obvious or militant in encouraging associations. In acting out the past in the present, they hold up a mirror in which the present is inevitably reflected. This was the case with Suitcase, and it was also the case when, to commemorate the arrival of the first Kindertransport in Harwich on December 2, 1938, schoolchildren took part in a reenactment eighty years later: “To mark the 80th anniversary of the evacuation, children of different ages wore newsboy hats, tweed coats and vintage shoes to get in character as evacuees who made the voyage from mainland Europe to Harwich” (Harwich Standard 2018). It would be surprising if those who looked on as the children made their way by train from Harwich to Liverpool Street Station in London had not made the connection to the present-day refugee crisis, especially as former Kindertransportee and Labour politician Lord Dubs has vigorously been campaigning—to much media coverage—for the government to bring in children, particularly unaccompanied children, from Syria (see Townsend 2018). Not surprisingly, he regards the Kindertransport as a precedent that the government, in some form or other, needs to follow. The Harwich reenactment of 2018 was an educational reenactment in several senses. First, it involved schoolchildren, who participated in it as part of the process of learning about the 1930s and 1940s. At the same time, the reenactment preparations enabled the schoolchildren to receive acting lessons (Daily Gazette 2018). But they were not just acting out a play, or any old history. The participating schoolchildren attend schools local to Harwich, and the reenactment was also designed, specifically, to help them engage more with the history of the area in which they lived; in fact, the commemorative event was financed by the Heritage Lottery Fund as part of a project whose purpose is to encourage residents to remember their heritage (Harwich Haven 2021). The schoolchildren took on the identities of children before them, bridging a historical, generational, and experiential gap, and strengthening, ideally, their sense of affiliation with their localities. There is a poignant irony in the fact that the children they were imaginatively embodying had come as strangers and outcasts, yet were being per-

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ceived in retrospect as interwoven with the history of their point of entry to the extent that that history had become unthinkable without them; they had become even as they arrived part of the host nation’s heritage. Yet the schoolchildren were also being invited to use their imaginations to put themselves into the mentalities of these outcasts, and of those othered by Nazi Germany, and thus they were also invited to imagine the Kindertransportees’ sense of isolation and abandonment. Quite how the schools involved in the reenactments handled this tension—the Kindertransportees as heritage and outcasts—is not addressed in the few newspaper reports. The whole reenactment, of course, was also educational for audiences with whom the children engaged, at Liverpool Street Station, for instance, where they approached members of the public and handed out postcards urging reflection on the history of the transports. Finally, what do we make of the event organized by the Association of Jewish Refugees at Speaker’s House in Parliament in November 2018, where a number of parliamentarians read out extracts from the debate in the House of Commons on November 21, 1938, over whether to allow ten thousand Jewish and non-Aryan children into Britain—a debate that paved the way for the Kindertransport? (Association of Jewish Refugees 2016). This event could certainly be described as a political reenactment, and not just in the sense that a historical parliamentary debate was restaged, but also because the restaging had a political function. That function became particularly clear on November 26, 2018, when Lord Dubs, who had read from his testimony during the reenactment event, tabled a question for a short debate in the House of Lords. Dubs asked the government what plans they had to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the Kindertransport. Introducing the debate, Dubs focused almost entirely on the contemporary Syrian refugee crisis, and the government’s failure to bring in more than 280 unaccompanied children, not even meeting its own modest target of 480 (House of Lords Debates 2018). Subsequent discussion among the Lords turned around this question of taking in today’s refugees. The reenactment event in the House of Commons, and this Lords’ debate, made of the November 21, 1938, parliamentary debate a present-day rallying call. Political reenactments can thereby be invocatory reenactments (for a theory of invocative memory in relation to the Kindertransport, see Williams and Niven 2020). In this case, the words of the 1938 debate, in their restating, took on the quality of an incantation: “Let history happen again,” was the implied message. (To date, though, the government has not allowed itself to be charmed into accepting more unaccompanied minors fleeing Syria.) When reenactments aim to stimulate similar actions or reactions in the present to those being portrayed in the reenactment, they take on an associative quality. In analogy to Michael Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory, according to which

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the memory of the Holocaust and other historical injustices can collaborate rather than compete with each other, we might speak of multidirectional reenactment. In remembering the Kindertransport, we recall the fate of refugees desperate to reach Europe over the past five to ten years. Empathy can be transferred from the past to the present, as well as the other way round (Rothberg 2009, 1–12). The example explored here of the Kindertransport shows that motives for reenactment can be various, but, as stated earlier, they can all be subsumed under the rubric of commemoration, or better, under the rubric of living commemoration, in which the mind and spirit do not so much hold the past at contemplative distance as they seek to experience its reality and create a personal relationship to cultural heritage that suffuses it with immediacy and relevance. One might also say that all the reenactments considered here are performative and educational, have a political connotation, serve to reanimate, and operate multidirectionally. If I suggested that they could be separated out according to a specific or exclusive motive, then I might have overstated the case in the interests of categorization. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that, in the cases considered above, certain features stood out, so that to sketch out a typology of motive appeared justified if we understand the issue as one of relative emphasis. Of course, this brief typology has another limit: it focused rather on the reasons why people reenact, but said little about how audiences perceive and respond to reenactments. Few, if any of the reports on the reenactments I have discussed have anything to say about such perceptions or responses. Knowing more about them would be a desideratum, not least because intention and reception can go in quite different directions. Because we think of reenactment as such a popular activity, we perhaps concentrate too intensely on those who do it rather than those who watch it. I am also aware that, in this case study, I spent little time looking at those who organized the reenactments—Jewish organizations, local communities, theater groups, charities. Clearly, any more-detailed survey of motive would have to look at specific institutional interests. My approach here was to look for lines and tendencies within the reenactments themselves. What is certainly true of all those engaged in the activities discussed is that they wished to engage in a novel or salient way with a key element of British heritage, and render it, as the Germans say, aktuell—as important today as it was at the time. Reenactors sought to inhabit heritage, and to accommodate audiences within it.

Liquid Modernity I want to conclude here by offering a broader explanation for our current obsession with reenactment, an explanation that obtains not just in the case

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of commemorative reenactment of the Kindertransport, but also much more generally. This explanation is linked to Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of liquid modernity. Sociologists, cultural theorists, and philosophers are still debating whether we are living in an era of postmodernity, where the modern has in some sense come to an end, or in a period of what has been variously called second modernity or reflexive modernity. Modernity, according to this latter understanding, is very much still with us, but rather than propelling us as it were automatically to a better world, it has generated problems and dilemmas that characterize a new phase in modernity whose consequences are now being recognized (Beck 1992, 2005; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1994). The most obvious example of this, of course, is climate change. One of the other key symptoms of ever-advancing modernity, for Ulrich Beck, is the loss of “traditional securities such as religious faith” ( Beck 2001, 276), and he further detects a gradual erosion of the binding power of the nationstate in the course of globalization, a weakening of the basic social unit of the household or family, and of social class (at least social class understood as based on occupational division) (276). “European modernity,” Beck concludes, “has freed people from historically inscribed roles.” The result is what he calls “individualization”: “in second modernity the individual is for the first time in history the basic unit of social reproduction” ( Beck 2001, 276). Individualization enforces “biographies full of risk and precarious freedom,” and is a “‘non-linear’ mode, an open ended, highly ambivalent ongoing process” ( Beck 2001, 277). In developing his concept of liquid modernity, Zygmunt Bauman also emphasizes this difficult binary: individualization, which he describes as a “fate, not a choice,” is both an opportunity as it signifies an apparently boundless freedom of choice, yet at the same time brings a burden, since the responsibility for coping with the risks and contradictions of modernity is now entirely placed on the individual’s shoulders (Bauman 2000, 34). In this state of “irredeemable loneliness” (36), any communities that might be built are “fragile and short-lived as scattered and wandering emotions, shifting erratically from one target to another” (36). In an individualized world, because people are not born into their identities, they find themselves caught up in a process of “needing to become” (31). This is the process that is liquid: identities are no longer solid, but instead are under constant redefinition and renegotiation. The ability to “‘shop around’ in the supermarket of identities, [to] make and unmake identities at will [seems to be the] royal road to the fulfilment of identity fantasies” (83). What, might one ask, does this have to do with reenactment, which is a practice, after all, that is centuries old, and not an invention of modernity? Whatever the long history of reenactment, there can be little doubt that the practice has found widespread popularity globally in recent decades. It is by now an institutionalized practice, too. In Britain, even primary school chil-

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dren take part in a whole series of reenactments. Many of these reenactments focus—unsurprisingly given Britain’s national preoccupation with memory of war—on World War I and World War II. Schoolchildren reimagine the trenches, experience what it was like to be an evacuee, sample foods that would have been eaten at the time (taking rationing into account), hide in makeshift air raid shelters, or indeed go on the Kindertransport. Thus, in 2014 schoolchildren from Newcastle Church High School and Central High School dressed up as evacuees and “took part in a wartime picnic, where they were offered the chance to sample similar foods to those eaten during World War II, so they could gain a glimpse of the wartime experience” (Wilkie 2014). Other famous moments of British history are reenacted, too, such as the Battle of Watling Street, which ended Boudica’s revolt in AD 60 or AD 61 (see Richard Avenue Primary School 2019), Guy Fawkes’s attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and the Great Fire of London in 1666 (St. Charles Catholic Primary School 2019). Victorian days or Roman days are particularly popular. The School Run, an online organization offering all that a primary school child might need, also provides costumes for reenactments. If you are “looking for an easy evacuee costume or a Roman centurion outfit,” or need to find a “dressing-up solution for your eager Viking warrior, Anglo-Saxon scholar or Georgian lady,” then The School Run can help: “From Stone Age to suffragettes and Sixties fashion, we’ve picked a selection of the best historical costumes to buy for kids” (School Run 202). As is clear from this offer, it is not just iconic events in British history that children reenact: it can be any historical moment, a style, a way of being. It can be a battle between Persians and Spartans, a scene from the Bible, or one from The Jungle Book (St. Mary’s CE Primary School 2019). Children also reenact video games, which can have unfortunate consequences. In 2018, pupils from Totley All Saints Church of England School acted out scenarios from the Tetley online video game Fortnite: Battle Royale, causing injuries. The pupils did this not at school, but on their own initiative: the video game is not supposed to be played by children age 13 and older (McCahill 2018). Historical episodes, figures, and experiences have become skins into which we slip—from primary school onward. As the case study of the Kindertransport shows, events associated proudly with national achievement are often the focus of reenactment, though the typology developed here shows that motives for identifying as Kindertransportees can vary. Reenactment is not so much about finding new ways of experiencing the quintessential moments of our past—as crystallized in self-congratulatory national histories—as it is about experiencing history of any kind for its own sake. As the editors of a recent volume on reenactment studies write in their introduction, interest in the field is shifting away from “national memory

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culture and the longue durée, and toward the direction of the recent past and its individualized, experiential manifestations” (Agnew, Lamb, and Tomann 2020, 7). National histories certainly are still the histories we know best, so it is natural that reenactment borrow from them, but they are no longer always privileged. Reenactment is about trying out one different history after another, as the School Run’s costumes department clearly indicates. History is theater, to be performed. In an age where we no longer know who we are, and where we shop around in the supermarket of identities, as Bauman has it, history also becomes a source of identities we can try on and then discard in favor of others, which we then discard just as quickly. Reenactment is the appropriate genre for our constant experimentation, our casual, consumerist approach to history. What use now are monuments, symbolizing the fixity of certain historical moments in collective consciousness, when what we want in the age of liquid modernity is fluidity of association? The typology outlined above, which is expandable, is no contradiction to this claim. Anniversaries also embody fixity, but in reenacting the commemorated event, we can break away from a straightforward celebration and explore that event from whatever vantage point of engagement suits us at any given moment: political, educational, emotional, ethical, multidirectional, postmemorial, invocatory, critical, or merely (if merely is the right adverb) experiential. We try on different histories, and we try out different approaches to history. The perspective is as experimental as the history. To interpret reenactment in terms of a playful, yet rootless individualism may seem to contradict the fact that reenactment is characteristically a social and collective phenomenon, but the contradiction is only an apparent one. Bauman refers to our “desperate need for ‘networking,’” a building technique that can indeed “spawn ‘communities,’” but these are merely what Bauman terms “‘peg’ communities,” a “momentary gathering around a nail on which many solitary individuals hang their solitary individual fears” (Bauman 2000, 36). It is significant that Bauman should choose a clothing metaphor. Transferring this to the current context, we might argue that, before reenactors pull on the historical clothing that binds them, for a brief moment, to a historical identity they can inhabit to escape their own sense of disconnectedness, they “take off” their everyday fears and anxieties and leave them in the dressing room. Sharing parallel historical identities provides a momentary sense of community, but the co-reenactors are arbitrary: they can shift with each reenactment. The community exists only as long as the reenactment does. The communities formed in liquid modernity, according to Bauman, are not only short-lived, but also drift “in the forever inconclusive search for a secure haven” (36). Perhaps this is also why reenacting the Kindertransport is proving so popular in Britain. The mainly Jewish refugees arrived at a secure haven—

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Harwich, from where they were then distributed, via transit camps in many cases, to their new foster homes or boarding schools. Remembering the Kindertransport is about remembering escape from the stigmatization or refusal of identity in Germany, to a country where, in theory, Jews could once again be themselves, or indeed once again be Christian, if they had had Jewishness reimposed on them by the race-obsessed Third Reich. Reenacting the Kindertransport is about a recovery and restoration of religious and cultural identity, or about acquiring a new national identity— British—in which Jews were free to move, given that German identity had been denied to them by Hitler. Acting this out gives reenactors a sense of moving from ejection to belonging, loss of identity to repossession or possession of identity. Is this, then, the deeper motive for Kindertransport reenactment? A brief and consoling identification with a story about a return to or a movement toward identity? If so, then we have not really understood the full history of the Kindertransport, because many Jewish refugees to this country soon found themselves interned in camps as enemy aliens during the war. The haven became a prison. But that is not something we want to know, or reenact. To do so would merely force us to face an uncomfortable truth. Even eighty years ago, when bonds of national, religious, and social identity were stronger, identity was not likely to protect you against anything. Others decided who you are. One moment you were an unwanted Jew, and the next you were an unwanted German. In the past, the problem with identity was its susceptibility to control. Now, the issue is the more fundamental one of its indeterminacy or fungibility. Neither story is a happy one.

Bill Niven is Professor Emeritus of Contemporary German History at Nottingham Trent University, England. He is author of Facing the Nazi Past (2001), The Buchenwald Child (2007), Representations of Flight and Expulsion in East German Prose Works (2014), and Hitler and Film (2018). He has edited and coedited volumes on German history and memory, notably Germans as Victims (2006), Memorialisation in Germany since 1945 (2010) with Chloe Paver, and Die Wilhelm Gustloff: Geschichte und Erinnerung eines Untergangs (2011). His latest book is Jud Süß - das lange Leben eines Propagandafilms (2022).

Notes 1. I am deeply grateful to Amy Williams, with whom I am writing a book on the Kindertransport, for our conversations about the topic in general, for our many discussions

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about forms of Kindertransport memory, and for drawing my attention to reenactments such as Suitcase.

References Agnew, V. 2007. “History’s Affective Turn: Historical Reenactment and its Work in the Present.” Journal of Theory and Practice 11 (3): 299–312. Agnew, V., J. Lamb, and J. Tomann, eds. 2020. The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies: Key Terms in the Field. New York: Routledge. Apel, D. 2013. “Violence and Historical Reenactment: From the American Civil War to the Moore’s Ford Lynching.” In Violence and Visibility in Modern History, edited by J. Martschukat and S. Niedermeier, 241–62. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Assmann, J. 2008. “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” In Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by A. Erll and A. Nünning, 109–18. Berlin: De Gruyter. Association of Jewish Refugees. 2016, November 21. “The Kindertransport Debate from 1938.” Accessed November 13, 2021, at https://ajr.org.uk/latest-news/the-kindert ransport-debate-from-1938/ Association of Jewish Refugees. 2018. “Wrap up London.” Accessed November 13, 2021, at https://ajr.org.uk/latest-news/kindertransport-statue-gets-wrapped-up/ Bauman, Z. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. BBC News. 2015. “Dunkirk Flotilla Sails to France for 75th Anniversary Events.” BBC News, May 21, 2015. Accessed November 13, 2021, at https://www.bbc.com/news/ uk-32821805 Beck, U. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage. Beck, U. 2001. “Interview with Ulrich Beck.” Journal of Consumer Culture 1 (2): 261–77. Beck, U. 2005. Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U., and E. Beck-Gernsheim. 1994. Riskante Freiheiten—Gesellschaftliche Individualisierungsprozesse in der Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. BR Bayern. 2015. “Aktionskunst zur Rettung von syrischen Kindern.” BR Bayern 2. Accessed November 13, 2021, at https://www.br.de/radio/bayern2/sendungen/kulturjournal/ zentrum-fuer-politische-schoenheit-104.html Daily Gazette. 2018. “2018’s Youngsters Recreate Iconic Harwich 1938 Kindertransport.” Daily Gazette and Essex County Standard, December 4, 2018. Accessed November 13, 2021, at https://www.gazette-news.co.uk/news/17272906.2018s-youngsters-recreateiconic-harwich-1938-kindertransport/ Freud, S. 1914. “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (Further on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis II).” Available at https://marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/ classes/201/articles/1914FreudRemembering.pdf Hansard. 1938, November 2021. “Racial, Religious and Political Minorities.” Accessed November 13, 2021, at https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1938/nov/ 21/racial-religious-and-political-minorities Harwich Haven. 2021. “Harwich Haven Surrender and Sanctuary.” Accessed November 13, 2021, at https://harwichhavenhistory.co.uk/ Harwich Standard. 2018. “2018 Children Recreate 1938 Kindertransport Arrival.” Harwich and Manningtree Standard, December 9, 2018. Accessed November 13, 2021, at https://www.harwichandmanningtreestandard.co.uk/news/17281445.2018-childrenrecreate-1938-kindertransport-arrival/

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Hasson, N., and Y. Lahav. 2019. “Four Days from Prague to London—WWII Survivors Reenact Kindertransport.” Haaretz, September 1, 2019. Accessed November 13, 2021, at https://www.haaretz.com/1.5098204 Hirsch, M. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. Kindle edition. House of Lords Debates. 2018. “Kindertransport Commemoration: Question for Short Debate.” Accessed November 13, 2021, at https://www.theyworkforyou.com/ lords/?id=2018-11-26a.513.3 Levy, M. 1998. “A Helpful Way to Conceptualize and Understand Reenactments.” Journal of Pyschotherapy Practice and Research 7 (3): 227–35. McCahill, E. 2018. “Fortnite Obsessed Primary School Kids ‘Acting Out’ Violent Scenes from Video Game ‘Causing Other Children to Get Hurt.’” The Mirror, June 29, 2018. Accessed November 13, 2021, at https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/ fortnite-obsessed-primary-school-kids-12801463 Miskin, M. 2009. “Survivors Reenact Ride to Safety.” Israel National News, September 2, 2009. Accessed November 13, 2021, at http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/ News.aspx/133229 Richard Avenue Primary School. 2019. Accessed November 13, 2021, at http://richardav enue.co.uk/year-3-reenact-boudicca-and-the-battle-of-watling-street/ Rothberg, M. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. School Run, The. 2021. “Kids’ Historical Costumes to Buy.” https://www.theschoolrun .com/kids-historical-costumes-to-buy Sherwood, H. 2018. “‘A Victory Ride’: Cyclists to Retrace Holocaust Evacuees’ Journey for 80th Anniversary.” The Guardian, June 14, 2018. Accessed November 13, 2021, at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/14/a-victory-ride-cyclists-to-retraceholocaust-evacuees-journey-for-80th-anniversary St. Charles Catholic Primary School. 2019. Accessed November 13, 2021, at http://stcharles rcvaprimary.co.uk/great-fire-of-london-year-2/ St. Mary’s CE Primary School. 2019. “A Warm Welcome to St Mary’s CE (A) Primary School in Mucklestone.” Accessed December 20, 2019, at https://www.st-marys-mucklestone .staffs.sch.uk/class-two/ Suitcase. 2013. “Suitcase: Kindertransport 75th Anniversary.” Accessed November 13, 2021, at http://suitcase1938.org/ Townsend, M. 2018. “UK Admits Only 20 Unaccompanied Child Refugees in Two Years.” The Guardian, November 3, 2018. Accessed December 20, 2018, at https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/03/uk-admits-only-20-unaccompanied-chi ld-refugees-in-two-years Wilkie, N. 2014. “Schoolgirls Reenact Refugee Experience.” Independent Education Today, May 21, 2014. Accessed December 20, 2018, at https://ie-today.co.uk/Article/school girls_reenact_evacuee_experience/ Williams, A., and B. Niven. 2020. “Memory of the Kindertransport in Britain and Germany, and the Current Refugee Crisis.” Diasporas 36: 109–21.

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Conceptualizing the Period Rush Ludic Dimensions of Immersive History in Historical Reenactment Robbert-Jan Adriaansen

To the question of what motivates them, historical reenactors generally have two answers: one is related to memory and refers to keeping the past alive and educating others about the past; the other is related to the thrill of being immersed in the past while reenacting a historical event. Often referred to as the “period rush” or “history flash” (Hochbruck 1997, 99), “time warp” (Turner 1990, 126), or “magic moment” (Handler and Saxton 1988, 245), the immersive aspect of reenactment refers to the experience of the dissolution of temporal distance and the concurrence of past and present (Otto 2016, 179). Fearing the scorn of scholars who are skeptical of their hobby, the first argument is usually the standard answer reenactors give to researchers studying reenactment (Apel 2012, 51); after all, it highlights the educational element of historical reenactment. The second answer remains below the surface at the first instance, but constitutes an important dimension of historical reenactment for many participants. In fact, the period rush is prevalent among historical reenactors. In her research on Civil War reenactment clothing, Kimberly Miller-Spillman (2008) conducted surveys with historical reenactors who have experienced a period rush. A survey with male reenactors shows that 85 percent of the 111 respondents mentioned having had magic moments (2008, 454). In another publication she and Min-Young Lee show that, among female Civil War Notes for this section begin on page 45.

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reenactors, 54 percent of the 143 respondents indicated having had a period rush (2014, 77). Apart from reenactors, scholars participating in reenactments during their fieldwork also report having experienced the period rush. Taking part in a Civil War reenactment, the cultural anthropologist Matthew Amster (2008, 16) notes, “For just an instant—as a haze rose around us from the gravel under our feet, the group moving along the trail in unison, only the sound of our gear clanging and a sea of blue uniforms with rifles pointed skyward—I momentarily grasped just a tiny bit of what it might have felt like to be one of these men in the 1860s, marching in the hot sun with a heavy rifle under someone else’s orders. Even though I’d only been doing this for a very short time, something visceral occurred that gave me a taste of what makes reenacting appealing.” Such testimonies fuel Vanessa Agnew’s (Agnew 2004, 330) remark that reenactments emerge as a “body-based discourse in which the past is reanimated through physical and psychological experience.” Despite the acknolwedgment of the period rush in literature, scholars do little more with it than using it—like Amster does—as an explanation for the popular appeal of historical reenactment. Some treat the period rush with suspicion since it could pose a threat to proper historical understanding and representation due to its irrational nature. The irrationality of experience together with the often-ritual character of reenactments gives it a quasi-religious character, which can result in a mythification and decontextualization of the past as the linearity of history is replaced with a certain “timelessness” (McCarthy 2014, 112). Experience would reinforce an uncritical attitude toward the past that reiterates old mythologies. According to Dora Apel (2012, 47), reenactments “recapture an imagined nostalgic past that focuses on individual experience while affirming dominant historical assumptions.” It must be said that such fears for immersive experiences make sense only if one takes the “the typical sort of discursive history produced by professional academic historians” as the measure for what Brian Fay (2002, 1) calls “unconventional histories,” such as historical reenactment. These approaches teach us little about the dynamics of historical reenactment and the role of experience therein, apart from the fact that reenactment does not meet academic standards of historical representation and understanding. A reconceptualization of the period rush is therefore required in historical reenactment studies. In this chapter I will explore the contours of a different approach that treats historical reenactment and its immersive aspects not as a threat to historical understanding, but rather as a different, performative mode of understanding. First, I will discuss the conceptualization of historical experience in the philosophy of history and sketch some implications for our understanding of the period rush. Second, since these conceptualizations

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of historical experience are mainly modeled on an individual experience of the past, they need to be expanded to be meaningful for the study of collective historical performances like historical reenactment. I will do so by approaching immersive experience as aspects of a ludic way of engaging with the past as theorized in Gadamerian hermeneutics. Finally, I will identify a number of ludic dimensions of immersive history in historical reenactment. This will elucidate the position of the period rush in historical understanding within the context of historical reenactments.

Historical Sensation and Historical Experience The period rush is by no means a recent phenomenon, nor is it exclusively linked to historical reenactments. In literature, many examples can be found of similar experiences of a sudden presence of the past, ranging from Goethe’s (2005) experience of Strasbourg Cathedral to the many experiences of immersion at historical sites that adolescent members of the German Wandervogel movement scribbled down in their notebooks and magazines in the early twentieth century (Adriaansen 2015), to the immersive archival encounters with the past many historians have reported about over the years (Robinson 2010). The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (2014) calls these experiences— which are so similar to the period rush—historical sensations. To Huizinga, the word “sensation” has little to do with its general contemporary meaning, but with the fact that the experience alluded to the human senses. He notes (54) that this “not completely reduceable contact with the past is an entry into an atmosphere, it is one of the many forms of reaching beyond oneself, of experiencing truth, which are given to man.” What is experienced is not precisely defined: the objects of experience are not particular historical individuals, events, or thoughts, and are not even images—and if so, perhaps they are a vague and composite image. Historical sensation might be more accurately described as sensing the mood or atmosphere of a past, which presents itself in a single moment. Huizinga warns that historical sensations have nothing to do with reexperiencing the past. Reexperiencing the past refers to the cognitive operation of historical understanding, somewhat similar to what Wilhelm Dilthey called Nacherleben (Makkreel 1992, 328) and what R.G. Collingwood (1946, 282) called “re-enactment.” There are two reasons for this. First, historical sensations occur suddenly, last for a single moment, and do not represent a process of understanding. Frank Ankersmit (2007, 116) would later add that, during a historical sensation—which he calls historical experience—all spatial and temporal demarcations are temporarily suspended to the extent

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that it “unites past and present in a brief but ecstatic kiss.” Second, historical sensations are multisensory and thereby are not exclusively tied to imagination—which favors vision. Using the German concept Ahnung (presentiment, similar in meaning to Huizinga’s concept of sensation), Huizinga stresses that historical sensations can be evoked by lines of text from archival documents or chronicles, but also by—for example—a few notes of an old song. Ankersmit adds that this multisensory aspect defies modern (post-Cartesian) subjectivism. For, he argues, whereas vision easily enables the objectification of what is sensed, other sense impressions such as sounds, tastes, and smells do not. Sensation therefore indicates an intimate relation with the world; hence he talks about historical experience as an “embrace of subject and object” (Ankersmit 2007, 126). Ankersmit stresses that during the experience the boundaries between subject and object are temporarily suspended. For this reason, Huizinga (2014, 54) notes that a historical sensation is not something a writer of a historical document “infuses in his work by using certain words. It lies beyond the book of history, not in it. The reader brings it to the writer, it is his response to the writer’s call.” The question how historical sensation relates to historical understanding is a relevant one—not only theoretically, but also in relationship to our case of historical reenactment. Huizinga argues quite strongly that (irrational) historical sensation should not be conceived to oppose (rational) historical understanding, but is part of historical understanding in the sense that it may spark historical interests that carry on the labor of understanding cognitively. According to Ankersmit, historical distance and historical objectivity are effectuated by historical experiences post hoc. He even speaks of sublime historical experiences when the experience (which may also be a collective one in this instance) concerns not a remote past, but a part of history still assumed to be part of contemporary reality. In such instances the experience effectuates a realization of an epochal break, the (traumatic) realization that a part of the present unequivocally belongs to the past (Ankersmit 2007, 410), which necessitates a reconfiguration of identity. This latter notion of sublime historical experience is generally not the type one encounters during historical reenactments, since a historical understanding of the event in question is generally already assumed when taking part in reenactments. So far, we can draw several implications from Ankersmit and Huizinga for understanding the period rush in historical reenactment. (1) Disavowing the period rush as irrational and not relevant to historical understanding need not be the case. Following Huizinga, it is part of historical understanding, just not a necessary condition for understanding. (2) The period rush is not a “subjective step through a parafictional wormhole into the other age, time and period” (Hochbruck 1997, 99), because the subjectivity of the observer is temporally postponed. (3) The period rush is not itself nostalgic, but it

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can generate nostalgic feelings post hoc. When Rory Turner (1990, 133) discusses the role of the unit in Civil War reenactments and emphasizes that the units function as a “fleeting kind of Gemeinschaft [community], a trace of a romanticized folk community,” he is actually romanticizing the unit while reflecting on his experiences while writing. The nostalgia is not part of the experience, but rather is the result of post hoc reflection on experience. (4) The multisensory nature of the period rush is key to understanding its immersiveness (Daugbjerg 2014). The downside to the Huizinga/Ankersmit approach lies in their explanation of the relationship between historical sensation and historical understanding; that explanation is not satisfactory because it maintains and even reinforces the hierarchical relation between experience and cognition that is so prevalent in historical theory (Ankersmit 2012, 189). Related to historical reenactment, Huizinga’s and Ankersmit’s accounts would mean that the only value of the period rush is that it could inspire one to dig deeper into the past cognitively only after the reenactment has been concluded. Furthermore, what remains a mystery in these approaches is what—given the absence of the past—these experiences are exactly experiences of. Are they mere aesthetic experiences? If so, how then is the past inferred from experience? Ankersmit (2007, 410) unproblematically assumes the objectivity of the past when he attributes historical experience to the “domain between subject and object,” in which the object refers to the past.1

Past, Play, and Experience In order to move beyond this conceptualization, I would like to explore another perspective—a perspective that relies on an often unnoticed aspect of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic theory of historical experience. Although Ankersmit relies heavily on Gadamer, he claims that the place they diverge is where Gadamer relates historical experience only to texts, whereas Ankersmit (1994, 211) follows Huizinga in his broader definition. This is only true if one focuses on the second part of Gadamer’s Truth and Method (2004), which discusses textual interpretation as relevant to historical understanding. The first part, however, is equally relevant and applicable to historical interpretation, but serves as an investigation into aesthetic experience. In his theory of aesthetic experience, Gadamer also relies on Huizinga, but on a different work, Homo Ludens (Huizinga 1949). Gadamer uses the concept of play as a means to conceptualize aesthetic understanding beyond Romantic hermeneutic theories of the affective understanding of the artist’s intentions. Key to understanding Gadamer’s project is the acknowledgment that he aims to theorize understanding in a way that avoids the epistemo-

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logical pitfalls resulting from the Cartesian subject-object dichotomy. To a large part he accomplishes this by applying Heideggerian phenomenology to hermeneutics, but where it comes to performativity Gadamer applies Spiel (the concept of play). Huizinga (1949, 13) understood play—in the broadest sense of the word—as a free activity that takes place outside the routines of daily life and that absorbs the player at the same time. He discerns five dimensions of play. First, he states that play is a free activity, meaning that play is conducted out of free enjoyment. Forced “play” is not play. Second, play must be discerned from ordinary life. Play is the domain of make-believe; it steps out of real life by establishing a distinct, less serious sphere of activity. That does not mean that players cannot be serious when playing—quite the opposite. It rather means that play creates an extra dimension to life, which is not governed by life’s basic necessities. Third, play has its own spatiotemporal dimension: a secluded playing field and a repetitive structure. Regardless whether one talks about child’s play or about formal games, the ability to play over and over again is a core characteristic. Fourth, the spatial play-ground has an ordered structure, which establishes the magic circle of play, meaning the captivating sphere of play that immerses the players. Play relies on a rule system. Whether or not the rules of play have been explicitly stated, every player abides by them voluntarily when deciding to play. Even the cheater acknowledges the rules by still pretending to play. It is only the spoilsport who breaks the magic circle of play by deliberately renouncing the rules. Fifth, there is no material gain connected to play, which emphasizes that play serves no purpose beyond itself. It was the immersive quality of play that made the concept so useful for Gadamer to move beyond Cartesian dualism in his theory of understanding. He did diverge from Huizinga in one respect, which is that he did not and could not set play apart from real life. This would imply a theoretical inconsistency since it would contradict the claim that play is self-referential and is not by definition instrumental to anything outside of play. Having acknowledged this, Gadamer stresses that play may have its own reality, but the elements that constitute the playing field—fellow players, objects, or the playing field itself—are simultaneously part of the reality of play and the reality of everyday life. Not separating play and life enabled Gadamer to theorize the hermeneutics of aesthetic experience in a similar way to his treatment of historiographic understanding in the second part of Truth and Method (Gadamer 2004). Here, he used the metaphor of the conversation to make clear that in real understanding the subject matter is not available as an object expressed in a text for the reader to comprehend, but that it is through an Engagement

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with the subject matter that readers listen to the different ways in which texts challenge their initial expectations and horizons. Similarly, play dismisses the suggestion that aesthetic understanding might have anything to do with the subjectivity of the interpreter of art or of the player in a game. The most important characteristic of play, Gadamer contends with Huizinga, is the absorption of the individual player in the to-and-fro movement of play. Play can therefore not be understood as a subjective act. The fact that play is rulebased and limits the player’s options is not in contradiction with that axiom, since these only come into play once one voluntarily submits to them by entering play (Gadamer 2008, xxiii). No individual can fully control play, nor can they use play for purposes that lie beyond it. This does not imply a passive attitude, far from it—it merely denotes an active engagement, but only with play as such. Gadamer even goes so far as to state that the ultimate goal of play is not winning. Winning might be a reason to participate, but this intention dissolves when play commences. What is essential to play is its structural repetitiveness: play has no goal orientation, but seeks to be repetitive. Every form of play—whether child’s play, a sacred ritual, or a football match—can be played over and over again. The structure of play is thus self-renewing, but play is also self-presenting. This is where we can use Gadamer to solve Huizinga’s problem of understanding play as being both representation and self-contained. Exactly because of the mediality of play, because it is self-contained and self-referential and absorbs the player, Gadamer does not speak of play being representation, but play as being Selbstdarstellung (self-presentation): “The self-presentation of human play depends on the player’s conduct being tied to the makebelieve goals of the game, but the ‘meaning’ of these does not in fact depend on their being achieved. Rather, in spending oneself on the task of the game, one is in fact playing oneself out. The self-presentation of the game involves the player’s achieving, as it were, his own self-presentation by playing—that is, presenting—something” (Gadamer 2004, 108). The so-called meaning of play does not depend on the achievement of goals that have been set for the player, but rather depends on playing something. What is presented is set by the goals of play. How the players present themselves is not determined by anything prior to play, but by the need to advance play. Self-presentation according to the demands of play invites response by other players and sustains the continuation of play. Failing to present oneself to the other players challenges play’s very continuation. In this way, play is “the self-presentation of play-movement” (Gadamer 2000, 31). The significance of this conceptualization of play is that it solves Huizinga’s problem of play as representation: any understanding of play holds a conversation with what is presented in play out of the demands of play,

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and not with what might precede it. This means that when analyzing forms of play in historical culture, the question of meaning should focus on what is presented in play within the context of play, and not on the relationship between play and historical reality. Now, one might say that, if not the performance of the players, then at least the rule system of play represents historical reality. But the rule system is only a derivate of reality, in the sense that it relies not on what actually happened, but on the Wirkungsgeschichte (historical effect) of what happened. A rule system is but a model of what is deemed to be historical reality, and the choices of which variables to include in the model are not at all historically given, but depend on the effect and impact of the history of interpretation of what happened.

