The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies: Key Terms in the Field [1 ed.] 1138333999, 9781138333994

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: What is reenactment studies? • Vanessa Agnew, Jonathan Lamb, and Juliane Tomann
1 Archive • Elizabeth Haines
2 Art • Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier
3 Authenticity • Vanessa Agnew and Juliane Tomann
4 Battle • Mads Daugbjerg
5 Body and embodiment • Amanda Card
6 Conjecture • Jonathan Lamb
7 Corroboration • Jonathan Lamb
8 Dark tourism • Vanessa Agnew
9 Documentary • Stella Bruzzi
10 Emotion • Juliane Brauer and Martin Lücke
11 Evidence • Paul Pickering
12 Experience • Anja Schwarz
13 Experimental archaeology • Gunter Schöbel
14 Expertise and amateurism • Anne Brædder
15 Forensic architecture • Fabrizio Gallanti
16 Gaming • Pieter Van den Heede
17 Gender • Stacy Holman Jones
18 Gesture • Jonathan Lamb
19 Hajj • Maryam Palizban
20 Heritage • Julie Park
21 Historically informed performance • Kate Bowan
22 History of the field • Ulf Otto
23 Indigeneity • Penny Edmonds
24 Living history • David Dean
25 Martyrdom • Martin Treml
26 Material culture • Stefanie Samida
27 Mediality • Maria Muhle
28 Memory and commemoration • Juliane Tomann
29 Mimesis • Kader Konuk
30 Mitzvah and memorialization • Rick Hilles
31 Narrative • Inke Arns
32 Nostalgia • Jonathan D. S. Schroeder
33 Objects • Katrina Schlunke
34 Pageant • Amy M. Tyson
35 Performance and performativity • Katherine Johnson
36 Pilgrimage • Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska
37 Play • Robbert-Jan Adriaansen
38 Practices of authenticity • Stephen Gapps
39 Practices of reenactment • Alexander Cook
40 Production of historical meaning • Scott Magelssen
41 Realism • Jonathan Lamb
42 Representation • Inke Arns
43 Ritual • Anja Dreschke
44 Role-play • Stephen Gapps
45 Sublime • Jonathan Lamb
46 Suffering • Vanessa Agnew
47 Trauma • Nena Močnik
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF REENACTMENT STUDIES

The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies provides the first overview of significant concepts within reenactment studies. The volume includes a co-authored critical introduction and a comprehensive compilation of key term entries contributed by leading reenactment scholars from Europe, North America, and Australia. Well into the future, this wide-ranging reference work will inform and shape the thinking of researchers, teachers, and students of history and heritage and memory studies, as well as cultural studies, film, theater and performance studies, dance, art history, museum studies, literary criticism, musicology, and anthropology. Vanessa Agnew is a Professor in the English Department at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, and a Senior Fellow in the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, Australia. Jonathan Lamb is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, United States. Juliane Tomann is Head of the Imre Kertész Kolleg’s research area History in the Public Sphere at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany.

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF REENACTMENT STUDIES Key Terms in the Field

Edited by Vanessa Agnew, Jonathan Lamb, and Juliane Tomann

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter,Vanessa Agnew, Jonathan Lamb, and Juliane Tomann; individual chapters, the contributors The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Agnew, Vanessa, editor. | Lamb, Jonathan, 1945- editor. | Tomane, Juliane, editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of reenactment studies: key terms in the field / edited by Vanessa Agnew, Jonathan Lamb and Juliane Tomane. Other titles: Reenactment studies Description: First edition. | New York: Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019026300 (print) | LCCN 2019026301 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138333994 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429819292 (adobe pdf ) | ISBN 9780429819278 (mobi) | ISBN 9780429819285 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Historical reenactments. | Public history. | Collective memory. | History–Study and teaching–Simulation methods. Classification: LCC D16.163 .R68 2020 (print) | LCC D16.163 (ebook) | DDC 901/.1–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026300 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026301 ISBN: 978-1-138-33399-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-44563-7 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

The volume is dedicated to our children—Caspar, Freya, Sefâ, and Charles—and their hopes for a more peaceful and equitable future.

CONTENTS

List of figures xi List of contributors xiv Acknowledgmentsxxii Introduction: What is reenactment studies? Vanessa Agnew, Jonathan Lamb, and Juliane Tomann

1

1 Archive Elizabeth Haines

11

2 Art Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier

16

3 Authenticity Vanessa Agnew and Juliane Tomann

20

4 Battle Mads Daugbjerg

25

5 Body and embodiment Amanda Card

30

6 Conjecture Jonathan Lamb

34

7 Corroboration Jonathan Lamb

39

vii

Contents

8 Dark tourism Vanessa Agnew

44

9 Documentary Stella Bruzzi

49

10 Emotion Juliane Brauer and Martin Lücke

53

11 Evidence Paul Pickering

57

12 Experience Anja Schwarz

63

13 Experimental archaeology Gunter Schöbel

67

14 Expertise and amateurism Anne Brædder

74

15 Forensic architecture Fabrizio Gallanti

79

16 Gaming Pieter Van den Heede

84

17 Gender Stacy Holman Jones

89

18 Gesture Jonathan Lamb

94

19 Hajj Maryam Palizban

97

20 Heritage Julie Park

100

21 Historically informed performance Kate Bowan

106

22 History of the field Ulf Otto

111

viii

Contents

23 Indigeneity Penny Edmonds

115

24 Living history David Dean

120

25 Martyrdom Martin Treml

125

26 Material culture Stefanie Samida

130

27 Mediality Maria Muhle

133

28 Memory and commemoration Juliane Tomann

138

29 Mimesis Kader Konuk

142

30 Mitzvah and memorialization Rick Hilles

147

31 Narrative Inke Arns

151

32 Nostalgia Jonathan D. S. Schroeder

156

33 Objects Katrina Schlunke

160

34 Pageant Amy M.Tyson

163

35 Performance and performativity Katherine Johnson

169

36 Pilgrimage Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska

173

37 Play Robbert-Jan Adriaansen

178

ix

Contents

38 Practices of authenticity Stephen Gapps

183

39 Practices of reenactment Alexander Cook

187

40 Production of historical meaning Scott Magelssen

191

41 Realism Jonathan Lamb

195

42 Representation Inke Arns

198

43 Ritual Anja Dreschke

202

44 Role-play Stephen Gapps

206

45 Sublime Jonathan Lamb

210

46 Suffering Vanessa Agnew

213

47 Trauma Nena Močnik

219

Bibliography225 Index254

x

FIGURES

  1.1 Abandoned sites such as this are a reminder of the labor required for archives to maintain their integrity 13   3.1 The permanent Hungarian exhibition, The Citizen Betrayed, Block 18, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, in which the wall covering of the entryway has been specially treated to smell “aged” 22   4.1 Rifles and other American Civil War reenactment equipment arrayed between battles at the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg in 2013 27   4.2 Artillery crew reenactors engulfed in smoke at the 2005 Battle of Waterloo, Belgium 28   5.1 Historical dance expert, Stuart Marsden (center back), rehearses with dancers and one of the program’s hosts, Alistair Sooke (center left), for the Regency ball in Pride and Prejudice: Having a Ball (2013), a documentary produced by Optomen with the BBC 32   5.2 Performing a cotillion in Pride and Prejudice: Having a Ball (2013) 33   8.1 Vanessa Agnew, Refugee Plaque, 2016, granite, brass flashing 48 11.1 Anglo-Saxon reenactors taking a break from the Battle of Hastings in 2006 58 12.1 Female reenactors in Victorian undergarments in Channel 4’s 1900 House  64 13.1 Silent film Natur und Liebe in the Pfahlbau Museum, Unteruhldingen 1926, premiered Ufa 1927, Berlin 68 13.2 National Socialist exhibition Lebendige Vorzeit (Living Past), Technical University of Berlin, 1937, of the Reich’s League for German Prehistory 69 13.3  Steinzeit, das Experiment: Leben wie vor 5000 Jahren70 13.4 Roman reenactment at the Unteruhldingen Museum, conducted by experimental archaeologist Markus Junkelmann in 2009 72

xi

Figures

14.1 In the Danish World War II reenactment context, the group “Regimentet” is considered highly expert due to their convincing representation of German Wehrmacht soldiers in Denmark, 1942–1943 77 16.1 Screenshot from the World War II-themed first-person shooter (FPS) game Call of Duty WWII86 16.2 The mixed-reality game A Breathtaking Journey, as showcased during the Dutch VR Days 87 17.1 Mama Alto, gender transcendent jazz singer and cabaret diva 91 17.2 Women reenacting at Colonial Williamsburg 92 20.1 Extra-illustration prints of the Abbey of St. Stephen in a copy (once belonging to William Beckford) of Anglo-Norman Antiquities Considered in a Tour Through Part of Normandy by Andrew Coltee Ducarel 103 21.1 The Dolmetsch family in costume outside Jesses, Haslemere, c.1919 108 23.1 Tame Iti shooting the New Zealand flag in 2005 116 24.1 Screenshot from Follow the North Star, a participatory museum theater experience that recreates some of the conditions faced by fugitive slaves in Indiana as they sought freedom in the North, Conner Prairie, Indiana  123 25.1 Relief depicting Saint George, 11th century, façade of St. Mark’s Basilica,Venice 127 27.1 Video stills from Chris Marker, The Last Bolshevik, 2003 135 29.1  Panorama 1453, History Museum, Istanbul 145 29.2  Panorama 1453, History Museum, Istanbul 145 30.1 Karen Zusman, Hasidim Post Sukkah at Coney Island148 32.1 Kane’s snow globe, one of the most brilliant encapsulations of nostalgia 159 34.1 Souvenir of the Oxford historical pageant: in aid of the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford Eye Hospital, etc. commemoration, 1907 164 34.2 Group of cast members from the Pageant and Masque, wearing colonial and American Indian costumes 166 34.3 “The Star of Ethiopia” to celebrate the XIII amendment … October 11, 13, and 15, 1915 [Washington, DC] Goins printing co. 1344,You Street N. W. [1915] 167 35.1 A medieval forging workshop at reenactment festival Beorg Wic 170 36.1 Lourdes Cave with the figure of Our Lady 174 36.2 The Temple Mount in Jerusalem 175 37.1 Cannon Hall Napoleonic Reenactment Day, 27 August 2009 180 38.1 A member of the Australian reenactment group The Huscarls demonstrates the Viking-age craft of tablet-weaving 184 39.1 The author at work: voyaging to observe the Transit of Venus at Lord Howe Island in 2012, on board the replica of HMB Endeavour189 40.1 Participants in The 1855 Lager Beer Riot Dodgeball Reenactment and Beer Tasting, Pocket Guide to Hell 194

xii

Figures

44.1 Actors at the Tower of London role-playing Queen Victoria and Prince Albert 207 46.1 Hagesandros, Athenedoros, and Polydoros, Laocoön and his sons, marble copy of a Hellenistic original ca. 200 bc214 46.2 A screenshot from the documentary short Nazi VR (2017) shows a mashup image of the defendant being tried as an accessory to mass murder 216 47.1  Cheers to Sarajevo, 2017 221