Ludic Dimensions of Historical Reenactment When applying the Gadamerian notion of play we can draw several implications about the generation of historical meaning in reenactments. In this case a historical reenactment is understood to be a form of play of and with the past, in an enclosed space with its own temporal dynamics. A reenactment is a simulation of the past, an enactment of actual or probable historical situations and events, based on a model of that past that highlights a (limited) number of variables and operationalizes them in an implicit or explicit rule system (Adriaansen 2019). These rule systems can be laid down explicitly in by-laws and scripts, and can be enforced implicitly through social control, training, and exercises. Once the reenactment commences, the rules are in effect and the participants voluntarily adhere to them. This is what Turner (1990, 130) has in mind when he notes that reenactment is a “pleasure structure, a voluntary creation shared by those who for whatever reason feel a resonance with any of the significances re-enacting might have.” This adherence may however contrast or even conflict with opinions and beliefs held in ordinary life, but this poses a problem only if the simulation is mistakenly confused with an objective representation of the past. Generally, the simulative nature of reenactment is recognized by reenactors, because they do not simply perform a character, but are (this is one of the ontological aspects of reenactment) the persona they embody during the reenactment. I say “embody” because reenactors also try to refrain from depicting themselves as actors who merely play a role (Clemons 2011, 10). These embodiments can be maintained only by preserving the magic circle. A striking example is given by Charlie Schroeder (2012) when he recounts the story of two Jewish American reenactors taking part in a reenactment of the Battle of Hastings. The two are confronted with the need to genu-

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flect before two reenactor priests as they bless the Norman troops upon the Anglo-Saxon advance. Knowing that kneeling is forbidden in the Jewish religion they faced the choice to break or maintain the magic circle. From the opposite side of the battlefield, they heard Anglo-Saxon reenactors pounding their shields and horse hooves thundering on the ground. The two men looked around them at all the kneeling Normans, then back at each other. They had no choice. To give over to the reenactment, to travel back in time, as it were, to experience that period rush, they had to temporarily suspend their disbelief—and, for that matter, their actual belief. “We took a knee,” Ed remembered. As he knelt down and stared across the very field where, nearly a millennium ago, England and the English language forever changed, he got chills. “You’re transported,” he told me. “That’s the only word I can use to describe it. You’re transported.” (Schroeder 2012, 229)

Here Ed indicates that the total dedication to play includes surrendering subjectivity, which he then identifies as a requirement for the period rush to set in. Let me briefly offer several other ludic dimensions of immersive history in historical reenactment related to the period rush. First, as many scholars have noticed, reenactors seem to be preoccupied with authenticity. Contrary to what some believe, authenticity also has a more meaningful function than mere antiquarianism. As Allred (1996, 7) notes, authenticity “maintains the illusion and makes it so plausible that one feels transported in time. Something that does not fit may break the illusion.” In the context of play, the quest for authenticity aims to establish and embellish the spatiotemporal dimension of the playing field. It is a means to simulation and not an end in its own right (which it might be in other contexts, such as collecting paraphernalia). In the performative context of reenactment, the presence of modern items would spoil the mood or atmosphere and would disturb the magic circle. Petra Kalshoven (2015) adds that, among the North American Indian reenactors she studied, the term “authenticity” was always understood as an attribute of a reproduced object, not in reference to the emulated past. The reenactors did not take the reenactment itself to be authentic, but the authenticity—in other words, the historical accuracy—of the used objects was deemed to be an important requirement for a successful reenactment because it set up the playing field. Kalshoven adds, “The authentic replica allows the Indianist to become involved in the past world of emulation” (567). Second, the comparison between reenactment and ritual has often been made (see also Bresco and Van Alphen, this volume). It has been emphasized that historical reenactment originated from, or at least relies on ritual (Hochbruck 1997, 100; Lowenthal 2015, 477; McCarthy 2014; Strauss 2001). Rather than trying to establish an artificial historical continuity between ritual and reenactment it would be better to argue in line with Huizinga

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that historical reenactment, like the ritual, originated in and as play—also in rituals, the shaman is the goddess when he puts on her robes. In some cases, ritual and reenactment blend to the extent that they become indistinguishable as different genres of play. The Hauka ritual, famously depicted in Jean Rouch’s 1955 film Les maîtres fous, saw Ghanese men going into a trance and becoming possessed with the spirits of white colonial officials. This “literal, bodily crossing of the deadly gulf dividing the West and Africa” (Ferguson 2002, 555) combined a grotesque (re)enactment of events and scenes from local colonial history with rituals such as initiation rites and animal sacrifice. In other cases, secular reenactments of historical rituals can regain religious meaning, as was the case with the reenactment of a vanished Edo-era rite for women’s salvation near Mount Tate (Tateyama) in Japan. While the 1996 reenactment of this rite was staged in support of the local economy, it ended up “acting as a living, powerful ritual that endowed its participants with religious experience” (Averbuch 2011, 4). Many participating women, even those who expected it to be a mere masquerade, reported the ritual crossing of a bridge in terms of experiencing a different spatio-temporal dimension, feelings of atonement and elevation: “For a short flash I was separated from this regular world and felt that until now nothing was real. When I came to the end of the bridge I felt I met a new me” (25). Subsequently, later editions were no longer marketed as historical tourism spectacles, but rather as traditional ceremonies aimed at spiritual healing. Third, some have argued that reenactment is a nostalgic reaction to an alleged postmodern loss of historical continuity and authenticity (Hall 1994; Handler and Saxton 1988). However, play itself cannot be nostalgic because its immersion covers by no means an immersion in the past (as if that were even ontologically or epistemologically possible), but, instead, means an immersion in play. The period rush has little to do with immersion in the past or being transplanted to the past, or even with the illusion of being transplanted. It is nothing more than immersion in the magic circle of play, and it is only after the experience that distancing takes place. Historical distance is thus not a precondition for, but rather is an effect of the period rush. Fourth, reenactment is much more than just an inspiration for further learning; it is both the environment and the object of learning. To be able to successfully participate, the reenactor must already have appropriated and understood the basics of the simulation’s rule system. These skills can be enhanced during play by means of mimicry, trial and error, or inquiring further instructions. Learning means understanding how the simulated model functions and how the relevant aspects are interrelated. The adage that “the re-enactor knows the price of everything in the past but understands the value and significance of nothing,” cited by de Groot (2011, 588), makes

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little sense, since knowing a price already presupposes an understanding of a value system. Successfully playing the reenactment already means that one understands how the model functions, and therefore how the past is simulated. Fifth, degrees of scriptedness in reenactments affect the possibilities for immersive history in reenactments. Mads Daugbjerg (2017), for example, describes the difference between scripted battles, performed in front of an audience, and the tacticals in which Civil War reenactors improvise. Whereas scripted battles appear to be more authentic in the sense that they aim at representing the historical course of events, the tacticals feel more genuine to the reenactors because the format offers a plethora of individual choices, simulates the chaos of the battle, and provides more instances of immersiveness. One could say that in the scripted reenactment, historical representation predominates; in the tacticals, the simulative and aleatory elements predominate. In the light of play, experiencing authenticity during tacticals can be explained—not as an experience of the past as an object, but as the experience of immersion in historical simulation. These dimensions only sketch the contours of a phenomenology of immersive history in historical reenactment, and I would like to stress that play can be troublesome and confusing to those who participate. Most troublesome are the questions regarding the establishment of the rule system and the justification of rules. Petra Kalshoven (2015, 562) provides many examples when she discusses the dilemmas that American Indian reenactors face: “What constitutes a dance step executed just right? Does its success reside in its faithfulness to a thoroughly researched ‘original’ model or script or in a feeling experienced by the dancer interpreting the model in a new context?” Kalshoven emphasizes that such problems arise from the transition of the unquestioned way in which the world presents itself ready-to-hand (on the ontological level of what Martin Heidegger calls Dasein [being-there]), to the more problematic state of present-to-hand in which the world appears as an object to consciousness (and when the Cartesian dualism is instated). Then moral breakdown can occur when the unreflective mode becomes problematic when, for example, things do not go as expected. Following Gadamer, who connected the ready-to-handedness of the world to the immersiveness of play, we can say that such moments can occur when the magic circle is broken, or when play is concluded and it becomes objectified in reflection and evaluation. Interestingly, Kalshoven (2015, 575) concludes that reenactors increasingly risk moral breakdown “as they insist on staying closer to a scholarly role model than might be in their own epistemological interest.” This includes problematizing authenticity based on scholarly realist assumptions rather than on emphasizing that authenticity implies an authentic experience of the reenactment.

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Conclusion In their introduction to a special issue on reenactment of the International Journal of Heritage Studies, Mads Daugbjerg, Rivka Syd Eisner, and Britta Timm Knudsen (2014) argue that the pertinence of reenactment in the contemporary field of heritage studies has four reasons. First, reenacting produces “ontologically intensive knowledge”; second, reenacting is “profoundly experiential”; third, it “transcends conventional Western mind-matter dualisms”; and fourth, reenactment means “performing and producing in the present, stressing immediacy, liveness and participation” (681–82). I agree with their call to take these aspects seriously without losing a critical stance toward reenactment as an object of study. In this chapter I have sketched the contours of a theory that can enable us to do so without having to resort to philosophically unsound notions of empathy. From the perspective of play, a critical analysis of the mythologizing aspects of historical reenactments is still valid, but requires an analysis of the rule systems of the simulation—which need not compromise a phenomenology of the simulative dynamics of reenactment as play. Concerning the period rush, the idea that the period rush provides an immersion in the past itself is a result of the make-believe quality of play. In reality, immersion and the dissolution of the Self do take place, but in the sphere and atmosphere (or mood) of play. It follows that reenactment is first and foremost an example of historical simulation to be valued as such, and not a “speculative historical representation” (Agnew 2007, 309) that should somehow be judged in comparison to the cognitive, objectifying, and methodological gaze on the past of modern academic historiography as if it has the same pretensions. Effectively, the simulation does not simulate the past itself, but rather simulates an interpretation of the past, as captured in the (explicit and implicit) rule systems reenactors adhere to.

Robbert-Jan Adriaansen is assistant professor in the theory of history and historical culture at Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR). His research focuses on the relationship between conceptions of time and historical understanding. Currently he is working on a research project on historical reenactment financed by EUR’s Erasmus Initiative “Vital Cities and Citizens.” Key publications include “Play,” in The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies. Key Terms in the Field, edited by V. Agnew, J. Lamb, and J. Tomann, 178–86 (New York: Routledge, 2019); and The Rhythm of Eternity: The German Youth Movement and the Experience of the Past, 1900–1933 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015).

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Notes 1. Here Ankersmit also misinterprets the ontological ramifications of Gadamer’s notion of experience to which he refers.

References Adriaansen, R.J. 2015. The Rhythm of Eternity: the German Youth Movement and the Experience of the Past 1900–1933. New York: Berghahn Books. Adriaansen, R.J. 2019. “Play.” In The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies: Key Terms in the Field, edited by V. Agnew, J. Lamb, and J. Tomann, 178–86. Abingdon: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780429445637-38 Agnew, V. 2004. “Introduction: What Is Reenactment?” Criticism 46 (3): 327–39. doi:10.1353/ crt.2005.0001 Agnew, V. 2007. “History’s Affective Turn: Historical Reenactment and Its Work in the Present.” Rethinking History 11 (3): 299–312. doi:10.1080/13642520701353108 Allred, R. 1996. “Catharsis, Revision, and Re-enactment: Negotiating the Meaning of the American Civil War.” Journal of American Culture 19 (4): 1–13. doi:10.1111/j.1542-734X .1996.1904_1.x Amster, M.H. 2008. “A Pilgrimage to the Past: Civil War Reenactors at Gettysburg.” In Reflecting on America: Anthropological Views of U.S. Culture, edited by C.L. Boulanger, 15–27. Boston: Pearson Education. Ankersmit, F. 1994. History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ankersmit, F. 2007. De Sublieme Historische Ervaring. Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij. Ankersmit, F. 2012. Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Apel, D. 2012. War Culture and the Contest of Images. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Averbuch, I. 2011. “Discourses of the Reappearing: The Reenactment of the ‘Cloth-Bridge Consecration Rite’ at Mt. Tateyama.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 38 (1): 1–54. Clemons, L. 2011. “Present Enacting Past: The Functions of Battle Reenacting in Historical Representation.” In Enacting History, edited by S. Magelssen and R. Justice-Malloy, 10–21. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Collingwood, R.G. 1946. The Idea of History. New York: Oxford University Press. Daugbjerg, M. 2014. “Patchworking the Past: Materiality, Touch and the Assembling of ‘Experience’ in American Civil War Re-enactment.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 20 (7–8): 724–41. doi:10.1080/13527258.2013.848820 Daugbjerg, M. 2017. “Being There: Time Travel, Experience and Experiment in Re-enactment and “Living History’ Performances.” In The Archaeology of Time Travel: Experiencing the Past in the 21st Century, edited by B. Petersson and C. Holtorf, 159–76. Oxford: Archaeopress. Daugbjerg, M., R.S. Eisner, and B.T. Knudsen. 2014. “Re-enacting the Past: Vivifying Heritage ‘Again.’” International Journal of Heritage Studies 20 (7–8): 681–87. doi:10.1080/135 27258.2014.939426 De Groot, J. 2011. “Affect and Empathy: Re-enactment and Performance as/in History.” Rethinking History 15 (4): 587–99. doi:10.1080/13642529.2011.603926 Fay, B. 2002. “Unconventional History.” History and Theory 41 (4): 1–6. Ferguson, J.G. 2002. “Of Mimicry and Membership: Africans and the “New World Society.’” Cultural Anthropology 17 (4): 551–69.

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Gadamer, H.G. 2000. Die Aktualität des Schönen: Kunst als Spiel, Symbol und Fest. Stuttgart: Reclam. Gadamer, H.G. 2004. Truth and Method (2nd rev. edition). London: Bloomsbury Academic. Gadamer, H.G. 2008. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Goethe, J.W. von. 2005. “Von Deutscher Baukunst.” In Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden. Bd. 12: Schriften zur Kunst, Schriften zur Literatur, Maximen und Reflexionen, edited by E. Trunz, 7–15. Hamburg: Wegner. Hall, D. 1994. “Civil War Reenactors and the Postmodern Sense of History.” Journal of American Culture 17 (3): 7–11. doi:10.1111/j.1542-734X.1994.00007.x Handler, R., and W. Saxton. 1988. “Dyssimulation: Reflexivity, Narrative, and the Quest for Authenticity in ‘Living History.’” Cultural Anthropology 3(3): 242–60. Hochbruck, W. 1997. “Between “Living History’ and Pageantry: Historical Reenactments in American Culture.” In Beyond the Mainstream: Papers Given on the Occasion of the Fourth Annual Conference of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English, edited by P.P. Schnierer, 93–105. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Huizinga, J. 1949. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-element in Culture. London: Routledge. Huizinga, J. 2014. “The Task of Cultural History.” In Men and Ideas, History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, 17–76. Princeton: Princeton University Press. doi:10.1515/9781400858088 Kalshoven, P.T. 2015. “Moving in Time, Out of Step: Mimesis as Moral Breakdown in European Re-enactments of the North American Indian Woodland.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21 (3): 561–78. doi:10.1111/1467-9655.12251 Lowenthal, D. 2015. The Past Is a Foreign Country—Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Makkreel, R.A. 1992. Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McCarthy, P. 2014. “‘Living History’ as the ‘Real Thing’: A Comparative Analysis of the Modern Mountain Man Rendezvous, Renaissance Fairs, and Civil War Reenactments.” ETC.: A Review of General Semantics 72 (2): 106–23. Miller-Spillman, K.A. 2008. “Male Civil War Reenactors’ Dress and Magic Moments.” In The Men’s Fashion Reader, edited by A.H. Reilly and S. Cosbey, 445–64. New York: Fairchild Books. Miller-Spillman, K.A., and M.-Y. Lee. 2014. “Female Civil War Reenactors’ Dress and Magic Moments.” In Fashion, Design and Events, edited by K.M. Williams, J. Laing, and W. Frost, 69–83. Abingdon: Routledge. Otto, U. 2016. “Gesten des Anachronismus. Theatrale Medienpraktiken im Reenactment.” In Reenactments. Medienpraktiken zwischen Wiederholung und kreativer Aneignung, edited by A. Dreschke, I. Huynh, R. Knipp, and D. Sittler (1. Aufl., Vol. 8). Berlin: transcript Verlag. Robinson, E. 2010. “Touching the Void: Affective History and the Impossible.” Rethinking History 14 (4): 503–20. doi:10.1080/13642529.2010.515806 Schroeder, C. 2012. Man of War. My Adventures in the World of Historical Reenactment. New York: Hudson Street Press. Strauss, M.D. 2001. “A Framework for Assessing Military Dress. Authenticity in Civil War Reenacting.” Clothing and Textiles Research Journal 19 (4): 145–57. doi:10.1177/ 0887302X0101900401 Turner, R. 1990. “Bloodless Battles: The Civil War Reenacted.” TDR 34 (4): 123–36. doi:10.2307/1146047

Part II

REENACTMENTS AS TOOLS OF CULTURAL AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES

CHAPTER

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Historical Reenactments in Spain A Critical Approach to Public Perceptions of the Iron Age and Roman Past David González-Álvarez, Pablo Alonso-González, and Jesús Rodríguez-Hernández

Historical Reenactment Festivals: A Growing Phenomenon across Europe Historical reenactments are jovial events that have recently grown in popularity across Europe and other Western countries (Appleby 2005; Crang 1996; Daugbjerg 2014; Johnson 2015; Kobiałka 2013). The number and public impact of these festivals is growing steadily in recent years, involving more and more participants and public, while their organization is becoming more complex. In Spain there are new historical reenactments getting started everywhere (Arceaga Morales 2018; Busquets 2009; Cortadella Morral 2011; Herrero Acosta and Ayán Vila 2017; Santamarina Otaola and Herrero Acosta 2018), with an outstanding increase among those related with the Iron Age (Alonso-González and González-Álvarez 2013; Burillo Mozota 2005; Jimeno Martínez 2013; Ruiz Zapatero 2005b). The Iron Age in the Iberian Peninsula correlates broadly with the first millennium BCE, comprising those centuries between the spread of iron metallurgy and the expansion of the Roman state (Gracia Alonso 2008). These historical reenactments attract many visitors, they get media attention, and they have a high impact on tourism and local commerce (Fernández Ramos et al. 2018; Folgado Fernández, Hernández Mogollón, and Campón Cerro 2016; Pena Castro 2004; Rojas Rabaneda 2011). However, little attention has been paid to these events by social scientists—particularly among archaeologists and

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heritage scholars—aiming to investigate their broad social context and connections with ongoing social, economic, and political processes. The past comes alive in these festive events, setting an outstanding arena for the socialization of historical and archaeological knowledge among general audiences. Academics are usually not involved in the organization of these festivals, so we can assess how the public builds up historical narratives in a multivocal context. In addition, we can reflect on the challenges posed by public outreach to social scientists. Social and political processes at different scales also intersect with reenactments, so they constitute appropriate case studies for analyzing the political and cultural roles that archaeology plays nowadays in public debates. Taking into account that the past is sometimes used to reinforce contemporary political discourses and create new business opportunities through tourism and heritagization processes, reenactments are an appropriate scenario for investigating the impact of these aspects in archaeology. Considering all these topics, reenactments constitute a great opportunity for developing critical reflections in the framework of public archaeology (Merriman 2004; Moshenska 2009, 2017; Schadla-Hall 2006), following up some of our previous research on the matter (Alonso-González and González-Álvarez 2013; González-Álvarez and Alonso-González 2013). These issues are relevant for cultural and social psychology because material culture is embedded in broader cognitive processes beyond individual minds (e.g., Criado Boado et al. 2019), cognition being distributed among complex collectives of people, things, and temporal frameworks. Indeed, material culture is “crucial in processes of enculturation and cultural transmission, in shaping daily experience and perceptions, and in orienting action” (González Ruibal 2012, 132). Following recent developments in the fields of material culture studies, heritage studies, and cultural studies, it is possible to affirm that the materiality of past and present objects has agency and makes us think (Alonso-González 2019; Hodder 2012), constitutes our individual and collective selves, and serves to transmit symbolic information involved in the constitution and reinforcement of certain discourses and (past and present) power relations. In aiming to understand the contemporary reception of the past by present societies, and the relevance of archaeological and historical narratives for shaping identities or reinforcing tourism, this chapter will reflect on several case studies investigated so far in our various research settings. This includes different reenactment festivals set in the Iron Age, related with the Roman conquest of northwest Iberia in Asturias and León, and the archaeological site of Ulaca, which is near Solosancho (Ávila) (see figure 3.1). In these events we have conducted ethnographic studies of the historical reenactments themselves during several editions, and have also concluded broader research on contemporary societies’ reception of the Iron Age and Roman

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Figure 3.1. Location of the case studies considered in this chapter: (1) Festival Astur-romano de Carabanzo (Lena, Asturias); (2) Fiestas de Astures y Romanos (Astorga, León); (3) Festival Luna Celta (Solosancho, Ávila).

past. Furthermore, we will explore the potential of these events for the dissemination of archaeological narratives in a more inclusive way, reflecting on open science.

Historical Reenactments as Popular Culture Manifestations Historical reenactments are contemporary cultural representations in which the past comes alive through theater, parades, music, and feasts (see figure 3.2). The participants dress up according to the epoch being performed, embodying the reenacted past through a specific program of activities. Ancient battles and traditional livelihoods from different historical periods are the main themes in these events. A multicultural and diverse public follows the performances while eating, drinking, and shopping for crafts in old-style markets organized by professional and nonprofessional individuals, private companies, or groups. Feast stalls are placed in crowded streets that have a festive atmosphere. For most people, having fun and spending their leisure time with their family or friends is the most relevant motivation to attend or get involved in these events. But the interest in local history and cultural heritage—in addition to the increasing relevance of regionalist and nationalist identities in

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Figure 3.2. Participants and public at the 2017 edition of Festival Luna Celta during one of the parades along the streets of Solosancho (Ávila). © David GonzálezÁlvarez, Pablo Alonso-González, and Jesús Rodríguez-Hernández.

some contemporary European contexts—are clear reasons for understanding the genesis of many historical reenactments. Indeed, these events can be understood as contemporary popular culture manifestations: contexts where the public knowledge about the past is negotiated and reproduced by different stakeholders (Holtorf 2005) (see figure 3.3). Quite often, academics are left out of the picture (Alonso-González 2016), since most of them usually deny the cultural meaning of these events and despise the pseudo-archaeological character imposed by their amateur organizers. But tourism experts,

Figure 3.3. Reenactors drinking and feasting at the local bullring in Astorga (León) during the 2012 festival while attending one of the main theater plays. © David González-Álvarez, Pablo Alonso-González, and Jesús Rodríguez-Hernández.

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local politicians, private companies, and even advertising agents have recognized their relevance, and they are getting practically involved with their own agendas in mind. Reenactment festivals are often the result of bottom-up initiatives promoted by the participants in these events, including amateur and professional reenactment collectives, local associations, families, and groups of friends. In other cases, these events result from top-down initiatives promoted by local institutions such as archaeological museums, city councils, or tourism agencies aiming to increase tourism and increase the public engagement with local heritage and history. Usually, local institutions support the events to promote cultural heritage resources and foster tourism, often supported by local businesses that see profit opportunities in these events. The intended purpose is to disseminate the results of historical and archaeological research, linked to museums and heritage centers, or ongoing archaeological excavations.

Case Studies: Reflecting on (Non-Academic) Public Explorations about the Past Our chapter will reflect on reenactments as sociopolitical contexts where the public engages with constructed notions of cultural heritage and builds up contemporary representations of the Iron Age and Roman periods. Historical reenactments are outstanding contexts to explore public perceptions of archaeological and historical knowledge, and to examine the ways people establish dynamic dialogues with both academic and pseudoscientific narratives. To do so we have conducted ethnographic research on historical reenactments in the Spanish regions of Asturias, León, and Ávila, reflecting on broader discussions recently developed in the field of public archaeology, critical heritage studies, and the history of science. Similarly to elsewhere in Spain, we cannot isolate the heritagization processes revolving around historical reenactments analyzed here from the cultural and political struggles derived from the reception and the use of the pre-Roman past in contemporary Spain (Díaz-Andreu 1993, 1995; Ruiz Zapatero 1996, 2006, 2017). The indigenous communities inhabiting these regions before the expansion of the Roman State were so-called Astures and Vettones by the classical Latin authors following the Roman conquest of Iberia (Costa-García 2018; Sánchez Moreno 2010). These ancient colonial identities are outstanding referents for contemporary identity-based social movements underpinning political parties and social feelings, so issues related with nationalism, regionalism, and the invention of traditions are always present (see Marín Suárez,

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González-Álvarez, and Alonso-González 2012 for Asturias and León; see Ruiz Zapatero and Salas Lopes 2008 for Ávila).

Performing the Roman Conquest of Northwestern Iberia The pre-Roman past constitutes an essential referent for contemporary identities in the regions of northwestern Spain (Ayán Vila 2012; Díaz Santana 2002; Fernández-Posse 1998; García Sánchez 2009; Marín Suárez, GonzálezÁlvarez, and Alonso-González 2012). This observation partially explains the growing public interest for this type of festivals (Alonso-González and González-Álvarez 2013). However, for most people involved, reenactments are mainly festive celebrations in which events from the past become alive through different ways of performance. Thus, historical and archaeological narratives constitute a sort of background sound for the party. For this reason, there will be people participating in reenactments who will not pay attention to heritage or archaeological narratives at any other time in their lives, since these topics are not the main motivations for them to get involved in those events. Consequently, reenactments become unique occasions for them to engage with historical narratives through their self-experience and performativity during the festivals. The confrontation between the Roman army and the indigenous communities are the most prominent subjects in the examples of Astorga in León or Carabanzo in Asturias. There, most of the rehearsals or games that are part of the festivals’ programs are directly related with battles, resistance from the indigenous populations, or Rome’s victory. But, at the same time, some other aspects from the Iron Age and early Roman period livelihoods are recreated by participants and are seen by visitors, such as the material culture related to those periods, the households, or the people’s social and cultural traditions (see figure 3.4). Astorga is a town with an outstanding Roman past (Mañanes 1983; Sevillano Fuertes 2014a; Vidal Encinas and González Fernández 2018), which is one of the local key resources for promoting tourism (Sevillano Fuertes 2014b, 2017). People in Astorga started to dress up like Romans at the local annual festivities during the 1990s, and the city council used this opportunity as a referent in tourism fairs and official promotion initiatives. But when a regionalist party became part of the city council government, and Leonesist ideology gained strength in the city, people started to dress up as indigenous people, too, in a sort of vindictive stance. Tellingly, the current reenactment festival was born as a separated event. At the same time, a nearby Iron Age hillfort started to be investigated and funded by the local government with a clearly ideological motivation (Muñoz Villarejo et al. 2015).

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Figure 3.4. Every summer the tribes of participants at the historical reenactment held in Astorga build up an indigenous village with wooden huts (top figure) and a Roman camp with tents made out of cloths (lower figure). There, reenactors perform some of the public acts comprised by the official program, and also hang out, feast, and even sleep. Spatiality and the material displays we can observe there naturalize some of the cultural and historical traits perceived by participants and the public. © David González-Álvarez, Pablo Alonso-González, and Jesús Rodríguez-Hernández.

Nowadays, the festival in Astorga is one of the best examples of a bottom-up initiative, since the organization is ruled by local associations. Nevertheless, the growth of the festival is generating a sort of institutionalization of the reenactment; we can hardly imagine any official ceremony at the city council these days without a bunch of people dressed up as indig-

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enous warriors and Roman legionaries. Touristification and commodification are gaining weight at the reenactment, and there are even multinational companies that sponsor it. At the same time, there is a lot of concern for gaining recognition from national official tourism agencies. In turn, the Festival Astur-romano de Carabanzo, a small mountainous village in Asturias, is one of the latest success experiences regarding reenactments. Its origins are related with the archaeological discovery of a marching Roman camp in La Carisa mountains, which was excavated and investigated (Camino Mayor, Estrada García, and Viniegra Pacheco 2001). Soon after its discovery, another set of defenses was identified one kilometer away, with stone walls, ditches, and earth ramparts. So, it was immediately considered to be the indigenous fortification where Astures warriors opposed resistance against Rome (Camino Mayor, Viniegra Pacheco, and Estrada García, 2005). This situation was breaking news in Asturias for a while, so the local municipality organized a reenactment in the nearby village of Carabanzo for commemorating that outstanding historical event and promoting tourism. A few years later, the preliminary interpretation regarding a great battle between the Astures and the Roman army was revealed to be incorrect, since the second site had been dated in the medieval period by further archaeological research (Camino Mayor, Estrada García, and Viniegra Pacheco 2007). However, this did not matter, and the festival around the battle of La Carisa between Romans and Astures is still reenacted today, with the same plot as the first edition: every summer, local people still dress up as indigenous warriors aiming to reenact the famous battle of Carabanzo against the Roman invaders (see figure 3.5).

Figure 3.5. Battle between indigenous warriors and the Roman army at the 2009 edition of the historical reenactment celebrated annually in Carabanzo (Lena, Asturias). © David González-Álvarez, Pablo Alonso-González, and Jesús RodríguezHernández.

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Within the past two decades, archaeological research on the Roman expansion in NW Iberia has advanced quite noticeable (Camino Mayor, Peralta Labrador, and Torres Martínez 2015; González-Álvarez et al. 2019). Although there have been some attempts to disseminate scientific research on these topics (Blanco-Rotea et al. 2016; Gago Mariño et al. 2017), and lectures and socialization activities are quite extended among local archaeologists, historical reenactments are probably the most relevant arena in the region for encouraging public knowledge about the Roman conquest of the region. Still, if you ask about what happened two thousand years ago in the mountains of La Carisa over the small village of Carabanzo in Asturias, most of the people will answer there was a battle up there, even though that never occurred.

Local Identities in the Lands of the Vettones (Ávila) The Vettones play an important role as a referent of prestige in the Ávila region. Some of that region’s inhabitants feel a sort of self-identification with these peoples of the Iron Age, which are also used by the regional government and the public agencies for promoting tourism. Also, local companies use archaeological referents related to the Vettones as a source of cultural labeling for business purposes (Álvarez Sanchís and Rodríguez-Hernández 2016; Ruiz Zapatero and Salas Lopes 2008). Luna Celta Festival in Ávila is one of the more outstanding historical reenactment festivals in Spain, since it has been celebrated for fifteen years. It involves thousands of people and is connected to one of the more impressive and well-known Iron Age sites in the Iberian Peninsula: the oppidum (large fortified Iron Age settlements) of Ulaca (Ruiz Zapatero 2005a), located in the local municipality of Solosancho, and considered to be the Vettonian Pompeii (Ruiz Zapatero and Álvarez Sanchís 1999). The Luna Celta Festival started in 2005, one year after the last archaeological excavations at the cemetery of Ulaca (Álvarez Sanchís et al. 2008; Rodríguez-Hernández 2019). The first three editions involved the collaboration of various archaeologists who explained different aspects of the Iron Age to the audience. However, since 2008 these archaeological conferences have been replaced by Celtic folk music. Since then, the festival has skyrocketed in terms of dimensions and public. The success of the Luna Celta reenactment has led to the launching of similar festival in nearby towns with Iron Age heritage, such as the Lugnasad festival in La Mesa de Miranda (fourteen editions), the Celtic festival in El Raso (nine editions) or the Vetton festival in Yecla la Vieja (nine editions). Local people and visitors dress up like Vettones and represent historical events; these are mainly battles, ritual ceremonies, feasts, and parades.

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Although they try to represent the past accurately, we should not forget that having fun and enjoying the weekend with their friends and family are the central aims for most of them. The festival starts on Friday night with a theater play performed by local actors on the Ulaca altar (see figure 3.6). Every year, the play represents a different topic, and the script follows the archaeological and historical information the authors gather from outreach books written by academics and from the internet. The performance generates controversy among archaeologists, since most of them are concerned with the conservation of the site and the integrity of the Ulaca altar itself. During the 2016 and 2017 editions the play at the top of the Ulaca site brought around three thousand people to the Iron Age oppidum who walk up the steep slopes of the Ulaca hillfort for more than half an hour, and later come down in the middle of the night. During the weekend, a big market is the focus of the festival, comprising stalls full of regional products, jewelery, crafts (from leather to aromatic candles), and bars. There is a regulation for the market that states that the decoration of the stalls, the dresses of the sellers, and the music must be Celtic-Vetton, and non-medieval. A tribes’ contest has recently been launched, aiming to reward the best reenactment groups, and to encourage local inhabitants to take part in the festival. Tribes are formed by families and groups of friends. Different aspects are assessed: the originality of their dresses and complements (hairstyle, beads, shoes, body paintings, etc.), their active involvement in the festival throughout the weekend, the historical accuracy of their outfits, and the short speech they give to the public at the main stage

Figure 3.6. Folk Celtic concert prior to the theater play on the Ulaca altar during the 2016 Luna Celta Festival, with thousands of people attending. © David GonzálezÁlvarez, Pablo Alonso-González, and Jesús Rodríguez-Hernández.

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of the festival. Complementary activities like games, archery, or climbing are also organized for kids. As with any other events, political parties get involved in this festival. A former local mayor from the labor party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español) was the main promoter of the festival, so he was always at the front of any act during the reenactment while we were conducting our ethnographic fieldwork (see figure 3.7). Antagonism between different parties was elevated, because regional institutions in Ávila were ruled by the conservative party (Partido Popular). So, tricky situations came up when they met at the festival, as we saw at the 2016 edition. That year local and regional conservative politicians came on stage at the tribes’ contest without being dressed up as Vettones. This was against the will of the local organization, because the conservative politicians would not give full prominence to the local mayor wearing Vetton warrior outfits.

Open Questions for Further Discussion Historical reenactments constitute one of the themes to which public archaeology should pay more attention. These events are underpinned by historical or archaeological narratives, they sometimes are related with archaeological

Figure 3.7. Tribes contest at the 2016 edition of the Festival Luna Celta, with the Solosancho mayor dressed up as a Vetton warrior in the center, surrounded by local and regional politicians from a rival party in casual clothes. © David GonzálezÁlvarez, Pablo Alonso-González, and Jesús Rodríguez-Hernández.

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sites, and they can affect heritage management in various ways. The increasing prominence of historical reenactments is turning them into one of the main arenas for the dissemination of archaeological knowledge. So, if we want to study the public perceptions of archaeology and to consider how stakeholders engage with cultural landscapes or archaeological sites, we cannot ignore historical reenactments. Also, reenactments are an auspicious ground for interdisciplinary debate between social sciences (e.g., sociology, anthropology, psychology) in their encounter with material culture studies understood broadly. Reflections on these events will provide an opportunity for social scientists to explore contemporary societal perceptions of the past, and will also reveal how contemporary issues can be uncritically naturalized through their projection on to the distant past in a form of naïve presentism (Stocking 1965). Through performativity and embodiment, the participants at reenactments naturalize a variety of aspects of archaeological and historical narratives and disseminate them to the public. These narratives are far more successful than most academic papers, exhibitions, or lectures. But one might ask, “Are they wearing the right type of sword?” That is not the more significant concern we, as archaeologists, should pose about historical reenactments. Unfortunately, that is the sort of observation most of our colleagues usually make. Certainly, a complementary conference program does not work properly for engaging the public with academic archaeological knowledge. If people must choose between several dozens of activities during the festival—watching battles, feasting, drinking beer from horns—almost nobody will attend a formal lecture. So, we need to explore different ways to engage the public, since we must be useful (and fun!) for people who are interested in the pre-Roman past. It is fair to have some concerns on some of these festivals regarding the ideological motivations behind them, or heritage commodification. Indeed, the links established by the cases explored here with Celticism in the Anglospeaking and Scandinavian worlds are also relevant, with pre-Roman labels becoming a source of value for merchandising products ( James 1999), in a clear example of what anthropologists define as the commodification of culture (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). But, at the same time, historical reenactments constitute an interesting arena where we can experiment different relationships between the academy and society, understood broadly. There are people who really want to know more about current discussions in archaeology with all their complexity. Regrettably, most of the time these ideas are not available for them, since we (archaeologists) do not write in Wikipedia, we are seldom active on social media, and we rarely write understandable outreach blogs. On the contrary, traditional old-fashion positivist or culture-history archaeology is easier to understand for the public. Similarly,

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postmodern narratives and pseudo-narratives can be found everywhere online and in books. So, we need to make an effort on public outreach to engage with local communities. Because, “If we do not do it, somebody else will do it with their own agenda” (Ruiz Zapatero 2013, 191).

David González-Álvarez is a Juan de la Cierva-Incorporación postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Heritage Sciences (INCIPIT-CSIC). He holds a PhD in prehistory (Complutense University of Madrid, Spain). His research explores the biographies of cultural landscapes in the Cantabrian Mountains (northwest Iberia) combining the integrated study of archaeological, palaeoenvironmental, and ethnographic data sets. Pablo Alonso-González is tenure track researcher in cultural anthropology at the Institute of Natural Products and Agrobiology of the Spanish National Research Council (IPNA-CSIC). He holds a PhD in history (University of León, Spain) and a PhD in heritage studies (Cambridge University, UK). His current research addresses cultural heritage as a sociopolitical reality at the intersection between society and nature. Jesús Rodríguez-Hernández is currently a postdoctoral researcher of the Department of Prehistory, Ancient History and Archaeology at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain). He is an archaeologist with diverse interest in Iron Age societies of Central and Western Europe, cultural landscapes, and public engagement with archaeological heritage.