xiii

CONTRIBUTORS

Robbert-Jan Adriaansen is assistant professor for the theory of history and historical culture at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His research focuses on conceptions of history and historical time in the past and in the present. In 2015, he published the monograph The Rhythm of Eternity:The GermanYouth Movement and the Experience of the Past, 1900–1933 (New York, Berghahn Books). He is currently working on two projects about the representation of violent pasts in contemporary historical culture, focusing on representations on Instagram and in historical reenactment. Vanessa Agnew is professor of English at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, and senior fellow at the Australian National University. She was educated at the University of Queensland (BMus), New York University (MA), University of Wales (PhD), Open University (BSc), and, currently, Humboldt University (MSc). She was associate professor of German at the University of Michigan until 2013. Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of Music in Other Worlds (Oxford UP, 2008) won the Oscar Kenshur Prize for 18th-Century Studies and the American Musicological Society’s Lewis Lockwood Award. She co-edited Settler and Creole Reenactment (Palgrave, 2010), special issues of Rethinking History 11 (2007) and Criticism 46 (2004), and book series: Historical Reenactment (Palgrave) and Music in Society and Culture (Boydell and Brewer). Her c­ o-edited books include Refugee Routes (Transcript, 2020) and Reenactment Case Studies (Routledge, forthcoming). Her children’s book It’s Not That Bad is appearing with Sefa Verlag. Her exhibition Right to Arrive was shown in Canberra, Australia, in 2018. Inke Arns is director of Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund, Germany. Since 1993, she has worked internationally as an independent curator and theorist specializing in media art, net cultures, and Eastern Europe. She received her PhD from the Humboldt University in Berlin with a dissertation focusing on a paradigmatic shift in the way artists reflected the historical avant-garde and the notion of utopia in visual and media art projects of the 1980s and 1990s in (ex-)Yugoslavia and Russia. She has curated many exhibitions: History Will Repeat Itself (2007, HMKV, Dortmund, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and 2018 Videotage, Hong Kong), and most recently alien matter (2017, House of World Cultures/HKW, Berlin) and The Storming of the Winter Palace (2017, HMKV, Dortmund, and 2018, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź). Her books include Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) – An Analysis of Their Artistic Strategies in the Context of the 1980s in Yugoslavia (2002), Net Cultures (2002), and Objects in the Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear! The Avant-Garde in the Rear-View Mirror (2004). xiv

Contributors

Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska is a researcher at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of Polish Academy of Sciences, where she has worked since 2007. She studied ethnology and Latin American studies. Her main areas of interest are the anthropology of religion and performance studies, and in particular forms of religious expression. In 2011, she received her PhD from the University of Warsaw with a dissertation on participation in Polish passion plays. She has conducted research on historical reenactment in Poland and on multisensory religious imagery in Catholic shrines. She is the author of articles on contemporary religiosity and representations of history and of the book, The Crucified: Contemporary Passion Plays in Poland (2017). Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier is an art historian. She is currently an ERC-Research Fellow at COTCA (Cultures of Occupation in Twentieth Century Asia), University of Nottingham. She received her PhD at the Erasmus University Rotterdam (‘Images of Khmer Rouge atrocities, 1975–2015’), and was associate researcher at the university’s Centre for Historical Culture for several years. She also works as curator and has organized exhibitions and events in Israel, France, Germany, Lithuania, Romania, Russia, Slovenia and Thailand. She has conducted research as Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien and the ICI Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin (2018–2019), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC (2012), the Stone Summer Theory Institute at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago (2010), and at the Theory Department at Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands (2005–2006). She is currently working on her first monograph, ‘Beyond skulls: Western visual culture and the memory of the Cambodian genocide’. She has contributed to essays collections, exhibition catalogs and journals such as Cinéma & Cie, Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, Mémoires en Jeu, Journal of Perpetrator Studies, Kunstlicht, and Media, Culture & Society. Kate Bowan is a lecturer in the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University. As a cultural musicologist, Kate explores the intersections between musicology and social and political history with a particular focus on transnational history. Her recent work has drawn upon music’s potential to be used as a heuristic device in the telling of transnational histories, while exploring uses of music in the 19th- and early 20th-century radical political sphere across the Anglophone world. Her recent publications include the co-authored book with Paul Pickering, Sounds of Liberty: Music, Radicalism and Reform in the Anglophone World, 1790–1914, published by Manchester University Press (2017) and a book chapter with Cambridge University Press, ‘Friendship, cosmopolitan connections and late Victorian socialist songbook culture’ in Cheap Print and Popular Song in the Nineteenth Century: A Cultural History of the Songster (2017), edited by Derek B. Scott, Patrick Spedding, and Paul Watt. Anne Brædder is currently the coordinator of the research program Uses of the Past at Aarhus University, Denmark, and part-time lecturer at Roskilde University, Denmark, mostly teaching within the area of uses of the past and gender studies. She holds a master’s degree in history and cultural encounters from Roskilde University Denmark (2009) and a PhD in history from Aarhus University Denmark (2017). Before writing her PhD dissertation she worked in different museums and in local archives. She continued exploring her interest in museums in her PhD dissertation on WW2 reenactment and living history in open-air museums in Denmark. Her research focuses on the uses of the past, memory, public history, and gender studies. She has published articles on the role of the body in WW2 reenactment, authenticity in reenactment, and memories of the 1970s women’s liberation movement in Denmark. Juliane Brauer is a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Centre for the History of Emotions in Berlin, Germany. Her research interests include the xv

Contributors

­ istory of education, public history, and cultural and music history of the 19th and 20th centuh ries. Her most important publications are “Empathy as an emotional practice in historical pedagogy” (Miscellanea Anthropologica et Sociologica, 2016), “Disciplining Young People’s Emotions in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the Early German Democratic Republic” in Stephanie Olsen (ed.), Childhood,Youth and Emotions in Modern History. National, Colonial and Global Perspectives, 2015, and (together with Ute Frevert et al.) Learning How to Feel. Children’s Literature and the History of Emotional Socialization, c. 1870–1970 (Oxford University Press, 2014). Stella Bruzzi is professor of film and executive dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at University College London, UK. In 2013, she was made a Fellow of the British Academy. She has published widely in the fields of documentary, costume and fashion, and masculinity and cinema. Her most recent publications are Men’s Cinema: Masculinity and Mise-en-Scene in Hollywood (EUP, 2013) and (co-edited with Pamela Church Gibson) Fashion Cultures Revisited (Routledge, 2013). The monograph Approximation: Documentary, History and the Staging of Reality will be published in 2020 by Routledge and includes a chapter on reenactment. Amanda Card is a former dancer and senior lecturer with the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research and teaching are in the areas of movement and dance studies, particularly the history of theatrical and social dance, the appropriation of Indigenous dance in (post)colonial contexts, the practice of intercultural performance, and the application of theories of embodiment to performance analysis. Alexander Cook is a historian based at the Australian National University. He specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of Europe and its colonial worlds. His primary research is devoted to the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and their aftermaths. He also studies cultures and practices of memory, in the past and the present. In this area, he has published several articles on reenactment, and participated in the joint BBC/History Channel series The Ship. His publications on reenactment include “The Use and Abuse of Historical Reenactment: Thoughts on Recent Trends in Television History” (Criticism, 2005) and “Sailing on the Ship” (History Workshop, 2004). He served as editor of History Australia, the journal of the Australian Historical Society from 2013–2016. Mads Daugbjerg is associate professor of anthropology at Aarhus University, Denmark. His primary research concerns the intersections of cultural and natural heritage, experiential tourism, and national and transnational identity and memory practices. He has published widely on these themes, including co-edited volumes of History and Anthropology (Globalized Heritage, 2011), The International Journal of Heritage Studies (Reenacting the Past, 2014), and a section of Critical Military Studies (Becoming a Warring Nation: Adjusting to War and Violence in Denmark, 2017). His first monograph, entitled Borders of Belonging: Experiencing History,War and Nation at a Danish Heritage Site, was published by Berghahn in 2014. He has been a visiting fellow at the University of Manchester, UK (2007), at Gettysburg College, USA (2010), and at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy (2015). In 2013, Mads Daugbjerg was awarded the Tietgen Research Award and Gold Medal from the Danish Society for Education and Business. David Dean is professor of history at Carleton University in Ontario, Canada, where he is also co-director of the Carleton Centre for Public History and coordinator of the MA in public history. He is the editor of A Companion to Public History (Wiley, 2018) and co-editor of History, Memory, Performance (Palgrave, 2015). His articles have appeared in journals such as Re-thinking History, Memoria e Ricerca, The Public Historian, Museum & Society, and the Journal of British Studies. He has blogged for Public History Weekly and History@Work. David was Company Historian to xvi

Contributors

Canada’s National Art Centre’s English Theatre Company between 2008 and 2012. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge, David is a member of the steering committee of the International Federation for Public History and co-editor of its new journal, International Public History. Anja Dreschke is an anthropologist, filmmaker, and curator based in Cologne, Germany. Her research interests and publications include visual and media anthropology, with a focus on the theory and practice of audiovisual media at the intersection of experimental ethnography, essayistic film, and artistic research. Currently, she is a research fellow in the department of media and cultural studies at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. Her publications include Trance Mediums and New Media. Spirit Possession in the Age of Technical Reproduction (Fordham University Press, 2015, with Heike Behrend and Martin Zillinger) and Reenactments. Medienpraktiken zwischen Wiederholung und kreativer Aneignung [Re-enactments. Media Practices Between Repetition and Creative Appropriation] (2016). Penny Edmonds is associate professor of history and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2012–2017) in the School of Humanities, University of Tasmania, Australia. Her research interests include colonial/postcolonial histories, Australian and Pacific-region transnational histories, performance, museums, and visual culture. Her most recent book, Settler Colonialism and (Re)conciliation: Frontier Violence, Affective Performances, and Imaginative Refoundings (Palgrave, 2016), was shortlisted for the 2017 Ernest Scott Prize.  Fabrizio Gallanti is a Montréal-based architect and curator who teaches at McGill University School of Architecture in Montréal, Canada, and the Architectural Association in London, UK. Together with Francisca Insulza, he is founding partner of the design and research studio Fig Projects, currently researching the relationship between architecture and labor. Fig Projects has co-edited the “No Sweat” issue of the Harvard Design Magazine (2018), dedicated to this topic, and he has curated the collective arts exhibition L’Attente at the UQAM Gallery in Montréal in 2019. Stephen Gapps is a historian and museum curator with research interests in public history, the Australian Frontier Wars, historical reenactment, and the commemoration of the past. His PhD dissertation was a history of historical reenactments and he has participated in various reenactment groups and events over the last 20 years. He has taught public history at the University of Technology, Sydney, and worked as a consultant historian in heritage, museums, film and television, and history events. In 2011, he won a NSW Premier’s History Award for Regional and Community History for his book Cabrogal to Fairfield – A History of a Multicultural Community. In 2016 he was awarded the NSW State Library Merewether Fellowship for research into the Australian Frontier Wars which resulted in his 2018 book The Sydney Wars – Conflict in the Early Colony 1788–1817. Stephen is currently lead curator developing a new permanent gallery display at the Australian National Maritime Museum that explores deep time, environmental, and Indigenous histories. He is a conjoint lecturer with the University of Newcastle and currently developing a research project around digital mapping the Frontier Wars. Elizabeth Haines is an honorary Research Fellow at the Science Museum, London, UK, and holds a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellowship at the University of Bristol in the Department of History. She has an interdisciplinary background that includes fine art and geography, as well as history. Her specialism is the history of colonial cartography in the 20th century, which she researches with a combination of archival research, landscape archaeology, interview, and film. She also has a strong interest in the exploration of historical scholarship through a variety of public-oriented formats including film screenings, radio broadcast, exhibitions, and theater. xvii