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Moshenska, G. 2009. “What Is Public Archaeology?” Present Pasts, 1, 46–48. Moshenska, G., ed. 2017. Key Concepts in Public Archaeology. London: UCL Press. Muñoz Villarejo, F., E. Campomanes Alvaredo, J. Celis Sánchez, and Á. Sevillano Fuertes. 2015. “El Entorno de Asturica Augusta desde la Protohistoria hasta la Romanización.” In Evolución de los Espacios Urbanos y sus Territorios en el Noroeste de la Península Ibérica, edited by R. Martínez Peñín and G. Cavero Domínguez, 39–61. León: Universidad de León, Instituto de Estudios Medievales. Pena Castro, M.J. 2004. “El Negocio de la Historia en la Feria Medieval de Noia.” Sociológica. Revista de pensamiento social 5: 81–100. Rodríguez-Hernández, J. 2019. Poder y Sociedad: El Oeste de la Meseta en la Edad del Hierro. Ávila: Institución Gran Duque de Alba. Rojas Rabaneda, A. 2011. “Herramientas y Estrategias de Difusión del Patrimonio Histórico: Los Eventos de Recreación Histórica en Cataluña.” E-rph: Revista Electrónica de Patrimonio Histórico, 9. Retrieved from https://revistadepatrimonio.es/index.php/erph/article/ view/109/93 Ruiz Zapatero, G. 1996. “Celts and Iberians. Ideological Manipulations in Spanish Archaeology.” In Cultural Identity and Archaeology. The Construction of European Communities, edited by P. Graves-Brown, S. Jones, and C. Gamble, 179–95. London: Routledge. Ruiz Zapatero, G. 2005a. Guía del Castro de Ulaca. Solosancho, Ávila. Ávila: Institución Gran Duque de Alba-Diputación de Ávila (Cuadernos de Patrimonio Abulense; 3). Ruiz Zapatero, G. 2005b. “Soria, “Keltiberoi”—2004: ¡La Historia a la Calle!” Complutum 16: 279–86. Ruiz Zapatero, G. 2006. “The Celts in Spain. From archaeology to modern identities.” In Celtes et Gaulois, l’Archéologie face à l’Histoire, I: Celtes et Gaulois dans l’Histoire, l’Historiographie et l’Idéologie Moderne. Actes de la Table Ronde de Leipzig, 16–17 juin 2005, edited by S. Rieckhoff, 197–218. Glux-en-Glenne: Bibracte, Centre archeologique européen. Ruiz Zapatero, G. 2013. “¿Qué son Arqueologías de Elite y Arqueologías desde Abajo?” In La Uni en la Calle, edited by A. Gaita, P. Pozuelo Blancas, L. Tejado Montero, and La Marea, 190–91. Madrid: Cooperativa MásPúblico. Ruiz Zapatero, G. 2017. “Los Pueblos Prerromanos al Servicio de la Dictadura Franquista (1939–1956).” In El Franquismo y la Apropiación del Pasado. El Uso de la Historia, de la Arqueología y de la Historia del Arte para la Legitimación de la Dictadura, edited by F.J. Moreno Martín, 45–66. Madrid: Editorial Pablo Iglesias. Ruiz Zapatero, G., and J.R. Álvarez Sanchís. 1999. “Ulaca: la Pompeya Vettona.” Revista de Arqueología 216: 36–47. Ruiz Zapatero, G., and N. Salas Lopes. 2008. “Los Vettones Hoy: Arqueología, Identidad Moderna y Divulgación.” In Arqueología Vettona. La Meseta Occidental en la Edad del Hierro, edited by J.R. Álvarez Sanchís, 408–23. Alcalá de Henares: Museo Arqueológico Regional (Zona Arqueológica; 12). Sánchez Moreno, E. 2010. “Los Vacceos a través de las Fuentes: Una Perspectiva Actual.” In De la Región Vaccea a la Arqueología Vaccea, edited by F. Romero Carnicero and C. Sanz Mínguez, 65–103. Valladolid: Centro de Estudios Vacceos “Federico Wattenberg”— Universidad de Valladolid (Vaccea Monografías; 4). Santamarina Otaola, J., and X. Herrero Acosta. 2018. “Pólvora y Uniformes: Algunas Reflexiones sobre el Recreacionismo de la Guerra Civil Española.” In Actas XI Jornadas de Jóvenes en Investigación Arqueológica, Tarragona, 9–12 de mayo de 2018, edited by A. Bucchi Morales, N. Escayola González, K. Fortuny Mendo, F.J. García-Vadillo, J. Luengo Gutiérrez, and P. Varona Rubio, 251–54. Tarragona: Institut Català d’Arqueologia Clàssica (Treballs d’Arqueologia de la Mediterrània Antiga; 5). Schadla-Hall, T. 2006. “Public Archaeology in the Twenty-first Century.” In A Future for Archaeology. The Past in the Present, edited by R. Layton, S.J. Shennan, and P. Stone, 75–82. London: UCL Press.

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Sevillano Fuertes, Á. 2014a. “Apuntes Arqueológicos para la Historia Antigua de Astorga.” Astorga: Centro de Estudios Astorganos Marcelo Macías (Cuadernos; 31). Sevillano Fuertes, Á. 2014b. “Proyecto ‘Astúrica Emerge.’” In Actas de las 6as Jornadas de Museología. Propuestas para Financiar Museos y Colecciones. Museo Sierra-Pambley. León, 21 y 22 de noviembre de 2013, edited by P. Centeno del Canto, 79–91. León: Fundación Sierra-Pambley. Sevillano Fuertes, Á. 2017. “De la Excavación a la Vitrina. Historia de un Pequeño Museo.” Boletín del Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Extra 35, 1053–61. Stocking, G.W. Jr. 1965. “On the Limits of ‘Presentism’ and ‘Historicism’ in the Historiography of the Behavioral Sciences.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 1 (3): 211– 18. doi:10.1002/1520-6696(196507)1:33.0.CO;2-W Vidal Encinas, J.M., and M.L. González Fernández. 2018. “Asturica Augusta: Actualización de su Urbanismo a la Luz de las Excavaciones Recientes.” In El Urbanismo de las Ciudades Romanas del Valle del Duero. Actas de la I Reunión de Ciudades Romanas del Valle del Duero. Segovia 20 y 21 de octubre de 2016, edited by S. Martínez Caballero, J. Santos Yanguas, and L.J. Municio González, 273–97. Segovia: Junta de Castilla y León; Diputación de Segovia; Ayuntamiento de Segovia; Asociación de Amigos del Museo de Segovia (Anejos de Segovia Histórica; 2).

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Reenacting the Reconquista Myth? Some Reflections on Moros y Cristianos Festivals in Spain Ignacio Brescó and Floor van Alphen

In spring and well into autumn, countless towns—particularly those located in regions with a historically significant Muslim presence such as Andalusia and Valencia—are attacked from the coast by hordes of Moors. After briefly capturing the town, the Moors are ultimately defeated by their Christian opponents, occasionally with the help of the local patron saint. These activities are part of celebrations that have a long, tangled history, and that have become particularly popular in Spain since the 1970s, attracting great crowds of locals and tourists (Brisset Martín 2001). Similar celebrations are also held in Portugal, Sicily, Corsica, southern France, and even Latin America, albeit to a lesser extent (Harris 2000). Although it is not easy to find an appropriate definition for the diverse forms that the celebrations take in the different regions of Spain, they are all commonly referred to as Moros y Cristianos (Moors and Christians). Characterized by a carnivalesque and ludic atmosphere, with colorful parades and fireworks, these celebrations commemorate different local episodes related to the Reconquista myth, which assumes an uninterrupted eight-century military campaign to regain the Iberian Peninsula since its Islamic conquest in 711 up to the takeover of the emirate of Granada by the Catholic monarchs in 1492. According to Brisset Martín (2001), these celebrations are popular annual theater representations that complement the liturgical rituals dedicated to the local saint, and serve an important social Notes for this section begin on page 80. ?.

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role in reinforcing community ties through the dramatization of a battle between good and evil, heroes and villains. The Christians are the victorious heroes aided by some divine intervention, while the Moors are the provocateurs, eventually losing the battle and occasionally converting to Christianity. Particularly in the well-known celebrations in the Valencia region, Christians and Moors showily parade in filas (rows or lines), along the decorated and crowded streets (see figure 4.1). Whereas the Moorish fila is an anachronistic amalgam of Muslims, Arabs, Berbers, and Turks (see figure 4.2), the Christian fila can comprise kings, knights, crusaders, and even angels (see figure 4.3). There have been several interdisciplinary attempts to pin down the wide variety of celebrations (Brisset Martín 1993, 2001). Carrasco Urgoiti (1996) suggests that, thematically, the celebrations revolve around loss and recovery. Even though there might be other forms of offense and challenge, the conquest and subsequent reconquest of a town or village is the most common theatrical event, which also identifies the local history with that of Spain in general. However, with this thematic narrative, different historical events may also be commemorated. Not only does the memory of a medieval battle or later Berber coastal attacks inspire these celebrations, but so too do the border conflicts between Christian and Muslim territories on the Iberian Peninsula, as well as the uprising of its last remaining non-converted Muslims in the sixteenth century (Brisset Martín 1993). The wars waged by the Spanish kings Charles V and Philip II against the Ottomans in the same cen-

Figure 4.1. Moros y Cristianos celebrations in Alcoy (Valencia region). Author: Pacodonderis (November 5, 2019). Wikimedia, public domain.

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Figure 4.2. Christian fila in Valencia City. Author: Rafa Esteve (October 6, 2016). Wikimedia, public domain.

Figure 4.3. Moorish fila in Alcoy (Valencia region). Author: Enrique Blasco (May 3, 2014). Wikimedia, public domain.

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tury likewise had an important influence on the celebrations (Pérez 2016), since the figure of the “bad Turk” was added to the curious mix of Christian opponents, a mix that can be grouped under the term “the Moorish other” (Brisset Martín 2001). Initially used—particularly prior to the Islamization of the Iberian Peninsula—as a demonym referring to the inhabitants of North Africa, the term “Moor” was subsequently extended to believers in the Islamic faith, as a synonym of Muslim. Nowadays, it is also used to refer to inhabitants of Morocco in a derogatory manner (Cenname 2014). Because many identities are grouped together under the term “Moor” and these celebrations are replete with a juxtaposition of anachronisms and legends, they are historical only in appearance. For example, the victory of the Christian troops can be attributed, depending on the local festivity, to the archbishop of Visigothic Seville, Saint Isidore, or Jesus’ grandmother, Saint Anne (Brisset Martín 2001). In sum, under the overarching theme of loss and recovery, Moros y Cristianos can be regarded as a communitarian self-affirmation practice (Brisset Martín 2001) whereby local Christians are set against the Moors in a miscellany of ritual performance, mythical past, and historical reenactment. This chapter sets out to explore the extent to which Moros y Cristianos reenact the Reconquista myth, a myth that, as it will be explained in this chapter, stems from a well-engrained master narrative in Spanish collective memory. In this regard, we also examine to what degree the annual reenactment of such a myth contributes toward reinforcing a Spanish national identity in opposition to the Muslim other. Finally, Moros y Cristianos is analyzed vis-à-vis traditional ritual performances and modern historical reenactments, practices understood as a body-based discourse seeking authenticity in reanimating the past, qua past, through physical and psychological experiences (Agnew 2004, 330).

The Reconquista Master Narrative The problem Spain has with Al-Qaeda and Islamic terrorism did not begin with the Iraq crisis. In fact, it has nothing to do with government decisions. You must go back no less than thirteen hundred years, to the early eighth century, when Spain, having recently been invaded by the Moors, refused to become just another piece in the Islamic world and began a long battle to recover its identity. This reconquest process was very long, lasting some eight hundred years. However, it ended successfully. There are many radical Muslims who continue to recall that defeat, many more than any rational Western mind might suspect. Osama Bin Laden is one of them. His first statement after September 11—I repeat, September 11—did not begin by referring to New York or Iraq. His first words were to lament the loss of Al-Andalus—Moorish medieval Spain—and compare it to the occupation of Jerusalem by the Israelis (Aznar 2004, September 21).

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This quotation by the former prime minister of Spain, José María Aznar, is taken from the speech that he gave at Georgetown University eighteen months after the beginning of the second Iraq War and six months after the 2004 Madrid attacks. These attacks, attributed to Al-Qaeda, constitute the worst Jihadist attack ever to take place on European soil, resulting in two hundred deaths. After being one of the most fervent European supporters (alongside Tony Blair) of the American military intervention in Iraq, Aznar’s political use of the Reconquista myth aims to justify the decision of his right-wing cabinet of backing a war that was widely unpopular in Spanish society. In this fragment, we can observe a clear identity claim, reflected in the protagonism of an imagined collective actor (Spain) confronted with various representatives of a world considered to be alien, the Islamic world. Aznar talks about the past, telling us the epic story of how many years ago Spain, after eight centuries of struggle, managed to reconquer its identity that had been snatched away by the Moors. However, he also talks about the present day, making the point that the problem that Spain faced in 2004 is framed within an everlasting identity battle, which, according to him, is still being waged. By doing this, the former prime minister of Spain appears to be reminding us of the main theme of a plot that takes us back centuries, a plot still open and unresolved but at the same time easy to follow, since it pits certain collective actors, defined in essentialist terms, against each other: “we, the Spanish/Christians” against “them, the Moors/Muslims.” This discourse appears to provide a type of script, not just for interpreting the current scenario, but also for guiding us through it toward the future. This script, as such, tells us what role we, as Spaniards, must play and what is expected of our historical opponents—in other words, those who represent the Islamic world. The narrative approach in the study of identity has become increasingly prominent in psychology over the past decades (Bruner 1986). In cultural psychology (Rosa and Valsiner 2018), numerous essays have analyzed the mediating role of narratives in formation of collective identity and memory (Wagoner, Brescó, and Awad 2019)—in other words, the affective relationship that a community has with its past, irrespective of how distant or mythical that past might be (Halbwachs 1952/1992). A key concept in this field has been the schematic narrative template (Brescó and van Alphen 2022; Wertsch 2002), which presents simplified ways of giving meaning to the past, present, and future of a certain community built around one narrative theme that is used and updated time and again at different points in history— e.g., the triumph-over-alien-forces in Russia.1 As dominant and preexistent sociocultural forms of interpretation, schematic narratives templates can be conceived of as meta narratives or master narratives. Although, as dominant discourses, master narratives function synchronically, taking a hegemonic

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position over other perspectives, narrative templates function diachronically, setting a national theme for the past, present, and future (van Alphen 2020). Carretero and Bermúdez (2012) highlight six main aspects of master narratives: (1) the presence of a homogeneous and permanent historical subject over time; (2) an essentialist notion of identity, nation, or national territory; (3) the presence of a binary logic, expressed in the clash between “us” and “them”; (4) the attribution of positive and negative moral judgements; (5) the presence of heroic historical figures; (6) a monocausal or teleological vision of historical events. In short, the role of these narrative forms, as predominant discourses in a given community, would seem to reinforce certain styles of historical thought that, in turn, act as scripts from which it is possible to imagine both the collective identity and its otherness (van Alphen and Carretero 2015). Aznar’s speech does not take place within a cultural void, but it rekindles and updates an old and well-known theme. According to historians such as Ríos Saloma (2013), the Reconquista theme constitutes one of the myths on which the Spanish collective identity has been built (see also García-Sanjuán 2018). Indeed, the very term “Reconquista” is an anachronistic expression that gains full meaning only by projecting the notion of Spain—as a Catholic nation—back to the eighth century, right before the conquest of Visigoth kingdoms by the Muslim commander Tariq ibn Ziyad. Hence the notion of reconquest, implying the recovery of what was initially ours, prior to Muslim presence on the Iberian Peninsula, which renders the Muslim period on the peninsula—known as Al-Andalus—as a historical anomaly, something alien, a mere parenthesis of eight centuries within Spanish history. The Reconquista myth was also used during Franco’s dictatorship to justify the civil war by presenting it in terms of a National Crusade or Reconquest of the Spanish identity that was supposedly lost under the parenthesis of the Spanish Republic (1931–36). In schools, the Al-Andalus historical period is traditionally taught under the name Reconquista, thus bolstering an essentialist vision of identity and territory. Although this approach has been changing considerably over the past years due to the incorporation of students from other countries and innovations in history education, we can still perceive essentialist visions of the territory held by many students (López, Carretero, and Rodríguez Moneo 2015), as well as textbooks (Rasskin-Gutman and Brescó 2019). The reconquest myth is not foreign to political speeches in the public sphere, either (Brescó and Rasskin-Gutman 2006), as we have seen in the case of Aznar. In the 2019 general elections, as a reaction to the increasing religious, linguistic, and cultural diversity in Spain, far-right political parties have started using Reconquista rhetoric again to call for a return to an alleged essentialist identity (Moreno 2019). This has kindled tensions in the annual celebra-

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tions of the conquest of Granada by the Catholic monarchs in 1492, with voices on one side claiming that there is nothing to celebrate, and on the other side the growing far-right praising the expulsion of the Muslims from Granada and the notion of Reconquista. Curiously, one of the measures recently taken by the right-wing Granada council was the elimination of the festivals of the Moros y Cristianos, which were introduced by the Socialists with the aim of bringing cultures together and calming things down (López 2020). Myths, such as the Reconquista, can be considered as a socially available reservoir of meanings (Connerton 1989), to be used and reused in order to interpret different scenarios. Along these lines, studies on representations of history tend to take a cognitive approach showing, for instance, how master narratives conveying an essentialist concept of the nation constrain people’s interpretation of the present. However, to what extent does cognition alone explain people’s actions, motivations, and identification with their nation? Narratives are powerful mnemonic devices, and yet, as this volume clearly indicates, there is something more that makes people hold on to a more affective relationship with the past (Agnew 2007). In How Societies Remember, Paul Connerton (1989) argues that hermeneutics have exclusively focused on inscription rather than incorporation as practices of history representation. That is, priority has been given to the transmission of written accounts over the embodied form of transmission. In handing the body over to the natural sciences instead of looking at its expressions, an essential part of the more affective kind of memory has been lost from sight. To remedy this, Connerton proposes looking at commemorative ceremonies and bodily practices. In commemorations, he argues, “images and recollected knowledge of the past are conveyed and sustained by (more or less ritual) performances” (4), where narratives are not just stories told, but are also enacted and represented in an active sense. In being performed, narratives are transfigured in to fixed bodily practices—encoded in a limited set of postures, gestures, and movements, thus leaving less room for variance and generating affective dispositions toward historical or mythical figures and events, which would explain the persistence of national myths whenever they are conveyed by ritualistic performances. According to Connerton, a continuity with the past is claimed “by ritually reenacting a narrative of events held to have taken place at some past time” (45). In this sense, “to enact a rite is always, in some sense, to assent to its meaning” (44). What kind of commemorative ceremony is Moros y Cristianos? Is it a ritual reenactment of the mythical Reconquista master narrative, based on a claim of continuity and repetition of the past? Or can it also be analyzed from the perspective of modern historical reenactments driven by claims of authenticity in simulating the past (see During 2007)?

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Moros y Cristianos: A Performative Version of the Reconquista Master Narrative? According to Cenname (2014), both Moors and Christians are depicted as characters of a narrative based on the conquest and subsequent Christian reconquest of Spain; it is a narrative not just transmitted through historiography, but also made popular through literature, songs, and festivals, in particular the Moros y Cristianos festivals. Attempts to provide a historical explanation and contextualization of the Moros y Cristianos phenomenon may give a somewhat more nuanced insight into its relationship with the Reconquista narrative and the construction of Spanish national identity. For instance, Irigoyen-García (2011) argues that “early modern Spaniards used impersonations of Moors to promote some sort of cultural coherence between the two shores of the Mediterranean empire, mainly between North Africa and the Iberian and Italian [shores]” (355). According to this author, despite the cultural homogenization promoted by the empire, there was an ambivalent relationship with the Moorish past, “an oscillation between pride, caution and nostalgia about a fading cultural reality” (361). Like many other authors, Irigoyen-García points to the juego de cañas (game of canes) as one of the main precursors of Moros y Cristianos. This popular game in early modern Spain, consisting of mock battles on horseback with participants attired as Moors, became a reminder of cultural continuity, especially in Andalusia and Valencia, where Moorish legacy was still strong. Representing the bulk of the peasantry in the eastern kingdom of Valencia, Moriscos— descendants of the Muslim population that had converted to Christianity by coercion—were expelled from that region in 1609 by King Philip III, which was more than a century after the date that traditionally marks the completion of the reconquest in 1492. Indeed, Moros y Cristianos celebrations somehow reflect the complex identity and other dynamics taking place during and in the aftermath of the Reconquista process, taking on a new twist with the war waged by the Hispanic monarchy against the Ottoman Empire. As Pérez (2016, 13) points out, “the war turned the Moros y Cristianos festivals into a channel for disseminating a negative image of the Ottomans among the general public, thus shifting a real conflict to the realm of festivity.” By attempting to imitate the enemy as much as possible—be it through dress, forms of speech, or actions—the Moros y Cristianos simulation struck a chord with many inhabitants of the Mediterranean coast of the peninsula, given the situation that they were experiencing, had experienced, or could experience. In a ritualistic context, the audience identified with the Christian actors as representatives of “Good” defeating “Evil.” This, therefore, gave rise to a kind of identity based on opposition to the other, the Moorish archetype embodying the

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Mohammedan realities that go against the interests of the Spanish monarchy (Pérez 2016, 15). In any event, setting aside subsequent transformations, there seems to be a broad consensus among scholars in interpreting these celebrations as a commemorative festival inspired, to a greater or lesser extent, by local events relating to the Reconquista process on the Iberian Peninsula (Carrasco Urgoiti 1996). In fact, drawing on the Reconquista narrative, Moros y Cristianos was somehow reinvented (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1992) and was used by local elites to develop their own regional identities in line with the emerging Spanish national identity in the nineteenth century (Hertel 2015). This was done by combining traditional local elements with a didactic nationalist view and evocations of national heroes. As a result, “every town, every village even, had its own locally specific version of the Reconquista myth” (Hertel 2015, 126). The prevalence of the reconquest myth—and the opposing identities underpinned by this myth—leads Carrasco Urgoiti (1996) to consider that, although the festivals acknowledge the importance of the Muslim past, this past is recovered and reappropriated in terms of conquest. In her words, “The representation of the showdown will be repeated year after year, as if it held some kind of key to Spanishness” (89). Moros y Cristianos can be considered as a bricolage not having one exclusive origin but instead comprised of a lengthy process of overlapping celebratory shows, dances, processions, and rituals—whether traditional or reinvented—happening for various reasons in different historical contexts. The result is a kind of heteroglossia, meaning a set of voices and meanings on which it is virtually impossible to confer an unambiguous interpretation. That said, we are inclined to argue that Moros y Cristianos—like school historical reenactments (Carretero, Perez-Manjarrez, and Rodríguez Moneo, this volume)—to a larger extent contribute to conveying and sustaining dominant historical assumptions, especially those related to the configuration of national identity and the national other. As far as the Reconquista myth is concerned, we can see enacted some of the defining elements of master narratives mentioned above: (1) the presence of a homogenous and permanent historical subject over time (Moors and Christians); (2) an essentialist notion of identity and national territory (inherent to the very concept of Reconquista); (3) a binary logic pitting us (Spanish and Christians) against them (the Muslim other); (4) attribution of moral judgments, especially when Catholic and Muslim religions are set against each other; (5) the presence of heroic figures, despite these being sometimes anachronistic; and (6) a monocausal explanation of history, in this case based on the conquest and reconquest theme. What then is being remembered in Moros y Cristianos? Echoing Connerton (1989), we could say that “part of the answer is that a community

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is reminded of its identity as represented by and told in a master narrative” (70). The other part of the answer is that, in these celebrations, the Reconquista master narrative is more than a story told, and becomes something socially enacted once a year by numerous local communities in Spain. But what type of enactment is Moros y Cristianos? What genre of performance and what kind of relationship with the past does this commemoration dramatize?

Moros y Cristianos and the Performance of Memory From an etymological standpoint, to commemorate is to remember in common: the Latin verb memoraˉre refers to the act of remembering, while the Latin prefix com- means with or together. Ranging from tightly organized and fully scripted historical plays to anniversaries, processions, pageants, or reenactments of historic events, performance of memory (Burke 2010, 105), above and beyond its ample range of genres, stands at the very core of commemorative events, such as Moros y Cristianos. Performance of memory, as an incorporated, rather than inscripted, practice provides an affective and embodied—rather than a merely cognitive—engagement with the collective past (Agnew 2004). Traditional rites, such as baptism in the Christian religion or the pledge of allegiance to a national flag, constitute commemorative acts of which performance is a consubstantial part. According to Connerton (1989, 45), rites are stylized recurrent calendrical ceremonies of remembrance. In his words, “All rites are repetitive, and repetition automatically implies continuity with the past.” Furthermore, “rites are not limited in their effect to the ritual occasion” (44), since their significance lies in the community’s shared values. Among rituals, Connerton highlights commemorative ceremonies as a specific kind of rite that explicitly refers to prototypical persons or events— whether regarded as historical or mythical. In relation to this, an important argument made by Connerton is that the performative continuity with the past, reenacted through the ritual, creates a specific relationship between the performers of the ritual and what is being performed. Despite their stylized nature, rites are not merely formal. For rites are felt by those who observe them to be obligatory, even if not unconditionally so, and the interference with acts that are endowed with ritual value is always felt to be an intolerable injury inflicted by one person or group upon another. . . . And conversely, people resist being forced to pay lipservice to an alien set of rites, incompatible with their own vision of the “truth,” because to enact a rite is always, in some sense, to assent to its meaning. To make patriots insult their flag or to force pagans to receive baptism is to violate them. (Connerton 1989, 44)

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Alongside traditional ritual reenactments, modern historical reenactments have emerged as an increasingly popular way of generating an affective engagement with the past. Modern historical reenactments, like traditional rituals, are also practices of commemoration, based on expressive collective performances. However, unlike traditional rituals, modern reenactments strive to re-create the past as it essentially was, rather than claiming a continuity with the past through a stylized ritual. In his study on the emergence of modern reenactments, During (2007) explains this quest for authenticity in historical reenactments by highlighting the new relationship between the present and the past that emerged with the advent of modernity in the second half of the eighteenth century. According to During (2007), “the present was then cut off from the past in terms that allowed the past to become the source for various modes of (often increasingly ‘authentic’) mimesis rather than continuity” (313). This new regime of historicity (Hartog 2003/2015)—whereby the past started to be experienced as a foreign country (Lowenthal 1985), as something different from the present, and, thereby, as an object of historical inquiry (Brescó 2018)—brought with it “the dissemination of detailed images of what the past authentically looked like or was imagined authentically to look like” (During 2007, 316). Hence, the realistic aesthetic inherent to modern historical reenactments (McCalman and Pickering 2010), where the past is meant to be represented qua past, as something different from the present, and not as a ritualized repetition and continuation of prototypical events of the past. The differences between traditional ritual reenactments and modern historical reenactments are important when it comes to discussing the affective relationship between performers and what is being performed in each case. Using Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of play, Adriaansen (this volume) understands modern reenactments as a simulation of the past based on an implicit set of rules to which participants voluntarily adhere during the limited period of time the reenactment lasts. From that assumption, this author goes on to explain the period rush that some participants experience whenever they feel their self merge into the persona that they are embodying during the reenactment. Adriaansen mentions a real example cited in Schroeder (2012) regarding two Jewish American reenactors who are requested to kneel—a forbidden action in the Jewish religion—as part of their role as Norman soldiers in the Battle of Hastings. The decision by these two reenactors to follow the rules of the play leads Adriaansen to highlight how total dedication to play includes surrendering subjectivity—something reenactors identify as a necessary element for the period rush to happen. Putting subjectivity—including one’s beliefs—on hold in order to meet the rules of a simulation play during the time the reenactment lasts is in stark contrast

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with Connerton’s (1989) idea of traditional rituals, because the latter lies precisely in the supposed continuity of values throughout time and beyond the ritual occasion. How does this apply to Moros y Cristianos? Does this celebration come closer to the simulative nature of modern reenactments in relation to a past understood as something cut off from the present? Or does this celebration commemorate a past that is felt as something somehow linked to the present, as in the case of traditional rituals? Perhaps it is important to remember that, since their inception, the Moros y Cristianos festivals were not eminently commemorative events. Instead, they expressed immediate conflicts and the determination to close down what came to be known as the reconquest process against the Moor (Guastavino Gallent 1969). After a successive overlapping of genres, the preservation of the reconquest myth as a key feature in the modern-day Moros y Cristianos festivals is framed within a primarily ludic event, with a mix of carnivalesque tones and historical anachronisms and, occasionally, a strong religious component centering on the local patron saint. As in the case of certain commemorative events analyzed by During (2007), it could be said that Moros y Cristianos is clearly “not a reenactment in the modern sense: it makes no serious claims to authenticity. Rather it is a hybridized mix of fashion and motifs” (327). Referring specifically to Moros y Cristianos, Hertel (2015, 126) states, “Although some of these festivals claim to be based on historical events, they cannot be viewed as actual reenactments. Instead they embody popular folklore surrounding the ‘Other.’” As Hertel goes on to say, “This Otherness is transferred onto the entire festival period, giving it the sense of being ‘outside of time’” (133). Rather than pursuing authenticity in the simulation of one specific historical event, this idea of being outside time seems to bring Moros y Cristianos closer to the kind of ritualistic reenactment Connerton (1989) talks about, in this particular case to the ritualistic reenactment of the Reconquista, as a myth reconstructed and actualized in different historical periods, including the present day. However, this is still an open question, as many aspects remain unclear—aspects that can be addressed only in future empirical studies through fieldwork and interviews with individuals participating in these celebrations. Among the questions to be further explored are these: What are the main similarities and differences between the ritual reenactment of the Reconquista and its representation through textual resources? Does the performative dimension of memory in Moros y Cristianos have particular affordances enabling or limiting certain forms of identification or othering? More specifically, how do participants identify with the characters they impersonate on each side? Is there any difference between the Moorish and

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the Christian sides? Drawing on Holman Jones’s (2019) approach on gender cross-dressing in reenactments, it may be worth exploring the extent to which the experience of impersonating a Moro provides an opportunity for reflection on individual or collective identity. It might also be interesting to investigate whether there are people from North Africa or with a Muslim background participating and, if so, who they tend to impersonate. Do participants experience something similar to the period rush during these celebrations? As for the public reception perspective, what kind of emotions does this celebration generate among the audience and how does the crowd identify with both sides? Does the ludic and carnivalesque component of Moros y Cristianos open up more possibilities for the public to traverse different identities, or does it contribute rather to naturalizing the opposition us/ Christians versus them/Moors?

Final Remarks Modern historical reenactments have been gathering popularity in Spain over the past years. Combining a playful and festive air with a concern for historical realism and authenticity, many of these reenactments have also been used to reinforce identities, both regional and national (González Álvarez, Alonso González, and Rodríguez Hernández, this volume). In parallel to this relatively recent phenomenon, a tradition of commemorative festivals has existed for a long time in Spain, Moros y Cristianos being among the most popular, particularly in Valencia and Andalusia. Although, as we have seen, their format does not fit with that of modern historical reenactments, we believe that this cultural phenomenon may be of interest, not only for the study of collective memory—in its affective and performative dimension—but also as a case study from which to analyze and rethink modern reenactments. In this respect, we agree with Vanessa Agnew (2018) when she highlights the importance of other nonrealist modes of affectively engaging with the past, and the need to expand the notion of reenactment in order to embrace its multiple dimensions. From among these multiple dimensions, we have focused here on the identity aspects involved in historical reenactments, considered in the broad sense. More specifically, we have explored how Moros y Cristianos reenacts the Reconquista master narrative, and the extent to which this commemorative celebration contributes toward reinforcing a Spanish national identity in opposition to the Muslim other. In other words, this research stems from our concern over how this celebration reinforces an existing script, so engrained and naturalized that it would make us actors bound to repeatedly act it out. This leads us to the question raised by some authors in this

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volume (Retz, Carretero, Perez-Manjarrez, Rodríguez Moneo, among others) regarding the need for critical historical thinking in relation to historical reenactments. Although reenactors and organizations very often do not articulate—or even know—the intended outcomes of their performances, and although they sometimes claim to be completely apolitical and more interested in celebration and spectacle than in historical discussion (Zurné, this volume), performance of memory—whether through traditional rituals or modern reenactments—always has political implications in society. That is why, as Agnew (2004) argues, “Rather than eclipsing the past with its own theatricality, reenactment ought to make visible the ways in which events were imbued with meanings” (335). This is particularly relevant in the case of Moros y Cristianos. With the far-right on the rise in Spain and a growing population of immigrants, especially those arriving from Morocco, this celebration is bound to face new challenges.

Ignacio Brescó is assistant professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, and external researcher at the Centre for Cultural Psychology and The Culture of Grief at Aalborg University, Denmark. His research topics revolve around collective memory, national identity, the teaching of history, and experience of memorial sites. He has coedited a special issue on collective memory in Culture and Psychology (2017) and another one on memory and conflict in Peace and Conflict (2016). Among his recent books are The Road to Actualized Democracy: A Psychological Exploration, with B. Wagoner and V. Gla˘veanu (Info Age 2018), Memory in the Wild, with B. Wagoner and S. Zadeh (Info Age 2020), Remembering as a Cultural Process, with B. Wagoner and S.H. Awad (Springer 2019), and Reproducing, rethinking, resisting national narratives. A sociocultural approach to schematic narrative templates, with F. van Alphen (Info Age 2021). In 2020 he was awarded with the JSPS Invitational Fellowship for Research in Japan and the Grífols Foundation bio-ethic grant. Floor van Alphen is assistant professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain. Between 2012 and 2018 she received scholarships from the Argentine National Scientific and Technical Research Council for research in Buenos Aires on the appropriation of master narratives among high school students. Through the Research Talent Attraction Programme of the Comunidad de Madrid she has been able to continue this research in Spain, with a particular interest in students’ cultural diversity and their manifold constructions of the past, as well as embodied memory. She recently edited the volume Cultural Psychology in Communities: Tensions and Transformations with Susanne Normann (Info Age 2020), and Reproducing, rethinking, resisting

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national narratives. A sociocultural approach to schematic narrative templates, with I. Brescó (Info Age 2021).

Notes 1. Wertsch (2002) postulates that different events in Russian history—ranging from the Mongol invasion to the Napoleonic Wars and the Second World War—tend to be narrated under the same fundamental theme, the triumph over alien forces, with the following general narrative pattern: (1) an initial peaceful situation, (2) followed by the aggression of an alien force, (3) leading to a time of crisis (4) which is finally overcome by the triumph over the alien force by the Russian people.

References Agnew, V. 2004. “Introduction: What Is Reenactment?” Criticism 46 (3): 327–39. Agnew, V. 2007. “History’s Affective Turn: Historical Reenactment and its Work in the Present.” Journal of Theory and Practice 11 (3): 299–312. Agnew, V. 2018, November 1–3. The Future of Reenactment Studies. International Seminar on Historical Reenactments and the New Ways of Enacting History. Interdisciplinary dialogues, Miraflores de la Sierra, Madrid, Spain. Aznar, J.M. 2004. Seven Theses on Today’s Terrorism. Speech delivered September 21, 2004, at Georgetown University, Washington, DC: United States. Brescó, I. 2018. “Imagining Collective Futures in Time: Prolepsis and the Regimes of Historicity.” In Imagining Collective Futures: Perspectives from Social, Cultural and Political Psychology, edited by C. de Saint-Laurent, S. Obradovic´, and K.R. Carriere, 109–28. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Brescó, I., and F. van Alphen, eds. 2022. Reproducing, Rethinking, Resisting National Narratives. A Sociocultural Approach to Schematic Narrative Templates. A Volume in the Series: History and Society: Integrating Social, Political and Economic Sciences. Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Brescó, I., and I. Rasskin-Gutman. 2006. “Función y Usos (¿Abusos?) de los Discursos Históricos en la Construcción Social de la Identidad” [Function and use (abuse?) of historical discourses in the social construction of identity]. Revista de Historia de la Psicología 27: 371–79. Brisset Martín, D.E. 1993. “Clasificación de los ‘Moros y Cristianos’” [A Classification of the ‘Moors and Christians’]. Gazeta de Antropología 10: 1–11. Brisset Martín, D.E. 2001. “Fiestas Hispanas de Moros y Cristianos: Historia y Significados” [Hispanic Celebrations of Moors and Christians: History and Meanings]. Gazeta de Antropología 17: 1–12. Bruner, J. 1986. Actual Minds and Possible Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press Burke, P. 2010. “Co-memorations. Performing the Past.” In Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe, edited by K. Tilmans, F. van Vree and J. Winter. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Carrasco Urgoiti, M. 1996. El Moro Retador y el Moro Amigo: Estudios sobre Fiestas y Comedias de Moros y Cristianos [The Challenging Moor and the Friendly Moor: Studies on Moors and Christians Festivals and Comedies]. Granada: Servicio de Publicaciones Universidad de Granada.

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Carretero, M., and A. Bermúdez. 2012. “Constructing Histories.” In Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology, edited by J. Valsiner, 625–46. New York: Oxford University Press. Cenname, A. 2014. La España Perdida. El Discurso sobre “Moros y Cristianos” [The Spain That Was Lost. The Discourse on “Moors and Christians”]. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Oslo, Norway. Connerton, P. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. During, S. 2007. “Mimic Toil: Eighteenth-Century Preconditions for the Modern Historical Reenactment.” Rethinking History 11 (3): 313–33. García-Sanjuán, A. 2018. “Rejecting al-Andalus, Exalting the Reconquista: Historical Memory in Contemporary Spain.” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 10 (1): 127–45. https:// doi.org/10.1080/17546559.2016.1268263 Guastavino Gallent, G. 1969. Las Fiestas de Moros y Cristianos y su Problemática [The Moors and Christians Festivals and their Problems]. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto de Estudios Africanos. Halbwachs, M. 1952/1992. On Collective Memory, edited and translated by L.A. Coser. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Harris, M. 2000. Aztecs, Moors, and Christians: Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain. Austin: University of Texas Press. Hartog, F. 2003/2015. Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, translated by S. Brown. New York: Columbia University Press. Hertel, P. 2015. Crescent Remembered: Islam and Nationalism on the Iberian Peninsula. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press. Hobsbawm, E. and T. Ranger. 1992. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holman Jones, S. 2019. “Gender.” In The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies, edited by V. Agnew, J. Lamb, and J. Tomann. New York: Routledge. Irigoyen-García, J. 2011. “‘Poco os Falta para Moros, pues Tanto lo Parecéis’: Impersonating the Moor in the Spanish Mediterranean.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 12 (3): 355–69. López, A. 2020, January 1. La Polémica Celebración de La Toma de Granada Vuelve con la Prohibición de “Símbolos Extremistas” [The Controversial Celebration of La Toma de Granada Returns with the Prohibition of “Extremist Symbols”]. ElDiario.es. https:// www.eldiario.es/andalucia/granada/presencia-vox-participa-toma-granada_1_1169335 .html López, C., M. Carretero, and M. Rodríguez Moneo. 2015. “Conquest or Reconquest? Students’ Conceptions of Nation Embedded in a Historical Narrative.” Journal of the Learning Sciences 24 (2): 252–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2014.919863 Lowenthal, D. 1985. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. McCalman, I., and P.A. Pickering. 2010. “From Realism to the Affective Turn: An Agenda.” In Historical Reenactment, edited by I. McCalman and P.A. Pickering, 1–17. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Moreno, A. 2019. ¿Por Qué Vox Rescata Ahora el Viejo Concepto de ‘Reconquista’? [Why Does Vox Recover the Old Concept of ‘Reconquest’ Now?]. Diario Público, January 15, 2019. https://www.publico.es/politica/ultraderecha-vox-rescata-viejo-conceptoReconquista.html Pérez, A.C. 2016. “Vencer al Turco en la Ficción: La imagen Negativa de los Otomanos en las Fiestas de Moros y Cristianos” [Defeating the Turk in Fiction: The Negative Image of the Ottomans in the Moors and Christians Festivals]. EHumanista: Journal of Iberian Studies 33: 1–18.