Contributors

Rick Hilles is the author of Brother Salvage (2006) and A Map of the Lost World (2012), both published with the University of Pittsburgh Press. He is a recipient of a Whiting Award and the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship. He recently completed two books of poetry, The Empathy Machine and The Invisible Thread, portions of which have appeared in The Hudson Review and Missouri Review, and been translated into Italian and Mandarin. He is an associate professor of English at Vanderbilt University, USA. Stacy Holman Jones is professor in the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University, Australia. She has written over 75 articles and authored and edited 13 books, focusing on performance as a socially resistive and community building activity, particularly as it narrates and changes the lives of minoritarian subjects. She is the founding editor of Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, a journal dedicated to publishing innovative work on the theories, practices, and possibilities of critical qualitative research. Katherine Johnson is a lecturer in performance studies at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. Her research spans performance, history, anthropology, and philosophy, with a focus on embodiment and performativity—in and as epistemology, pedagogy, historiography, heritage, and community. Before coming to Sheffield, she taught at the University of Sydney and wrote theater criticism for digital culture magazine M/C Reviews (a sister-project of academic journal Media & Culture). Her ethnographic and archival research in Australia, Scotland, and England led to her being a visiting researcher at the University of Edinburgh and the Scottish Storytelling Centre. Kader Konuk is professor and chair of Turkish studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. From 2001 to 2013 she was assistant and associate professor of comparative literature and German at the University of Michigan. Trained as a comparatist in German, Turkish, and English literatures, Konuk focuses on the disciplinary nexus between literary criticism, cultural studies, and intellectual history. In her monograph, East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (Stanford UP, 2010), she investigates the relationship between German-Jewish exile and the modernization of the humanities in Turkey. East West Mimesis  won the prizes for the best book in both of her disciplines: it was awarded the René Wellek Prize by the American Comparative Literature Association and the DAAD award by the German Studies Association. In 2017, she founded the Academy in Exile which offers scholars-at-risk fellowships to continue their work in Germany. Jonathan Lamb is an English literature scholar and has taught at Auckland University, New Zealand, Princeton University, and (most recently) Vanderbilt University, USA, where he holds the Andrew W. Mellon Chair of the Humanities. His recent books are The Evolution of Sympathy (2009), Settler and Creole Reenactment (2009, co-edited with Vanessa Agnew), and The Things Things Say (2011). His latest book is called Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery, published in 2017. It deals with the unevenness both of the epidemiological history of the disease and of its effects on what Thomas Trotter called “the nervous temperament.” Currently, he is speculating on the narrative and pictorial exploitation of the ellipse, defined by Marx as “two contrary motions reconciled in a single figure.” Martin Lücke is professor of history education at the Free University Berlin, Germany. His research interests span the Holocaust and history education, diversity and intersectionality studies, and public history. His most important publications are Martin Lücke, Else Engel, Lea Fenner, and Felisa Tibbitts (eds.), Change: Handbook for History Learning and Human Rights Education. For Educators in Formal, Non-Formal and Higher Education (Schwalbach/Ts.: Wochenschau, 2016) and the peer-reviewed Introduction to Public History (Series UTB Einführungen,Vol. 4909, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2018, with Irmgard Zündorf). xviii

Contributors

Scott Magelssen is associate professor and director of the Center for Performance Studies in the University of Washington’s School of Drama, where he co-heads the BA degree program. He is the author of Simming: Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning (2014) and Living History Museums: Undoing History Through Performance (2007). He edited Theatre Historiography: Critical Interventions with Henry Bial (2010), Enacting History with Rhona Justice Malloy (2011), and Querying Difference in Theatre History with Ann Haugo (2007). He edits Southern Illinois University Press’s Theater in the Americas series and hosts the website theater-historiography.org with Henry Bial. Nena Močnik is a postdoctoral researcher at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies and adjunct professor at the School of History, Culture and Arts Studies, University of Turku, Finland. In 2017, she published Sexuality after War Rape: From Narrative to Embodied Research (Routledge). Her research focuses on sexuality, structural violence, collective memory, and intergenerational trauma transmission. She was awarded the Bank of Montreal Award in Women’s Studies (University of Ottawa, 2018) and several other fellowships, including the EnTe Fellowship (New Europe College, Bucharest, 2016–2017); the Brown International Advanced Research Institute Fellowship (Brown University, 2015); and the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Fellowship (University of Southern California, 2014). Maria Muhle is professor for philosophy and aesthetic theory at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, Germany and co-founder of the publishing house August Verlag Berlin. She is a member of the DFG-research program “Media and Mimesis”, principal investigator of the International Doctoral Program “Mimesis” (LMU Munich), and a member of the academic board of the German Society for Aesthetics. Her research focuses on political aesthetics, media philosophy, mimesis, strategies of reenactment in contemporary art, and biopolitics. Her p­ ublications include Black Box Leben (ed. with Chr. Voss, August Verlag, 2017); Eine Genealogie der Biopolitik (Fink, 2013); Praktiken des Inkarnierens. Nachstellen,Verkörpern, Einverleiben (Zeitschrift für Medien und Kulturforschung, 2017). She is currently working on a project on Roger Caillois’ excessive mimesis. Ulf Otto is professor for theater studies and intermediality at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, Germany. His areas of research include interconnections of theater history and history of technology, theatricality of digital cultures, gestures and genealogies of reenactments, and media performances in contemporary theater. His recent publications include Theater als Zeitmaschine. Zur performativen Praxis des Reenactments, eds. U. Otto and J. Roselt (2012); Internetauftritte. Eine Theatergeschichte der neuen Medien (2013); and Auftritte. Strategien des In-Erscheinung-Tretens in Künsten und Medien, eds. U. Otto, M. Matzke and J. Roselt (2015). His current research projects deal with the electrification of theater and the theatricality of electricity at the end of the 19th century, the politics of representation in German theater, and the art of rehearsal. Maryam Palizban is a theater studies scholar, actress, director, and poet. She earned a diploma in performing arts and theater studies at Tehran University (2004) and received her PhD from the Free University Berlin, Germany, in 2014. She has been a research fellow on Performing Martyrdom in ta’ziya as Shi’a Theater – Ritual: Martyrs on the Stage in the project Figurations of the Martyr in Near Eastern and European Literature (2012–2015) at the Center for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin (ZfL). Her research deals with religion, culture, and their theatricality, with a focus on Islamic traditions. Her dissertation, Performativity of Killing: Performing Martyrdom in Ta’ziya as Shi’a Theater-Ritual, explores Ta’ziya, a theater ritual with a malleable, religiousbased content, which has been practiced among Shiites since the 17th century, especially in xix

Contributors

Iran. Recently, she became a research fellow at CERES at the University of Bochum (Center of Religious Studies, Käte Hamburger Kolleg), working on a project entitled The Theatrical Space of Beliefs:Transcendence and Immanence in Roman-Catholicism and Shi‘a-Islam: From Napoli to Rasht. Julie Park is Assistant Curator/Faculty Fellow at the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library of New York University. The author of The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford University Press, 2010), her current book projects are My Dark Room, a study of the camera obscura as a spatial paradigm for novelistic interiority in eighteenth-century England, and Writing’s Maker, an examination of diverse inscription technologies and their materials as interconnected channels of thinking, creating, and record making for writers of the long eighteenth century and beyond. Her co-edited collection with Miriam Jacobson, Organic Supplements: Bodies and Objects of the Natural World, 1580–1790, is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press. A recipient of several fellowship and grant awards, she will be a visiting research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh in 2020. Paul Pickering is professor of history and director of the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at the Australian National University. His most recent book (with Kate Bowan) is Sounds of Liberty: Music, Radicalism and Reform in The Anglophone World, 1790–1914 (Manchester University Press, 2017). Paul’s current book project, From ‘Dark Satanic Mills’ to the ‘Manchester Miracle’:The politics of urban-industrial heritage in Britain, will be published by Routledge in 2019. Stefanie Samida is associate professor of popular culture studies at Zurich University, Switzerland, where she was appointed in 2017. She studied proto- and prehistory, classical archaeology, and medieval history as well as media studies. Katrina Schlunke is an independent scholar affiliated with the University of Sydney and the University of Tasmania, Australia. She is also a co-editor of Cultural Studies Review. Gunter Schöbel is professor at the Institute for Pre- and Protohistory and Medieval archaeology at the University of Tübingen, Germany, where he was appointed in 2013. He studied archaeology, anthropology, and geology at the University of Tübingen from 1979 to 1982. In 1989, he received his PhD from the University of Freiburg. Since 1990, Schöbel has worked as scientific advisor at the Pfahlbau Museum, Unteruhldingen and became its director in 1994. His work focuses on Neolithic and the Bronze Age archaeology, archaeology of pile dwellings in alpine lakes and bogs, experimental archaeology, archaeological research methods, archaeological open-air museums, museology, museum education, and the history of archaeology. Besides this, Schöbel initiated and advised on the German living history documentary film series, Stone Age, The Experiment: Life as it was 5000 years ago, which was broadcasted on German television and radio in 2007 and accompanied by special exhibitions in several museums. Jonathan D. S. Schroeder is assistant professor of English and comparative literary studies at the University of Warwick, UK. He is currently working on a dual biography of John Swanson Jacobs and critical edition of his autobiographical slave narrative (forthcoming from University of Chicago Press), and an edited collection, Rethinking Ahab: Melville and the Materialist Turn (forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press). His articles and translations have been published or are forthcoming in American Literary History, American Literature, The Cultural History of the Sea, and Critical Inquiry. Anja Schwarz is professor of cultural studies at the University of Potsdam, Germany. She is a senior fellow in the research training group Minor Cosmopolitanisms and currently ­co-directs the German-Australian research group German Anthropological Legacies in Australia xx

Contributors

(­DAAD-Universities Australia). Her most recent publications address the role of German science in the Australian colonies (special issue of the journal Postcolonial Studies on “GermanAustralian Colonial Entanglements”, 2018) and the legacy of Tupaia’s Map (with Lars Eckstein, The Journal of Pacific History, 2019). She has published on the reenactment TV programs The Ship, 1900 House, and Outback House, and maintains a strong interest in popular reenactment. Juliane Tomann heads the research area “History in the Public Sphere,” one of the core research areas at Imre Kertész Kolleg, Friedrich Schiller University Jena. She studied cultural studies at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany and Wrocław University, Poland, between 2000 and 2007. She received her PhD from the Free University Berlin with a dissertation on the role and functions of history in deindustrialization and structural change since 1989 in the Upper Silesian (post)industrial city of Katowice, Poland. Her dissertation was awarded the Scientific Award of the Ambassador of Poland in 2015. In her recent postdoctoral book project, she focuses on historical reenactment, and examines performative practices and approaches to the past in the USA, Germany, and Poland under a comparative perspective. Furthermore, she is interested in the theory of public and applied history. As the speaker of an EU-funded project, she explores the possibilities for teaching public and applied history under a common framework in different European countries. Martin Treml is a historian of religion and culture. He graduated from the Free University of Berlin, Germany (1996) and has, since 2000, worked as a senior research fellow at the Center for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin (ZfL). He was academic coordinator of the research project “Figurations of the Martyr in Near Eastern and European Literatures” at the ZfL (2005–2014) and fellow of academic institutions in Jerusalem, London, Berlin,Weimar, Stanford, Innsbruck, and Vienna. His research focuses on the history and methodology of cultural research around 1900, and on theory and figures of Western religions. He is currently working on Aby Warburg and the Cultures of Religion and has edited Aby Warburg,Werke in einem Band (Berlin, 2010; with Sigrid Weigel and Perdita Ladwig). Amy M. Tyson is associate professor of history at DePaul University, where her research interests center on 19th- and 20th-century US social and cultural history, with a particular interest in how that history is interpreted and distilled for the larger public through museums, plays, art, music, and pageantry. She received her PhD in American studies from the University of Minnesota, where she first became interested in labor and performance at living history museums—the subject of her book The Wages of History (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013). Pieter Van den Heede is a PhD candidate in the Departments of History and Media and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He holds a master’s degree in history from Ghent University. His PhD research focuses on the representation and simulation of history in digital games set in war-devastated European (urban) landscapes during the 20th and 21st centuries.The project is part of the broader research program War! Popular Culture and European Heritage of Major Armed Conflicts, which investigates how the heritage of modern war history is represented and appropriated in contemporary popular culture.

xxi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors gratefully acknowledge the intellectual labor contributed by the authors of this volume, along with the editorial assistance provided by Klara Muhle, Adam Bresnahan, Thea J. Autry, and Katherine V. Mullins. We also thank Routledge’s Julie Fitzsimons and Robert Langham for supporting the project, and the readers, including Jerome de Groot, who provided helpful suggestions. The volume’s preparation has been generously underwritten by financial support from the Imre Kertész Kolleg at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, the Dean’s Office at the University of Duisburg-Essen, and Vanderbilt University. The editors would also like to gratefully acknowledge the support and encouragement provided by Kader Konuk, Sefâ Agnew, and Andrea Bohlman. In memoriam David Lowenthal (1923–2018), Tony Horwitz (1958–2019), and László Rajk (1949–2019).

xxii

INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS REENACTMENT STUDIES? Vanessa Agnew, Jonathan Lamb, and Juliane Tomann

Reenactment redefined One way or another, reenactment attempts to copy the past. As the past does not exist any longer, access to it is limited and shaped mostly by remains (physical and archival) and by traditions. Thus, if reenactment is to take place it must to some extent be imagined. That is, reenactment must be pictured in the mind, and then—accompanied by as many alibis as documents, tradition, and material remains will allow—incarnated. If the incarnation works well, then sufficient energy is released to fuel belief in the being of the past, for it has just this minute become present to our senses as a living and moving phenomenon. Therefore, reenactment requires affect in its performers and aims to elicit affect in its audience. In proportion to its success, the experience is immersive for a subject who is struck by the singular and original appearance of the past, with all sense of a copy eliminated. As for the spectators, they are exposed to a view of the past whose authenticity is proportionate to the community and extent of their own aroused feelings. Reenactment, then, breaks with grand narratives and tendentious explanations. Its interests may be focused on local, cultural, political, or national affiliations, but its success relies on the surprise of the moment when what was imagined takes shape, and not always as imagination had anticipated. However, there is at the other end of the spectrum a species of reenactment much cooler, more efficient, and not reliant upon imagination or afflatus. Largely enabled by technology, it is capable of reproducing the past as datasets so densely arranged and cross-referenced in a virtual space that it is not passion which fetches the past into being, but proof. In between these two extremes, dividing (on the one hand) the excited subject facing an imaginatively reconstructed historical object from (on the other) a jury of witnesses inspecting a virtual site replete with information, there are degrees of involvement variously reliant upon differing investments of imagination, affect, spectatorship, accident, evidence, and objectivity. While it may be that the excited subject is moved by mere likeness, resemblance, or verisimilitude, the jury is much stricter in applying standards of representation. As opposed to those who are content merely to be present “as it were” at the reproduced event, the jury demands a simulacrum indistinguishable from what really happened there and then (mimesis). Although reenactment has become a topic of scholarly debate comparatively recently, its importance to devotees of various faiths has always been crucially important. Consider that the Reformation turned on a debate about representing the history of the life of Jesus Christ, 1

Agnew, Lamb, and Tomann 

especially the Last Supper and its incorporation into the liturgy of communion. For Roman Catholics, the figural dimension of wine and bread as representing the blood and body of Christ himself is not a figure at all, but what they call the “real presence.” In the course of reenacting the supper, the figural resemblance is incarnated as the reality of the sacrifice that was shortly to be made in Jerusalem. For Protestants, this has only ever been a figure, a manner of speaking, an analogy made of words and so to be understood as a metaphor, not a metamorphosis. This sort of division is repeated in those forms of mimesis where the agent and medium of representation is elided, as in the still lifes of the Dutch artist Torrentius, where not even a brushstroke is detectible, compared with the lavish laying on of paint in Turner’s paintings of sea and sky, van Gogh’s landscapes, or modern color field painting. The same contrast can be observed on the stage, where method actors usurp the character they are representing, as opposed to those exploiting Brechtian techniques of alienation, where each scene provides a signature of action and (for the audience) a station of reflective thought, a formalist arrangement of possibilities occasionally perforated by the pathos of a song. The same formalist possibilities are evident in fictional narratives, which may either wear their devices on their sleeves, or disguise them as letters written by the characters themselves. So, questions range from: “Who or what is the subject of reenactment?” to “What is its object?” and “What is the medium of the encounter between the two?” Is it thought, sensation, dream, music, gesture, dance, speech, battle, air, water, machinery, a prosthesis, technology, or data? And finally, what is its target—affect, information, knowledge, truth, sympathy, suffering, shame, aesthetics, persuasion, reflexivity, or presence? This Handbook reflects upon these questions, embracing a wide range of different perspectives and understandings of what reenactment entails. It sets out a spectrum of its practical and theoretical implications, and it encourages the reader not only to distinguish between different techniques but also to spot where there appears to be an anomalous overlap between them, such as the probative function of corroboration going hand in hand with affect, or the alienations of formalism accommodating pathos. How is it that a carefully planned scenario only succeeds because an unexpected accident interfered with its unfolding? The degree of imagination present in a reenactment is always important to notice, for it is an index of how much invention is needed to supply the want of material facts; contrariwise, there may be so much information packed into the narrow box of forensic enquiry that imagination is scarcely needed at all. The question of aesthetics is never far from a review of reenactment, for the allurements of music, song, tableau, dance, panorama, and spectacle are important parts of its repertoire. These questions are aligned with the key terms that are currently used to describe and analyze the field of reenactment studies. It is a field developing rapidly in company with adjacent disciplines, such as theater, heritage, media, and performance studies, and it will be important to identify where the possibilities of joint research lie. The Handbook’s purpose is to encourage exchange across these frontiers and to refine and strengthen the conceptual structures they have in common.

Reenactment across the disciplines The term reenactment is not solely applied to historical events; it is important in the fields of ethnographical and anthropological research as well. Reenactments in their more formal aspect share with rituals a transformative potential arising not from the perfection of an imitation but from the exact and punctual performance of a sequence of actions and gestures as laid down by rule and precedent.Thus, the reenactment and the ritual will work not according to the inventiveness of its actors but to the “happiness” (to coin J. L. Austin’s locution) of their delivery. Here the importance of symbol and sign rise in proportion as the self-active power of images and the illusions of presence decrease. In modern art, this linguistic turn from image to sign is evident 2

Introduction: What is reenactment studies?

in the calligraphic tendency of abstract expressionists such as Cy Twombly and Franz Kline, and in the work of New Zealand artist Colin McCahon. In media, film, and theater studies, the reviving or restaging of older pictures, formats, or movies is a form of quotation not unlike the active quotations of Amadis and Orlando performed by Don Quixote when he wishes to run mad according to the best models. In its simplest form, reenactment is expository, as in historical reality television, which restages scenes of a past life (The Trench, Frontier House, etc.) within a documentary framework, partly as an investigation of what extreme circumstances were “really like” and partly as an opportunity for easy sympathy when a reenactor breaks down and weeps real tears. Archaeology comes into the picture when the reenactor’s investigative role contributes to experimental archaeology. This subfield of archaeology strives to recreate past lifeways and technologies in order to test hypotheses about the past. One of the latest and most radical developments is forensic architecture. It uses architectural expertise and various means of visual representation to provide and analyze evidence gathered from a wide array of cases of institutional violence, breaches of human rights, or environmental crimes. Reenactment is also part of religious life and has an explicitly sacred character, being practiced in Christian pilgrimages or the Muslim hajj or in neo-paganism. At the other end of the spectrum, reenactment can verge close to fantasy in video gaming, historical toys, and so-called live action role-play (larp), and thus wear the aspect of play. It can operate within an ethico-juridical context, as in courtrooms and truth and reconciliation tribunals, which use the process of discovery and testimony to exhibit past injustices, if not necessarily to redress them. And it can be musical, understood as historically informed performance practice or the use of music and sound to augment other forms of simulative historical representation. It is not only the disciplinary lens, then, which shapes the definition of reenactment.To a large extent, time is a factor as well, as the definition of reenactment has changed and been widened over the last two decades. Twenty years ago, reenactment was still associated predominantly with the restaging of significant historical events like the American Civil War and World War II battles, and with living history that used first-person performances to recreate past lifeways by simulating modes of dress, recreation, work, transportation, and speech. Although embraced by the public and attracting large numbers of practitioners, it was regarded with skepticism, if not disdain, within the academy. To the extent that reenactment swelled visitor numbers at heritage sites, it constituted a useful augmentation of other forms of heritage and commemorative practice. Australian ethnohistorian Greg Dening’s view of reenactment, often cited since, as the “past dressed up in funny clothes” was a register of its slight stature among serious historians but also an index of its popular appeal. Reenactment might have lacked intellectual rigor and seriousness, but at least it was an attractive vehicle for transmitting historical knowledge to the public, and it drew “citizen historians”—to borrow a term from the sciences—to the study and performance of the past. Claims to authenticity underscore most reenactments—whether through the use of historically accurate techniques, materials, and performance practices or through technological means like CGI, which generates a heightened sense of realism and historical “completeness.” It is for this reason that practitioners and scholars have taken the claim for authenticity to be a defining feature of the practice. Reenactment has what McCalman and Pickering call a “realist aesthetic.”Yet simulative historical performances need not be constrained by claims to authenticity: non-realist, non-representational modes of reenactment can likewise collapse temporalities and generate an affective engagement with the past. This recognition signals a need for a revision in our understanding of reenactment, one that goes beyond its realist aesthetic to accommodate reenactment’s multifarious character. In other words, the dominion of imagination in historical reenactment is probably changing. With the advent of virtual reality and digital forms of processing information of events from 3