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Rasskin-Gutman, I., and I. Brescó. 2019. “Identidad y Alteridad en Libros de Texto Escolares: Un Estudio de Caso sobre la Representación de Al-Andalus” [Identity and Otherness in School Textbooks: A Case Study on the Representation of Al-Andalus]. Avances en Psicología Latinoamericana 37 (3): 471–88. https://doi.org/10.12804/revistas.urosario.edu .co/apl/a.7942 Ríos Saloma, M.F. 2013. La Reconquista en la Historiografía Española Contemporánea [The Reconquest in Contemporary Spanish Historiography]. Madrid: Sílex. Rosa, A., and J. Valsiner, eds. 2018. Cambridge Handbook of Sociocultural Psychology, 2nd edition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Schroeder, Ch. 2012. Man of War. My Adventures in the World of Historical Reenactment. New York: Hudson Street Press. van Alphen, F. 2020. “Beyond the Master Narrative: Memories in the Globalizing Educational Context.” In Memory in the Wild, edited by B. Wagoner, I. Brescó, and S. Zadeh, 165–83. Charlotte, NC: Information Age. van Alphen, F., and M. Carretero, M. 2015. “The Construction of the Relation between National Past and Present in the Appropriation of Historical Master Narratives.” Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 49: 512–30. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124015-9302-x Wagoner, B., I. Brescó, and S.H. Awad. 2019. Remembering as a Cultural Process. New York: Springer. Wertsch, J.V. 2002. Voices of Collective Remembering. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Part III

POLITICS

OF REENACTMENT Troubled Pasts, Colonialism, and Democratic Prospects

CHAPTER

5

Statue Wars and Reenactments Reinterpreting the Colonial Past in Australia Stephen Gapps

An Immovable Monument? In the regional New South Wales town of Bathurst, around three hours drive west of Sydney, there is a monument to the first colonial explorer, the surveyor George William Evans (see figure 5.1). He looks toward the horizon, admiring the Wiradjuri nation’s lands that were to then become the foundation of wealth of the expanding British colony. An unnamed Aboriginal guide kneels at his feet, included in the statue but excluded from history. Evans’s journey in 1814 from Sydney across the Blue Mountains has been celebrated ever since as both a heroic struggle beyond the rugged mountain range between Sydney and Bathurst that opened the west to settlement, and as the first critical element in a local European founding moment. In fact, it was a reconnaissance journey for the military occupation of Wiradjuri lands that began with the arrival of Governor Macquarie and his soldiers in May 1815. While there has been some public comment on this monument, and only recently an interpretative panel was added that actually mentions the Aboriginal guide and the dispossession of the traditional owners of the land, there have been no public calls for its removal, yet. The monument remained largely under the radar of the initial Australian version of the Statue Wars in 2017 (Daley 2018). As we have recently seen, with our understanding spurred on by the Black Lives Matter movement, the Statue Wars have not been settled. From

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Figure 5.1. Evans statue at Bathurst. Image. © Stephen Gapps.

Colston to Columbus, monuments have been torn down, thrown into rivers, and put into museums. In Australia, no colonial monuments to figures associated with dispossession and massacres have yet fallen, but they have come under significant fire. In June 2020 a statue of Captain Cook in Sydney needed to be guarded by police when protesters gathered nearby. At Townsville in northern Queensland someone dabbed red paint on the hands of a statue of Robert Towns in a dramatic statement about the founding

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figure’s connections with the trade of Pacific Islanders to work as slaves on sugar cane plantations during the late nineteenth century, a practice called Blackbirding. At Bathurst, there are more than thirty monuments or commemorative plaques of various size and shape dedicated to the remembrance of war. The monuments at Bathurst all mark military sacrifice and service in modern wars—wars conducted after the Australian Federation of the colonies in 1901. None of these refer to the intense period of resistance warfare that broke out around the Bathurst region between 1822 and 1824. In August 1824, after desperate appeals from the local settlers and administration, Governor Brisbane declared martial law and sent a strong military force to the area to extinguish the intense conflict. The historical record is vague, but there are reports of killings, battles, and massacres including poisoned food being given to Wiradjuri people. Wiradjuri oral histories and some settler reminiscences suggest hundreds of Wiradjuri people and just twenty Europeans were killed in the conflict (Gapps 2021). In Bathurst today there are also dozens of plaques and monuments to early European settlers. Some of these names were undoubtedly involved in the Bathurst Massacre of 1824 where numbers of Wiradjuri people were shot down by settlers for taking potatoes from a field without permission. There are no monuments, no memorials, no commemorations, and certainly no reenactments in a town known for its Foundation Day performances over the years, to the resistance warfare that threatened the early township. This warfare forced the complete abandonment of outlying farmsteads since Wiradjuri warriors killed both convict shepherds and the sheep and cattle that were decimating their lands. Rather, for the casual observer at least, the Aboriginal guide at George Evans’s feet literally cements Indigenous history at Bathurst as assisting the Europeans in unlocking the great wealth of the Bathurst Plains by bringing into Wiradjuri lands tens of thousands of sheep and cattle in just a few short years. While there is a longstanding pride among Wiradjuri people for the defense of their lands conducted by the warrior Windradyne, in particular, his story is also told by European settler descendants as a tale of reconciliation. In this story, Windradyne spared the lives of some “good” Europeans. Now told as a first act of reconciliation, the focus of this story crystalizes all resistance around Windradyne and smooths over the broader story of resistance warfare and the harrowing stories of widespread massacres during 1824. Whether this reconciliation story influenced the shape and subject of the Evans statue in a moment of early-twentieth-century civic pageantry that may have been designed to shore up the otherwise almost completely erased presence of Aboriginal people in the district, we may never know. But the two tales of friendship and assistance expressed in the Windradyne story and

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the Evans statue certainly do not focus on massacre or resistance warfare (Coe 1989; Dortins 2018, 157–82; Gapps 2021).

From Reenacting (Dis)Possession to Performing Reconciliation So, too, in Cooktown in far north Queensland, a reenactment of the first acts of possession (and dispossession) has in recent years come to focus on an act of reconciliation between the local Guugu Yimithirr people and the crew of the ship HMB Endeavour who were stranded there for several weeks in 1770. The British had caught some turtles for food; when the Guugu Yimithirr demanded some of the catch (breeding turtles) be released and were refused, they set fire to grasslands around the British camp on shore. The Aboriginal men were then shot at by Cook himself with small shot, then shown the deadly effects of larger musket balls, and some of the warriors’ spears were taken by the British. When their spears were returned to them, this, according to Cook, reconciled everything. Since the 1950s an annual reenactment of the arrival of Cook and the Endeavour crew has been conducted at Cooktown on the banks of the Walaam Biri, or Endeavour River, primarily as a kind of heritage attraction to the remote town bestowed with Cook’s name. The main reason for the existence of the town was its coastal access to the Palmer River goldfields of the 1870s, and as such it was a central hub of the long and horrific Frontier Wars conflict that decimated northern Queensland during the late nineteenth century. Historians have recently suggested more than fifty thousand Aboriginal people and around two thousand Europeans, were killed in the late-nineteenth-century violence of resistance and conquest (Bottoms 2013). Perhaps unintentionally, but certainly with great effect, Cook has been detached from this violent conquest in his reperformances. Over recent years the focus of the reenactment has shifted from the arrival of Cook to the events around this apparent misunderstanding over the turtles and the moment of reconciliation. This statement has now become a Cooktown mantra—“Australia’s first act of reconciliation”—and is supported by some First Nations people in the region. At both Cooktown and Bathurst, past moments of reconciliation rather than the histories of colonial dispossession or violence are now center-stage. At Cooktown the focus of commemoration has been a performance of history, which, as historian Charlotte Ward acknowledges, has at least allowed for some form of narrative transformation (while counterintuitively always still claiming to be a reenactment), driven by shifting historical sensibilities. Neither Cooktown or Bathurst, like much of the rest of Australia, have monuments to, or reenactments of, the Frontier Wars.

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Too Many Captain Cooks? Despite their promise of restaging the past, reenactments are rarely if ever understood by performers or audiences as exact simulations. Reenactments re-create historical narratives rather than events. Does this then make them meaningless history? In fact, there is little difference between the concept and the intent of a reenactment—to copy the past—and what we might readily think of history such as books and film. The live performance of history certainly differentiates reenactments from other forms of historymaking, but, as the growing field of reenactment studies has shown, it features similar central concepts and practices such as authenticity and the production of historical meaning (Agnew, Lamb, and Tomann 2020, 1). Over recent years, with the growth of self-styled historical reenactors and the popularity of participation in reenactments, there has been a corresponding critique of these practices, often by the reenactors themselves. The reenactment of past events is rarely taken literally as an attempted exact simulation, but more often as space to engage in histories that had been manipulated by narratives of nation or race in the past. As performance rather than monument, in reenactments history itself can be negotiated. Reenactments can and have consolidated colonial narratives, but they also offer alternative historical possibilities and agency, opening up spaces for popular participation in revision and reconstruction. If they are contested, rather than being torn down, reenactments can be moved on, reshaped, and redirected. Reenactments can shift according to changing historical sensibilities. They offer much to future commemoration that didactic monuments cannot (Bignall and Galliford 2003, 50; Gapps 2002). Yet reenactments are by no means a straightforward commemorative alternative to monuments. First Nations Australians, often forced to watch or cajoled to participate in more than a hundred years of historical pageantry of colonization and settlement, have increasingly protested this particular form of history in recent years. Redoing the past seems to be resealing it in all its colonial glory, reiterating the old narratives of progress and modernity. Yet reenactments have also been central in First Nations political protests at events such as a re-creation of the 1938 Day of Mourning protest or the restaging of Australia’s 1965 version of the civil rights’ movement’s Freedom Riders. The idea of a reenactment in reverse has also been a strong theme of political protest and an important element of contemporary First Nations political art such as Gordon Syron, Blak Douglas, and Jason Wing, to name a few (Gapps 2002; Gapps and James 2020, 88). The concept of reenactment is less at issue (the ceremonial performance of historical events by Aboriginal people has been seen as a form of reenactment) than the continual searing of unhealed wounds when the past is used

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as self-congratulatory dress-ups, rather than as a wardrobe of endless possibilities. The performance and reperformance of the dispossession of First Nations Australians at every round in the cycle of anniversary moments now has very little to do with contemporary concepts and practices of historical reenactment. In fact, it is increasingly difficult for major commemorative events of Australia’s colonial past to remain uncontested. Efforts to explicitly avoid calling such events reenactments have failed. Until the COVID-19 pandemic forced its cancellation, the replica HMB Endeavour had been scheduled to undertake a journey in 2020 up the east coast of Australia during the 250th anniversary of Cook’s original voyage. It had been branded a voyage of reconciliation that would highlight the view from the ship as well as the view from the shore. The planned voyage was specifically trying to avoid being called a reenactment. Yet the Endeavour replica was to visit locations along the coast where the original Endeavour made landfall, and on the same dates as Cook and his crew had made landfall. While there was to be no costumed Captain Cook, no marines firing muskets at warriors opposing their landing, no warriors plucked from far away to perform for audiences enthralled by the idea of such a heroic set of white Australian origins, for many First Nations and other Australians the voyage was going to be, in effect, just another reenactment.

From Statue Wars to Reenactment Wars? After a period of colonial statues being graffitied and protests calling for the removal of monuments, in 2018 the Statue Wars abated in Australia. But the then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull kept them simmering when he announced a $50 million project for the Cook’s Landing Site at Kamay-Botany Bay in early 2019 with the suggestion that calls to replace or modify statues of English colonists, including Captain Cook, were tantamount to a Stalinist rewrite of history. Many historians agreed that even offensive statues are still part of history (or, perhaps, a part of material heritage), and that to remove them is a censorship of the past, just like $50 million burning of books. The concept of counter-memorials has become the rallying cry for many who are not willing to remove monuments, even those that glorify a racist past. In this understanding of counter-memorials, the addition of a plaque to a monument that tells “both sides of the story” seems a way to “settle” the Statue Wars (Na. 3 2018). In early 2020, criticism of the planned Endeavour replica voyage later that year was growing. Australians may well have witnessed something like the massive protest turnout for the 1988 Bicentenary reenactment of the ar-

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rival of the so-called First Fleet that began British colonization of Australia. The stage was set for a contest over Cook that seemed, in early 2020 at least, to be centered around the voyage that was not meant to be a reenactment. But the voyage was cancelled at the last minute and Australia avoided a transformation of the Statue Wars into what might well have been called the reenactment wars. The cancellation meant that the question of how this reenactment might divide Australians along similar lines as the Statue Wars did not arise. Reenactments can always reinforce older dominant versions of history. But they can challenge them as well. In 2006 the replica Dutch ship the Duyfken participated in a reenactment of the original vessel’s landing in far northern Queensland in 1606. This landing—the first recorded landfall of Europeans in Australia—resulted in significant conflict between the local Wik people, with nine Dutch sailors killed. However, in the 2006 reenactment, the legacy of colonial encounters was interrupted by a performance that recognized First Nations protocols and traditional ownership of the land. Without the loaded symbolism of Cook and the declaration of possession of Australia for the British Crown, the Duyfken reenactment was uncontested, indeed held up by many as an outstanding example of a contribution to the “post-colonial discourse of reconciliation” (Bignall and Galliford 2003, 59) As historian Henry Reynolds has noted, the unique quality of Australian colonization has been the fact that, unlike all other settler societies, not one single formal treaty arrangement ever occurred. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have known this for a long time, and the symbolism of Cook as the beginning of invasion is grounded in the historical fact most non-Indigenous Australians gloss over or avoid—that Cook’s 1770 declaration of the possession of Australia was contrary to his own orders from the British government that instructed him to negotiate with any inhabitants he found there (Reynolds 2021). There are thirty-six monuments to Captain Cook across the east coast of Australia. Even though Cook only briefly visited Australian shores in 1770, due in no small part to his disproportionate remembrance, he has a strong resonance with all First Nations people as the symbol of invasion. First Nations activists such as Nathan Sentance have pointed to monuments as critical symbolic sites of public history and argued for a decolonization of commemoration. Yet, strangely, many historians who over the past two decades came to the fore in a period of truth-telling and recognition of Australia’s violent colonial past have largely failed to engage with an everyday Australian landscape strewn with monuments to Captain Cook and other colonial figures, some of whom were known to have been involved in massacres of Aboriginal people (Sentance 2018).

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The proposed voyage of the replica Endeavour undoubtedly was meant to reenact the politics of reconciliation of the Duyfken’s 2006 voyage, rather than be a celebratory history lesson about Cook’s voyage. The loaded symbolism of Cook’s claim of possession of most of the Australian continent would almost certainly have meant this kind of reenactment would fail.

Monuments to the Frontier Wars? In the early 2000s what became known as the History Wars saw a dramatic and divisive public debate over Australia’s colonial past. Unusual for history in a country dominated by narratives of sacrifice in the world wars, the topic of the Frontier Wars—the conflict, warfare, and violence from British colonization in 1788 to the last known massacre in 1928—appeared in mainstream news and public discussion. Incredible as it may seem (though not to First Nations people in Australia) it is only really in the past decade that the full extent of massacres and the long history of resistance warfare has been brought into the broader Australian historical consciousness. Frontier Wars historians have now pushed the estimate of casualties in frontier warfare and violence to more than sixty thousand—greater numbers than Australian soldiers killed in World War I, the conflict that arguably defined the Australian nation after 1901 (Ryan 2018). During the Statue Wars of 2017–19, debate shifted from what really happened in frontier warfare (which is still being revealed, but arguments of a benign form of colonization in Australia are now rare) to how this should or should not be represented in monuments, memorials, and commemoration (Clark 2002). In 2019 a survey of hundreds of First Nations Australians conducted by the Australian Museum found that reenactments or exhibitions about Cook were not important. First Nations people wanted to see exhibitions about histories that had rarely been publicly commemorated—the Frontier Wars (Australian National Maritime Museum 2020; McBride 2019). There is no official national memorial to the Aboriginal men and women who died in the Australian Frontier Wars. The Australian War Memorial, the national memorial to Australians who fought in wars, remains steadfast in the view that Australian military history begins in 1901, when Australia was federated as a nation from British colonies, rather than from 1788 when the British arrived and began the occupation of Aboriginal lands. When the Statue Wars emerged in Australia, the push to erect monuments and memorials to massacres and frontier warfare gained more attention. There were increasing calls to balance the range of histories represented in, and the numbers of, such monuments. Yet even before this, a memori-

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alization of the Frontier Wars had been occurring across Australia that had bypassed the form of monuments and statues altogether. Aboriginal artists had in fact been making monuments for many years. The burial poles or log coffins from Arnhem Land Yolgnu artists (now in the National Gallery, Canberra) were installed in 1988—specifically timed to coincide with the bicentenary of British invasion. Of less notice at the time was the accompanying statement that it commemorated all the indigenous people who, since 1788, had lost their lives defending their land, Tony Albert’s more-recent public sculptural work of giant bullet shells ostensibly commemorates Aboriginal service in World War I (and sits not two hundred meters from the most significant Cook Statue and the Sydney Anzac Memorial), but also subtly refers to their role defending their country in the Frontier Wars. Some artists such as Jason Wing have been quietly going about their business creating murals and outdoor artworks in suburban parks and other public places that commemorate the Frontier Wars. Along with these artworks, artists and activists have also argued that memorials have in fact long existed as a form of archive in the landscape. Rather than creating artwork memorials (of log coffins, for example) for non-Indigenous audiences, they argue that understanding art and landscape as memorials might stretch modes of history-making as well as historical inquiry (Foley 2018; Sentance 2018).

Frontier Wars Reenactments? Where does the performance of history as reenactment sit in these contested histories and forms of history-making? Could reenactments replace monuments? Or do their origins as celebratory performances of settler nationalism make this impossible? On the surface, reenactments appear as visceral reinforcements of key historical moments, and as constant and recycled reminders of dispossession under colonialism. The performance of some histories as reenactments seems to be even more contentious than their representations in statues and monuments. Reenactments have been seen as potentially cathartic, reparative options for engaging with traumatic pasts. Yet they have also been flashpoints of political division. I have argued elsewhere that historical reenactors can become a form of mobile monument—commemorating the past in performances, rather than cemented in place and time in bronze or stone. Because they are ephemeral, contestable, and able to evolve, reenactments may offer less divisive commemorative possibilities than statues and memorials. Reenactments are a mode of history-making that might offer new ways of visualizing the past in memorial landscapes. A key element will

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be, in the cases of colonial monuments and commemoration, the voices and participation of Australia’s First Nations (Gapps 2009). The concept of reenactment itself may be at issue here, particularly where it is considered as historical methodology; its double status as bodily performance and concept has proven evasive to pin down in academic study as well as in popular practice. Historians have seen performed reenactments as part of an affective turn in history that avoids or breaks with ethical and political responsibilities (Agnew 2007; K.M. Johnson 2015). However, when reenactment is part of commemoration, it often becomes a political flashpoint, very much focused on ethical questions and political responsibilities. Yet, unlike monuments, reenactments can transform over time and seem to offer possibilities that do not end in tearing down edifices or dragging them into museums. They are not necessarily safe havens of nostalgia, so are unlike the practices of contemporary historical reenactors, which have often been seen as such. The differences in political functions and possibilities of reenactments and monuments may well prove important in understanding contested moments in broader culture wars focused on commemoration and remembrance, and are certainly worthy of further investigation.

Sacred Statues Reenactments can offer alternatives to the sacred nature of monuments. Monuments to men of colonization were erected in Australia during nineteenth- and early-twentieth century bursts of local or national celebrations of progress and settler prosperity, loosely tied in—sometimes very loosely tied in—with commemorations of past events. But during the twentieth century these monuments to explorers and founders faded into the background. After 1915 the commemorative landscape of statuary was swamped by the construction of bronze figures of Anzac soldiers—one in the center of almost every town in the country—that stood in for the graves of tens of thousands of World War I dead that were never to return to cemeteries in Australia. In recent years, the Anzac legend has attained a quasi-religious nature, and Anzac monuments are, literally, the shrines of remembrance. But recent threats to bring down or even merely transform colonial monuments have stirred a strong public response, a response that centers on an argument that all monuments are sacred. In this argument, even monuments to those who claimed ownership of enslaved people or colonizers who massacred Aboriginal people should remain as historical lessons. Many historians have joined this call, suggesting no monument should be removed—though counter monuments and new interpretive plaques should be considered. The monument has become sacred heritage.

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This seems to be underpinned by the fear that one day Anzac monuments may come under threat. Defining all monuments as sacred is in some ways a smart move. It shows an understanding of the nature of history as a constant reinterpretation—hence the fear that one day calls may grow to tear down Anzac monuments. It buttresses against any attacks on making more monuments to recent wars. What better way to ensure the sacred nature of the Anzac statue or monument than to understand all non-Indigenous monuments as immovable, sacred heritage. At the Bathurst memorial, history seems set in stone and bronze. The town was at the center of a region that, after warfare from the 1820s, quietly and efficiently forced Aboriginal people on to missions and reserves and was part of the system of removing Aboriginal children from their families. Growing claims for reconciliation and truth-telling will be contested in the symbolism of Bathurst’s statues. Perhaps additional historical information on a nearby plaque will be acceptable to the majority of the non-Aboriginal community. It is highly unlikely that any monuments will be removed from their pedestals in Bathurst (Gapps 2009, 395–409; Ward 2019). Calls to commemorate the warfare at Bathurst during the 1820s alongside the commemoration of modern wars will undoubtedly grow over coming years as Wiradjuri voices are increasingly being listened to by nonAboriginal people concerned with their shared pasts. Descendants of settlers connected with violence and warfare in the Bathurst region are now more open to such commemoration. The Frontier Wars are arguably, if slowly, becoming accepted as part of the broader history of Australians at war. Will monuments to the Frontier Wars jostle with Anzac memorials? Or will, and should, other forms of commemoration take shape? Many colonial monuments in Australia commemorate histories connected with the more than five hundred known massacres that occurred in eastern Australia alone between 1788 and 1930 (Ryan et al. 2018). These monuments remain as constant, searing wounds—and to some people, reminders of lived experience. As Tjanara GorengGoreng, a Wakka Wakka/ Wulli Wolli woman from Central Queensland, wrote, “The whisperings of our people remember these events across the generational divide. The trauma of these events, the covering-up by authorities, the lack of justice for Aboriginal people, and the deep depression of knowing that no-one cared has been passed on to each generation as we share and talk of these stories. In my own family, my great-grandfather escaped a massacre in Central Queensland as a young boy” (Goreng Goreng, 2018). Aboriginal people have had to wait more than two hundred years to have the walls of silence in the general community gradually dismantled, as archaeologists and historians investigate the details of these events in our shared Australian colonial history. That such events were denied and hidden

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is a testament to the shame, the degradation, and the complete dysfunction of Australia’s white history (Goreng Goreng 2018). While we might just be able to conceive of Frontier Wars reenactments, the reenactment of massacres seems to be an impossible form of representation of the past. They may be able to be presented in film and in books, but not in real life. But rather than see this as a problem with reenactment as a practice, the power of the conceptual framework of the live performance of history is something worth pursuing.

Dr. Stephen Gapps is a historian working to bring Australia’s Frontier Wars into broader public recognition. He is a senior curator at the Australian National Maritime Museum, president of the History Council of New South Wales (NSW), and has a longstanding interest in public history and the history of early colonial Sydney. Stephen’s doctoral thesis was a history of historical reenactments and public commemorations. Stephen has taught public history at the University of Technology, Sydney, and worked extensively as consultant historian in heritage, museums, film and television, and history events and performances. Stephen won the NSW Premier’s History Award for Regional and Community History in 2011, and in 2017 he was awarded the NSW State Library Merewether Fellowship during which he conducted research for the book The Sydney Wars—Conflict in the Early Colony 1788–1817. In 2021 his book Gudyarra—The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance 1822–1824, was published by New South Press.

References Agnew, V. 2007. “History’s Affective Turn: Historical Re-enactment and its Work in the Present.” Rethinking History: Journal of Theory and Practice 11 (3): 299–312. Agnew, V., J. Lamb, and J. Tomann, eds. 2020. The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies: Key Terms in the Field. London: Routledge Australian National Maritime Museum. 2020. “Encounters 2020.” https://www.sea.museum/ whats-on/encounters-2020 Bignall, S., and M. Galliford. 2003. “Reconciling Replicas. The Second Coming of the Duyfken.” Cultural Studies Review 9 (2): 37–63 Bottoms, T. 2013. Conspiracy of Silence: Queensland’s Frontier Killing-Times. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, Crows Nest. Clark, A. 2002. “History in Black and White: A Critical Analysis of the Black Armband Debate.” Journal of Australian Studies 26: 1–11. 10.1080/14443050209387797. Coe, M. 1989. Windradyne, a Wiradjuri Koorie. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Daley, P. 2018. “How Do We Settle the Statue Wars? Let’s Start by Telling the Truth about our Past.” The Guardian, June 29, 2018. Accessed June 29, 2018, at https://www .theguardian.com/australia-news/postcolonial-blog/2018/jun/29/how-do-we-set tle-the-statue-wars-lets-start-by-telling-the-truth-about-our-past

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Dortins, E. 2018. The Lives of Stories. Three Aboriginal-Settler Friendships. Canberra: ANU Press. Foley, F. 2018. “The Spectacle of Aboriginal Frontier War Memorial Research.” Visual Arts Hub, July 2018. Accessed July 6, 2018, at https://visual.artshub.com.au/news-arti cle/opinions-and-analysis/museums/fiona-foley/the-spectacle-of-aboriginal-frontierwar-memorial-research-256020 Gapps, S. 2002. “Performing the Past: A Cultural History of Historical Reenactments.” PhD Thesis, University of Technology, Sydney. https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/bitstream/ 10453/20121/2/02whole.pdf Gapps, S. 2009. “Mobile Monuments: A View of Historical Reenactment and Authenticity from Inside the Costume Cupboard of History.” Rethinking History 13 (3): 395–409. Gapps, S. 2021. Gudyarra. The First Wiradjuri War of Resistance, the Bathurst War 1822–1824. Sydney: New South Press. Gapps, S., and B. James. 2020. “‘Too Many Captain Cooks’. The Australian National Maritime Museum Collection.” In East Coast Encounters 1770, Reflections on a Cultural Clash, edited by P. Curby. Sutherland: Sutherland Shire Historical Society. Goreng Goreng, T. 2018. “‘A Powerful Remembrance of the Myall Creek Massacre and of All That Is Reprehensible about the Colonisation of Australia.” Honest History, October 16, 2018. Accessed October 16, 2018, at http://honesthistory.net.au/wp/goreng-gorengtjanara-a-powerful-remembrance-of-the-myall-creek-massacre-and-of-all-that-is-repre hensible-about-the-colonisation-of-australia/ Johnson, K.M. 2015. “Rethinking (Re)doing: Historical Re-enactment and/as Historiography.” Rethinking History 19 (2): 193–206. McBride, L. 2019. “The 2020 Project First Nations Community Consultation Report.” Australian Museum. https://australian.museum/learn/cultures/the-2020-project/ Na. 3 “New Captain Cook Monument Draws Mixed Response from Indigenous Community.” NITV, April 30, 2018. Accessed October 10, 2018, at https://www.sbs.com.au/ nitv/nitv-news/article/2018/04/30/new-captain-cook-monument-draws-mixed-respo nse-indigenous-community National Gallery of Australia (NGA). 2018. “The Aboriginal Memorial—Introduction.” National Gallery of Australia. Accessed October 2, 2018, at https://nga.gov.au/aboriginal memorial/home.cfm Reynolds, H. 2021. Truth-Telling. History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement. Sydney: New South Publishing. Ryan, L., Debenham, J., Pascoe, B., Smith, R., Owen, C., Richards, J., Gilbert, S., Anders, R. J., Usher, K., Price, D., Newley, J., Brown, M., Le Hoang, L., Fairbairn, H. (2018). “Colonial Frontier Massacres in Central and Eastern Australia 1788–1930.” The Centre for 21st Century Humanities, Newcastle University, Accessed June 2, 2018, at https:// c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/ Sentance, N. 2018. “Wirimbirra: How Libraries and Archives Can Support the Cultural Ecological Knowledge of First Nations People.,” Archival Decolonist [-0-] June 2018. Accessed October 2, 2018, at https://archivaldecolonist.com/ Ward, C. 2019. “Remembering His Visit. How remembering Captain Cook Made and Remade Cooktown, 1873–2019.” BA Arts (Honors) thesis, Australian National University.

CHAPTER

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From Yogyakarta to Independence Negotiating Narratives in the Historical Reenactment of Recolonization in Indonesia Lise Zurné

Introduction In 2016 I joined a historical society, the Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945, which organized a large annual reenactment commemorating the General Offensive of March 1, 1949, a major offensive against the occupying Dutch troops in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Standing in the parking lot of a former colonial fortress in the city’s centre, I wore a uniform of the Indonesian National Army. My shirt was tucked in to green trousers and my own palladiums, which had been approved by interviewees because of the brand’s military heritage. I had been allowed to do an Indonesian impression, impersonating a defector of the former colonial authorities, the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army. Rather than defending the colonial fortress with the Dutch, I wanted to observe the participants that had been at the center of my research, most of whom reenacted as the guerilla fighters. I was specifically interested to see how they would represent this specific episode: it was claimed this surprise attack triggered the negotiations between the former Dutch authorities and the Indonesian government, resulting in the official transfer of sovereignty on December 27, 1949. The episode became one of the main controversies in Indonesian history after the fall of Suharto’s authoritarian regime in 1998, as an increasing number of intellectuals argued that Suharto had manipulated historical facts for self-glorification and political legitimacy (Ahmad 2016). Notes for this section begin on page 115.

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Three years later, in 2019, I returned to Yogyakarta to learn how the reenactment had evolved. This edition marked the historic event’s seventieth-year anniversary. From a relatively small-scale event with about 120 participants, I observed how the event had now become part of an extensive program of commemorative activities concerned with remembering the historic attack. Featuring an exhibition of military vehicles and a parade, the reenactors expected the reenactment to attract an audience of five thousand spectators. A couple months prior, the governor (a title inherited by the ruling Sultan of the Special Region Yogyakarta) had sent a letter to the national Indonesian government, asking them to declare March 1 as a national day, the Enforcement of Sovereignty Day.1 While historical reenactments have received increasing attention in academic research, scholarship on the issue has remained mostly oriented to the West. Some scholars have described reenactment as history from below that can possibly democratize historical knowledge (Agnew 2004, 335). This chapter focuses rather on the power structures between and within reenactor communities and other parties that are involved in facilitating these events. This case study demonstrates that reenactments can be seen as prisms through which the politics of historical representations are negotiated, involving not only reenactors themselves but also the local governments and, in some instances, the national army. It demonstrates how an initially small-scale reenactment became a pivot of the region’s agenda to revive Yogyakarta’s reputation as the epicenter of resistance against the Dutch. The findings presented in this chapter are based on two fieldwork periods in 2016 and 2019 of twenty-two weeks in total, in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. It draws on a broad range of ethnographic data that I was able to acquire as a researcher and temporary member of the Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945. The chapter offers a personal perspective of my observations and participation during meetings, preparations, workshops, seminars, and the reenactment itself. Furthermore, my data includes twenty-two in-depth interviews ranging from 30 to 120 minutes with reenactors, volunteers, the head of a veteran organization, and a representative of the Culture Office of Yogyakarta, 1 focus group and a survey among visitors of the Benteng Vredeburg, usually in combination with visual research methodologies such as photo and video elicitation and videography. Finally, I conducted a narrative analysis of the voice-over, soundscape, and promotional materials of the reenactment. I will start this chapter by introducing how the General Offensive of the 1st of March has been represented in Indonesian historiography.2 Then, I will provide a short ethnographic description of the Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945, its members and their practices. I will deconstruct how the annual reenactment has been facilitated in 2016 and how it changed compared to the 2019 edition. Lastly, I will demonstrate how competing narratives have

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been negotiated in the reenactment of the General Offensive of March 1st as part of the region’s agenda to revive Yogyakarta’s status as the starting point to sovereignty.

The Struggle over The General Offensive of March 1, 1949 The yearly reenactment organized by the Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945 commemorates and celebrates the successful Serangan Umum 1 Maret [General Offensive of March 1] in 1949. This historic event was a surprise counteroffensive by the Indonesian forces on Dutch positions in Yogyakarta during the National Revolution, in The Netherlands commonly referred to as the decolonization or Indonesian War of Independence (1945–49), although the these terms are contested.3 In the final stages of World War II, nationalists Sukarno and Hatta proclaimed the independence of the Republic of Indonesia on August 17, 1945. However, the former colonial authorities, The Netherlands, wanted to restore their administration on the archipelago and launched a military campaign targeting Jakarta. This prompted the new Indonesian government to move the Republican capital to the monarchy of Yogyakarta, as its Sultan, Hamengkubuwono IX, publicly supported the resistance. In response, the Dutch launched a second military attack and took control over Yogyakarta.4 On March 1, 1949, the Indonesian army launched a surprise attack on several Dutch positions in the city. They were successfully able to reclaim control over Yogyakarta for six hours. The surprise raid was seen as a great political success as the international public condemned the Dutch’ “final attempt at empire in Indonesia” (Ricklefs 2001, 28). It has been claimed the attack started negotiations between the Dutch and Indonesian authorities and led eventually to the formal transfer of sovereignty to Indonesian authorities on December 27, 1949. When President Suharto came to power in 1967, the General Offensive became one of the most systematically organized commemorations in Indonesian history (Ahimsa-Putra 2012). It has been commemorated through a large monument in Yogyakarta’s city center, two docudramas produced by the government, an annual ceremony, and a reenactment staged at the Benteng Vredeburg, a former colonial fortress now turned museum, by “student regiments from universities in Yogyakarta, members of the army, and several veterans” (156–65). Over the years speculation increased that these representations of cultural memory served a political interest. Similarly to Suharto’s autobiography (Ramadhan & Dwipayana 1991), these different media portrayed the former president as the initiator and architect behind the plan that is regarded as one

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of the first steps to Indonesian sovereignty. Suharto had described how he heard “the Dutch had lied [about their power]” listening to debates within the United Nations on the Indonesia issue (Ramadhan and Dwipayana 1991, 58). This inspired him to carry out an attack in daylight that would generate international attention to the Indonesian resistance. In 1985, the first rumors started to circulate that criticized Suharto’s version of the event, when the mayor of Yogyakarta was interviewed in a newspaper. He claimed that, rather than Suharto, it was Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX of Yogyakarta who had actually listened to the radio and had come up with the idea of a “shock therapy” (Ahimsa-Putra 2012, 169). The army then published a book analyzing the “background of the General Offensive of March 1st” (Staf Komando Angkatan Darat [Seskoad] 1983, 1). In it, it stated that both the Sultan and Suharto were listening to the radio and came up with the idea. It therefore skirted the question of who actually initiated the offensive, and was rather “a compromise designed to put an end to the controversy” (Ahimsa-Putra 2012, 173–74). Nonetheless, at that time, Suharto’s authoritarian regime was too strong to publicly challenge official history. Yet, when the protests of the Reformasi in 1998 forced Suharto’s resignation and ended the authoritarian New Order, a great number of papers, articles, and news stories were published with the aim of rewriting history that had been twisted by the political elite (Curaming, 2003 Vickers, 2005; Zurbuchen, 2005; McGregor, 2007). An increasing number of historians concerned with the issue wrote about witnesses and evidence that supported the alternative version, namely that Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX was the one that invited Suharto in order to discuss the idea of a surprise attack (AhimsaPutra 2012, 169). Additionally, as a lieutenant colonel, Suharto would not have been able to mobilize troops without the consent of his superiors (172). The former president had therefore manipulated historical facts to strengthen and legitimate his own political power by “draping himself in hero clothes” (see also Purwanto 2001, 113). In the words of Malinowski (1926), this myth became a “social charter for leading the new nation” (161). Because of the public debate, the Minister of Education, Yuwono Sudarsono, announced an “enquiry” that resulted in the publication of a National History Supplement in 2000 (Schulte Nordholt 2004, 129). Later editions of the official textbooks used in schools have also given more credit to the role of the Sultan as initiator.5 However, no alterations concerning the representation of the event have been made in museums, monuments or the two docu-dramas. My visits to several public seminars in Yogyakarta in 2019 indicated how the issue is still relatively sensitive and therefore often avoided in public debates.6 To most people, the discussion has therefore gone by unnoticed. While many conceived the Reformasi as a promising

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flow that would “right past wrongs and dispel conflict” (Zurbuchen 2005, 3), the renegotiation of history in Indonesia proved to be rather slow. And, as I will argue in the following sections, the annual reenactment of the General Offensive has performed similar competing narratives.