Agnew, Lamb, and Tomann 

multi-perspectival points of view, the eyewitness—and the eye and the image it generates—have been dislodged from their ancient angle of authority to be replaced by an algorithm that does with mathematical precision what imagination used to do. A contest is developing between information technology and the eye (and indeed the other four senses) over the object of reenactment that has broad implications for the status of history itself. By means of digital data storage and the release of that processed data as indisputably belonging to whatever historical case is under investigation, it is possible to assemble such a full and coherent three- and even four-dimensional simulacrum from the streams of data that can be trapped from a single phenomenon—formerly impossible even to discover, never mind adjudicate—that is so densely corroborative of what happened in that place at that moment of time, that the result cannot be judged otherwise than authentic and even true. It is evidence of a kind so indisputable that were an archive to be assembled of historical moments such as those probed by the new school of forensic architecture, then it is fair to say that history as a debate about evidence would cease, and reenactments relying on the empirical model of a personal or group experiment would have to present themselves as fundamentally fictional, or even fantastic, alternatives to truth. Imagination would be regarded as no different from a dream, certainly not as a motive or alibi for any serious enquiry into the case as it is known now beyond a shadow of a doubt to be (forensic architecture). The only form of reenactment exempt from this regime of truth would be the Cartesian or Malthusian negative conjecture—“What if what I do know, I didn’t?”—because its mathematical approach to the formation of ideas has as little investment in positive empirical evidence as it has in imagination. To avoid the blurred boundaries of a relativist approach, it is necessary to situate reenactment inside a contest between Platonism and empiricism that has shaped the intellectual world of the West from its beginning, dividing Plato from Aristotle and, later, Descartes from scientists such as Hooke and Boyle, and Locke from Hume. Platonists are skeptical of the value of representation of any sort, believing that the world intelligible to the mind and soul is supersensible, real but invisible. A visible copy is bound to be infinitely inferior to the original form (mimesis). The shadows of moving figures flickering on the walls of the cave in The Republic could be construed as an ingenious yet contemptible reenactment of what is going on elsewhere in that space. An idea for Plato then is the repetition in the finite mind of the formal perfection of divine intention, pre-existent and perfect. History, therefore, is not a process of coming into being; it is a record of successive erasures of an idea of truth that we must recollect, not anticipate. An idea for Descartes is what he has when he thinks, and these thoughts owe nothing to sensible impressions, although they may validate them. An idea for empiricists is generally held to be the image of the thing or situation that caused it, which explains how attached the scientists of the early modern period became to prosthetic enhancements of the senses: telescopes and microscopes for the eye, megaphones for the ear, hygroscopes for the nose. The more distinct the impression, they maintained, the more vivid the idea. Under a Platonic regime, ideas become attached to one another by the need to express concepts that grow more abstract as they are refined. But empiricists rely on association: one idea is allied with another because they arrived together in the mind; or because one is the usual effect, or cause, of the other; or because it is its direct opposite. Locke thought such random collections of ideas in the brain were a species of madness. But Hume, following Hobbes on association, pointed out there is no rationale for the train of ideas that pass through the brain: like actors crossing a stage, we neither know where they come from nor where they are going. Platonists use words that will function like ideas, not resembling their referents or casually associated with them, but acting as conventional yet unmistakable signs of meanings, clear and

4

Introduction: What is reenactment studies?

determinate. Empiricist scientists were fond of words that reported facts clearly, “a close, naked and more natural language, so many things in an equal number of words,” as Sprat put it in his History of the Royal Society. Hence the two philosophers in the third book of Gulliver’s Travels who carry round sacks of things which they hold up to each other in order to communicate, getting rid of spoken words altogether. But they are much more immersed in the material world of impressions, and much more liable to equivocal statements, than the Platonic mathematicians of the Flying Island who, with one eye turned inward and the other up to the sky, meditate so deeply on the supersensible forms of geometry and mathematics that they have to be woken up if they need to attend to what is happening around them. The conversion of words into signs provides the model for the conversion of sensations into ideas among the Platonists. Descartes demanded, “Why could not Nature have established some sign which would make us have sensations of light, even if that sign had in it nothing that resembles this sensation” (1998 [1664], p. 4). What he really means to say, is that the sensation of light, once delivered to the optic nerve, turns into a sign that that the brain interprets as the idea of light. Locke follows on with an even more trenchant analogy between the process of perception and conventional signs: We may not think (as perhaps is usually done) that [ideas] are exactly the Images and Resemblances of something inherent in the subject; most of those Sensations being in the Mind no more the likeness of something existing without us, than the Names, that stand for them, are the likeness of our Ideas. (1979 [1689], p. 134) The traces of these two schools of thought are found at all the major intersections of epistemological innovation down to the present day, or what Otto in his entry to this Handbook calls “the crossroads of memory, performance, and media.” How do the techniques and objectives of reenactment adapt to the current of these two streams? It would seem at first glance that empiricism is the most attractive, since it has enlarged and complicated the equation between experience and experiment as immersive relations with matter negotiated by the five senses. Most reenactments began with the aim not of knowing what history was like but rather feeling what it was like. For those who believe the line separating information from imagination is still porous, the likeness of reenactment to what is reenacted is an important zone of resemblance rather than identity, allowing a necessary degree of play between the prototype and the copy. Explaining how the later Collingwood retreated from his Cartesian assertion that we think our way into the past, and into the characters of those who populated it, Pickering stands up for “the imaginative process at the core of seeking to understand it.” Schwarz reminds us, however, that imagination is not exactly the womb of things, for no matter how keenly we as individuals experience the past, it is wrong to suppose that because history was, it can be summoned by Faustian reenactors to be once again. The division Benzaquen-Gautier proposes between liveness and experience, mediation and image, in artistic representation sustains a space that performance studies appropriates for tactical maneuver, manipulating mimetic illusions in order to put an end to the “house arrest” of performance (Schneider). Bruzzi, on the other hand, sees it as an arena in which the will of the representer is subject to chance, contingency, and caprice, a context prolific in unplanned excitements. For Holman Jones, as for Edmonds, reenactment’s space of performative contingency generates the possibility of new subject positions, political interventions, and historical insights. On the other hand, the space can simply be a blank intensified by reenactment: the place in the archive where an expected record or thing is not to be found (Park), or what Schroeder discusses as the absent home that is not where the nostalgist

5

Agnew, Lamb, and Tomann 

is, and is not anywhere else either, the home “that is impossibly one’s own,” “the blind spot of historicism.” These exercises in pure or applied empiricism pale before the comprehensive novelty of forensic architecture, which is determined to bring to light whatever the nefarious intentions of governmental agencies have been determined to conceal. There is no room for imagination here: the stakes are too high for the inexactitude of play, or for the paradoxical subtleties of a something that is not there, or a nothing that is. Gallanti puts it succinctly:“Forensic Architecture then generates three-dimensional digital models and a complex set of analytical drawings that constitute an accurate depiction of a specific space or building, caught in the precise historical moment of an event.” But no matter how experimentally focused on the space and time of a singular event, over time forensic architecture will develop skill in harnessing multifarious media for these reenactments. As Gallanti says, it will control a “slow accumulation of knowledge from a widening pool of specialized information” and the “development of evidentiary systems.”This would generate an archive of cases that successfully surpassed not only the evidentiary techniques of those with an interest in hiding the truth, but also usurped their power. With such an archive, forensic architecture would contemplate a concatenation of moments of truth rather than a dispersion of facts. It would build a narrative of the past from which all shreds of doubt would have been expunged. History would cease to be a matter of conjecture and debate, more a series of indisputable self-evident truths. This is a newer departure for reenactment history than any other proposed within these Keywords, and it demands a rigorous reconception of what we mean by the past, and by its reenactment. In summary, reenactment is a broad set of practices and genres that tackles the questions of many disciplines. Because it is related to the past, the natural home for its study and analysis could be the history department. Notwithstanding the fact that the gap between popular and academic forms of historiography has narrowed and history itself has come to be less exclusively the preserve of academically trained historians, the study of reenactment is still a marginal part of historical inquiry. This holds true despite the recent institutional changes that history departments are undergoing. As an outcome of these changes, public history, a subfield of history that engages with different forms of historical knowledge and its presence in the public sphere, has gained significance. However, reenactment, which could be at the center of the public historian’s attention, remains, at least in the European context, a marginal area of inquiry. The underlying reasons are diverse: reenactment’s oscillation between time-then and time-now makes it difficult to categorize reenactment as either a strictly historical phenomenon or a social one related to the present. Further, reenactment is less institutionalized than forms of public history like museums and heritage sites. In many of reenactment’s guises, the main protagonists are laypeople who treat the activity as a hobby, albeit a serious one. Engaging with and understanding laypeople, their attitudes and aims regarding history and the past requires not only historical methods but also anthropological and sociological approaches. Understanding reenactment as an element of historical culture and historical consciousness would benefit from a transdisciplinary approach to the subject, one that considers its myriad aspects as a general feature of reenactment.