The Business of Reenactment During former president Suharto’s regime, the General Offensive had been commemorated with a yearly ceremony, speech and reenactment staged at the former colonial fortress Benteng Vredeburg in the center of Yogyakarta. Historian Heddy Ahimsa-Putra (2012) has described how these commemorations lost popularity after the 1998 Reformasi that discredited former president Suharto’s regime. In 2013, however, several reenactors from Yogyakarta established a historical society: the Komunitas Djokjakarta 19457 with the sole purpose to educate the community about the history of Indonesia’s struggle for independence through the “visualization of history,” in particular the General Offensive of March 1 (Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945 2016b, my translation). The Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945 consists of fifty to a hundred members, most of whom are men, with an age range from 12 to 69 (Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945 2016c; 2019), not all of whom had experienced the colonial past nor National Revolution but who feel somehow connected to it, as a kind of “prosthetic memory” (Landsberg 2004, 2). It is a hierarchical society with its structure based mainly on age and social-economic position, a common characteristic of “Javanese culture” (Anderson 2007). Henry,8 the head of the group, functioned as the spokesperson and made almost all decisions, ranging from where the group would eat to the extent of the information I could access. I had established my initial contact with this community by requesting to become a member of their Facebook page, the main medium of communication in the world of reenactment. Unknowingly, this meant that I was immediately part of a large network of reenactment groups across Indonesia, counting 2,182 members in October 2018. Each of these historical societies focused on a specific kind of historical reenactment: while some mainly did photoshoots reenacting original photographs from the colonial times, others organized teatrikals (reenactments) such as the General Offensive of March 1. Usually, reenactors would visit each other’s events, hence there was a certain rivalry between groups as to who would produce the most impressive show. Success in these circles was not defined by historical accuracy but rather by spectacle and aesthetics, in particular the number of explosions and the rarity of the military props displayed.

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The first edition of the renewed yearly reenactment commemorating the General Offensive was held in 2014. According to several of the interviewees, the event attracted at least 120 participants. In 2015, videos of the event including an official trailer appeared on YouTube (Serangan Oemoem 1 Maret 2015). About 150 people participated and the reenactment featured a fordlynk scout, which is a military vehicle used by the Dutch during the attack on Surabaya in 1945. For the 2016 edition that I visited, two hundred people participated and three hundred fireworks were used. The community was able to hire a tank from the military, a Stuart M3A3; this model was also used by the Dutch army in the attacks on Surabaya in 1945. Every year, the Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945 aspired to increase the size and spectacle of the event. When I returned in 2019, the community had planned to relocate the reenactment to the Jalan Malioboro, the busiest shopping street of Yogyakarta. The event would start with a parade of 2,050 people, including reenactors, the military, police, various cultural societies, a drumband, and military vehicles, that would march through the shopping street. The restaging of the attack would be held in front of the Serangan Umum 1 Maret monument. About five thousand spectators were expected, and 250 seats would be allocated to special visitors such as the head of museum Benteng Vredeburg, representatives from the air forces, police, the military commando Yogyakarta Region, the local veteran organization, and the press. Additionally, the event would be live-streamed and the parking area of the Benteng Vredeburg would feature an exhibition of military vehicles. In contrast to the idea that everything in reenactment has to be authentic (Gapps 2009), exceptions were made for go-pros, cameras, and other kinds of modern items that allowed streaming to online audiences. For instance, the tank (Stuart M3A3) that was featured in the 2016 edition was actually not present on March 1, 1949, but had stalled in Magelang, a town near Yogyakarta. Asking why it was featured, Henry replied, “Because [the re-enactment in] Surabaya also had a tank,” implying that competition and entertainment prevailed over historical accuracy. Additionally, the National Revolution had been characterized as guerrilla warfare with limited weaponry for the Indonesian resistance. However, during the show each Indonesian soldier carried several guns, ranging from common army pistols to automatic machine guns such as the SS1. The reenactment of the event suggested an intensive mass spectacle with sound effects and countless colorful explosions that did not seem to coincide with the guerilla surprise attack of 1949. Producing such a spectacle is a costly and time-consuming enterprise, and reenactments are in some ways like businesses, requiring what most reenactors call lobbying for funding. In 2016 the total amount required for the event was about three thousand euros, provided by various stakehold-

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ers. Months prior to the event, Henry went lobbying at various museums, a veteran organization, the local municipality, and the national army. Many of those eventually provided financial support, such as the Benteng Vredeburg, the former colonial fortress turned museum where the reenactment was held. The Culture Office of Yogyakarta9 donated the biggest amount, about half of the total budget (Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945 2016a). Other institutions allowed the Komunitas to use objects from their collections, such as the military museum Dharma Wiratama and the national army that allowed the Komunitas to use the Stuart M3A3 tank if they would pay for the transportation costs. It was also expected that all members of the Komunitas would financially contribute through donations. Initially, in 2016, the event was only profitable to the few reenactors that were being paid for their services such as sewing uniforms, wood-cutting and painting for weaponry and sound-editing. In 2019, the costs and work must have increased immensely as did the event itself. However, when asking about the finances this year, Henry labeled that subject “classified.” While such financial and organizational support is necessary to organize such an event, relationships with the Culture Office, various museums, veterans’ organizations, police, and military state apparatus extended beyond practicalities. The reenactment had become part of a program of commemorative activities concerning the Serangan Umum 1 Maret including a special exhibition at the Benteng Vredeburg, a public ceremony attended by the military, the local government, veterans, cultural organizations, and the Komunitas held in front of the Serangan Umum 1 Maret monument, various seminars, praying sessions “for your heroes,” and a patriot run organized by the Memorial Museum HM Suharto (Peringatan Serangan 2019). While this all required practical coordination, the Komunitas had established close ties with some of them over time and was invited every year to the military’s anniversary ceremony. In interviews, it became clear that most members were proud of these invitations, and interpreted them as recognition for their commemorative work. When asked what interviewees enjoyed the most about being part of a historical society, one of them, Ahmed, answered that, for him “the most important things are the meetings at museums, because we can meet every chief of each museum. [For example], I met the chief from the Satria Mandala Museum and a member from the National Army in Jakarta. I suggested to him that Jakarta should also have a reenactment and that we would use safe explosives. So in August, they arranged one, and we were invited and they were in the audience.” Recognition by certain institutions seemed to be an important factor of reenactment, not only as a source of legitimation but also potentially as a way of establishing relations with the people most interviewees wanted to identify with. Generally in Indonesia, there is a strong hero-culture surrounding

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the military since it is considered the most powerful institution after the presidency (Anderson 1992, 331). Patriotism is strongly linked to militarism and all “official” national heroes have participated in military struggles to defend the nation against eternal enemies (Kasetsiri 2003, 20). Unsurprisingly, almost all interviewees had expressed a strong sense of respect and admiration of the armed forces, while some also indicated they tried to or were aiming to join. Due to members’ appreciation of the armed forces as well as the financial dependency on Yogyakarta’s municipality and Culture Office, the Komunitas had to navigate between two competing views on history, specifically the historical narrative of the General Offensive of March 1. The city had long been prominent in supporting the Sultan’s version, the mayor being one of the first to publicly criticize Suharto’s version, while the national army (Seskoad 1983) had presented a compromise. In the following section, I will show how various and competing narratives of the General Offensive of March 1 have been negotiated in the reenactment of this historic event. I will argue how, initially, reenactors chose to perform a past without controversy, which skirted the question of who initiated the surprise attack. However, in 2019, the historic day of March 1, 1949, seemed to have been reinvented as a celebration of local history, culture, and people.

Negotiating Narratives Analyzing two annual editions of the same performance may demonstrate how historic narratives are negotiated over time. Let me start by providing a short description of the reenactment as I encountered it in 2016. First of all, the the 2016 reenactment started with a siren indicating the end of the curfew. Additional sound effects such as plane engines and explosions provide the background of the National Revolution, while a voiceover narrates background information in three chapters, separated by the reenactment of battle. The first chapter, for example, narrates how Yogyakarta became “the center of resistance” after Sukarno and Hatta were captured, followed by Yogyakarta being attacked by the Dutch. The second chapter highlights how the resistance “refused to give up” when Yogyakarta was re-occupied. It also describes how the resistance came up with a counteroffensive. In a few lines, the voiceover narrates that “the Netherlands disseminated propaganda that the guerrillas are defeated and that there is no resistance anymore.” In response, the resistance develops a plan for a surprise attack. Without mentioning an initiator, the narration states that the attack is “led by lieutenant colonel Suharto with tactical coordination by Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX” (my translation). According to my observations and

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the script, at that moment four commanders (Lieutenant Colonel Suharto, Colonel Bambang Sugen, Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX, and General Sudirman) meet in the middle of the “stage,” enact having a “meeting” by talking to each other, pointing in several directions, and, finally, shaking hands. What follows is the counter-offensive: the spectator observes how the resistance troops perform a surprise an attack on the Benteng Vredeburg, and are able to liberate the fortress from the Dutch. After the defeat, the start of the national anthem “Indonesia Raya” indicates the end of the reenactment: the Indonesian fighters cheer while the Dutch soldiers walk away from the colonial fortress. So, in short, in the few seconds attributed to the motives of the offensive during the reenactment, the controversy is not addressed. More so, it emphasizes the importance of both Suharto, the Sultan, the Colonel and General, providing a compromise rather than a claim on historical truth. Although this was surprising to me, I had experienced a similar stance in interviews. Often, when asking about the issue, I had received evasive answers. First, I asked interviewees to describe what they knew about the offensive. Although a few younger members knew nothing about the controversies at all, others clearly felt uncomfortable answering my question. They either did not want to take a stance, or believed that such controversies were “merely” politics. Several of my interlocutors claimed that they were not interested in these discussions; for example, Kevin said, “I myself don’t know, many people are still in debate. I just take the information, but I can’t decide.” It also seemed as if many did not want to question the authority of Henry. Kevin, for example, who acted as Suharto during the reenactment, claimed that it was not up to him to make claims on historical truth, and said, “As far as I know, the making of the script was based on history. You cannot change that, if you change that, you lie to the people. It must be proved by people. It is already legalized. It’s from the books, you have the references. It must be [the] truth.” Henry and other people who could be considered higher up in the hierarchy of the Komunitas were a bit more open to my questions concerning this issue. Actually, their responses indicated that they were highly aware of the politics of representation. Henry, for example, told me that there was indeed a “different perspective upon history” between the national army and the Culture Office of Yogyakarta, and both supported the show. How aware Henry was of having to negotiate between these perspectives became clear in a conversation about another potential stakeholder for future editions. When discussing the finances, Henry told me that he had attended a meeting at the Suharto Memorial Museum near Yogyakarta. The organization had proposed to organize the reenactment at the museum, suggesting that they would pay the entire costs of the show. I asked Henry whether he

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considered taking the offer. Henry replied that he would not, because “then we have to tell it the way they want [us] to.” While (financial) dependency and a desire for recognition by certain institutes may influence how the Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945 represented the past, I must also add, perhaps, that the issue of who initiated the attack did not matter that much to most interviewees. As I already noticed, some of the reenactors were not even that interested in the controversies. An example was Annisa, a history student who also participated in the event, who said, “There are just so many issues with history now, I really don’t know.” This response made me question how to interpret the answers I received so far; I wondered if perhaps people were rather indifferent to the issue. When I asked Ahmed, for example, whether the issue was still discussed in meetings, he argued they had constructed their own solution: “We had that discussion before so nobody raises the issue anymore. Like Henry said, [maybe] if we finally have the answer. [Until then] everybody has their equal role.” The organizers of the reenactment of the General Offensive of March 1 in Yogyakarta did not want to take a public stance regarding the claims on historical truth. Financial dependency, respect, and a desire for recognition by institutions like the military, and perhaps also a general disinterest or fatigue in “the issues with history” might underlie this decision. However, while the organizers choose a compromise, by doing so they also enact a narrative that rejects controversy. Rather, they present a past in which the primary figures have equal roles and stand shoulder to shoulder. One could say it is an argument that commemorating victory over colonial rule should be about celebration rather than discussion. As Kevin explained, “[The re-

Figure 6.1. Reenactment of meeting between Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX and Suharto. © Lise Zurné.

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enactment] is like Christmas. We only see each other twice a year. It must be a good day.” However, three years later, I encountered a different version of the past.

Enforcement of Sovereignty Day The reenactment of the General Offensive in 2019 was planned to be the biggest yet, celebrating its 70th anniversary. The members of the Komunitas Djokjakata 1945 had planned the event for months. This year, it would feature a parade of about twenty-five-hundred people, including several military troops, an exhibition of historic military vehicles, and the final performance on the central shopping street of Yogyakarta, with an audience of special guests, including the head of the military of Yogyakarta region, several museums and veterans’ organizations, and national news coverage. Yet, two days before, the military canceled their participation due to “the sensitivity surrounding the upcoming elections,” as explained by Henry while I was asked to help put tape over the promotional materials that featured the troops’ logos and titles. Nevertheless, it was still a big event. There were about three hundred reenactors participating; eight hundred people joining the parade, which included a drum band; countless regional and national journalists; and a live-stream on YouTube. The reenactment of the General Offensive of March 1 in 2016 had offered us a romantic representation in which all primary figures worked together, skirting the question of who initiated the attack. In 2019, however, representation of the past had changed. In line with Suharto’s critics, it presented the version in which Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX came up with the idea of a surprise attack in daylight. It was presented in an extensive dialogue that lasted several minutes, starting with the Sultan inviting Suharto, telling him about the UN, his plans for a surprise attack and asking him to mobilize the troops (see Figure 6.1). In an interview with Detik News, Henry ensured that “there was no debate over the version of history” in this reenactment (Hadi 2019). The question then is, why had the narrative been altered, three years later? The answer lies possibly in the Yogyakarta’s agenda. On October 31, 2018, the current governor of the Special Region of Yogyakarta, Sultan Hamengkubuwono X, sent a letter to the president of the Indonesian Republic. It emphasizes that the General Offensive of March 1, 1949, has been an important part of Indonesian history as it played an important role in “re-establishing the country’s sovereignty,” and “the spirit of unity of the Indonesian people” as Rully Andrianto, the head of the department of History, Literature, Museum and Culture at the Culture Office, explained to me. Therefore, the governor asked the president to designate

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March 1 as a National Day, carrying the title Hari Penegakan Kedaulatan Negara, which could roughly be translated as Enforcement of Sovereignty Day (Fridaus 2019; Wirayudha 2019, my translation). The letter is currently “at the presidents table,” as explained by Andrianto. To support the proposal for a National Day, the Culture Office asked the Gadjah Mada University to write an academic report in order to provide legitimation for the claim. A team of historians produced a booklet that analyzed and compared different kind of historical research and literature written on the attack, and came to the conclusion that, similarly, it was the Sultan of Yogyakarta who came up with the attack. The book ends with conclusions and recommendations in which the authors support the aim for a National Day, as the transfer of sovereignty cannot be separated from the General offensive of March 1, it is its product (Margana et al. 2019, 100). And as Yogyakarta was at that time temporarily the Ibu kota [capital], it was of national relevance: “it was a national struggle with international impact” [my translation] (100). Therefore, the Enforcement of Sovereignty Day will celebrate with the “highest appreciation Yogyakarta, the Sultanate and the people as the elements that constitute the General Offensive of March 1st” [my translation] (100). Taking into account the region’s agenda to revive Yogyakarta’s Special Status and reputation of the city of resistance, and the Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945’s close cooperation with the Culture Office, we can only conclude that the narrative of the reenactment had been adjusted in order to fit in with this aim. Although, in 2016, members of the Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945 still had to lobby to pay for the costs of the reenactment, in 2019 all the costs were paid for by the Culture Office. I argue that the 2019 reenactment of the General Offensive of March 1 should therefore be interpreted as a demonstration and re-invention of Yogyakarta nationalism. To demonstrate how, besides the narrative itself, this specific kind of royalist nationalism has come to the fore in this performance, we need to simultaneously look at the region’s history.

From Yogyakarta to Independence Yogyakarta ( Jogja in colloquial speech) is a provincial-level autonomous region of Indonesia on Java, its capital similarly titled Yogyakarta. The region is the only recognized and surviving monarchy within Indonesia today and has been ruled by the Yogyakarta Sultanate sultanate since 1755. Just a few days after the declaration of independence president Sukarno sent a letter to the Sultan of Yogyakarta, Hamengkubuwono IX, that the region was recognized as part of the newly born nation of Indonesia. The Sultan replied by

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expressing his support, while also proclaiming Yogyakarta to be a kingdom in which all power and authority remained in the hands of the ruling Sultan (Woodward 2011, 2). The region’s contributions, and particularly those of Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX, to Indonesian independence and nationhood (Van Klinken 2008) awarded the Javanese kingdom an official status as Daerah Istimewa (Special Region) within the Indonesian Republic. Today, that means that the one occupying the hereditary position of Sultan of Yogyakarta also automatically becomes the governor of the Special Region (Puddington et al. 2013, 324). Historically, the Sultan(s) of Yogyakarta have also occupied other high positions in office since sovereignty, including vicepresident (1973–78), minister for economic and financial affairs (1966–73), and a bid to become national president (2009). Yogyakarta’s Sultanate has therefore consistently occupied a prominent position on the national stage (Van Klinken 2008, 5). As a result of Yogyakarta’s history and special status, many of Yogyakarta’s citizens consider themselves as instinctively different from other Indonesians. Anthropologist Mark Woodward (2011) describes how Indonesian-nationalism and Yogyakarta-nationalism are to some extent competing phenomena. Yogyakarta-nationalism should not be understood as an ethno-nationalism in conventional terms (8). The Yogyanese are simply different because they are kuwala (subjects) of the Sultanate. Yogyakarta is a nation within a nation, one in which many cherish the concept of sacral kingship in the form of their Sultan (8). And although it is constituted of many Islamic elements, Yogya-nationalism transcends religion in the sense that also “Christians and members of the modernist Islamic organization Muhammadiyah, . . . are devoted subjects” (11). One of the core characteristics of the Yogyanese nation is its identification with revolution, something that, in the commemorations of 2019 was emphasized over and over again. A recently invented slogan, “Dari Yogyakarta Republik Indonesia Berlaudat” (from Yogyakarta to Indonesian Independence) was reprinted on all kinds of promotional materials, from posters of the exhibition in the Benteng Vredeburg to the cups distributed among the volunteers that helped organize the reenactment. The channel Humas TV Jogja also published a video online with the same title, explaining in one and a half minutes the historic attack (Serangan Umum 1 Maret, Dari Jogja Republik Indonesia Berdaulat. n.d.). In this video, but also in the performance and promotional materials itself, Yogyakarta was presented as the epicenter or mother city of the revolution. Not only after March 1, 1949, did the Dutch accept negotiations; it was also the place where the Dutch forces retreated first on June 6, 1949. Hence, Yogyakarta has often been described as the Kota Perjuangan (city of struggle), a title that was similarly

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reproduced on flyers, booklets, and the website of the region’s Culture Office when nearing March 1. But Yogyakarta’s reputation as a city of struggle reference is not limited to the period of the National Revolution. While Suharto ruled Indonesia “with an iron hand,” regional governments increasingly lost power, including Yogyakarta (Woodward 2011, 12). However, the city became again the center of the national stage when, in 1998 during the Reformasi, the Sultan openly sided with the protestors who demanded the end of Suharto’s authoritarian rule (256). He stated that he simply followed the spirit of his father who had also struggled for the cause of the people (against the Dutch) (256). The demonstrations against the national government and, in particular, President Suharto, took the shape of long marches in Yogyakarta, all leading to the square before the Sultan’s palace. According to descriptions, they ended in prayers, “the singing of patriotic songs, and cries of ‘Long Live the Sultan’” (257). Yogyakarta became therefore the city of struggle, both during the struggle for independence as well as during the Reformasi, the two contributing extensively to a rise in royalist nationalism (Woodward 2011). Another characteristic of Yogyakarta’s collective identity that is used in the reenactment is its insistence of an origin far older than the Indonesian Republic—namely, the precolonial Land of Mataram, the last independent Javanese kingdom that expanded to a great territorial and military power, even attempting to conquer Dutch port settlements before finally losing power to the colonial forces (Peacock Konz and Peacock 2009, 344). It became divided into two halves in the eighteenth century, of which only Yogyakarta, the “traditional one,” has remained (Carey 1986, 19). Yogyakarta asserts itself as the legitimate successor of Mataram, drawing a connecting to “the cradle of Indonesian civilization,” as Mataram has been regarded by some (Woodward 2011, 13). Also, the term “Mataram” occupies a dominant position in the reenactment. The term is used both as cheer prior to the reenactment in order to hype the reenactors and to claim victory after the enactment of Dutch defeat. With hands and guns in the air, the reenactors repeatedly shouted “Mataram, menang!” which could be translated as “The kingdom won!” (see Figure 6.2). Additionally, the term “Mataram” is also featured on the logo and therefore t-shirts and flags of the Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945. The use of the slogan therefore not only emphasizes Yogyakarta’s pre-colonial resistance against the Dutch but also its antiquity as a nation, one of the key ingredients for the construction of the imagined community as famously described by Benedict Anderson (1983). As Gerry van Klinken describes, sultanates offer a “Durkheimian ideal of an indigenous conscience collective” (2008, 19; emphasis in original) with

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Figure 6.2. Reenactors celebrating victory. © Lise Zurné.

shared beliefs, values, ideas, and attitudes that inform our sense of belonging. Emphasizing ethnicity, symbols, customs, and myth in performances, reenactments might therefore offer a sense of political stability in times of unrest (Van Klinken 2008, 19). The revival of local identities such as we witnessed in this case, can be considered part of a broader communitarian turn in Indonesian politics (Van Klinken 2008). However, here we face a theoretical gap as researchers: because the post-Suharto era is usually described as a process of democratization, the great rate with which local identities and “pre-colonial authority figures” are reinvented challenge this equation (2). The narrative of the reenactment that has been re-modeled over the years might, in its current form, be a response to contemporary societal issues. The cancellations of the military as a response to upcoming elections already demonstrated the sensitivity concerning Indonesian politics. Other concerns indicated by interviewees included the rise of political Islam and the increasing religious, cultural, and ethnic polarization in Indonesian society. The performance of the General Offensive of March 1 produces in that sense a counter-narrative in which all Indonesians stood shoulder-to-shoulder. First, this idea of unity can be found in relation to place, namely Yogyakarta itself, which has a reputation as having one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse populations of the country. It prides itself in this diversity as a model for the rest of the nation and refers often to Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, which means unity in diversity, which is also Indonesia’s national motto. Second, unification can be found in the narrative of the reenactment itself. As Dr. Margana, one of the authors of the academic booklet written to support the proposal explained in an interview, the success of the General Offensive of

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March 1 should be attributed to the collaboration between the three elements: the Sultanate, the national army, and the (revolutionary) people of Indonesia. It is in that sense unique, he argued, since other holidays such as National Heroes Day and National Day of the Armed Forces focus on only one aspect. He argued that there might be a “psychological need” for another narrative, saying that he observed an increasing dichotomy between the national army and civic society. In sum, the reenactment of the General Offensive of March 1 is an expression of Yogya-nationalism. It is an attempt to re-emphasize its special identity that encompasses predominately the following elements: the region’s mythic past, its revolutionary character, and the central role of the Sultanate in Indonesian history. While we can argue that this idea of the Yogyakarta’s historical, cultural, ethnic, and religious distinctiveness has always been prominent for its citizens, at least the Culture Office of Yogyakarta seems to think it might have been forgotten beyond the Special Region. Anthropologist Heddy Ahimsa-Putra (2012) has described how the controversy surrounding the historical narrative of March 1, 1949, has led to a declining popularity of the event: Suharto was criticized for constructing a myth of a revolutionary hero in which the attack was the most important building block. Since the attack has been a central element of Yogya’s so-called special-ness as well (it was only after the historic attack that the official special status was granted by the Indonesian government), this may have resulted in a perceived decline of its uniqueness. Probably the erosion of the communicative memory of the Serangan Umum 1 Maret due to passing away of veterans and witnesses, may have contributed to this process. According to the Culture Office and the governor of Yogyakarta (Sultan Hamengkubuwono X), the Enforcement of Sovereignty Day will re-emphasize Yogyakarta’s keistimewaan (special-ness) by celebrating “the highest appreciation for Yogyakarta, the Sultanate and its people” (Margana et al. 2019, 100). Currently, the annual reenactment of the General Offensive of March 1, 1949, has become a central pivot in the claim for legitimacy for this proposal.

Conclusion This chapter focused on the reenactment of a historic attack that became one of the main controversies in Indonesian historiography after the end of Suharto’s authoritarian presidency: the General Offensive of March 1 in Yogyakarta 1949. The period after 1998 resulted in the circulation of different narratives of the General Offensive: while Suharto had always claimed to be the initiator and main architect behind the successful surprise attack, critics argued that the former president had manipulated historical facts to

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strengthen and legitimate his own power. Rather, Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX was the one that invited Suharto in order to discuss the idea of a surprise attack. Suharto had therefore constructed a myth that became a central narrative in leading the nation. I have analyzed how the reenactors of the historical society Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945 have dealt with this sensitive issue in their annual performance in both 2016 and 2019. The conclusion is that these reenactments should not be simply interpreted as bottom-up history but rather as complex negotiations between and within reenactors, historical societies and other stakeholders involved. In 2016 the organizers of the reenactment chose initially a compromise over discussion, skirting the pressing issue of who was the initiator and who the architect behind the surprise attack. A desire for a past without controversy was expressed, although factors including (financial) support and diplomacy might have played a role. In 2019 the narrative had been changed: not only did the reenactment cover how the Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX came up with the attack and ordered Suharto to mobilize the forces, but also the symbolism of the performance itself can be interpreted as an expression of Yogya-nationalism. In line with the recently re-invented slogan “From Yogya to Independence,” Yogyakarta is now presented as the epicenter of sovereignty. The region’s governor and Sultan argued that March 1 should become a national day, namely Enforcement of Sovereignty Day. In order to legitimize his claim, much attention is paid to all commemorative activities, helped by the Culture Office with advertising, facilitation, and financial support of events. The reenactment has become the biggest and most prominent of all the events, and is performed with numerous participants, in front of special appointed seats for the head of the region’s army, most important museums and veterans, a live-stream on YouTube, and national media coverage. The reenactment has become the center stage to revive the region’s mythic past, and Yogyakarta’s revolutionary character, while celebrating its Sultanate. Beyond this specific case of the reenactment of the General Offensive of March 1, this study has therefore drawn attention to a broader issue in historical reenactment studies, namely the recurring tendency of reducing reenactments to retell “history from below” (Agnew 2004, 327). Reenactment is often regarded as a participatory practice that offers a more democratic form of history-making (Agnew 2004, 335; Gapps 2010, 61). Such analyses seem to suggest that reenactments represent a people’s history, the people being here the reenactors themselves, while overlooking the conditions in which reenactments are produced and performed. Contrarily, taking a behind-the-scenes approach, I have argued that reenactments function as platforms through which historical narratives are renegotiated, while finan-

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cial dependency, prestige, and other interests are at play. And, since such interests change from time to time, what we need to remember does too, as demonstrated here by the competing narratives performed. Reenactments can and do challenge dominant histories. However, as with any representation of the past, one always has to question whose privileged voice(s) dominate. In this case, it is not the voices of the people we see: the reenactors. Rather, reenactments might tell us less about the people who actually perform them as often as expected.

Lise Zurné is a PhD candidate at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication, where she currently conducts a PhD project titled “Performing Sensitive Pasts: Exploring Historical Re-Enactments in Europe and Indonesia.” Her documentary The Feel of History (2017) has been screened at various ethnographic film festivals. She co-founded a collective of visual anthropologists called ethnovision, and works as a co-chair of the working group Safety in the Field at the LOVA network of engaged feminist anthropologists.

Notes 1. My translation from “Hari Penegakan Kedaulatan Negara Indonesia,” as presented in Margana et al. (2019). 2. The historic background of the General Offensive of March 1 draws broadly on Zurné (forthcoming). 3. Both the terms “War for Independence” and “decolonization” have been increasingly challenged. As Sukarno and Hatta proclaimed independence on August 17, 1945, the military campaigns in 1947 and 1948 by the Dutch are by many Indonesians seen as attempts to recolonize the sovereign state. In Indonesian, this period is often referred to as the Revolusi Nasional Indonesia [Indonesian National Revolution]. 4. In Dutch newsreels, these military campaigns were long described as the politionele acties [police actions]. The term, however, has been criticized as a euphemism that misleadingly qualified the offensives as having a limited and humanitarian character (Jansen Hendriks 2012, 403, 408). 5. I have analyzed the descriptions of the General Offensive in three schoolbooks: Kurnia and Suryana (2006); Sadirman and Amurwani (2014); and Habib Mustopo (2011). 6. This includes a seminar titled Peringatan 70 Tahun SU 1 Maret held at the Benteng Vredeburg (March 2, 2019) and a two-day seminar titled Jambore dan Sarasehan Kesejarahan SU 1 Maret 1949 (March 1 and March 2, 2019), at Hotel D’Senopati, Yogyakarta. 7. The group’s name uses the colonial spelling to refer to Yogyakarta. 8. Henry is not his real name. The names of most respondents have been anonymized in this chapter. 9. The Dinas Kebudayaan or Kundha Kabudayan of Special Region Yogyakarta is part of the government’s Ministry of Education and Culture.

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CHAPTER

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Memory Sites and Reenacting State Terrorism The Museum at Argentina’s Naval Mechanics School Marisa González de Oleaga

Introduction The politics of memory have become a sine qua non of the agendas of Western governments. Transitional justice, symbolic reparations, and memory transmission are some of the concepts that accompany these new trends in remembrance. In this process, the sites of traumatic events affecting the community—events necessary to remember—have gained particular prominence. Often referred to as places or sites of memory, they represent a novel combination of memory and space not seen in the past. Public policies have traditionally commemorated and emphasized sites associated with victory, not defeat. It was not until post–World War II that the places where atrocities took place began to emerge from the past as a way to take stock of the present. What can be done with an extermination camp after the fact? How can a battlefield be incorporated into a community’s historic landscape? This transformation can be achieved by resignifying these sites—for example, by turning them into spaces of memory, museums, study centers, cultural institutions, or social organizations where history can be reenacted, to list just a few examples. There appears to be a need, generally voiced by survivors and by the organizations that represent them, to not simply let bygones be bygones, to not allow these sites to be destroyed, and to preserve them as pow-

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erful documents but at the same time invalidate them as monuments. Those who promote this type of remembrance seem to suggest that, although we cannot change what happened at such sites, we can incorporate sites into our experiences and tell their stories to the generations to come in a different way. There are many possible types of resignification, myriad ways to transform places of horror into places of memory; one of these types of resignification, in my opinion, merits particular attention. I am referring to museums, to the new museums located at the sites of former atrocities whose purpose is not to display a community’s heritage but to evoke historical memory—and reenact collective memory—through the chosen space. These new museums have appeared in Europe, the Americas, and on the African continent. They include exhibitions that show the inner workings of Europe’s concentration camps; permanent expositions that re-create the prisons that existed during South African apartheid; materials on exhibit that reveal the suffering of Africans kidnapped for slavery and held on the island of Gorée, Senegal; and the museum located in what was once the Naval Mechanics School (ESMA) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In all cases, these are referred to as museums, evoking an old institution with a history of its own. Similarly, what distinguishes these institutions is the fact that they are located in the same material space—a space not created but re-created— where the acts they intend to evoke and reenact occurred. Not only will stories be told on these sites, not only will attempts be made to render a traumatic past intelligible, but also that material, symbolic space will be the showpiece. Books can provide a more detailed history of these places and the misadventures of those who once inhabited them, but these places of memory have another aim as well. A sort of phenomenology of space supports these museums that appeals to the senses, to that skin-deep memory so characteristic of our species. The aim is to convey the feeling of oppression within enclosed spaces, spaces where people were locked away; to get visitors to put their body on the line in order to reach an understanding beyond words; to transmit the heaviness in the air, the narrowness of the cots, the constant darkness, the feeling of being kidnapped and locked up. It is an experience that alters and agitates one’s own subjectivity, stripping the visitor of any sense of well-being for the duration of the visit. A sort of reenactment is thus initiated as a strategy for teaching history that places modern individuals in a simulation of past situations (Cook 2004, 487). In the words of one of the most prominent researchers on reenactments, Vanessa Agnew, this historical representation “both takes affect as its object and attempts to elicit affect” (Agnew 2007, 301; see also Agnew, this volume), and this is one of the explicit and deliberate purposes of these historical simulations (Cook 2004). When transformed into museums, memory sites allow visitors to experience state terrorism in the flesh, building an atmosphere that relays

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a sense of the victims’ suffering. Reenactments, representations that demand emotional identification with the suffering of the victims reflect the affective turn that history has taken in recent decades (Agnew 2007). The objective is to give a voice and provide symbolic reparations to those directly affected while successfully passing down memory, warning the new generations of the dangers of the past and future. In Latin America, Argentina is the country that has come the farthest in the resignification of its places of memory. More than five hundred spaces of different sorts now bear markers, though there is one in particular that has become emblematic of this reconversion. This site, the ESMA, is the topic of this chapter. Since 2015, when it was converted into a memory museum, ESMA has hosted a permanent exhibition in the main building of one of Argentina’s largest clandestine centers for detention, torture, and extermination. The site’s resignification, which continues to be a source of strife even today, aims to provide the public with an understanding of state terrorism. One of its explicit aims is to convey how average Argentines experienced the modus operandi of repression under military rule (1976–83), using emotional experiences and focusing on testimonies about daily life. The idea is to build the understanding of the past into an emancipatory force in the present. All of these features are present in the permanent ESMA exhibit. For this reason, I am interested in describing and analyzing this process of transforming a clandestine detention center, ESMA, into a museum; this transformation would lead to resignification of the space—or, more precisely, the spaces—on the school grounds that were later converted into a death camp. Through a visit and examination of this recreation, it is possible to examine how the narrative structure reflects the aims of the reenactment—in other words, symbolic reparation for victims and the intergenerational transmission of traumatic memory. Finally, I will attempt to address the principal question associated with transforming these spaces of horror: What needs to be shown at a place such as this? And what can a reenactment like this contribute to its teaching aims?

Naval Mechanics School: From Military School to Concentration Camp to Memory Site Argentina’s ESMA was founded in the 1920s to train navy cadets. It is located on a large, fenced-in property spanning seventeen hectares with more than thirty buildings in a busy area near the Buenos Aires city limit. Following the military coup of 1976, part of ESMA began to operate as a concentration camp. It is the last place where nearly five thousand of the detained or disappeared were seen alive. Approximately two hundred of those held

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at this detention center survived. The Officers’ Hall was the site where detainees were taken after being kidnapped and the point of departure for the airport, where countless victims were loaded onto planes for the so-called death flights, a euphemism for assassination. This building also served as the headquarters for the kidnapping, torture, and murder at ESMA. Soon after democracy was reinstated in 1983, a debate began on what should be done with these facilities, which had served not only as a military academy but also as a concentration camp. A series of presidential decrees were passed in an attempt to define how the space would be used. Proposals in the broad and bitter debate on what to do with ESMA ranged from demolition to an educational center and symbolic reparation. In 2004 the entire property was declared a space for memory and for the promotion and defense of human rights, and the naval school was moved to the General Belgrano Naval Base. The Argentine navy, however, did not vacate the premise until November 20, 2007. Between 2000 and 2007 human rights organizations involved in the discussion on the future of the site organized several conferences. One of these conferences entitled “Memoria Abierta, or the Museum We Want,” included presentations, work groups and discussions on what could be done there. Participants at the conferences laid out a series of questions that continue to be relevant to the Memory Museum today. The issues addressed in these early meetings can be organized according to the type of institution (e.g., museum, memory site, cultural center, agency), the aim/s of any memory-related exhibit (e.g., reparation, memory transmission, citizen building), the subjects represented there (i.e., who is given a voice, whether experts or victims), the contents (i.e., what should be shown, whether suffering, resistance, or the modus operandi of state terrorism), strategies (i.e., how to show the contents, whether through objects, testimonies, narrative histories, or traditional and nontraditional exhibit devices that replicate the experience of detainment), and the target audiences of the space (i.e., who the museum is designed for, whether youths, victims, or citizens). Although the proposals varied greatly, all participants agreed on the key points that define historical reenactments: the need to make the disappeared and their stories visible as part of restorative justice and the intention to build an emancipatory link between past and present for new generations (Agnew 2021). The Memory Site Museum opened in May 2015. The exhibit design was based on the always fragile and temporary consensuses between survivors, human rights organizations, and scholars from different disciplines. The controversy around the museum continues even today, since Argentina’s supreme court has agreed to hear the lawsuit brought by Carlos Lordkipanidse and the Association of Former Detainees-Disappeared against the opening of the site as a museum.