Reenactment studies as an emerging field We have seen that reenactment challenges established disciplinary approaches and crosses disciplinary boundaries. Notwithstanding the difficulties associated with grasping the object of inquiry, reenactment studies is emerging as a new field. Increasing numbers of scholars identify themselves as belonging to this community of scholars whose ramifying network of techniques

6

Introduction: What is reenactment studies?

and theories is providing new material and new insights into its importance. There is growing consensus about norms of data collection and interpretation, albeit ones that draw on methods, modes of inquiry, and intellectual objects from other fields.There is, moreover, increased institutional support for conducting research, training students, and disseminating and archiving new knowledge via dedicated conferences, meetings, professional organizations, and journals. While colleges and universities in Europe and the Anglophone world have yet to appoint a chair of reenactment studies, this remaining designator of institutional credibility cannot be far off. It can be predicted that within the coming decade, the first department of reenactment studies will begin admitting students. Establishing reenactment studies as an interdisciplinary transnational endeavor will bring a desirable rigor to the field and establish new benchmarks for valid and useful scholarship. This will facilitate communication and cooperation between reenactment studies and other fields. At the same time, it might be asked whether, as Foucault suggests, something might not be lost through the disciplining of the field. At the very least, we can say that reenactment’s sometimes productive, often antagonistic relationships with traditional historiography and public history stand to change. We can predict that Anglo-American modes of inquiry will be less likely to dominate the field, as they have up until now, and that the national particularities that currently govern reenactment scholarship will be subject to processes of homogenization—a thesis that is tested in Reenactment Case Studies: Global Perspectives on Experiential History, co-edited by Vanessa Agnew, Juliane Tomann, and Sabine Stach. As Otto suggests, in the past decade, reenactment has moved beyond its “constitutional phase” and perceptions of the field have shifted. Reenactment is no longer to be regarded as an “amateur pastime,” but rather as a field with a “stable epistemic object,” as a “subject of theory that promises to contribute new knowledge.” At this critical juncture in the emergence of reenactment studies, it is worth asking how we would like the future of the field to look: what questions do we, as scholars of reenactment (or as sometime reenactors), want to pose, what new knowledge do we want the field to contribute, and what institutional forms do we want the field to assume?

Key findings of the Handbook One of the key findings of The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies is that the study of reenactment has undergone a decisive shift. Whereas a decade ago, the nascent field was most closely allied with public history and museology, the intervening period has seen a shift away from history. As indicated before, the number of historians—public or otherwise—working on reenactment is comparatively few. History educationalists in Europe remain interested in reenactment, yet, since history education remains a marginal field in many countries, academic historians’ interest in reenactment remains correspondingly small because of the challenges posed by interdisciplinarity, among other factors. While history may have lost ground, what has gained in significance is performance studies. The work of Schneider, Arns, Lüttiken, and others, has built—wittingly or not—on the insights of scholars like Dening, who recognized early and played upon the theatricality of historical knowledge making and who explicitly linked such performativity to social and political concerns. Many contributors to the Handbook embrace reenactment’s shift toward performance studies, with its emphasis on the body as an evidentiary vehicle for historical knowledge making. Yet others flag intellectual concerns.These concerns center on questions about reenactment studies’ loose handling of phenomena such as historical truth, evidence, and objectivity. Schwarz, for example, draws on the work of Joan W. Scott and Raymond Williams to question the supposed

7

Agnew, Lamb, and Tomann 

authenticity of experience. As Scott pointed out in the 1990s, the “appeal to experience as incontestable evidence and as an originary point of explanation” is problematic because it leaves out “the constructed nature of experience, [and an awareness of] how subjects are constituted” (1991, p. 777). Schwarz links this explicitly to reenactment, which, she says, exhibits an epistemological dependence on experience … [that] runs the danger of hindering a better understanding of historical events and life worlds. One of these dangers is the result of a circular logic according to which the reenactor’s experience of the reconstructed historical setting can never do more than validate already accepted, regimented, and institutionally sanctioned assumptions about the historical past. A similar point is made by Haines, who identifies problems with reenactment studies’ current dependence on body-based evidence. “Historians,” she says, “have typically relied on a communal approach to establishing truth claims through peer review and accountability. Where one’s own body is being used as a source of evidence is this still possible?” she asks. A more sanguine view is taken by Magelssen, who highlights the ways in which reenactment establishes an affective “connection” between the past and the reenactor’s own life. Participatory programing at museums and heritage sites, he says, lends visitors “the perception of free choice that will help determine the outcome of the story.” But he sees something salutary in reenactment’s capacity for fostering emotional impact, inclusivity, and social justice. Contributors to the volume collectively make clear that to become an autonomous field, reenactment studies will need to tend to its own disciplinary history. Although in its infancy, reenactment studies’ disciplinary origins in battle reconstructions and pageantry are becoming obscured as interests shift away from national memory culture and the long durée, and toward the direction of the recent past and its individualized, experiential manifestations. There is, moreover, a tendency for each academic field engaging with reenactment to reinvent the wheel. A prime example here is musicology, which grappled with questions of historical fidelity and authenticity before many other disciplines. The fierce debates over early music revival (also known as historically informed performance) in the 1990s were resolved, as Bowan points out, by an acknowledgment that musical reenactment was shaped by the concerns, tastes, and social and political agendas of the present, not the past. At the same time, musicologists came to appreciate that musical reenactment could expand the aesthetic palette: performing on period musical instruments and reintroducing historical listening practices contributed to unfamiliar soundscapes that audiences found rich and rewarding. Musical reenactment was thus both chastened and elevated in its claims to represent and interpret past musical cultures. Unlike other branches of reenactment, which remain mired in the problem of authenticity and are wedded to what we might call “stitch Nazism,” historically informed music performance was discovered to have value in and of itself, independent of any assertions of historical authenticity. Recently, the interest in musical reenactment has taken a new direction, as musicologists come to investigate its potential for commemoration.

Future challenges Arguably the strongest argument for bringing together disparate objects of inquiry under the mantle of reenactment is that reenactment trades in conjecture and the counterfactual: not only might the past have been this way or that, but also the present and future are subject to imaginative manipulation. Reenactment erodes the boundaries between the real and the simu-

8

Introduction: What is reenactment studies?

lated, between the world as it is, and the world as we would like it to be. Moreover, its immersive self-referentiality can be thought of as analogous to the filter bubbles that increasingly characterize the reception and dissemination of information today. Adopting the term coined by Eli Pariser to describe the intellectual isolation arising from self-reinforcing internet algorithms, we can think of reenactment as a form of historical filter bubble because of its tendency to elide competing interpretations of the past. Reenactment acts to confirm the existing viewpoints of its practitioners and their audiences. We cannot attribute to reenactment an occult Big Brother, Google, or Facebook that uses search histories, click behavior, and tracking algorithms to shape our views on the past. Nonetheless, it is vital that we ask where and how reenactors derive their historical sources, to what extent such sources are subject to critique, and to what extent the nature of reenacted experience is driven by commercial interests. To intervene meaningfully in the pressing social and political concerns of today, reenactment studies will need to acknowledge its own filter bubble. It will need to become less self-congratulatory in its embrace of experience, emotion, performance, and authenticity. It will need to stop defining itself self-referentially (reenactment is what reenactors do), and/or in opposition to traditional historiography. Reenactment studies will need to ask itself hard questions about the costs of sacrificing criteria such as evidence, objectivity, corroboration, skepticism, and consensus in the pursuit of individual “historical” experience. The field will have to become more knowledgeable about the mechanisms that make it effective at what it does—using mental and/ or physical hardship and a sense of historical estrangement to generate an emotional response, a response to which the individual can credibly testify, with the capacity to move and persuade others. In seeking to better elucidate how these mechanisms work in a variety of media, reenactment studies will need to more clearly articulate its concerns. Yet, it is for the very reason that reenactment operates like a filter bubble on the past, that the field has the potential to engage in rigorous critique and to analyze its own methodological operations. Done well, such analysis could make a significant contribution in training students to be more critically astute at evaluating sources of historical information, its media packaging, dissemination, and ideological interests. The corollary of a department of reenactment studies would be area studies, departments constituted not by a common object of study like national linguistic traditions and the book— but by shared social and political interests and related areas of inquiry. As such, reenactment studies would articulate with the burgeoning study of global history. Reenactment in its different forms and genres would be the object of (empirical) study and subsequently lead to more general findings about a specific historical culture or the historical consciousness of a particular group or society. It might also yield insights into broader theoretical issues such as how knowledge about the past is produced, (mis)used, staged, or performed, as well as insights into how social groups or societies imagine the relationship between the past, present, and future. In speculating about potential course offerings in a reenactment studies program, we might envision students supplementing their historical studies with courses in the following: rhetoric and critical thinking, digital humanities, gaming, VR and AR, archival science, heritage, memory and commemoration, audience and reception theory, ethics and restorative justice, trauma theory, witness testimony, oral history, participant observation and ethnographic methods of data collection, imbedded journalism, haptics and experimental archaeology, the scientific method, and statistics. Among the learning objectives would be the ability to identify and evaluate sources of historical evidence, develop historical theses and test these experimentally, the capacity to contextualize historical information and discern the constructedness of historical subjects and historical knowledge, the ability to effectively communicate historical findings

9

Agnew, Lamb, and Tomann 

using a range of new media, to discern the strengths and limitations of eyewitness testimony, to uphold the distinction between the past and present, between the past and history as a product made in the present and to modulate what we might think of as reenactment’s radical experiential relativism. Finally, reenactment studies might aspire to greater scholarly rigor by acquiring some of the trappings of academic historiography—the participation in scholarly conversations with other reenactors and scholars of reenactment, the inauguration of field-specific scholarly journals, presses, and professional societies, and peer review processes that extended beyond publishing to the performance and practice of reenactment itself. We can assume that interest in reenactment will continue to grow. Indeed, all indications are that simulative, immersive historical experiences will gain in popularity and significance as media technologies become more sophisticated and irresistible to users.Virtual and augmented reality will increasingly come to include not only audiovisual experiences but haptic ones as well, savoring the physical experience of history’s spaces and things as integral to “experiencing” the past. For scholars of reenactment, then, an important moment. We have a weight of responsibility to not only define the future of the field, but also to steer it in a productive direction. There is the potential to further hone experiential and performative approaches to representing the past. But reenactment studies can also become a vehicle for developing new tools for critiquing the immersive, simulative, and testimonial modes of apprehending the world. By rigorously scrutinizing the operations of the historical echo chamber and by trading in its main currency, conjecture, reenactment studies can help us to revive and conserve notions of fact, truth, and objectivity.

10

1 ARCHIVE Elizabeth Haines

There are several productive tensions between archiving—the collection of documents, objects, photographs, and other material to create historical records—and reenactment practices. Archives, whether formal or informal, aim to act as a source of information about the past that is laid down away from normal social use for future interpretation. In Pierre Nora’s terms, an archive is a lieu de mémoire, a space that contains “moments of history torn away from the movement of history, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded” (1989, p. 12). By contrast, reenactment seems to fit more easily into the category of activities that create what Nora calls milieux de mémoire: rich, living environments of memory that are intended to produce a social sense of historical continuity (memory and commemoration). Archives and reenactment typically have been variously deployed by different historical practitioners. Professional historians have, until recently, relied almost entirely on the written archive as a source from which to conduct analysis and then draw their accounts of the past. Reenactors, on the other hand, often express the desire to go beyond the perceived petrification of historical experience in professional historical scholarship. Depending on the form of reenactment in question, this going beyond may have various ambitions. It may be an effort to recall haptic or sensorial aspects of historical experience. It may be an effort to capture subaltern histories, or other forms of subjectivity that are not represented in the archive. Alternatively, in some reenactments, epistemological considerations might be overtaken by the sociocultural importance of the act of commemoration. Although reenactors of all kinds might frequently draw from archival records to inform their work and to augment the perceived authenticity of their reenactments, the archive may not hold a core legitimizing function in their activities. Yet in recent years, the use of these forms of record within differing communities of historical practitioners has become more hybrid. Some academic historians are drawing on more diverse forms of source material and supplementing the analysis of written texts with the creative interpretation of milieux de mémoire. Equally, the digitization of archival material alters expectations and practices around the availability of records that have been systematically preserved in lieux de mémoire. Archives are increasingly accessible to a wider range of historical practitioners, including reenactment societies and researchers for film and television, potentially altering expectations about accuracy and authenticity in reenactments.

11

Elizabeth Haines

These changes in patterns of creation and use of historical memory have been accompanied by an interrogation of definitions: what counts as an archive? What do archives do? And, what are they for? Scholarship across various disciplines has begun to explore archives not only as stores of record, but as environments with embodied practices and traditions that might offer sociocultural prompts for the reenactment of their own past (heritage). Equally, it is increasingly common to encounter phrases such as “the body as archive” or “the city as archive.” These suggest that the historical legacies carried by the fabric of the human body and the built environment can also be drawn upon as sources of record and used for the analysis of past historical experiences (embodiment). Nora’s distinction between the idea of a mediated, decontextualized form of documentary history and an unmediated authentic domain of living social memory is becoming harder to defend.The rapprochement of these two seemingly opposing domains puts the archive in an interesting and evolving relationship with reenactment. The contemporary perspective that archives are more than simply stores of knowledge owes a great deal to the work of Foucault (see, for example, Foucault, 2002). For him, archives—as well as libraries and museums—reflect the interests and world view of those who have the means to lay down a record, notably the state. He promoted an archaeological approach to explore the effect of power relationships on the production of knowledge. In order to understand those power relationships, historians have paid closer attention to the creation of archives: archiving as a process. Through this lens, the institutional activities of archives (especially classification) became subject to critical scrutiny. Subsequently, the architectural housing for archives and the material stuff they contain have also come under historical interrogation. An interest in the processes of creating archives has led scholars to be more reflexive about the experience of using archives. Thus, it is possible to identify a proto-reenactive approach to the archive in a strand of Marxist-inflected history that critically considers the experience of using archives as indicative of the conditions of their production (Rose, 2000; Samuel, 1994; Sekula, 1986). We can also find a proto-reenactive approach to the archive in accounts that highlight the effect of archival work. For example, in Archive Fever—Derrida’s examination of the psychology of the archival impulse—he invites us imaginatively to relive the moment that his thought became a written record. Derrida recreates the phenomenology of the words taking shape on the screen of his portable computer, and the act of “saving” a text electronically (1996, p. 25). Steedman’s Dust (2001) is a meditative reflection on her physical experience of archival material as a form of relationship with the bodies of those who produced the paper and glue, and efforts of those who have maintained its physical integrity. Accounts of archives such as these encourage attention to the gestures and experiences of the historical actors who created them. More recently, scholars have moved beyond imagining the work of creating and keeping records and begun to physically reenact those processes. In a straightforward definition of the archive, these investigations address very mundane techniques of record-keeping and commonplace skills such as typing, indexing, and filing.This work has precedents in both media archaeology and social history. Media historians and literary scholars have long explored documentary technologies from the quill to the digital camera. See, for example, Kittler’s interrogation of the term “typewriter” as meaning both a machine and the machine’s operator (1999). Equally, historians and sociologists have studied the conditions of clerical workers (Anderson, 1976; Lawrance et al., 2006). However, by taking up reenactment as a method, historians hope to access the immediate embodied experiences of the invisible technicians of the written record and to reinstate their role in the writing of history (Haines, 2019). Paperwork is only one of a wider range of techniques and experiences of historical preservation being reenacted. Wenzel Geissler and Kelly (2016) describe reenacting the creation of 12

Archive

scientific data in a biological Field Station in Tanzania. Patchett (2016) has used reenactment to explore the history of the practice of taxidermy. De Silvey (2007) uses the term reenactment to describe her creative investigation of the remnants of domestic collections found in an abandoned North American homestead. Although we associate archives with the abstraction and standardization of historical experience, all these various studies highlight that archives and archival practices are not removed from broader social contexts. Records, even documentary records, are localized within specific sites, technologies, and traditions. Seen in this way, archives are more than sites for the accumulation of historical evidence, and they are not “torn away from the movement of history” (Nora, 1989, p. 12). They are environments from which past activity can, potentially, be revived (Figure 1.1). Elsewhere, challenges are being made to the term archive through studies in which codified, intentional forms of historical record are brought into dialogue with environments that carry historical memory in less obviously structured ways. Reenactment practices in various guises have played an important role in the creative interpretation and representation of history from these expanded archives, embracing multiple modes of historical work and arenas of practice (Pearson and Shanks, 2001). This scholarship is most strongly developed in performance studies. Researchers in performance studies have found interesting resonances between multiple trajectories for the historical memory of dance or theatrical experiences. Many creative performances are based on a script (or a score in music), which in some senses can be considered the original document. However, theatrical or musical archives usually also include the documentation of performances, based on a script in text or audiovisual formats. Alongside any deliberately archived records, cultures and

Figure 1.1 Abandoned sites such as this are a reminder of the labor required for archives to maintain their integrity (see Steedman, 2001; Haines, 2019).This recognition opens up the idea of the archive as a space of performance. Source: Lode Van de Velde.

13

Elizabeth Haines

traditions of performance develop. Through the adoption of a style or technique, performers take on historical modes of performance, including the conscious and unconscious mimicry of gestures and attitudes (Borggreen and Gade, 2013). Some scholars suggest that performers can use their own bodies as a source to explore the legacy of learned performance traditions, i.e., a performer’s body can be read as an archive (Lepecki, 2010). The body-archive is obviously highly individualized, and as well as challenging the primacy of the codified archival record, the body-archive also challenges the idea of an objective historical analysis. Although many critical studies of this kind have addressed records of creative or artistic performance, similar approaches have been taken to daily life and mundane social practices. Taylor (2003) expands the idea of performance to include social behaviors (behaviors that she calls the “repertoire”). She considers how individuals might perform preconditioned responses to celebratory events or traumatic ones like 9/11. Such responses might be prompted by broadcast media or other codified cultural expressions, but they are then reproduced in ordinary social activity. In this way, for Taylor, the archive and the repertoire “exist in a constant state of interaction” (2003, p. 21). Other scholars have examined the capacity of physical environments to act as a form of archive. De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) proposes that we can use urban spaces as a kind of historical record of daily life. Mundane political acts are not always the subject of self-conscious record-making, nonetheless, we can read their traces (for example, how pathways are worn into existence through habitual use). This approach offers the opportunity to work imaginatively with the material substrate of urban life. Rao (2009) suggests we can use the city as archive to explore the lived experience of urban density, while Roberts (2014) points out that digital archives are increasingly interwoven with our use of city spaces. We access them on our phones, on the move, and they shape our experience of the city. Does it make sense to see archive and activity as separate in that case? Studies such as these bring new definitions of acts and experiences into the purview of reenactment. Through several different strands of work, then, we find the definition of archives much expanded. An individual’s physical memory, contemporary social interactions, or built infrastructure may all be considered as historical records that can potentially be read. These forms of archive are not set apart from daily life and reserved for historical analysis. They remain embroiled in the “sea of living memory,” embedded as they are in the tangible and intangible infrastructures of society (Nora, 1989, p. 12). These challenges to a received dichotomy between archives and living memory have several consequences for both reenactors and academic historians. Firstly, it is important to avoid assumptions about the temporalities of different forms of historical record. Is it accurate to conceive of archives as stable or permanent but performance as fleeting and ephemeral if we consider forms of song or dance that have endured hundreds of years (Borggreen and Gade, 2013)? Secondly, we are prompted to reconsider how we might make truth claims about the past. Neither archives nor living traditions can offer unmediated access to the past. Historians are habitually skeptical about the evidentiary capacity of documentary records in archives, observing how archival remains are always to some extent fragments that have been shaped by processes of deliberate selection, partial preservation, and reframing. It is important to be equally hesitant about seeing traditions of living memory, or the recreation of embodied practices as offering the opportunity to speak authentically or directly of the past (McCalman and Pickering, 2010). The use of more diverse sources also shapes the possibility of making objective claims about the past. Historians have typically relied on a communal approach to establishing truth claims through peer review and accountability. Where one’s own body is being used as a source of evidence, is this still possible (Haines, 2019)? Have these definitional changes fundamentally shifted 14

Archive

the concept of an archive from being a place for objective analysis to being a site for exploring competing forms of subjectivity? Finally, because archives have historically been associated with literate political elites and high culture, while living tradition (including reenactment) has been associated with physical skills, popular culture, and illiteracy, the blurring of the boundaries of these forms of historical memory has political consequences. Authority over historical truth is no longer reserved for those with the financial capacity to house historical records and employ people to maintain them. In sum, exploration of the interplay between archives and tradition opens exciting new perspectives for reenactment studies. In light of recent literature and shifting definitions, the suggestion that reenactment can take performers or audiences beyond the archive seems harder to maintain. However, the use of creative methods to explore archival records; conflicting ideas of authentic presence (the phenomenological authenticity of “real” human presence, versus the historical authenticity of documents and objects that are “really” of the past); the quest for new kinds of epistemologies that account for more diverse forms of archival memory; and the proliferation of digitally mediated archives and performances, all suggest that exploring the intersections between material archival records and lived practices is likely to continue to be extremely fruitful.

Further reading Borggreen, G., and Gade R. (eds.), 2013; Haines, E., 2019; Nora, P., 1989; Pearson, M., and Shanks, M., 2001; Roberts, L., 2014; Taylor, D., 2003.