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The Museum and Its Narrative: An Overview The permanent exhibition at the museum was inaugurated on May 19, 2015, in accordance with Decree 1133 issued by President Cristina Kirchner. The decree, in turn, came two years after an agreement was signed by Argentina’s executive branch, the Human Rights Department at the Ministry of Justice, and the University of San Martín. According to said agreement, the state would allocate 500,000 Argentine pesos for the development of a museum in the facilities of the former ESMA. There would be no public bidding for the project, which contained a confidentiality clause. An additional obstacle to the plan related to the jurisdiction of the site would soon be resolved with the dissolution of the Instituto Espacio para la Memoria (Memory Space Institute), a bipartite agency overseen by both the municipal authorities and national government. Under a new agreement between the government and the opposition, jurisdiction of the site falls to the national government. The inauguration of the exhibit was also polemical. The Officers’ Hall is a three-story building, in addition to a basement and an attic, in the shape of a backward letter E with the longest side facing one of the city’s busiest avenues, Avenida Libertador. There are two parking lots behind the building, which has two front entrances: the main entrance with an artistic intervention, and a smaller entrance. The main entrance has been covered by panes of glass imprinted with portraits of young people who, in all probability, were among those detained and disappeared here. The exhibit is divided into stations (glass panels with texts) that are not directly related to the building’s features, but rather represent a curatorial choice: Reception; Historical Context; History of ESMA; Central Hall; Officers’ Bedrooms; Capucha (Hood); Capuchita (Little Hood); Pregnant Women Room; Lavatories; Storeroom; Pecera (Fishbowl); Los Jorges (the Jorges); the Admiral’s House; the Basement; the Transfers; the Golden Room; and Memory, Truth, and Justice Square. Named for the hoods that detainees were forced to wear over their heads at all times, Capucha was the largest area for detainees at the camp. Each detainee was assigned a cot inside a cubicle measuring one meter high, two meters long, and seventy centimeters wide. Capuchita, a smaller, L-shaped space in an attic where the building’s water tank was located, was also reserved for detainees. Pregnant women were kept in three tiny rooms until they went into labor. The storage room was used to hold the objects (furniture, home appliances, clothing) stolen from the detainees’ home at the time of their kidnapping. Pecera was a glassed-off area where some prisoners were chosen to perform slave labor. The room for the pregnant women, the storage room, and Pecera were on the third floor. Los Jorges were the offices of the task force chiefs. The area was named for the alias, Jorge, that several of the officers used. It was located

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on the main floor along with the Admiral’s House, where the school’s director lived. Also on the main floor is the Golden Room, where the closedcircuit TV system was located. This room, where many of the officers had their lockers, was where the kidnappings were planned. Navy officers slept on the first and second floors. The basement was one of the areas of the concentration camp where prisoners were taken in and out. It was a long, rectangular space divided into small rooms that had different uses over the years, including an infirmary, torture chambers, and others. This is the standard museum visit as outlined in the brochures handed out with the audio guides, the same one used by the museum guides. The curatorial approach treats each area differently. The curators have underscored the difference between the spaces reserved exclusively for the perpetrators (the Admiral’s Home, The Jorges, and the rooms where the officers slept) and the places where the victims—the detainees-disappeared—were held. The texts on the glass panels are much shorter in the spaces reserved for perpetrators than those for detainees-disappeared; they are generally located outside the spaces—in other words, at the entrance to the Admiral’s Home or outside the hallway leading to the officers’ rooms. In contrast, the areas for illegal detention, torture, and slave labor are overrun with panels, audiovisuals, and 3-D representations, making it difficult for the visitor to get a feel for the building structure and the areas where detainees were held. There is simply too much testimonial information for the visitor to absorb. On the richly detailed displays, an evidence-based narrative is crafted, one that draws on the legal proceedings that have been held in Argentina since the emblematic Trial of the Juntas in 1985. Indeed, the entire exhibit comprises evidence such as testimonies and documents about what happened at this site and insight into how state terrorism functioned. By drawing on survivors’ voices, evidence forms the backbone of the narrative and points to one—but only one—of the possible objectives of an exhibit like this one. Third, the words of the survivors are used to convey the horrific experiences they had here. No one else is asked to engage; there are no other voices. Notably, there is no reference to the political activism of those targeted by the dictatorship, and the testimonies unanimously reflect their role as victims. The exhibit is thus characterized by the overwhelming amount of information at the stations in the case of the spaces reserved for the detained-disappeared; the evidence-based narrative; and, finally, the detained-disappeared who present themselves as victims, and not as political activists. In my opinion, this third and final feature is the most troubling. The figure of the detaineedisappeared is stripped of any context here. There is mention of the Montoneros (left-wing peronist guerrilla organization), but little is said about the political ideals supported by most of the thirty thousand disappeared, or about what kind of society they were fighting to achieve. This oversight, which

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was probably intentional, is undoubtedly due to fear of reviving the wellknown theory of the two demons, which, by equating the violence waged by the state with the revolutionary violence of the 1970s, caused so much controversy in the 1990s. Yet the decision to overlook the political activism that figures importantly in this chapter in history—and the pending discussion on violence as a legitimate response of the lower classes—diminishes the exhibit’s ability to inform visitors and to tell the story in all its complexity. This is my principal objection to the narrative of the exhibit. In terms of the other issues mentioned, the excessive amount of information and the focus on evidence (a narrative motivated by the need to prove what occurred there), my objections are not directed at the narrative itself—despite the fact that other narratives, including symbolic and educative ones ( Jelin 2013), are clearly possible—but at the relationship between the evidenceheavy narrative and the Officers’ Hall, the core location in the clandestine detention and death camp.

Memory and Space: The Effects of Reenacting State Terrorism The ESMA Site Museum where this informative, evidence-based, victim narrative unfolds is not a space created after the fact to show and describe the features of government terrorism. Rather, it is the site where repression took place under the dictatorship, the very nerve center of state terrorism. The Officers’ Hall is a monument left by the perpetrators as an old emblem of horror, as well as a document, a piece of evidence, that enables justice for both victims and the community at large. One objective could be to avoid maintaining the space as a monument (like all monuments, it remains active long after the events themselves have passed) while preserving it as a powerful document, a materiality that no longer belongs to the survivors but to society as a whole and to future generations (Lord 2007). It is necessary to ask whether the narrative that currently circulates within this space is pertinent. The question is not about the truth of what is told at the exhibit or the need to recount these events: it is about the narrative’s suitability in this particular space. As the base of operations of a clandestine detention center and death camp, a site where thousands of citizens were seen for the last time, is the Officers’ Hall the right place for this overwhelmingly informative, evidencebased, victim’s narrative? The curators and other museum staff would answer affirmatively, with arguments to back their answer. In the first place, the permanent exhibition is a form of resignifying this place—that is, giving it new meaning and new uses. The slogan, “Where once there was death, now

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there is life” is repeated time and again by both government officials and the representatives of human rights organizations with offices on the ESMA grounds. Second, the open exhibition allows large groups of citizens, students, and tourists to visit the facilities. For an exhaustive look at state terrorism, these visitors can choose from a variety of options such as audio guides, personal guides, group tours, and solo tours. According to the museum’s director, Alejandra Naftal, the simulation of the horrific modus operandi of state terrorism is the principal objective of the exhibit. As the backdrop for this new historical, civic, and patriotic approach to education, what better place than the actual site of a great number of the events recounted? The Officers’ Hall, it is argued, has a certain mystique, generating (or able to generate) an atmosphere that would not be possible elsewhere (Casey 2000; Griffero and Moretti 2018). Though there is something to be said for these arguments, there are strong counterarguments as well. As the concept of resignification is frequently used in connection with places of memory, I believe it is useful to provide a brief summary of the origin and uses of the term. To resignify means to give another meaning to a place: in this case, to a site where events occurred that prove traumatic for an entire community—in other words, state repression against political dissidents. This resignification is frequently contextualized, providing some sort of explanation in an attempt to help the community understand aspects of the terror waged by the state and its connections to the historical context and to economic and political interests of those in power. This is one way to prevent the space from being monumental while conserving—not eradicating—its power as a document, its status as witness to what has occurred. Resignifying is, after all, about changing the tale that is told, and about telling a new tale that sheds light on what happened there. In the case of disappearances, this is particularly important. The ESMA is nearly one of the few material sites that can show and prove how state terrorism operated. It is a building as witness, a building where nearly five thousand detainees-disappeared were seen for the last time. And preserving that materiality is essential. Yet in addition to the material dimension of the space of the intervention in the Officers’ Hall—the building as witness—the space has an immaterial dimension, or perhaps a materiality other than that of walls and floors. I am referring to the place’s symbolic dimension, which is also essential to preserve. Though the conservation of the building itself is essential, it is not enough to maintain that symbolic dimension. There is nothing on the walls or the floor indicative of a commemoration here. As a political decision—political in the sense that it corresponds to the public sphere, but not partisan—commemoration is not something the space itself demands. Naturally, it is essential to conserve the site’s ma-

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teriality, but this alone does not suffice. While the place itself is the pièce de resistance—and fundamental for the historical reenactment—the uses given to this space are what constitute this symbolic dimension. In the myriad history of human culture, there are many examples of places that merit respect or veneration, places where only certain behaviors are acceptable and others are harshly condemned. Examples date back to the cave art of the late Stone Age and include places of worship as well as natural spaces that require conservation and protection. This ties in to the great number of visitors to the ESMA Site Museum. While the curatorial staff at the museum clearly sees this as an achievement, it is, at the very least, a disputable one. The ESMA Officers’ Hall is an exceptional place—tragically exceptional—that must be preserved as evidence for the ongoing trials against the perpetrators. However, it is also necessary to preserve the sacred nature of the place—sacred in the civic sense of the word. The fact that it is such a special place means it should be reserved for special uses. It is a special place where atrocities occurred, and the assurance that such atrocities will never again occur depends on Argentina’s citizens. The problem is that it will be enormously difficult to maintain the space’s specialness if the institutional aim is the more, the better, and as it begins to appear on the list of the not-tobe-missed destinations of dark tourism (Lennon and Foley 2000, Sion 2014). Due to its exceptional, and therefore vulnerable, status, it requires diversified uses and functions. The ESMA Officers’ Hall should not be the place where one goes to seek information on the military repression that occurred during the last dictatorship. If someone wants to learn about state terrorism, there are a range of supports that provide information; in fact, there are more than ever before in human history. Films, books, audiovisuals and 3-D recreations are a few examples, many with a high level of sophistication (Huella Digital 2018). The proposed trade-off of a constant flow of visitors in exchange for greater collective information does not even appear to yield the desired outcome. It is unlikely that the place will change the perspective of its visitors, though it appears very likely that these visitors will alter the nature—symbolic and material, in that order—of the place itself.

Reenacting the Past Through Absence Is it possible to find a satisfactory criterion for what to do at a space such as ESMA? In my view, in the case of ESMA, this exceeds the question of what (state terrorism, the experience of victims, the disappearances), whom (survivors, human rights organizations, historians, curators), and even why (reparation, transmission, construction). Rather, the criterion should be based on its exceptional nature. ESMA is not exceptional in the sense of rare—there

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are many other places across Argentina, and indeed worldwide, that were used as clandestine detention centers and death camps—but it is a place where exceptional events occurred, events we hope will never happen again. Perhaps the question is not what should be shown at the former ESMA Memory Site Museum but instead what could be offered at this place that cannot be found or replicated elsewhere. What experience can be had there and not anywhere else? A tentative answer is absence. State terrorism introduced a paradigmatic figure, that of the disappeared. It is a figure characterized by the incorporeal, by the absence of a body, by a vanishing act. This is precisely the experience of absence, the experience of one or more people missing that cannot be filled by words or explained. The experience of that absence demands bareness, emptiness, scarcity. It requires the ability to take stock of the building, feel the silence, sense the weight that lingers in the air. It also requires a certain solitude, a retreat within oneself like the retreat that people experience upon entering a sacred place. When I speak of absence, I am referring to those who are evidently not among us and to the echo of that evidence—in other words, what that absence can mean today. It is the absence of those who are no longer with us and those whose fate remains unknown, but also the absence of rights, protections, and safeguards in a state that violated all human laws and laid siege to the civil population it was expected to protect. In this way, the experience of that emptiness or absence connects past and present—a frequent topic in the discussions and demands of those involved about the resignification of ESMA and a core objective of historical reenactments—and allows questions to be formulated regarding the continuities of that past. The experience of absence in both senses, that of past and present, cannot be felt in a book, film, or virtual recreation, or at least not in the same way. It is the space rendered place that enables the “physical and psychological experience,” to borrow Vanessa Agnew’s definition of historical reenactments (Agnew 2021, 330). This is not a space that needs be created as other representations do: its mere presence—as a mute witness of that terrifying past—suffices. Entering the tiny room where the pregnant women were kept, the visitor feels cramped, and when walking beneath the beam in Sector Four, the visitor is forced to stoop to avoid hitting her head on the cement. The bareness of Capuchita is stifling and uncomfortable, generating unease. These are individual experiences that have social meaning. We can have them because we share common corporeal and emotional signifiers. When the signage in Capucha or Pecera is not too distracting, the lack of windows constricts, allowing us to feel the enclosure, the discomfort, the terror. Yet what theoretical tools are brought to bear here? How should we approach this place whose exceptional status we must guarantee both now and

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in the future? I believe that, because of its exceptional status, the place—and the uses it is given—should be treated as sacred, though the same need not apply to the narratives that circulate within. A civic sense of the sacred is a human sort of transcendental. If we do not value the ESMA as a place that transcends its own history—almost as possessed by an aura, as described by Walter Benjamin—it will be banalized, transformed into yet another spot on the dark tourism map. And in order to prevent this, it will be necessary to forgo massive numbers of visitors and think again about how to resignify the place from the perspective of emptiness.

Marisa González de Oleaga has a degree in geography and history and a PhD in contemporary history. She is full professor of social and political history and specializes in social movements at the Social History Department at the Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología, UNED. Throughout her career, she has published five books with prestigious academic publishers and a large number of articles in academic journals and collective books. Her works have dealt with various aspects of the political, economic, and cultural history of Latin America and Spain—from utopias to museum and memory site narratives. She is currently dealing with the link between memory and democracy in this specific geographical, as well as cultural, areas.

References Agnew, V. 2007. “History’s Affective Turn: Historical Reenactments and its Work in the Present.” Rethinking History 11 (3): 299–312. Agnew, V. 2004. “Introduction. What is Reenactment?”. Criticism, 46, (3): 327-339. Casey, E. 2000. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cook, A. 2004. “The Use and Abuse of Historical Reenactment: Thoughts on Recent Trends in Public History.” Criticism 46 (3): 487–96. Griffero, T., and G. Moretti, eds. 2018. Atmosphere/Atmospheres: Testing a New Paradigm. Milan: Mimesis Internacional. Huella Digital. 2018. Centros Clandestinos. Documental Interactivo, Buenos Aires. It can be consulted at http://www.centrosclandestinos.com.ar/. Jelin, E. 2013. “Memoria y Democracia: Una Relación Incierta.”Revista de Ciencia Política 51 (2): 129–44. Lennon, J., and M. Foley. 2000. Dark Tourism. The Attraction of Death and Disaster. Hampshire: Cengage Learning EMEA LTD. Lord, B. 2007. “From the Document to the Monument: Museums and the Philosophy of History.” In Museums Revolutions: How Museums Changed and Are Changed, edited by S. Knell, 355–66. London: Routledge. Memoria Abierta. 1999–2007. Pensar el Museo de la Memoria: Jornadas. Buenos Aires. Available at http://www.memoriaabierta.org.ar/jornadas.php Sion, B. 2014. Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape. London: Seagul Books.

Part IV

REENACTMENTS AS EDUCATIONAL DEVICES IN FORMAL AND INFORMAL CONTEXTS

CHAPTER

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Reenacting the Past in the School Yard Its Role of Reenactment in Civic and History Education Mario Carretero, Everardo Perez-Manjarrez, and María Rodríguez-Moneo

School Historical Reenactments: An Open Field for Exploration In several countries, historical reenactment has been a long-standing educational practice with great impact on people’s ideas of history.1 In many American countries, it has been an essential support of the school history curriculum and schools’ social purpose. As a mandatory practice, held yearly in public and private primary and secondary schools, young students recreate the official narratives of the national foundational past and the prowess of the founding heroes learned in the history classroom. Studies have shown that these school recreation hold an important controlling influence on young learners’ historical understanding (Carretero and Kriger 2006). However, this type of reenactment has not been fully explored, and nor have its broader implications. In this chapter we explore how school historical reenactments, by consistently commemorating a romantic and nationalistic past, have a lasting effect on youths’ historical thinking and civic identity development. Likewise, in our view, it also seems that this effect is navigating through the middle of the tensions between national history, historiography, and collective memory in the students’ understanding of the past. Notes for this section begin on page 145.

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Interestingly, while reviewing the current state of the art of the field, one of the most recurrent issues concerning historical reenactment is its educational dimension in terms of the interest to which the activity of reenactment may give arise. In the opinion of scholars, what appears to stand out about it is the strong and appealing learning alternative it represents to people in opposition to what conventional history learning settings have offered (de Groot 2016). Not surprisingly, historical reenactment is seen as the social response to the gap between history and the people (de Groot 2011; Gustafsson 2015). Debates come and go around the learning needs that historical reenactments apparently fulfill, from the perceived lacks left behind by formal history education, and people’s own personal questions and interest in the past, to the enthusiastic curiosity about and thirst for knowledge about some widespread chapters of history adapted in entertainment formats, such as movies and TV series about World War II. Reenactment seems to offer something akin to authenticity and real experience. Far from looking for rigorous accuracy, it enables a sense of closeness and a truely personal and collective stimulating experience of the past (Gapps 2009; Hall 2016). Reenactors and reenactment audiences believe that reenactment, although ephemeral, is a great opportunity to live the past and put themselves in someone else’s shoes. It also builds community, boosts imagination and understanding, and projects the past into the current present every time it is enacted. Ultimately, historical reenactments seemingly give access to a reality that cannot be achieved—or has not been adequately depicted—in school classrooms and conventional lectures. Recent reenactment research (Agnew, Lamb, and Tomann 2020; de Groot 2016) has asserted the significance of this sociocultural practice’s learning value, as occurs with self-teaching and meaningful learning of the past, historical consciousness development, and fostering personal sense-making and engagement with history (Pasieka 2016). From a major overhaul of reenactment studies, education is a very neglected research line from which very few but relevant efforts have been achieved. Aiming at the learning advantages and challenges of historical reenactments, “it provides” us with an initial overview of the educational features and functions of historical reenactments in instructional and noninstructional settings. These studies point out that institutional school historical reenactment initiatives, if any, are inadequate for history education, concerning the development of historical thinking and historical awareness, and are mainly oriented toward promoting national identity, patriotism, and even discrimination (Akca Berk 2012; Bery 2014; Carretero and Kriger 2011). In this sense, the efforts have mainly been concentrated on building didactic proposals for teachers, identifying structures, and implementing procedures to apply critically historical reenactments in the classrooms (Akca Berk 2013; Bery 2014; Dozono 2016; Morris 2001).

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In brief, some of these studies argue that school historical reenactment can promote historical thinking skills and historical concepts. Exposure to and participation in these historical simulations may foster the skills of comparing views among cultures, and developing decision-making and perspective-taking by the exposure to multiple voices around a given historical fact (Morris 2012). Of special attention is the narrative form underlying historical reenactment—that is, storytelling. It is stated that reenactment’s storytelling fosters understanding of the broad context as well as of the self; in this sense, it is suggested that historical reenactment would have important implications in students’ identity construction, cognitive development, and the growth of prosocial abilities such as problem solving (Morris 2012). The outlook that these incipient studies portray may look promising, but it is far from been consistently sustained. At heart, most of these studies are still very instrumental-oriented and provide very little data and analysis to support these claims. In order to fully understand the reach of historical reenactment in historical thinking development, it is necessary to address some debates in history education and the place of performativity in it. Anyway, as will be shown below, the main working hypothesis of this chapter is that most school historical reenactments are a cultural tool to develop patriotism in such a way that they do not allow a complex historical understanding even though they probably contribute to the enhancement of social and civic cohesion. Nevertheless, it is also very debatable that this cohesion is inclusive and reflexive.

History Teaching: Educational Goals, Tensions, and Performativity School historical reenactments have been part of history educational practices since the very beginning of this school subject matter. Because of this, it makes sense to consider which are and have been the main objectives of school history. Traditionally, history education, in the broadest sense, has served one or the other of two simultaneous objectives, which we might term “enlightened” and “romantic” (Carretero 2011, 6); the former term relates to the emergence of a critical understanding of the past and the latter term relates to fostering in citizens an emotional identification with and attachment to their own national or cultural community. The beginnings of history as a curricular subject in schools were very much in the service of this second objective. As analyzed elsewhere (Carretero and Bermudez 2012) the romantic goals held exclusive predominance in national education systems from their inception at the end of the nineteenth century until approximately the 1970s. Recent historiography (Berger 2012) has identified,

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as the central motivation behind this emphasis on patriotism and national identification, a need for the construction of national identities as a narrative support to nation-states (Anderson 2006). Since the 1970s, numerous countries have effected marked changes to their school history curricula, incorporating current approaches from the social sciences and particularly from contemporary historiography. In this vein, educational initiatives involving the idea of historical concepts and historical thinking have undergone an important development (Wineburg 2001). In numerous societies, however, the content of school history remains fundamentally romantic in the sense of being strongly nationalistic or indeed blindly patriotic (Carretero 2011; Seixas 2017). In fact, the past two decades have seen a degree of renaissance in nationalistically oriented history curricula. Current tensions between nationalism and globalization are likely to be influential in these developments (Carretero 2017a). We note the conundrum inherent in what we have defined as romantic representations of history. There is little basis or support in historiography for these romantic representations, which instead are effectively founded on national myths of origin; yet they play a powerful role in maintaining social cohesion among citizens and therefore national self-definition and selfperception. In other words, this romantic content, implicitly or explicitly, continues to undergird the construction and maintenance of national and societal identities. Its impact is particularly evident when we examine the informal devices of history education (as opposed to formal, school-based learning), such as commemorative events, historical reenactments, TV series, and similar cultural productions. Interestingly, several of these practices have a significant performative component, whose implications, in terms of social and cognitive psychology, research to date has been overlooked. This performative component is of decisive significance because of the potential momentum it lends to the internalization as lived experience of events that might have been communicated to citizens in the context of formal history education; put differently, it has the capacity to bridge the experiential gap between the formal and the informal. Studies on formal history education generally engage with institutionalized practices in schools, largely based on national curricula, and in institutions of higher education. Work on informal history education, by contrast, explores engagement generated via out-of-school settings, such as reenactments, films, theater, and museum-based learning, and other activities relating to historical memory. While history as a school subject has traditionally been associated with a lack of student interest (“History is boring”), informal historical activities have exercised great and broad appeal in recent years, to both students and adult citizens. This may be due to the

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engagement generated by the practice of revisiting or restaging the past in the form of narratives like those reproduced in films, plays, and similar dramatizations. Performances and reenactments bring history to life, creating phenomenological experiences that likely exert a significant influence on people’s ideas of the past (de Groot 2011), generating a singular sense of reality and unfolding, by the way of the affective turn (McCalman and Pickering 2010), a significant and durable impact on citizens’ representations of historical events (Coles and Armstrong 2018). It is not by chance that some heavily visited sites of historical importance and memory are called living history sites in various countries. The voices heard at those sites could impact ours. Within this context, it is somewhat regretful that practices of historical reenactment in schools have received little attention in research to date. This dearth is particularly noticeable with regard to empirical educational or psychological studies. In our view, this lack of interest stems from the function of such reenactment practices as vehicles for national master narratives; in conveying the traditional accounts of the past that contain national communities’ myths of origin, they take firm root as believable and believed narrations in the minds of citizens, social sciences included; in other words, the narratives thus reproduced stand as unquestioned and foundational entities without the capacity to become objects of research by appearing to be something questionable. This points to a link between the reenactment format and the historical master narrative, in its capacity as a comprehensive explanation that determines how the past is understood and memorialized in a specific context, and is key to community-building and individual identity (Wertsch and Rozin 2000). Because national master narratives are a cultural production that navigates between historiography and collective memory, let us examine some issues about how memory processes work in both individuals and societies.

Reenactment, History, and Memory Piaget, the great researcher of cognitive development, and a pioneer in studying how children understand heritage (Piaget 1933), provided us with a fascinating personal anecdote about how way memory works, which may be very counterintuitive. He described an episode that happened when he was a small child while being cared for by a nurse: he had clear memories of being kidnapped by criminals, and then being rescued. Of course, it was a traumatic event occupying an important place in his memories. However, much later, when that nurse was very old and close to death, she confessed

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that the crime never occurred, and that it was something she had invented because she was not taking proper care of the young Piaget. After learning this information, Piaget wondered how it was possible that he had remembered so clearly this false event for so many years. Thus, Piaget presented this example as a clear case of the constructive nature of human memory. This is to say, something that is invented by somebody who then presents it verbally to children, becomes real and, consequently, becomes part of the children’s memories during their life span. In sum, something that never happened became finally a true part of the past. As a matter of fact, present experimental research on memory has documented that a number of our memories cannot be trusted because they may be either explicitly or implicitly induced by specific persons or circumstances, but that they really never happened (Carretero and Solcoff 2013; Sacks 2013). In this vein, this type of mnemonic device in the case of individual memories has a parallel form in collective memories. Thus, research on social psychology and collective memory has stressed the importance of perceptions of history in the emergence of national identity (Reicher and Hopkins 2001). The content of collective memory (Halbwachs 1925/1992; Psaltis, Carretero, and Cˇehajic´-Clancy 2017), transmitted from one generation to another, is a set of collective constructs that, acting within a given society, defines rights and obligations, legitimizes political consensus, and determines “right” and “wrong” individual and collective actions in accordance with past historical experience (Páez, Bobowik, and Liu 2017; Sibley, Liu, Duckitt, and Khan 2008). These findings are consistent with theories of social identity and cognition that postulate that people who define themselves in terms of their membership of a specific group are motivated to evaluate that group positively. This national identification serves as a link between individual self-esteem and collective in-group esteem, and establishes a cultural continuity between past and present (Carretero 2011, 2017b). The result is generally a simplified understanding of history that is skewed favorably toward one’s national group and tends toward exclusion of the other (Barreiro, Wainryb, and Carretero 2016). Parallel empirical cognitive studies in Spain and Argentina (Carretero and van Alphen 2014; Lopez, Carretero and Rodríguez Moneo 2015; van Alphen and Carretero, 2015) have found identification of individuals with their own national group to be a firmly rooted dimension in the historical master narratives around the attainment of national independence espoused by high school and university students. Research has likewise found the exclusion of an antagonist group—indigenous people in the case of Argentina (Carretero and Kriger 2011) and Muslims in the case of Spain (Lopez, Carretero, and Rodríguez Moneo 2015)—to be a feature of this conception of history. These romantic and essentialist narratives, then, appear to remain active and virulent despite

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the influence of the enlightened paradigm in formal learning. We can see this also present in and out of school historical reenactments.

School Historical Reenactments, Civic Education, and Commemoration The recent social and research boom of reenactment may lead to confusion about its novelty, but in fact this sociocultural practice has a long history inside society and academia, especially with regard to education. Bringing history to life and celebrate it has been a very common practice in the history of nation-states around the world. In this sense, reenactment is part of a broader sociocultural phenomenon: heritage and commemoration. Many nation-states have formalized the memorialization of history as an institutionalized practice in the form of public civic commemoration and through the school curriculum. The most recent example is France, which, in the context of the bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989, formalized the commemoration of this country’s keystone historical event (Rabotnikof 2009). For some scholars (Nora 1992) this event was the starting point of commemoration as an independent area of study that analyzes the memorialization of the past as an act of performance and public memory, and as a civic ritual. In addition, there is evidence that the remembrance of foundational historical events through civic commemorations and school reenactments have a long history, especially in the Americas. In the United States, reenactments of the Civil War took place event before that war ended, as a way to remember those lost on the battlefield (Lee Hadden 1999). The celebration of national holidays in schools was introduced at the end of the nineteenth century in Latin America and still rules the school calendar in many countries of the region (Carretero and Kriger 2008). The ties between historical reenactments, formal school history, and civic education have historically been strong. The inclusion of citizenship and history in national school curricula in the late nineteenth century sought to strengthen the roots of the nation among youths. Civic education would provide the social skills and knowledge to participate in and interact with others in society, while history education would offer the symbolic contents to foster community building through a compelling national historical narrative of a common past (Carretero 2011; Levstik and Barton 2008; PerezManjarrez and Carretero 2021). The main goal of both school subjects is to inculcate in students a sense of belonging and common values through curricular content and participation in civic celebrations. In this context, these extracurricular activities, such as theater, folk festivals, and regional festivities, allow the connection of cognition and subjectivity—that is, they enable

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educators to blend school content, national identity and values, community’s sensitivities, and students’ knowledge and emotions. Throughout the twentieth century, school civic celebrations have also allowed nation-states to bring different ethnic populations together and reconcile regional identities and cultures into one common national identity (Carretero and Kriger 2011; Westheimer 2007). Civic commemorations stand out among school civic celebrations. These commemorations are at the core of school curriculum, regulate school calendars, and are performed at all the mandatory school levels; they have been adapted to the different changes, academic and social, in different contexts, especially in the Americas. Historical reenactment underlies civic commemorations and has been one of the most effective informal didactic resources for history learning and civic identity development in schools, with far-reaching influence oon people’s historical representations, from childhood to adulthood (Carretero 2011; Morgan 1998). As is true of many other historical reenactments, school reenactments commemorate those crucial episodes in the nation’s history—primarily focusing on birth, independence, and revolution (Daugbjerg 2014). They not only evoke the moment but also the symbolic baggage of the event; facts and names mix with vivid sensations, heroic military prowess, memorable speeches, and great achievements that give a community unity, pride, and hope. School historical reenactments establish crucial social relations: the personal and the collective, the private and the public, the past with the present. They also interconnect three contesting ways of making sense of the past: academic history, memory, and commemoration. The following analysis of the case of Argentina, in fact very similar to other American countries, perfectly summarizes all the above mentioned.

Historical Origins of the Argentinean School Reenactments The celebration of patriotic holidays in Argentina was originally military: it was all about parades ending with singing “Te Deum” in the cathedral of Buenos Aires. Later on, reenactments were linked to childhood and schools, where they stayed. Bertoni (2001) points out that national holidays with a school format seemingly emerged from a fortunate inspiration by the young school Principal Pablo Pizzurno in 1887, on the occasion of celebrating an anniversary of the May revolution, commemorating the pre-independence of Argentina, which took place on May 25, 1810. According to the newspaper La Prensa at the time, “[Pizzurno] complied with that civic duty to patriotism on the 24th. He assembled the students and explained to them the glorious event the motherland was celebrating that day. . . . He led them at once to the schoolyard, where he had raised the national flag, before which

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the children recited patriotic verses . . . then everyone sang the national anthem. . . . The ceremony was truly beautiful. . . . Mister Pizzurno is worthy of special praise for his fortunate inspiration” (La Prensa, May 25, 1887, cit. by Bertoni 2001, 79). Before that time, such celebrations had not been a regular activity in the school calendar, nor had raising the flag, which would later become an everyday ritual that persists to the present day. Bertoni’s work accounts for the displacement of these holidays’ stages and tone; although traditionally they had had a popular character, they evolved to make part of a new patriotic tradition within a pedagogic project that replicated the European model and revealed a clear intervention by the state in the nation’s historical and monumental invention. The official appropriation of celebrations that used to have a popular and village-like appearance changed its focus, from the public place to the state. This process had two central mediating institutions: the army and the school. The school, in turn, joined those celebrations two months after Pizzurno’s initiative. The alliance among school, state, and army was thus consolidated, as the national sentiment crystallized in the militarized image of childhood, where students—in uniform and armed as soldiers next to the army corps—were organized as the appraised school battalions, which “had the virtue of generating popular enthusiasm and patriotic adherence in society at large, while they allowed for the children’s patriotic education” ( Bertoni 2001, 86). It is important to mention also that one of the main objectives of Pizzurno inventing these patriotic school celebrations was to build a durable and consistent Argentinean national identity that did not exist at that moment. This identity was constructed as a rival to the European identities of the numerous immigrants. This is to say, Argentina was receiving at the end of the nineteenth century an enormous number of immigrants, mostly from Italy and other European countries, and these citizens used to celebrate their own national holidays; this was an obstacle to them adopting a new national and cultural identity. Pizzurno was very aware of this challenge and he tried to generate a festivity, along with its rituals, myths, heroes, and stories that could be common to all the new citizens, independently of their cultural origins. This strategy was very much in line with the classical contribution of public-school systems to the construction of contemporary national-states. In fact, Argentina started to build in those years a very powerful national educational system developing important public investments in education; one reason for the growth was that the country had an impressive growth compared not only with other American countries but also with any other nation in the world. Therefore, the idea of introducing historical reenactments into school was very effective because most children attended schools.

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Master Narratives and Schools’ Historical Reenactments School historical reenactment’s structure is mainly comprised by three stages: (a) the ceremonial, dedicated to the cult of national symbols; (b) the discursive, in which the teachers or directors narrate the historical story commemorated by the anniversary and confirm its validity in the present; and (c) the expressive, in which the students perform some artistic representation, usually theatrical, in reference to the events of the past that are remembered (Carretero 2011). Over time reenactments were instituted as a key moment of convergence between the state and civil society (represented by the schools and parents, respectively), and also as a symbolic act of confirmation, in which the traditional repertoire of images and values from official history is transmitted to the new generations to create a civic identity based on patriotism (Carretero 2018). These three stages are very common to many nations and very often have a military flavor. For example, they can be observed at numerous reenactments of the United States’ living history sites or at national museums such as the one in Gdansk, Poland. In this chapter we will focus on the relationship between the two last stages—discursive and expressive—and the structure of the national master narratives, which are the basic content included in these school reenactments, and which definitely have numerous similarities with religious ceremonies. It is well known how numerous nations incorporate liturgical elements from religion, mostly at the initial moments of their construction processes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (see, e.g., the importance of political catechisms in Latin America at Banrepcultural. n.d.). Often overlapping with the official histories of nations, such narratives are, in essence, a cultural tool that forges a community of shared understanding and cohesion by promulgating a global interpretation of the past, offering to those who buy into it a sense of heritage and belonging, as well as prospects for the future (Wertsch 2018). Like the essential features of master narratives, the school-based reenactment practices explored in our research have remained fundamentally the same, in terms of their content and educational functions; since their creation at the end of the nineteenth century, drawing substantially on one single idealized version of the past, regardless of the varying age groups, cultural differences, and possibly diverse historical views among the cohorts they address (Carretero 2011). In a school-based reenactment, then, students are effectively following a closed, dramatized ritual that presents a monolithic account of the nation and affords them very little opportunity to generate an alternative script or enter into dialogue; the narrative is univocal and we may read in many instances the voice as that of the nation-state concerned. We have studied these issues through both observational methods and semi-structured interviews in the case of Argen-

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tina (Carretero and Kriger 2008, 2011), but we think most of our findings and conclusions could be applied to numerous countries, particularly on the American continent. In this vein, we think the discursive structure that appears most often in these school reenactments has the dimensions described below. It is highly plausible that a number of specific differences could be found if specific school reenactment practices in different contexts would be compared—for example, urban versus rural schools. In this occasion we just are presenting the general features that could be used for future empirical and detailed comparative work. These dimensions were found in the historical discourse of the Argentinean school reenactments, and are based on our theoretical and empirical work about how high school Argentinean students represent national master narratives (Carretero and van Alphen 2014). Thus, our working hypothesis is that experiences of historical reenactment, repeated year after year since the students were six years old, or even younger, in and out of school, constitute the most important discursive background for master narratives representations. Thus, school reenactments do not change much across students’ ages and, interestingly, these commemorations have not changed much across generations, either. But it is not the case that history curriculum contents have changed across decades. In sum, the romantic component of school history has remained very stable, which has these discursive dimensions: (1) historical subject, (2) identification process, (3) monocausal and simplistic cause, (4) moral dimension, and (5) history of heroes. Historical Subject Who is the historical subject mentioned in the teachers’ discourses and the students’ dramatizations of the independence of Argentina in 1810? As can be easily imagined, the subject is the Argentinean people. And this characterization can be found in school reenactments in any school grade, from first to twelfth grades. It is established in opposition to an antagonist historical subject: the Spaniards as colonizers. In other words, the historical subject is established in terms of inclusion and exclusion, radically opposing it to others and as a coherent and homogeneous group. Therefore, the establishment of the nation is based on a preexistent and everlasting historical subject. Of course, this determines the main voice of the narrative of the school reenactment itself. But the historiographical research has shown that the Argentinean people was not really established as such historical subject by 1810 (Chiaramonte 2000), but rather several decades later. Thus, in the territory that today is Argentina at least three different types of social and cultural identities could be found—the porteña, related to Buenos Aires as a capital city, the American, and the Spanish—and really the Argentinean

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national identity was a consequence of the political events between 1810 and 1860, aproximately. Therefore, in the historical discourse presented by school reenactments the historical subject is not seen as a result of a number of changes across time, but as something prior to those historical transformations. In other words, this historical subject is in fact an essentialist and nonhistorical subject based on a process of continuity between the past and the present. Besides this continuity, citizens tend to see the historical subject as homogenous instead of heterogeneous. This is to say all the members of this imagined national community (Anderson 2006) are seen as a prototypical part of it instead of considering the possibility of different and heterogeneous groups of nationals. In this vein, this historical subject is also imagined through a logical operation based on the distinction between exclusion and inclusion, “us” and “them.” This logical operation is performed in such a way that any positive aspects will be almost always assigned to the national “we,” and any controversial or negative aspects will be assigned to “them” (Todorov 1998). Identification Process It is rather clear that the school reenactment is making a fundamental contribution to this process by attaching personal affection and value judgments to the unification and opposition mentioned above. A shared identity—a timeless national identity—between the present storyteller and the past historical subject is being established through these performances at very early ages, being precisely this precocity one of its characteristics. Of course, the idea of continuity mentioned above is also related to this identification feature, which is adding very intense emotional ties. This implies that the students not only acquire a historical misconception about their national origin but also embraces this misconception as an emotional tie. Thus, this identification process operates as a cognitive and affective anchor. Nationalism is such a powerful cultural tool precisely because it stems from this cognitive and affective identification process. As different works have shown (Barrett and Buchanan-Barrow 2005), a distinction between the national “we” and the other “them” is already mastered by children between approximately six and eight years of age, but that distinction is more likely based on emotional and affective features than on cognitive ones. Monocausal and Simplistic Cause Why did independence take place? The historical events presented by the school reenactment narrative are usually simplified around one common narrative theme, such as the search for freedom or territory. It is a monocausal explanation instead of being multicausal as most sophisticated historical explanations are. In comparison with the previous two dimensions, this

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explanation considers only the freedom of a specific group: the freedom of the Argentinean people. The narrative tends to minimize, or even negate, the right to freedom of additional and of other possible subjects, such as the Indigenous people, slaves, or women. Moreover, of course, it also avoids mentioning frequent conflicts among them. Moral Dimension This dimension is particularly obvious and important because school historical reenactments are in close connection with other patriotic performances, such as the Pledge of Allegiance and similar rituals in relation to the national flag, which are so common in numerous countries. As a matter of fact, students, parents, and teachers, and the whole educational system, consider all of them as parts of the construction process of patriotic citizens. In the case of Argentina, this pledge is a mandatory ceremony at the early age of fourth grade. As is well known, the development of loyalty to the nation among future citizens is the basic objective of these activities. And that loyalty implies, by definition, a moral dimension that contributes largely to the distinction between the in-group and the out-group. Interestingly, whereas this loyalty is conceived in relation with the future, on the contrary the main content of historical reenactments is about the past. This apparent paradox could be explained in terms of how an imagined past, as described in our analysis of previous dimensions, is being used to establish a meaningful relationship of continuity among past, present, and future (Carretero 2018). In other words, school historical reenactments provide, via a performative experience, the myth of origin, which is the main support of the future loyalty of the citizens. History of Heroes This dimension is very much related to the previous ones because the main characters of school reenactments are precisely heroic figures such as founding fathers. In the case of Argentina, these characters have been assigned additional days in the national calendar aside from when commemorations take place in the schools. Thus, the day to remember the main national founding father, the leader of the military campaigns of the independence, General J. San Martin, is celebrated in and out of the schools on August 17; and on June 20, the National Flag Day is associated with General Belgrano who is also commemorated that day. In all these cases, their life is basically presented through dramatizations focused on their particular heroic role. But very often, the complex historical scenario where their life and actions took place is omitted. In other words, school historical reenactments, in general, emphasize a view of the past that is mostly based on the particular influence of specific individuals instead of presenting more-general and more-structural social and political causes.

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Discussion Historical reenactment is gaining momentum in different academic circles. Historians, anthropologists, cultural managers, and even business people are turning their attention toward this cultural phenomenon (de Groot 2016). There is now an important body of studies reflecting on its definition, characteristics, participants, and sociocultural implications. It has also been pursued to exploit the growing interest in historical reenactments aimed at developing formal didactic proposals for the school. Few studies have undertaken this endeavor using historical reenactment as a tool to promote empathy, an understanding of causality, and historical time among young learners (Morris 2012). However, as we exposed in this chapter, two main strands have been overlooked from the discussion: the educational implications and the narrative composition of historical reenactment. School historical reenactment has been a regular mechanism used to instill national belonging among youths in Western and non-Western countries. Foundational events and historical characters are reenacted by students who, in many cases, have not even been taught official history. In regions such as Latin America, school historical reenactments structure school calendars, determining the ways students experience compulsory schooling, identity, and history, as well as social relationships. However, little attention has been paid to the cognitive, identity, and civic consequences for young learners experiencing this standardized dramatization of the past. Examining its role and characteristics appears necessary, in a context of current popularization and growing theoretical debates on this phenomenon. Ultimately, historical reenactment has become as a new way to truly experience and to gain meaningful knowledge of the past, while interacting with national history. The success of historical reenactment seemingly relies on the material and symbolic vehicles this provides to engage with history and on the tale-like adaptation of historical master narratives that make a true experience of the past possible. Still, we are far from having a full understanding of this vibrant cultural experience, its components, its social implications, and its scope in terms of historical thinking and historical consciousness enhancement. There are various aspects of historical reenactment about which we still have questions: Is the historical reenactment an alternative response or a continuation of national traditional historiography? What are the connections with school history? What are its main characteristics of historical reenactments’ narratives? Does historical reenactment foster or inhibit individuals’ complex historical thinking development? What implications does it have for people’s civic engagement? Can it help societies to deal with troubled pasts and overcome traumas? New research is necessary

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to answer all these questions, and it is hoped that this chapter will provide motivation for new studies in those directions.

Mario Carretero is professor at Autónoma University of Madrid, Spain, where he was dean of the Faculty of Psychology, and researcher at FLACSO, Argentina. He has carried out extensive research on history education and received the Guggenheim Fellowship to work on the construction of national identities. His last two books are Palgrave Handbook of Research in Historical Culture and Education (2017, coedited) and History Education in the Digital Age (2022, coedited). His work has been translated to Portuguese, Japanese and Euzkera. Everardo Perez-Manjarrez (PhD in education) is a researcher at the National University of Distance Education (Spain), and a visiting scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He investigates the intersections between citizenship and history in education. He has been recently analyzing alternative ways of history production and consumption in digital platforms, historical reenactments, and civic commemorations, and the impact of these alternative historical narratives on people’s civic engagement. His research is based on qualitative methodologies, especially narrative discourse analysis and positioning analysis. His recent publications include two articles, “Facing History: Positioning and Identity Negotiation in Adolescents’ Narratives of Controversial History” (Qualitative Psychology, 2019) and “‘Pragmatic, Complacent, Critical-Cynical or Empathetic? Youth Civic Engagement as Social Appraisal (Teachers College Record, 2021). María Rodríguez-Moneo is associate professor at the Department of Psychology and Director of the University Institute of Educational Sciences (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid). Her research focuses on history education, self-regulated learning, and teacher training. She has a chapter (“Concept Acquisition and Conceptual Change in History”) in the Palgrave Handbook of Research in Historical Culture and Education (2017). Her latest paper in history is “Historical Borders and Maps as Symbolic Supporters of Master Narratives” (2020), and her latest book is Formación Permanente del Profesorado (in-service teacher training) (2020).

Notes 1. This chapter was made possible by the contribution of Projects RTI-2018-88239 (MINECOFEDER-Spain) and PICT-2019-02477 (ANPCYT, Argentina), coordinated by

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the first author and a research grant form the National Council on Science and Technology of Mexico (CONACYT, Mexico) awarded to the second author. We would like also to express our gratitude to M. Gonzalez de Oleaga, M. Cantabrana, and C. Parellada for their valuable comments.

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Carretero, M., and M. Kriger. 2008. “Narrativas Históricas y Construcción de la Identidad Nacional. Representaciones de Alumnos Argentinos sobre el “Descubrimiento” de América.” Culture and Education. Cultura y Educación 20 (2): 229–42. Carretero, M., and M. Kriger. 2011. “Historical Representations and Conflicts about Indigenous People as National Identities.” Culture and Psychology 17 (2): 177–95. Carretero, M., and K. Solcoff. 2012. “Commentary on Brockmeier’s Remapping Memory: The Relation between Past, Present and Future as a Metaphor of Memory.” Culture and Psychology 18 (1): 14–22. Carretero, M., and F. van Alphen. 2014. “Do Master Narratives Change Among High School Students? A Characterization of How National History Is Represented.” Cognition and Instruction 32 (3): 290–312. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07370008 .2014.919298 Chiaramonte J.C. 2000. Nacionalismo y liberalismo económicos en Argentina, 1860-1880. Buenos Aires: CUSP/EDHAS Coles, J., and P. Armstrong. 2018. “Living History: Learning Through Re-Enactment.” In Whither Adult Education in the Learning Paradigm?, edited by L. Crowther, V. Edwards, V. Galloway, M. Shaw, and L. Tett, 126–33. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh. Daugbjerg, M. 2014. “Patchworking the Past: Materiality, Touch and the Assembling of “Experience” in American Civil War Re-Enactment.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 20 (7–8): 724–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2013.848820 de Groot, J. 2011. “Affect and Empathy: Re-Enactment and Performance as/in History.” Rethinking History 15 (4): 587–99. de Groot, J. 2016. Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture (second edition). London: Rouledge. Dozono, T. 2016. “Historical Experience and the Haitian Revolution in the History Classroom.” Social Studies 107 (1): 38–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/00377996.2015.1104285 Gapps, S. 2009. “Mobile Monuments: A View of Historical Reenactment and Authenticity from Inside the Costume Cupboard of History.” Rethinking History 13 (3): 395–409. https://doi.org/10.1080/13642520903091159 Gustafsson Chorell, T. 2015. “Desire for the Past?” Rethinking History 19 (4): 569–82. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2015.1004879 Halbwachs, M. 1925/1992. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hall, G. 2016. “Selective Authenticity: Civil War Reenactors and Credible Reenactments.” Journal of Historical Sociology 29 (3): 413–36. https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12089 Lee Hadden, R., ed. 1999. Reliving the Civil War: A Reenactor’s Handbook. Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania: Stackpole Books. Levstik, L., and K. Barton. 2008. Researching History Education: Theory, Method and Context. New York: Routdledge. Lopez, C., M. Carretero, and M. Rodríguez Moneo. 2015. “Conquest or Reconquest? Students’ Conceptions of Nation Embedded in a Historical Narrative.” Journal of the Learning Sciences 24 (2): 252–85. McCalman, I., and P.A. Pickering, eds. 2010. Historical Reenactment From Realism to the Affective Turn. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Morgan. 1998. “Memory and the Merchants: Commemoration and Civic Identity.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 4 (2): 103–13. Morris, R.V. 2001. “How Teachers Can Conduct Historical Reenactments in Their Own Schools.” Childhood Education 77 (4): 196–203. Morris, R.V. 2012. History and Imagination. Reenactments for Elementary Social Studies. Lanham: Rowman and Litllefield Education. Nora, P., ed. 1992. L’Ère de la Conmémoration, les Lieux de Mémoire (Vol. 3), Paris: Gallimard. Páez, D., M. Bobowik, and J. Liu. 2017. “Social Representations Concepts of the Past and Competences in History Education.” In Palgrave Handbook of Research in Historical Culture

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and Education, edited by M. Carretero, S. Berger and M. Grever, 491–510. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pasieka, A. 2016. “Reenacting Ethnic Cleansing: People’s History and Elitist Vationalism in Contemporary Poland.” Nations and Nationalism 22 (1): 63–83. https://doi.org/10.1111/ nana.12113 Perez-Manjarrez, E., and M. Carretero. 2021. “Key Aspects of Citizenship and the Intersections with History.” In Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350970809.006 Piaget, J. 1933. “Psychologie de l’Enfant et Enseignement de l’Histoire.” Bulletin Trimestriel de la Conférence Intemationale pour l’Enseignement de l’Histoire 2: 8–13. Psaltis, C., M. Carretero, and S. Cˇehajic´-Clancy. 2017. History Education and Conflict Transformation. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rabotnikof, N. 2009. “Política y Tiempo: Pensar la Conmemoración.” Sociohistorica 26: 179–212. Reicher, R., and N. Hopkins. 2001. “Psychology and the End of History: A Critique and a Proposal for the Psychology of Social Categorization.” Political Psychology 22 (2): 383–407. Sacks, O. 2013. “Speak, Memory.” The New York Review, Februay 21 2013. https://www .nybooks.com/articles/2013/02/21/speak-memory/ Seixas, P. 2017. A model of historical thinking. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(6), 593-605. Sibley, C., J. Liu, J. Duckitt, and S. Khan. 2008. “Social Representations of History and the Legitimation of Social Inequality: The Form and Function of Historical Negation.” European Journal of Social Psychology 38 (3): 542–65. Todorov, T. 1998. On human diversity: Nationalism, racism, and exoticism in French thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. French van Alphen, F., and M. Carretero. 2015. “The Construction of the Relation between National Past and Present in the Appropriation of Historical Master Narratives.” Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 49 (3): 512–30. Wertsch, J.V. 2018. “National Memory and Where to Find It.” In Handbook of Culture and Memory, edited by B. Wagoner, 259–83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wertsch, J.V., and M. Rozin. 2000. “The Russian Revolution: Official and Unofficial Accounts.” In J.F. Voss, and M. Carretero, Learning and Reasoning in History: International Review of History Education, 39–60. London: Routledge. Westheimer, J., ed. 2007. Pledging allegiance: The Politics of Patriotism in America’s Schools. New York: Teachers College Press. Wineburg, S. 2001. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

CHAPTER

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Inside Historical Reenactment Tyson Retz

Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Introduction Nietzsche’s 1874 essay On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life struck a devastating blow against the asceticism of the newly born race of eunuchs laboring in the archive to discover historical facts. “We need history,” Nietzsche affirmed, “but we need it for reasons different from those for which the idler in the garden of knowledge needs it. . . . We want to serve history only to the extent that history serves life” (Nietzsche 1874/1997, 59). He warned that the ascetic values at the heart of Europe’s burgeoning historical culture were in fact signs of a “consumptive historical fever” whose sufferers had turned away from life and action and found comfort in amassing trivialities from the “great historical world-harem” (84). Half a century later, two novels offered a haunting vision of humanity’s coming cultural decline. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) depicted a world overcome by an external oppressor. His fear were the tyrants who would outlaw books, withhold information from us and conceal the truth from us. Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) painted no less dark a picture, but humanity this time would need no external oppressor—we ourselves would bring about our own destruction. We would not be deprived of informa-

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tion. We would be drowned in information and reduced to apathy and egoism. We would not have the truth withheld from us. Submerged in an ocean of irrelevancies, we would no longer be able to recognize the truth, or worse, we would no longer care about the truth. The liberals and rationalists ever on guard to oppose tyranny would fail, as Huxley put it in Brave New World Revisited, “to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions” (Huxley 1984, 279). Apart from a few bad apples, Nietzsche’s historical eunuchs have died out and today we like to congratulate ourselves that history serves our varied social, cultural, political and ethical purposes. Few historians nowadays would regard themselves as enjoying a singular authority to report on the past as it actually happened. History’s quintessentially porous disciplinary borders have long permitted entry to the score of theories and methodologies that define in all their diversity the humanities and social sciences, and a large-scale democratization of the past since at least the 1960s has produced no shortage of voices expressing credible historical accounts and counternarratives. Previous historical cultures appear slight in comparison with the current ethos of cooperation between disciplines and inclusion within historical studies of popular forms of engaging with the past and the industries accompanying them. The so-called affective turn in the theory and practice of historical reenactment encapsulates part of the modern-day confidence that we have reinjected the blood back into historical practice. Vanessa Agnew (2004, 2007) has led much of the discussion in placing reenactment at the center of a movement to democratize historical knowledge, to multiply beyond the academy the sites of historical production, the better to foster conjectural and provisional interpretations of the past holding emancipatory potential. Reenactment is a “form of affective history” that “both takes affect as its object and attempts to elicit affect” (Agnew 2007, 301). Iain McCalman and Paul Pickering (2010, 3) observe that “reenactment in some variant has become the most widely consumed form of popular history,” an appetite that Maja Mikula (2015, 585) attributes to a preference in contemporary society for immediacy and personal experience. Indeed, as the editors of a reenactment book series state at the outset, common to all forms of historical reenactment “is an attention to the details of physical, emotional and psychological experience rather than the sweep of largescale historical processes or structures” (Agnew, Lamb, and McCalman 2010). Nietzsche would have to approve that reenactment is history in the service of life. Or would he? Even if we grant that historical reenactment is more visceral, immediate and creative than the detached mode of historical reflection that Nietzsche condemned, these features alone do not transform the past into a productive field for self-knowledge and historical meaning-making.

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The problem is that the changing and dynamic inner historical structures that give human life its historical character are overlooked in place of their outward expression in psychological experience. In the language of two of Nietzsche’s types of history, historical reenactment appears to commit the monumental error of celebrating effects (or rather affects) and ignoring causes, and the widely acknowledged “authenticity fetishism” of its devotees fussing over the accuracy of their clothing and objects gives it a decidedly antiquarian complexion. McCalman and Pickering (2010, 1) describe vividly how material authenticity among hardcore reenactors can be seen as narrowing the gap between past and present, “as if counting the stitches on a tunic or soaking leather in urine is a way to experience what it felt like to live in the past.” As Stephen Gapps (2009, 396) has remarked, some reenactors are in danger of crossing the line separating an “authenticity fetishist” from an “authenticity fascist.” It is difficult to appreciate reenactment’s full potential as an exercise in historical meaning-making when, first, visible effects enjoy status over harder-to-detect causes, and second, when a chief concern remains achieving material correspondence with a supposed past reality. My trouble is less with the enthusiasts eager to perfect their outfits than with the theory behind current practice that is unconcerned with historical processes and structures. I try to show in this chapter that any reenactment of emotional and psychological experience necessarily draws in the wider structural conditions of the past. By describing the dialectical character of reenactment and Collingwood’s opposition to individualistic psychology, I hope to move reenactment theory beyond the idea that Collingwood encouraged sympathetic identification with the past through a collapse of temporalities. The more accurate conception maintains temporal distinctions while attending to the historical context in which past actions and behaviors expressed meaning. I shall finally turn to the concept of play in the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer to illustrate how reenactment might be conceived as a form of movement within structure. My concern throughout is with the processes of historical meaning-making within the big picture of human development.

Critical Reenactment from the Inside Since history emerged as an autonomous discipline and form of knowledge, historians have tended to work under a methodological charter stressing the importance of penetrating to the inside of events rather than satisfying themselves with painting a picture of the world from the outside. Giambattista Vico, the eighteenth-century Neapolitan credited with initiating the counter-Enlightenment that questioned the Cartesian authority of math-

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ematics and natural science while putting forward a case for history, argued (1725/2002) in the verum factum principle that human beings could understand from the inside only those things that they themselves have created, with the natural world as God’s creation being observable only externally. In the words of Vico’s admirer Isaiah Berlin (1969, 375), Vico “uncovered a species of knowing not previously clearly discriminated, the embryo that later grew into the ambitious and luxuriant plant of German historicist Verstehen—empathetic insight, intuitive sympathy, historical Einfühlung . . . a discovery of the first order.” Moreover, it was a discovery cultivated by Herder that set the tone for the large efforts in the nineteenth century to secure for history an epistemological foundation (Berlin 1976). Collingwood saw himself as inheriting this tradition of historical thought stretching back to Vico and covering the mostly German and Italian idealist historical philosophers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “It is difficult, indeed,” as Patrick Gardiner (1996, 109) has observed, “not to see in Vico’s particular application of the so-called verum factum principle, according to which we can only fully know what we ourselves have made, an anticipation of an idea that lay at the heart of many of Collingwood’s contentions regarding the distinctive character of historical knowledge.” This idea would be captured in Collingwood’s maxim that “all history is the history of thought” (1994, 115) and his belief that what distinguishes the human sciences from the natural sciences is this human capacity to enter into, understand and explain mindsets and behavior foreign from our own. Collingwood is a familiar name among scholars of historical reenactment, though the picture painted of his philosophy is anything but clear. On the one hand, Collingwood’s appeal for “sympathetic identification with the past” has made him a spokesperson for the affective history that some believe can forge new paths of historical representation (Agnew 2007, 302). On the other hand, if Collingwood has been criticized more harshly on any one dimension of his philosophy, it has been precisely that he discounted affected elements in conceiving history as a fundamentally intellectual exercise. That Collingwood in reenactment called on historians to “make a strenuous imaginative leap into the past, trying as far as possible to obliterate contemporary knowledge and values,” has led McCalman and Pickering (2010, 4) to ask whether his theories have anything to contribute to modern forms of virtual reenactment, where immersion in a simulated past removes the need to expend intellectual energy leaping imaginatively into the past. Kate Bowan’s (2010, 148) analysis of Collingwood’s early scribblings on the role of music in historical reenactment raises the important point that he “sensed the dangers inherent in embodied reenactment” when insisting that history should be viewed as an act of thinking about a past act of

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thinking. Unlike a form of reenactment in which temporalities dissolve, this maintenance of a distinction between past and present involves reenactors in reflecting self-consciously on affinity and difference between past and present—what McCalman (2007) calls a “reflexive reenactment” that truly illuminates the strange past and ensures that the practice is “not just the past dressed in funny clothes.” Such remarks on Collingwood’s view of embodied reenactment are helpful but could go further to underscore the fundamentally critical and dialectical character of the doctrine (Retz 2017, 2018). Two aspects of his philosophy illustrate this point: (1) his repudiation of pyschologism in historical thinking; (2) the concept of thought in its mediation within the reenactment doctrine. First, Collingwood repeatedly warned readers against thinking that reenacting past thoughts could recapture the immediacy of past experiences— that is, the private mental processes that occurred inside a past agent’s head. “We shall never know how the flowers smelt in the garden of Epicurus,” he declared in The Idea of History, “or how Nietzsche felt the wind in his hair as he walked on the mountains; we cannot relive the triumph of Archimedes or the bitterness of Marius; but the evidence of what these men thought is in our hands; and in re-creating thoughts in our own minds by interpretation of that evidence we can know, so far as there is any knowledge, that the thoughts we create were theirs” (Collingwood 1994, 296). Collingwood’s purpose in this passage is to distinguish between the perceptual and ideational context in which past agents operated. We can reenact past thoughts in our present context because the “peculiarity of thought is that, in addition to occurring here and now in this context, it can sustain itself through a change of context and revive in a different one” (297). It may be ennobling to emulate Nietzsche in feeling the mountain wind blow through our hair, but the person located at sea level on a still day will suffer no disadvantage in grasping his theories. Confusion regarding the object of reenactment arises when an act of thought is considered an event or situation. Even a historian as influential as Quentin Skinner (2001), who names himself among a group of historians inspired by a Collingwoodian approach, has interpreted reenactment as an attempt to replay the mental event in which resides a past thought’s pristine meaning. Collingwood distinguished clearly between thoughts and events: “This power to sustain and revive itself is what makes an act of thought more than a mere ‘event’ or ‘situation.’ . . . The immediate, as such, cannot be re-enacted. Consequently, those elements in experience whose being is just their immediacy (sensations, feelings, &c. as such) cannot be re-enacted; not only that, but thought itself can never be reenacted in its immediacy . . . the immediacy of the first occasion can never again be experienced” (297).

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Collingwood’s insistence that reenactors cannot identify immediately with their subjects is one aspect of his lifelong opposition to individualistic psychology in historical thinking. He believed that psychology lost its way when it stopped seeing itself as a science of feeling and began to regard itself as a science of thought. It fulfilled its rightful place between the two sciences when it emerged in the sixteenth century from the realization that “feeling is not a kind of thinking,” that in feeling coldness, seeing redness, or hearing shrillness we are not cognizing an object, “but simply having a feeling” (Collingwood 1998, 109–10). But when psychology combined in the eighteenth century with a “materialistic epistemology,” the intellectual activities or operations of thought that were previously the subject matter of the criteriological sciences—logic and ethics—became regarded as “aggregations and complexes of feelings and thus special cases of sensation and emotion” (113–14). Crucially, this new psychological science of thought removed the criterion of truth and falsity by reference to which the self-critical sciences had specified the categories deployed in their own self-criticism. Having mixed up thoughts and feelings, which are neither true nor false but simply “are,” it did not occur to the psychologist to investigate the functions by which thought distinguishes itself from the things it thinks about. Central to Collingwood’s philosophy of history is the idea that historical thinking involves untangling the knots that entwine past and present ways of thinking. Although in these knots and his theory of “incapsulation” the past lives in the present, the very service of historical thinking to life and conduct resulted from our becoming explicitly aware of the possibilities open for action in past and present contexts. He could not accept a theory proffering the immediate accessibility of the past in the present for the simple reason that it removed the need to reflect consciously on the fact that one is engaged in an act of thinking about a past act of thinking. Historical thinking based on psychologistic principles of intuition and apprehension, in granting effortless access to the past, downgraded historical thinking by eliminating the need to consider what other people may have thought. In this respect, Collingwood placed pyschologism at the heart of a growing irrationalism in European culture. That reenactment operates on a principle of methodological selfawareness brings us to our second aspect of Collingwood’s philosophy: the concept of thought in its mediation. In addition to the clarification that Collingwood regarded thoughts not as events but as having extra-contextual conceptual identities, the concept of thought in its mediation makes plain that reenactment occurs against the backdrop of our present-day context and throws doubt on the notion that he envisaged reenactment as a theory of reproducing the experiential identity of past mental events.

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Collingwood was clear that a past thought is always rethought in a context of present thoughts. “The past event, ideal though it is, must be actual in the historian’s re-enactment of it. In this sense, and this sense only,” he wrote, “the ideality of the object of history is compatible with actuality and indeed inseparable from actuality” (Collingwood 1994, 441–42). By “ideality,” Collingwood meant the quality of a past thought being an object of our thought without being present to perception, and by “actuality” he meant the conveying into the present of this ideal object. But in the process of acquiring this actuality—that is, in the process of being rethought by thinkers in the fresh context that is the present moment—the thought undergoes a change that disqualifies it from being considered a duplication of the past thought. Reenactors, in Collingwood’s words, “must enter into a past frame of mind, reconstitute it with their own mind, and at the same time objectify this very reconstitution, so as to prevent it from mastering their own mind and running away with them” (442). Put differently, reenactors enter into past frames of mind while holding up that thinking self-consciously as an act of thought about another person’s act of thought, and it is seeing this contrast between both acts that allows the past thought to be held up to analysis and criticism. This contrastive activity is also the dialectical movement fueled by friction and strain that untangles the knots tying past and present ways of thinking. Collingwood believed eagerly that history as reenactment offered humanity a fuller conception of the human mind and its possibilities for deliberate and purposive action in the present. This is the political philosophy at the center of his philosophy of history. I take readers through these admittedly technical aspects of Collingwood’s thought not merely to clarify his stance toward sympathetic identification, affective history and embodied reenactment, but to insist on the importance of reflexivity in his reenactment doctrine and the practice at large as I think it should be conceived. Here I am in agreement with Alexander Cook (2004, 494) that the practice of reenactment should deal explicitly with the nature of reenactment itself, by which he means that activities involving reenactment are not in any direct sense “about” the events being reenacted; rather, they are about modern-day activities inspired by our interest in the past. They are as much about the present and our present-day interests in the past as the past being reenacted. Reenactment as historical pedagogy possesses the valuable quality of being able to foreground this present. As we attempt to re-create a scene from the past, a fuller picture of the structures underlying our own realities comes into view, untangling the knots linking past and present and so providing a productive counterpoint to our view of the past. Such denaturalization of the present, reported so frequently by reenactors after prolonged exposure to different ways of life,

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is a necessary first step in any social-critical inquiry. If proceeded by further investigation, it can yield substantial insight into the nature of human life past and present.

Movement within Structure It is specifying the character of this further investigation that must absorb the remainder of our attention, for the potential of reenactment as historical pedagogy consists in the possibility of new understandings emerging from the dialectical movement between past and present-day forms of life. This is to take a different route to the inside view of history from the one that exponents of the affective turn believe themselves to be achieving by penetrating the exterior of historical events and meeting with their inner essence in the reliving and reconfiguration of psychological and emotional experience. It is also to take a fresh look at a view put forward in the art world that reenactment’s “liberating trait” is its “signature quality” (Blackson 2007, 30). According to Sven Lütticken (2005, 60), reenactment “may lead to artistic acts that, while not instantly unleashing a ‘tremendous emancipatory potential,’ create a space—a stage—for possible and as yet unthinkable performances.” This is without doubt true, though it leaves us with the question of how we are to assemble the stage. We must consider the mise-en-scène that is the space where the stories play out. The stage on which historical reenactments take place could be regarded as composed not only of the physical but also sociocultural conditions that set limits on how all lives are lived. In this way, the historical investigation that accompanies the performance of a historical reenactment is an inquiry into the ever-present and problematic relationship between freedom and necessity, structure and agency, between which historians have constantly to pave ways. The real matter is not whether the experience of reenactment brings us in touch with the material and mental realities of the past; it is whether the experience of reenactment helps us to grasp the historical nature of human existence, both in shaping human behavior in the past and in our own lives without our being fully aware. The sociological concept of habitus helps to outline what it might look like for participants to come up against unfamiliar forms of social organization with an intensity hard to match in the calm of the library (Cook 2002, 492, 496). Habitus denotes the process by which sociocultural configurations are established, produced and reproduced through individual and collective action in a manner that is not wholly deterministic. While it might be inappropriate to speak of habitus for shortterm experiments that aim deliberately to disrupt established configurations, the challenge of understanding foreign ways of life helps to denaturalize the

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engrained dispositions of contemporary habitus while offering a sense of how life might have been different in the past. In Bourdieu’s terms (2000, 155–59), these disturbances can generate critical self-reflection in the “dialectic of positions and dispositions”—modifications to positions generated by the clash between the uncomfortable novelty of a new situation and the in-built dispositions of modern social life. One could think of this as play within structure. Reenactment’s emancipatory potential, its advocates note, follows from widespread testimony that participants “lose themselves” in the activity. That is to say, a variety of self-transformation occurs when a performance intended as re-production transcends the limits of the simulated situation and becomes an enactment of something new. What happens is akin to Gadamer’s account of the experience of art, which to him is the experience of play: we lose ourselves. We lose our relation to the world of serious purpose, but we do so by acquiring a different seriousness directed toward the game. “Play fulfils its purpose only if the player loses himself in play. Seriousness is not merely something that calls us away from play; rather, seriousness in playing is necessary to make the play wholly play” (Gadamer 2004, 103). Since until now Collingwood has been central to our account, it is worthwhile noting that Gadamer admired Collingwood’s philosophy and was even responsible for having his Autobiography translated into German. Though Gadamer criticized the intentionalist philosophy of history behind Collingwood’s theory of reenactment, when so much of history is the story of unintended consequences, Gadamer (1976, 11) declared Collingwood’s logic of question and answer, according to which interpretation consists in treating propositions as answers to questions, the hermeneutical Urphänomen or highest principle. That a historical phenomenon is made an object of interpretation, both agreed, means that it puts a question to the interpreter in relation to which the phenomenon must be understood. According to Gadamer, what takes over in play is the game. The game enjoys primacy over the consciousness of the players. “The players are not the subjects of play; instead play merely reaches presentation through the players” (Gadamer 2004, 103). In a game the players are changed; they no longer act naturally as themselves and, in a sense, it is somebody else who imposes the blows, feels the humiliation of defeat or glows in the triumph of victory. This change results from the player having ceded authority to the game—to play the game does not allow the player to treat the game as an object; to play the game is to conform to its regulations and rules. Thus Gadamer states (106): “all playing is being-played. The attraction of a game, the fascination it exerts, consists precisely in the fact that the game masters the players. . . . Whoever ‘tries’ is in fact the one who is tried. The real subject of the game . . . is not the player but instead the game itself. What

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holds the player in its spell, draws him into play, and keeps him there is the game itself.” Central to my claim that structure is an indispensable element of historical reenactment is this insight that freedom is constrained in play by the nature of the game. To play is to enter into a rule-governed game, to sacrifice autonomy and to accept limits. A game’s limits are not something that we would want to surpass even if we could, as if cricket would be a better game if there were no wickets, or soccer a better game if there were no goalie. In Gadamer’s words: Games differ from one another in their spirit. The reason for this is that the to-and-fro movement that constitutes the game is patterned in various ways. The particular nature of a game lies in the rules and regulations that prescribe the way the field of the game is filled. This is true universally, wherever there is a game. . . . The playing field on which the game is played is, as it were, set by the nature of the game itself and is defined far more by the structure that determines the movement of the game from within than by what comes up against—i.e. the boundaries of the open space—limiting movement from without. (Gadamer 2004, 107; my emphasis)

My emphasis serves to stress that the sociocultural context in which a past society lived regulates according to its internal characteristics the performance of a historical reenactment, when performance is “play” and the event being reenacted is the “game.” Here I am using the term “sociocultural context” interchangeably with the term “structure,” for the point is that historical contexts are specific to time and place, and these are the structures within which human beings have exercised their freedom in all its diverse manifestations across time and space. To reenact a past event genuinely is to play within the structure circumscribed by the past event. “The space in which the game’s movement takes place,” to quote Gadamer again, “is not simply the open space in which one ‘plays oneself out,’ but one that is specifically marked out and reserved for the movement of the game. Human play requires a playing field” (2004, 107), and so historical reenactments require a stage built in the distinct character of the past in question. The construction of this stage involves entering into and moving within the framework of past agents whose conceptual lifeworlds filled their behavior with meaning and purpose. Following this model, reenactors move within and in so doing reinvent the conceptual life worlds of the past inhabitants whose lives they reconstruct. A chief purpose above of specifying the critical and dialectical character of Collingwood’s concept of reenactment consisted in making plain that past thoughts are always rethought in the context of present-day language, concepts, questions and concerns. All history is contemporary history, it is often said, not because the present distorts our view of the past, but rather

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because our present-day interests open up a past to be investigated in its own right. While it might appear as if abiding by the rules of the game grants structure a greater role than individual agency, for it is true that no game allows one to do precisely as one wants, it is also true that no game ever determines how it will be played. When we play, we choose not only to take leave of work and quotidian routine; we also choose to play some particular game and, specifically, to take on some task that transforms our own aims into the ends of the game, such as defending the goal line if one is a goalie, or scoring runs if one is a batsman. Even if the essence of a game consists in unburdening oneself of routine and purposiveness, “playing is always a playing of something,” and so every game presents the player with a task (Gadamer 2004, 107). The enjoyment derives from transforming the aims of one’s purposive comportment in everyday life into tasks of the game. The reason why the theory and practice of reenactment cannot do without the concept of structure lies precisely in this need to define the parameters within which self-transformation in playful reenactment can occur. These parameters are discovered through study of the structural conditions in which it was possible for past agents to think and act in the ways they did. Here, in the true style of Collingwood’s philosophy of history, a necessary condition for reenacting past ways of life is an understanding of the wider ideational environment. Historical thinking and understanding are so often challenging precisely because they require us to reconstruct chains of reasoning from premises that we know from our vantage point to be false. The real feat of historical thinking and understanding, it might be said, consists in imbuing these premises with a truth that supplied past systems of belief, ritual, thought and action with their meaning. Thus when the scientifically trained person in the present day knows that casting spells on people cannot bring them harm, this knowledge will not stop the person from reconstructing in vivid detail the past world in which that belief could be held according to perfectly rational chains of reasoning. Reenactment becomes the investigative process of both recognizing and playing out the truth claims of past forms of life. But it does so only by foregrounding the present and so bringing us into more intimate dialogue with the tacitly held assumptions that govern at a preconscious level so much of what we say and do.

Conclusion Nietzsche’s excoriation of history was an early essay that the later philosopher ignored and regarded as an immature work (Brobjer 2007). Educated as a historian and philologist, it was not history or its methods that troubled him—what troubled him was that history had attained such a status that

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historical scholarship was seen as the goal, whereas its methods in his view ought to be the means for doing philosophy. The newly crowned founders of modern historiography had the right idea in forging a disciplined approach to the past, but they put their labor to fruitless ends in regarding their output as an achievement in itself. The later Nietzsche made sure to emphasize that philosophy requires historical sensibility and, moreover, historical method. A difficulty with upholding the importance of a disciplined approach to the past in so public a field as historical reenactment is that it may be perceived as an attempt to impose the standards of academic history on individuals who engage with the past for reasons different from those that drive the wheels of scholarly discourse. It would be myopic to think that academic historians can force their procedures on more popular forms of history, and it would be unrealistic to assume that any amount of scholarly fine-tuning can prevent misuses of the past. Yet as long as an education in history remains precisely that—an education in history, and not something else—the need to reflect on history’s properties as a practice and form of knowledge will continue to be paramount. The educational potential of historical reenactment consists largely in the way that it foregrounds and denaturalizes the present in entering into dialogue with past forms of life. Reenacting the past is both a historical and transformative activity when we identify the systems of tacitly held assumptions in which human meanings were expressed and hold them up against our own. Present-day beliefs and convictions are formulated in concepts that presuppose a historical lineage, and the historical study of this lineage often necessitates a reassessment of one’s present-day beliefs and convictions. Embodying the affective elements of past people’s lives provides no entry into this self-understanding. The inside view is more than seeing the world from the standpoint of the people who lived in the past; the inside view is knowing how it was possible for them to see the world in the ways they did and thereby expanding our conceptions of human possibility. Historical reenactment considered as movement within structure affirms the intermediate character of an activity that operates both within the rules of the game and freely in the transformation of our own ends. To act freely and transformatively in historical reenactment is to move purposively within the bounds defined by the past form of life. Identifying these bounds is the investigative work of historical reenactment.

Tyson Retz is Associate Professor at the University of Stavanger, Norway, where he teaches and writes on intellectual history, the philosophy of history, and history didactics. He received his PhD in history from the Uni-

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versity of Melbourne. His first book Empathy and History (Berghahn, 2018) offers a dual exploration of empathy’s intellectual and educational history, including its place in historicist, idealist and hermeneutic traditions, as well as in the school subject of history. His second book, Progress and the Scale of History (Cambridge University Press, 2022), examines the idea of progress in different conceptions of history.

References Agnew, V. 2004. “Introduction: What Is Reenactment?” Criticism 46 (3): 327–39. Agnew, V. 2007. “History’s Affective Turn: Historical Reenactment and its Work in the Present.” Rethinking History 11 (3): 299–312. Agnew, V., J. Lamb, and I. McCalman. 2010. “Historical Reenactment Series Introduction.” In Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn, edited by I. McCalman and P. Pickering. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Berlin, B. 1969. A Note on Vico’s Concept of Knowledge. In Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, edited by G. Tagliacozzo, H.V. White, I. Berlin, M.H. Fisch and E. Gianturco. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Berlin, B. 1976. Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas. London: The Hogarth Press Blackson, R. 2007. “Once more . . . with feeling: Reenactment in contemporary art and culture.” Art Journal 66 (1): 28–40. Bowan, K. 2010. “R.G. Collingwood, Reenactment and the Early Music Revival.” In Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn, edited by I. McCalman and P. Pickering, 134–58. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bourdieu, P. 2000. Pascalian Meditations, trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brobjer, T.H. 2007. “Nietzsche’s Relation to Historical Methods and Nineteenth-century German Historiography.” History and Theory 46: 155–79. Collingwood, R.G. 1994. The Idea of History, rev. edition, Jan van der Dussen. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Collingwood, R.G. 1998. An Essay on Metaphysics, rev. edition, R. Martin. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cook, A. 2004. “The Use and Abuse of Historical Reenactment: Thoughts on Recent Trends in Public History.” Criticism 46 (3): 487–96. Gadamer, H.-G. 1976. Philosophical Hermeneutics, edited and translated by D.E. Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gadamer, H.-G. 2004. Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edition, trans., J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall. New York: Continuum. Gapps, S. 2009. “Mobile Monuments: A View of Historical Reenactment and Authenticity from inside the Costume Cupboard of History.” Rethinking History 13 (3): 395–409. Gardiner, P. 1996. “Interpretation in History: Collingwood and Historical Understanding.” In Verstehen and Humane Understanding, edited by A. O’Hear,109–19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huxley, A. 1932. Brave New World. London: Chatto and Windus. Huxley, A. 1984. Brave New World Revisited. London: Chatto and Windus. Lütticken, S. 2005. “An Arena in Which to Reenact.” In Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art, edited by S. Lütticken. Rotterdam: Witte de With. McCalman, I. 2007, September 17. “Past not just the Present Dressed in Funny Clothes.” Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/national

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McCalman, I., and P. Pickering. 2010. “From Realism to the Affective Turn: An Agenda.” In Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn, edited by I. McCalman and P. Pickering, 1–17. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mikula, M. 2015. “Historical Re-enactment: Narrativity, Affect and the Sublime.” Rethinking History 19 (4): 583–601. Nietzsche, F. 1874/1997. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” In Untimely Meditations, edited by D. Breazeale, trans., R.J. Hollingdale, 57–124. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Orwell, G. 1949. Nineteen Eighty-four. London: Secker and Warburg. Retz, T. 2017. “Why Re-enactment Is not Empathy, Once and for All.” Journal of the Philosophy of History, 11 (3): 306–23. Retz, T. 2018. Empathy and History: Historical Understanding in Re-enactment, Hermeneutics and Education. New York: Berghahn Books. Skinner, Q. 2001. “The Rise of, Challenge to and Prospects for a Collingwoodian Approach to the History of Political Thought.” In The History of Political Thought in National Context, edited by D. Castiglione and I. Hampsher-Monk, 175–88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vico, V. 1725/2002. The First New Science, edited and translated by L. Pompa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

EPILOGUE

What Is the Task of Reenactment? Vanessa Agnew

My interest in reenactment was sparked by a BBC production called The Ship. In 2001, I was recruited to take part in a reenactment of Captain James Cook’s 1768 voyage to observe the Transit of Venus, a voyage that saw the east coast of Australia mapped for the first time. As reenactors, we spent six weeks sailing a replica of Cook’s ship HMS Bark Endeavour from Cairns in north Queensland to Bali, Indonesia. My task was to act as a historical consultant and, like the other participants, to simulate aspects of life as an eighteenth-century seaman—handle sail, sleep in a hammock, eat salt meat and ships’ biscuit, wash in a bucket, navigate using historical techniques, meet local people, and expound on historical topics (Agnew 2010). For me, at least, the experience raised two lasting questions: What can this form of historical representation reliably tell us about the past? And what does it tell us about the present? In the two decades since the film series was made, reenactment societies have burgeoned globally; reenactment has become an increasingly common device in a range of media and has gained respectability as a pedagogical and museological tool. Historians, anthropologists, and other academically trained scholars have not remained indifferent to the possibilities implicit in reenactments. The number of scholarly publications has grown commensurately and reenactment studies has emerged as a recognizable academic field (Agnew, Lamb, and Tomann 2020). Yet, as the contributions to this volume variously suggest, definitional questions and questions about its mandate persist. Notes for this section begin on page 169.

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As a point of departure, reenactment might be defined as a form of historical representation that takes affect as its object and simultaneously attempts to elicit affect in its audience. In all its diverse manifestations—in film, theater, dance, living history, gaming, museum exhibit, battle restaging, commemorative event, and other forms—(a) reenactment typically places emphasis on physical, emotional, and psychological experiences rather than on explication of large-scale historical events, processes, and structures; (b) it foregrounds testimony about daily life and social interactions in the present, while at the same time this testimony becomes evidentiary for a generalized notion of historical experience; (c) it operates with a conditional understanding of the past that offers emancipatory potential for the present; and (d) it attends to the demands and requirements of its audience. Its performativity can thus be said to have an explicitly pedagogical purpose, one that complements efforts to contribute to historical knowledge-making and to engage with larger historiographical problems within a broader political and social context (Agnew 2004). Reenactment’s complex, often unrealized set of charges can be traced in the example of Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 The Act of Killing, a documentary that draws attention to the forgotten or ignored mass killing of Communists and ethnic Chinese in Indonesia in 1965–66. Not only did the perpetrators remain at large, but many also continued to occupy positions of power and authority in Indonesian society. “It is,” said Oppenheimer in a 2014 opinion piece for The Guardian, “as if I’d wandered into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust, only to find the Nazis still in power” (Oppenheimer 2014). Framing the film within the context of Holocaust discourse and the need for genocide recognition, Oppenheimer and his anonymous Indonesian codirector set out to rectify this “forgetting” by filming members of the death squads making a film about their own crimes. These men reenact the murders they once committed, staging them in the manner of 1950s Hollywood epics, Westerns, and gangster movies. The killers enlist local people to act in the film-within-a-film; they play the roles of executioner and executed; they are interviewed on television and celebrated at paramilitary rallies. With a swaggering bravado, they air their reenactments in public and in private, indifferent to the suffering they have caused in the past and to the pain they continue to inflict in the present. Reenactment is, then, the central structuring device of the film. And the burden it bears is heavy: reenactment is, according to executive coproducer, Errol Morris, envisioned as a tool for “bringing the past back to life” (Morris 2013). This act of reanimation must serve as a corrective to the cover-up under former president Suharto and the willful forgetting on the part of the West. Reenactment must memorialize the victims. It must also serve an inquisitorial role, uncovering the murder sites and the methods of kill-

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ing in all their repulsive specificity. To some extent, too, reenactment must recover the identity of the victims and the particularity of their fates. Like other reenactments, The Act of Killing promises historical fidelity and a level of authenticity, but it is one that seem at odds with the film’s surreal means. Insisting on the need to reenact “properly,” the executioner is, for example, particular about the color of his trousers and the type of fabric used (“I would never have worn white pants [for killing]. I never wore white. I always wore dark colors,” says Anwar Congo, the main protagonist in The Act of Killing). When reenacting a murder, he insists that his victim face the “right” way. Elsewhere he insists on the need for the “proper” affective mode, reminding himself in one scene that his acting must be suitably “violent.” Later we learn that when he and his killing squad watched Elvis movies, this made for killing in a “happy” way. If the aesthetic character of The Act of Killing invites discussion, so too does the contribution that the film makes to our understanding of reenactment. As in historical reenactments like The Ship or Chasing Shackleton (2013), we find a preoccupation with the quotidian and the micrological. Revisiting the rooftop where the Medan murders took place or the river where bodies were dumped provides more than a backdrop for the historical events; it lends authority to the murderers’ accounts. Their use of props to stage the killings similarly provides a form of object constancy that links the past and the present and ushers in certain kinds of truth claims, such that we can say that the blurring of temporalities in reenactment allows for a blurring of the distinctions between the ontological and the epistemological (Agnew 2009). The reenactor’s affective performance of how things were done—and, by extension, the affective responses of the audience—stand in for a fuller account of what happened and why. There are, however, also ways in which The Act of Killing breaks with genre conventions, such as when it departs from reenactment’s realist tendencies (McCalman and Pickering 2010). In place of a restrained and sober restaging of events of the kind seen in, for example, Rithey Panh’s 2003 film, S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine or even Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 Shoah, in The Act of Killing, realism gives way to kitsch—that form of emotional gratification devoid of intellectual effort (Menninghaus 2009, 41). The apotheosis of The Act of Killing—a scene from the killers’ own “film”— encapsulates this precisely: it shows girls in a tropical landscape, dancing to the tune of the song “Born Free,” while the murder victims slowly remove their garrottes and bestow medals on their executioners, Anwar and his cross-dressing accomplice, Herman, and to thank the pair for having executed them and sent them to heaven. About the scene, Anwar says he is surprised that he could have made something “so beautiful”: the “waterfall,” he declares in a bizarre instantiation of Romantic ideas about the sublime,

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“expresses such deep feelings” (Oppenheimer 2012, 2:29). Yet by depicting a theater of the oppressor rather than of the oppressed, Oppenheimer destabilizes the moral high ground typically occupied by reenactment—its self-claimed prerogative to democratize historical representation and to give voice to those silenced by conventional historiography (Manchanda 2013). And it is precisely here that critics of the film might take issue. Within the larger context of the film, the surreal hallucination is not so much an aestheticization of violence as it is its kitschification. What meaning is to be derived from here remains unclear: it hangs, like the scene itself, as a misty cipher. Central to Oppenheimer’s Holocaust-inflected film is Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil. Yet, whereas banality belongs to Oppenheimer’s aesthetic means, for Arendt reporting about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, banality is an analytic category. Cliché is what Eichmann resorts to at his moment of execution: “Long live Germany. Long live Argentina. Long live Austria. . . . I shall not forget them”. Arendt concludes that this confused recourse to funeral oration on Eichmann’s part—his “forgetting” the fact of his own imminent death—encapsulates “the lesson” to be derived from “this long course in human wickedness—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil” (Arendt 2006, 252). In restaging this and other scenes, Arendt rarely attempts to occupy the same temporal plane as her subject matter. The account of Eichmann’s trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem, written in the past tense and stitched together from personal observations, trial transcripts, witness affidavits, a manuscript written by Eichmann himself, and various other legal, historical, literary, and philosophical sources, is largely devoid of ekphrasis, the kind of vivid description characteristic of reenactment (Arendt 2006, 280–82). Affective and performative gestures, Arendt seems to say, are the enemies of reflection and critical thinking (Horsman 2010).1 To reenact is, potentially, to stray into the terrain of cliché and banality. Like this earlier contribution to the investigation of genocide, The Act of Killing intends not only to recover lost stories and contribute to alternative ways of doing history, but also to intervene in a process of restorative justice. By stimulating dialogue and creating a license to speak, Oppenheimer and his collaborators invite audiences to enquire into the occult history of Indonesia and, in so doing, to question the involvement of the West in historical events. Oppenheimer sees this as preparatory to a process of truth-andreconciliation of the kind undertaken in post-apartheid South Africa, where the act of telling was regarded as significant in itself, and where witnessing, confession, and public confrontation were integral to grappling with the violent past (Du Pisani and Kim 2004).

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If the central task of the film is to use reenactment to revisit historical atrocities, no less important is the necessity of establishing continuities between the past and the present. Oppenheimer asks how comfortable lives in the West are purchased at the expense of disenfranchised workers in countries like Indonesia and China, workers whose conditions are upheld by the very power structures put into place half a century ago. To point the finger at the death squad members, he insists, is, in other words, to point a finger at oneself (Oppenheimer 2012). Here Oppenheimer’s interests align uncomfortably with the interests of the murderers shown in the Act of Killing. Most historical atrocities, including slavery and colonialism, have not been prosecuted, responds the most reflective and cynical of the murderers in the film, Adi Zulkadry, adding that one day there could be a Jakarta Convention to replace the Geneva Convention. While Oppenheimer would obviously want to distance himself from this kind of exaggerated and self-serving moral relativism, it does mean that for him the most pressing victim stories have yet to be told. Act of Killing sets out to document genocide through processes of reenactment, using a revelatory character. This is predicated on a transformative moment within the film: the necessity for the main protagonist to acknowledge his guilt and empathize with the victims. Reenacting murder will bring about this catharsis, marked toward the end of the film by the main character, Anwar Congo, losing physical control and repeatedly vomiting. Arguably, this catharsis is performed on behalf of the audience, whose expectation, too, is for resolution. If we take seriously Oppenheimer’s historical charge, we might ask what such a reenactment project would entail. What contribution can reenactment make to processes of truth-and-reconciliation and how might this extend to political contexts hitherto excluded from the judicial process? While these are not new questions, Oppenheimer’s film invites audiences to pose them again. What, he wants us to ask, would a reenactment of British colonial violence resemble, one that contributed meaningfully to a proper reckoning of the present with the past. And one that might take cliché as its theme and modus operandi, yet nonetheless avoid succumbing to banality and an incapacity for rigorous historical thought. The reenactment in which I took part, The Ship, director Chris Terrell’s 2002 piece of historical reality television, aimed in some sense to address the kinds of concerns underscoring Oppenheimer’s work. Produced by the BBC in conjunction with the History Channel, it intended to tell the story of two adventures: that of Captain Cook’s eighteenth-century voyage and that of the twenty-first-century reenactors of that earlier voyage. This investigation into eighteenth-century voyaging needed to be contextualized

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within a broader political context: the colonization of Australia and New Zealand (Aotearoa in the Maˉori language), the dispossession and slaughter of indigenous peoples, and the legacy of colonialism in the present. Maˉori and Aboriginal participants were duly recruited and perfunctory space given to airing their concerns. The director went on to specialize in documentary filmmaking about contemporary naval life; training for the US Army Special Forces, known as the Green Berets; and life on the frontlines of conflicts in Afghanistan. That the by-line of his production company is “documentaries that celebrate not denigrate” tells us something about his political leanings, if not his investigative aspirations. An abiding irony of The Ship was that, in its effort to give voice to the silenced, contribute to a form of history from below, and acknowledge the necessity for reconciliation, the film series itself was produced under the very conditions that it was at pains to undo—pervading incivility, arbitrary exercise of power, humiliation, dissimulation, misogyny, and homophobia. Dissenting reenactors were summarily removed from the project. Mere lip service was paid to the colonial dimensions of British maritime exploration and the bearing this has had on Indigenous peoples to this day. As a set of practices and habits, reenactment cannot, of course, be blamed for flawed film making. Nor can it be faulted for failing to live up to its larger epistemological or political potential. Reenactment does, however, have a duty to intellectual honesty. It must lay bare its suppositions and methods, and catalogue its evidentiary criteria. And, as it claims the status of a science and inches toward intellectual respectability, reenactment must be prepared to overturn itself and confess to what it does not know. In the spirit of Arendt, it must shy away from cliché and open a space for critical thinking and reflection. It must stage less historical certitude and at last become refutable.

Vanessa Agnew is professor of anglophone studies at the Universität Duisburg-Essen and honorary professor in the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at The Australian National University. She directs the Critical Thinking Program of Academy in Exile at Freie Universität Berlin. Her Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of Music in Other Worlds (Oxford University Press, 2008) won the Oscar Kenshur Prize from the Center for EighteenthCentury Studies and the American Musicological Society’s Lewis Lockwood Award. She coedited Settler and Creole Reenactment (Palgrave, 2010), special issues of Rethinking History 11 (Taylor & Francis, 2007) and Criticism 46 (Wayne State University Press, 2004), and book series Historical Reenactment (Palgrave, 2010) and Music in Society and Culture (Boydell and Brewer, 2016). Other coedited books include The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies (Routledge, 2020), Refugee Routes (transcript, 2020), and Reenactment Case

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Studies: Global Perspectives on Experiential History (Routledge, forthcoming). Her children’s book, We’ll Make It, appeared with Sefa Verlag in 2021. Her exhibition Right to Arrive was shown in Canberra (2018) and Berlin (2021); What We Brought with Us is being prepared for publication.

Notes 1. Eichmann in Jerusalem has been said to perform a reenactment when, as Yasco Horsman points out, the epilogue “stages a scene of justice” (p. 10). Here, Arendt switches to the conditional to claim that justice would have been seen to have been done had the judges dared to address their defendant.

References Agnew, V. 2004. “Introduction: What Is Reenactment?” Criticism 46 (3): 327–39, Summer 2004. Agnew, V. 2009. “Genealogies of Space in Colonial and Postcolonial Reenactment.” In Settler and Creole Reenactment, edited by V. Agnew and J. Lamb, 294–318. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Agnew, V. 2010. “History’s Pure Serene: On Reenacting Cook’s First Voyage.” In Staging the Past: Themed Environments in Transcultural Perspectives, edited by J. Schlehe, M. Uike, C. Oesterle, and W. Hochbruck, 205–18. Bielefeld: Transcript. Agnew, V., Lamb, J., and Tomann, J. 2020. “Introduction.” In Reenactment Studies Handbook: Key Terms in the Field, edited by V. Agnew, J. Lamb, and J. Tomann, 1–10. London: Routledge. Arendt, H. 2006. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin. Du Pisani, H.A., and K.-S. Kim. 2004. “Establishing the Truth about the Apartheid Past: Historians and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” African Studies Quarterly 8(1): 77–95. Horsman, Y. 2010. Theaters of Justice: Judging, Staging, and Working Through in Arendt, Brecht, and Delbo. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Manchanda, N. 2013. “The Office of Blood: Or, ‘The Act of Killing.’” The Disorder of Things, July 3, 2013. http://thedisorderofthings.com/2013/07/03/the-office-of-bloodor-the-act-of-killing-2012/. McCalman, I., and P. Pickering, eds. 2010. Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Menninghaus, W. 2009. “On the ‘Vital Significance’ of Kitsch: Walter Benjamin’s Politics of ‘Bad Taste.’” In Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity, edited by A.E. Benjamin, and Ch. Ricend. Melbourne: re.press. Morris, E. 2013. “The Murders of Gonzago.” Slate, July 10, 2013. http://www.slate.com/ articles/arts/history/2013/07/the_act_of_killing_essay_how_indonesia_s_mass_killings_ could_have_slowed.html?via=gdpr-consent Oppenheimer, J. 2012. The Act of Killing. Denmark: Final Cut for Real. Oppenheimer, J. 2014. “The Act of Killing has Helped Indonesia Reassess Its Past and Present.” The Guardian, February 25, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/ feb/25/the-act-of-killing-indonesia-past-present-1965-genocide

Index

Adriaansen, Robbert-Jan, 11, 76 aesthetic, aesthetics, 76, 102, 165–66 experience, 37–38 understanding, 37, 39 affect, 2, 119, 142, 150–51, 164 affective and performative dimension, 12, 78 affective engagement, 75–76 affective relation, relationships, 2, 4, 6, 70, 72, 76 affective turn, 2, 94, 120, 135, 150, 156 Africa, 42 North, 69, 73, 78 South African Apartheid, 119 agency, 50, 89, 121, 156 individual, 20, 159 Agnew,Vanessa, 3, 4, 34, 78, 119, 150 Ahnung, 35 Al-Andalus, 69, 71 Al-Qaeda, 69–70 Albert, Tony, 93 Allred, Randal, 41 Amster, Matthew, 34 Ankersmit, Frank, 35–37, 45n1 Anzac, 93–95 Apel, Dora, 23, 34 Arab, Arabs, 67 Arendt, Hannah, 166, 168, 169n1 Arias, Lola, 4 Argentina, Argentines, 4, 13, 118–23, 126– 27, 136, 138–39, 141, 143, 166

archaeology, 50, 53, 59–60 archaeologists, 57–58, 60 Assmann, Jan, 7, 21 Association of Jewish Refugees, 23, 25 Astures, 53, 56 Australia, 12, 85–86, 88–96, 163, 168 Austria, 20 authenticity, 2, 12–13, 20, 41–43, 69, 72, 76–78, 89, 132, 151, 165 Aznar, José María, 70–71 Bathurst (Australia), 85, 87–88, 95 massacre, 87 battle, battles of Carabanzo, 56 of La Carisa, 56 of Hastings, 40, 76 of Watling Street, 28 Bauman, Zygmunt, 27, 29 Blair, Tony, 70 Beck, Ulrich, 27 Belgrano, Manuel, 143 belief, beliefs, 1, 40–41, 76, 112, 152, 159–60 Benjamin, Walter, 128 Berlin, 22–24 Berlin, Isaiah, 152 Bermúdez, Ángela, 71 Bourdieu, Pierre, 157 Bowan, Kate, 152 Brave New World, 149–50

Index

Brisset Martín, Demetrio E., 66 Britain, 20–21 Buenos Aires, 119–20 Captain Cook, 86, 88–93, 163, 167 Carrasco Urgoiti, Soledad, 67, 74 Carretero, Mario, 71 cartesian dualism, 38, 43 Catholic, Catholics, 5, 12, 28, 66, 71–72, 74 Catholic monarchs, 12, 66, 72 Cenname, Anne, 73 Center for Political Beauty (Germany), 24. See also Meisler, Frank; memorial Charles V, 67 children, 20–25, 28, 135–36, 139, 142 Aboriginal, 95 Jewish, 11, 20–21, 25 refugee, 23 Syrian, 24 See also refugees Christian, Christianity, 66–67, 69–70, 73–75, 78 See also Catholic, Catholicism citizens, citizenship, 4, 8, 10, 13, 110, 113, 121, 124–26, 133–35, 137, 139, 142–3 in Argentina, 139 British, 21 Civil War American, 7–10, 33–34, 37, 43, 137 Spanish, 71 clandestine centers for detention, 120, 124, 127 Cook, Alexander, 155 Collingwood, R.G., 3, 35, 151–55, 157–59 colonialism, colonization, 2, 12, 89, 91–94, 167–68 decolonization, 91, 100, 115n3 colonists, 6–7, 90 Cooktown (Australia), 88 Congo, Anwar, 165 Connerton, Paul, 72, 74–75, 77 cultural studies, 2, 50 Czechoslovakia, 20–21 Dasein, 43 Daugbjerg, Mads, 42, 44 Day of Mourning protest, 89 de Groot, Jerome, 42 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 35

171

dictatorship, 4, 71, 123–24, 126 detained-disappeared, the, 123, 125 Association of Former DetaineesDisappeared, 121 disappearances, 125–26 documentary, documentaries, 4, 19–20, 115, 164, 168. See also The Act of Killing; The Ship Douglas, Blak, 89 Dubs, Alf, 25 Dunkirk, 21 During, Simon, 76–77 Eichmann, Adolf, 166 Einfühlung, 152 Eisner, Rivka Syd, 44 embodiment, 20, 40, 60 epistemology, epistemological, 2, 44, 152, 154, 165, 168 ESMA, 119–22, 124–28. See also museums experience, 2, 4–5, 13, 21–22, 26, 28, 33– 37, 41–43, 50, 54, 56, 76, 78, 95, 119, 121, 123, 126–27, 132, 134–35, 141, 143–44, 150–51, 153, 156–57, 163 aesthetic, 37–38 immersive, 34–35 emotional, 1–2, 14, 120, 150–51, 156, 164 historical, 20, 34–37, 136, 164 of the past, 35, 43, 132, 144 physical and psychological, 14, 34, 69, 127, 150, 164 religious, 42 Evans, George William, 85, 87 Falklands War, 4–7 Fay, Brian, 34 First Nations (Australia), 88–92, 94 France, 21, 66 Freud, Sigmund, 22 Frontier Wars (Australia), 88, 92–96 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 37–39, 43, 45n1, 151, 157–58 game of canes. See juego de cañas Gardiner, Patrick, 152 Gapps, Stephen, 151 Gemeinschaft, 37 gender cross-dressing, 78

172

Index

General Offensive of March 1 (Indonesia), 98–100, 102–3, 105, 107–9, 112–14 genocide, 6, 164, 166–67 Germany, 20, 25, 30 globalization, 27, 134 Goethe, J.W. von, 35 Gorée, island of (Senegal), 119 Great Fire of London, 28 Guerra de las Malvinas. See Falklands War Gugu Yimithirr people, 88 Gunpowder Plot, the (England), 28 Guy Fawkes. See Gunpowder Plot habitus, 56–57 Halbwachs, Maurice, 6 Harwich (United Kingdom), 22–24, 30 Hatta (Indonesian nationalist), 100, 105 Heidegger, Martin, 43 heritage, heritagization, 11–12, 24–26, 50–51, 53–54, 57, 60, 88, 90, 94–95, 98, 119, 135, 137, 140 studies, 44, 50, 53 hermeneutic, hermeneutics, hermeneutical, 35, 37–38, 72, 151, 157, 161 romantic hermeneutic theories, 37 Hertel, Patricia, 77 HMB Endeavour, 88, 90, 92 Hirsch, Marianne, 22 historical culture, 40, 149 method, 160 reality, 11, 40, 167 society, societies, 13, 98, 102, 104, 144 See also Komunitas Djokjakarta subject, 71, 74, 141–42 understanding, 10, 13, 34–37, 44, 131, 133 historiography, historiographic, 3, 10, 38, 44, 73, 99, 113, 131, 133–35, 141, 144, 160, 164, 166 history, histories, academic, 3, 138, 160 affective, 150, 152, 155 colonial, 12, 42, 95 education, 13, 71, 132–34, 137 immersive, 33, 35, 41, 43 living, 8, 19–20, 135, 140, 164 local, 51, 67, 105

national, 29, 101, 131, 144 philosophy of, 34, 154–5, 157, 159 popular, 1, 160 public, 91 romantic notions of, 131, 133–4, 136, 141 as a scientific discipline, 2–3, 37, 149– 52, 160 school, 131, 133–34, 137, 144 ‘history flash’. See ‘period rush’ History Wars (Australia), 92. See also Statue Wars Hitler, Adolf, 30 Holman Jones, Stacy, 78 Holocaust, the, 7, 11, 26, 164, 166 survivors 22 See also children; refugees House of Cards, 7–10 House of Commons (United Kingdom), 25 House of Lords (United Kingdom), 25 Houses of Parliament (United Kingdom). See Gunpowder Plot Huizinga, Johan, 35–39, 41 human rights organizations, 121–22, 125–26 Huxley, Aldous, 150 Iberia, Iberian Peninsula, 49–50, 53–54, 57, 66–67, 71, 73–74. See also Spain islamization of, 12, 69 identification, 11, 20, 23, 30, 57, 72, 77, 110, 120, 133–34, 136, 141–42, 151–52, 155 identity, identities, 6, 9–10, 12–14, 24, 27, 29–30, 36, 50, 53–54, 57, 69–71, 73–75, 78, 112–13, 135–36, 138, 142, 144, 154, 165 Argentinean, 139, 141–42 civic, 131, 138, 140 collective, 70–71, 78, 111 national, 1, 7, 11–14, 30, 51, 69, 73–74, 78, 132, 136, 138, 142 porteña, 141 Spanish, 12, 69, 71, 73–74, 78, 141 immersion, 33–35, 38, 41–44, 152 affective, 11 immersive history, 33, 35, 41, 43 immersive experiences, 34–35

Index

173

Latin America, 66, 120 Lee, Min-Young, 34 Les maîtres fous. See Rouch, Jean Levy, Michael S., 22 linguistic turn, 3 London, 21, 23 ludic atmosphere, 66 component, 78 dimensions, 33, 35, 40–41 event, 77 Luna Celta Festival, 51–52, 57 Lütticken, Sven, 156

communicative, 7, 21 cultural, 7, 21 multidirectional, 25 performance of, 75, 77, 79 politics of, 118 postmemory, 22 rememory, 22 remembrance, 75, 118–19 See also site, sites; space, spaces memorial, 6, 12–13, 21, 23–24, 87, 90, 92–93, 95, 104, 106 counter-memorial, 13, 23, 90, 105–6, 112, 151 Mikula, Maja, 150 Miller-Spillman, Kimberly, 33 modernity, 27, 76, 89 liquid, 27, 29 postmodernity, posmodern, 27, 42, 61 Montoneros, 123 monument, monuments, 12–13, 29, 85– 95, 100–101, 103–4, 119, 124 Morocco, 69, 79 Morrison, Toni, 22 Moors, 66–67, 69–70, 73, 77–78 Moors and Christians, 66, 74. See also Moros y Cristianos moorish fila, 67, 68f See also Muslims Moriscos, 73 Moros y Cristianos, 66, 67f, 69, 72–75, 77–79 museums, 2, 11, 19– 21, 53, 86, 92, 94, 100–101, 103–4, 106, 108, 114, 118– 27, 134, 140, 164 living history, 19–20 Muslim, muslims, 66–67, 69–74, 78

magic circle, 38, 40–43 ‘magic moment’. See ‘period rush’ Mataram (Indonesia), 111. See also Yogyakarta McCalman, Iain, 150–53 Meisler, Frank, 23. See also monuments, memorials ‘Memoria Abierta, or the Museum We Want’, 121 memory, 33, 67, 69–70, 72, 119–20, 136 affective, 72 collective, 5, 69, 78, 119, 136

Nacherleben, 35 nationalism, nationalistic, 5, 12–14, 51, 53, 74, 93, 111, 131, 134, 142 Yogyakarta, 109–10, 113–15 National Revolution (Indonesia), 100, 102–3, 105, 111 nation-state(s), 3–4, 27, 134, 137, 140 narrative, narratives, 3–4, 6–7, 10–14, 50–51, 53–54, 59–61, 67, 69, 70–75, 78–79, 80n1, 88–89, 92, 98–99, 102, 105, 107–9, 112–15, 120–24, 128, 131, 133–35, 137, 140–44

immersiveness, 11, 37, 43 See also magic circle ‘individualization’, 27 Indonesia, 98–102, 104, 106, 108–13, 163, 166–67 Instituto Espacio para la Memoria (Memory Space Institute), 122 International Journal of Heritage Studies, 44 Irigoyen-García, Javier, 73 Iron Age, 49, 53–54, 57 Iraq, 69–70 Jews, 22 , 30. See also children juego de cañas, 73 Kalshoven, Petra, 41, 43 Kinder, 21–22, 25. See also children Kindertransport, 20–28 memorials, 23–24 Knudsen, Britta Timm, 44 Komunitas Djokjakarta, 98–100, 102–9, 111, 114

174

Index

archaeological, 50–51, 54, 59–60 counter-narrative, 112 evidence-based, 123–24 form, 6, 133 historical, 4, 50, 105, 113, 133, 135–37, 140–41, 144 histories, 121 master narrative, 12, 69–75, 78, 135–36, 140–41, 144 meta-narratives, 3, 70 ‘schematic narrative template’, 70–71 Naval Mechanics School. See ESMA. Netherlands, the, 100, 105 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 149–51, 153, 159–60 Nineteen Eighty-Four, 149 Oppenheimer, Joshua, 164, 166–67 Orwell, George, 149 other, otherness, 25, 69, 71, 73–74, 77–78, 136, 142 Ottomans, 67, 73 Ottoman Empire, 73 pedagogy, 155–56 Pérez, Álvaro Casillas, 73 perception, perceptions, 12, 26, 50, 60, 134, 136, 155 public perceptions, 49, 53, 60 performance, 4, 6–7, 12, 35, 40, 51, 54, 58, 75–76, 79, 87–91, 93–94, 96, 105, 108–10, 112, 114, 135, 137, 142–43, 156–58, 165 collective, 35, 76 of History, 88–89, 93 ritual, 6, 12, 69, 72 ‘period rush’, 33–37, 39, 41–44, 76, 78 Piaget, Jean, 135–6 Pickering, Paul, 150–52 Pizzurno, Pablo, 138–9 Phillip II, 67 Phillip III, 73 play, 11, 37–44, 76, 151, 157–59 See also Gadamer, Hans-Georg See also theater players, 38–40 Pledge of Allegiance Argentina, 143 United States, 8 political activism, 123–124

Portugal, 66 Prague, 21, 29 psychology, 6, 50, 60, 70, 134, 136, 151, 154 Queensland, 88, 91, 95 Reconquista, 71–74, 77 myth, 66, 69–71, 74, 77 master narrative, 69, 72–75, 78 reenactment, reenactments audience reaction to, 26, 50, 120, 127, 132, 165 critical, 151 commemorative, 21–22, 27 of concepts, 3, 152–55 embodied, 152–53, 155 festival, festivals, 49–50, 53–54, 57 historical, 1–5, 7–8, 10–14, 21–22, 33– 37, 40–44, 49–53, 55–57, 60, 69, 72, 74, 76, 78–79, 90, 98–99, 102, 114– 15, 121, 126–27, 131–35, 137–40, 143–44, 149–52, 156, 158, 160, 165 in education, 24–25, 28, 74, 119–120, 131–33, 135, 155–56 modern historical reenactments, 12, 69, 72, 76, 78 ritual, 72, 76–77 scripted reenactment, 6, 43, 75 school historical reenactment, 13, 131, 133, 137–138, 140–41, 143–44 studies, 28, 34, 89, 114, 132, 163 theory and practice of, 150, 159 traumatic, 22 reenactors, 2, 13, 20, 26, 29–30, 33–34, 40–44, 52, 55, 76, 79, 89, 99, 102–5, 107–8, 111–12, 114–15, 132, 151, 153–55, 158, 163, 165, 167–68 Civil War, 34 historical, 11, 33, 89, 93–94 Jewish American, 40, 76 North American Indian, 41, 43 refugee, refugees, 23–26 Jewish, 3, 29–30 Syrian refugee crisis, 25 representation, representations, 11, 14, 19–21, 23, 39, 40, 51, 53, 66, 74, 77, 93, 100–101, 106, 108, 120, 123, 127, 134–35, 138, 140–41

Index

historical, 7, 9, 13–14, 34, 43–44, 99, 119, 138, 152, 163–64, 166 of history, 72, 134 of the past, 10–11, 96, 108, 115 resignification, resignifying, 118–20, 125, 127–28 Ríos Saloma, Martín, 71 ritual, rituals, 6, 8, 34, 39, 41–42, 57, 66, 72–77, 79, 137, 139–40, 143, 159 Hauka, 42 See also performance Reynolds, Henry, 91 Roman, Romans, 49, 53–57 Rothberg, Michael, 25 Rouch, Jean, 42 Russia, Russian, 70, 80n1 Royal Netherlands East Indies Army, 98 San Martín, José de, 143 Schroeder, Charlie, 40, 76 Selbstdarstellung, 39 Sentance, Nathan, 91 settler, settlers, 87, 91, 93–95. See also colonialism Sicily, 66 simulation, simulations, 2, 12, 40–44, 73, 76–77, 89, 119, 125 historical, 11, 43–44, 119, 133 site, sites, 24, 123–26, 135, 164 historic, 12–13, 35 living history, 135, 140 memory, 118–21, 127 symbolic, 91 See also ESMA Skinner, Quentin, 153 slave, slavery, 10, 87, 119, 143, 167 enslaved people, 94 labor, 122–23 South Africa, 119 space, spaces, 13, 40, 89, 118–21 124–27, 156, 158, 168 and/of memory, 118–19, 121–22, 124 phenomenology of, 119 symbolic, 119 Spain, 49, 53–54, 66–67, 69–71, 73, 75, 78, 79 Andalusia, 66, 73, 78 Asturias, 53–54 Ávila, 52–53, 57

175

Carabanzo, 51, 54, 56–57 Granada, 66, 72 León, 52–54 Valencia, 66–68, 73, 78 Spaniards, 70, 73, 141 Spanish Republic, 71 Spiel. See play Statue Wars, the (Australia), 85, 90–92 structure, structures, 3, 14, 38–40, 102, 132, 150–51, 155–60, 164 power, 99, 167 Suharto, 98, 100–101, 105–8, 111, 113–14, 164 Memorial Museum 104, 106 post-, 112 Sukarno, 100, 105, 109 Sultan, Sultanate, 101, 105, 109–11, 113. See also Indonesia;Yogyakarta Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX,100–101, 105–6, 108–10, 114 X, 108, 113 See also Indonesia;Yogyakarta Syron, Gordon, 89 terrorism, terrorist attacks 2004 Madrid attacks, 70 September 11, 69 state terrorism, 12, 119–21, 123–25 ‘time warp’. See also ‘period rush’ Thatcher, Margaret, 4, 57 The Act of Killing, 164–67 The Ship, 163, 165, 167–68 theory of the two demons, 124 theater, 4–5, 19, 29, 51 Mined Field, 4 Suitcase, 23 Third Reich, 30 tourism, 2, 42, 49–50, 52–54, 56–57 dark, 126, 128 Transit of Venus, 163 Trial of the Juntas, 123 truth and reconciliation, 166–67 Turk, Turks, 67, 69 Turner, Rory, 37, 40 Urphänomen, 157 verum factum, Verstehen, 152

152

176

Index

Vettones, 57 Vico, Giambattista, 151–52 video games, 28 Ward, Charlotte, 88 Wiederholungszwang, 22 Windradyne (Wiradjuri warrior), 87. See also Wiradjuri Wing, Jason, 89, 93 Winton, Nicholas, 21–22 Wiradjuri nation, Wiradjuri people, 85, 87

Wirkungsgeschichte, 40 World Jewish Relief, 23 World War I, 28, 92–94 World War II, 21, 28, 80n1, 118, 132 Wrap Up London, 23 Yogyakarta (Indonesia), 98–103, 105, 108– 11, 113–14. See also nationalism Ziyad, Tariq ibn, 71

Index compiled by María Victoria Lallana and Will Epps.