15

2 ART Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier

The staging of the Storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd, a mass action dramatizing key moments of the October Revolution and created by a collective of artists under the direction of Russian director Nikolai Evreinov in 1920, is often mentioned as one of the first examples of artistic reenactment. As a recent study has shown (Arns et al., 2017), the Storming of the Winter Palace deceptively fit the category of reenactment.Yet, it provides a starting point for the genealogy of a practice that has gained prominence in modern and contemporary art over the past decades, up to the recent boom in the 1990s and 2000s, when reenactment featured centrally in a number of exhibitions and conferences. Among them, projects such as Life, Once More (2005), Experience, Memory, Reenactment (2005), and History Will Repeat Itself (2007) provide a basis for the conceptualization of this cultural phenomenon. Art theorists and curators emphasize the diversity of stories, media, methods, and results in artistic reenactment at the turn of the century. Far from seeing it as a new genre, a movement or a mode, they consider it as part of a long history, “an element within a wider cultural field, which incorporates the copy in its manifold manifestations” (Rushton, 2005, p. 7). Moreover, they point out the similarities between reenactment in art and in other domains, such as criminology (forensic architecture), experimental archaeology, and living history. Besides the photographic and video documentation by artists of popular historical re-staging of battles, art theorists and curators distinguish between two principal categories of artistic reenactment: that of artistic events and that of historical events. While the two categories have different implications and give rise to different discussions, they are nevertheless related through the question of mediation. Today’s ubiquity of media images and their triumph over direct observation in our experience of the world might explain the turn to reenactment in the arts in the 1990s and 2000s (Arns, 2007; Quaranta, 2009). Artists do not seek to understand what “really” happened or how to access the actual event. Rather, they use reenactment as a means of reflecting on the tension between liveness and mediation, and the effect of the images and texts through which the event is remembered (Pil and Galia Kollektiv, 2007, n.p.) (mediality). Yet, there is a paradox at the heart of this attempt to regain control over mediation. Artistic reenactments in public spaces and museums produce in turn a massive amount of documentation.Therefore, they replicate “the tension between the experience and the image of the performance” (Lütticken, 2005, p. 41). This interdependence of reenactment and media representation constitutes a critical feature of artistic reenactment. 16

Art

The historical events reenacted in art are often events of the 20th century, considered in their traumatic or political dimension and seen as of relevance today (Arns, 2007, p. 2) (trauma). For example, in Farbtest, Die Rote Fahne II (2002), Felix Gmelin reenacts in Stockholm a 1968 relay race of students waving a red flag in West Berlin. In 80064, Artur Żmijewski (2004) convinces a Holocaust survivor to tattoo afresh the concentration camp number he has on his arm. Such works are less about the past events themselves than the ways in which events keep haunting the present, more specifically, the channels through which they reach us after many decades.The notions of history and memory are thus deeply entangled in the practice of artistic reenactment. Writer Steve Rushton sees the ongoing restructuring of collective memory as the core element of it (2005, p. 10). For some theorists, it is the transformation of historicism—our relation to history—and the cultural regimes through which it is expressed that plays a central role (Lütticken, 2005, p. 29). Art critic Jan Verwoert makes a direct connection between the upsurge of reenactment practices in art in the late 1990s and the loss of the grand narratives (such as modernity, progress, and civilization) that shaped our experience of history until postmodernism, postcolonialism, and associated ideological crises fractured them. Deprived of paradigms of historical interpretation,Verwoert argues, we experience the present either as “continuum without end or direction,” or as “absolute urgency.” Artistic reenactment thus becomes a means of reintroducing “true perspectives” or “true choice” into our relation with time and historical change (2009, p. 29). There are two main strategies at play. One consists in creating distance vis-à-vis the past by laying bare the constructedness of mediation. The other proposes an affective relation to history through embodiment and the erasure of any safe distance between abstract knowledge and personal experience of the past (Arns, 2007, pp. 8−9) (embodiment). By exposing mediation as something to be challenged either through critical interpretation or imagination, reenactment opens up a different space for addressing the presence and effect of the past in our lives. This makes possible the rewriting of canonical history, even “do[ing] justice to history” (Verwoert, 2009, p. 30). Such corrective dimension, as emphasized by a number of authors, has much to do with linguistic structures. Reenactment introduces a n ­ arrative aspect—with a beginning, an end, and a sense of duration—into “the chaotic unfolding of the [original] event” (Allen, 2009 [2005], p. 20). Moreover, rather than being a descriptive act, reenactment is best understood as a performative utterance that creates something new (Caronia, 2009, pp. 14–15). This production may also contribute to the (re)emergence of voices that had been written off in official versions, hence the possible cathartic effect of reenactment. Works such as Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave support this view. In 2001, the artist ­re-staged the 1984 confrontation between picketing miners and police forces in South Yorkshire, using firsthand testimonies. Among the reenactors were former miners and policemen, whom Deller asked to swap their roles. Authors generally concur on the emancipatory dimension of such projects. Not only does reenactment release history “from the confinement of the past” by reopening it to changing perspectives (Verwoert, 2009, p. 31). By proposing alternative scenarios, it also gives people a way out of the scripts they feel compelled to follow in their everyday life (Gilligan, 2007; Lütticken, 2005). Reenactment attributes transformative power to tools of narration. Those who tell the story anew do not only re-fashion historical representations in their own way.Their re-appropriation of the past makes it possible for them to redefine their position in the present as well. This informs to a great extent the discussion about the effect of reenactment on the public. Two essays structure this debate. On the one hand, Guy Debord’s La Société du Spectacle (1967) problematizes the use of reenactment, itself an element in the repetitive logic of the spectacle, as a means of disrupting the passive consumption of mass/popular culture and narratives. Producing more mediation only adds to the self-dispossession inherent in the spectacle. On the other hand, 17

Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier

Jacques Rancière’s Le Spectateur Émancipé (2009) deconstructs the idea of mediation as alienation, and instead revalorizes the spectator’s position as being an active one. Some art theorists and curators think that the affective experience of history achieved through immersion and physical involvement turns passive viewers into active participants (Arns, 2007, p. 8). On the opposite side, it is argued that the interchangeability of the audience, which is the outcome of the mechanical recording and the conventional museum display of artistic reenactments, hampers any direct form of involvement (Allen, 2009 [2005], p. 22). Moreover, artists focus on events rather than processes, and resurrect “hollowed out” forms rather than the labor that produced these forms (Sarlin, 2009, pp. 144−147).This deprives the reenacted action from its original political or ideological specificity. It aestheticizes the action, thus making any mobilization around this purely cultural form an empty gesture (Jones, 2011, p. 25). What emerges, though, is mostly a set of moderate views on the capacity of reenactment to generate “participatory politics” (Gilligan, 2007, p. 429). Reenactment is seen as a “realism of potentialities” that may change people’s perception of what is possible politically (Muhle, 2013b, p. 89). While it “cannot be a substitute for a political force that is lacking,” it may at least create a “space of reflection” and perhaps a stage for “small but significant acts of difference” (Lütticken, 2005, p. 60). As it disassociates cause and effect, reenactment makes people aware of the existence of a range of options and their own responsibility in choosing one over the others. This enables individual acts of interpretation and imagination that might coalesce, or not, around questions of mediation and agency. In that sense, reenactment is the promise rather than the realization of a new kind of community. The reenactment of art performances, nowadays a staple in museum programing, poses the question of potentialities in a different way. If the political mobilization of the public appears at first sight less of a concern for the artists, the practice is nonetheless political since it intersects with institutional dynamics and production of knowledge. In the context of performance art, the question of mediation is inseparable from that of documentation. Furthermore, it points to the theatrical dimension of the genre, and the foundational discussion in theater about the tension between stage and public. For the past 40 years, the relation between performance art and its documentation has been an ongoing debate, shaped by diverging views on the genre’s ephemerality and interactivity, and how these are affected by authorship, commodification, fetishization, and the marketplace. Marina Abramović’s oft-discussed project Seven Easy Pieces (New York, 2005) provides an interesting entry point into these issues. For seven consecutive nights at the Guggenheim Museum, the artist reenacted historical artistic performances (including two of her works). From the start, documentation was central to her endeavor. Not only did Abramović explore the role and reactivation of documents by choosing to reenact pieces she had never attended and knew only via iconic photos (Burton, 2006, p. 55).Through “performative documentation” or “embodied documentation,” she proposed to create alternative ways to preserve performance for future generations (Santone, 2008, p. 147; Cesare and Joy, 2006, p. 170). Ironically, though, the conventional fashion in which the project itself was documented through a film, photos, and a book, was at odds with Abramović’s declaration of intent (Shalson, 2013, p. 433). Reenactment is thus part of the debate about the institutionalization of performance art, the curatorial strategies this implies, and the historicization of the genre. The question it raises is whether it offers a way out of what performance scholar Lara Shalson aptly calls the “evidentiary crisis” of performance (2013, p. 432). Being itself a performing—and performative—act, reenactment may help go beyond the reductive, “freezing” dimension of material documentation. At the same time, if the artist-reenactor is driven by the wish to produce “a truer account of the past” (Santone, 2008, p. 150) or as Abramović stated in an interview, to “[keep] the story straight” (Kennedy, 2005, n.p.), reenactment becomes just another means of stabilizing or fixing the original work. Still, it might have the potential for generating new ways of documenting 18

Art

performance, collaborative and cumulative rather than hierarchical ones (Santone, 2008, p. 147). But for this to work, reenactment needs to maintain a continuous tension between liveness and mediation, between the unrecordable and the documented. It must acknowledge within its own unfolding “the impossibility of ever fixing [the original performance] in time and space” (Jones, 2011, p. 18) and the existence of “irretrievable losses” in the process (Santone, 2008, p. 151). In Seven Easy Pieces, these losses were expressed through the variations Abramović introduced into each reenacted performance, for example, in the duration. While this creative act reflects the “liberating trait” characteristic of reenactment (Blackson, 2007, p. 3), it might also be construed as a denial of the original work (Boyd, 2007, n.p.). This denotes the limits of emancipation in the reenactment of artistic performances, and the moment when extending or reinventing the original piece might turn into mere appropriation, or worse even, into parody (Boyd, 2007, n.p.; Cesare and Joy, 2006, p. 172). Rather than a legal or copyright issue, it is the moral aspect of authorship that is to be underlined. Moreover, this calls attention to the degree of participation expected from the audience: are spectators witnessing a “re-make” or participating in the creation of a novel piece? Reenactment, indeed, complicates performance art. It does not bring any solution to the ongoing dilemma of theater as possible “exemplary community form,” to draw on Rancière’s expression (2009, p. 5), since the distance between stage and public remains something to be either shown or abolished. However, it generates blurred areas that foreground the interdependence of past and present. As some art theorists remind us, the differences in histories of performance art should not be overlooked when it comes to the question of emancipation (Brygzel, 2018; Sosnowska, 2015; Wood, 2012). In her study of artistic reenactment in Eastern Europe, art historian Ami Brygzel emphasizes the particular situation in the former Eastern bloc. Under communist regimes, performances were often an attempt to break free from political power, rather than from an art market that did not exist. Taking place in private settings, they remained “invisible” since documentation could not be circulated easily (2018, n.p.). Faced with the task to rebuild national art histories after 1989, some artists, such as collectives Kontejner (Croatia) and IRWIN (Slovenia), chose reenactment as both an instrument of historiographical recovery and an educational tool for younger generations. Rather than nostalgically pointing to a totality that can never be fully conveyed through reenactment, the “irretrievable losses” encountered in the process bore witness to the radical transformation that post-socialist societies had just lived through. This shows the importance of decentering Western stories and looking into other contexts of performance art. For example, when Otobong Nkanga reenacted in 2007–2008 Allan Kaprow’s piece Baggage (1972), she extended the geographical scope of the original performance. Kaprow displaced sandbags across the United States. Nkanga shipped sandbags from Belgium to Nigeria, and vice versa. Through this gendered and racialized reinvention, she laid bare historical ties between the two continents, and explored recent forms of migration and human trafficking. She gave a contemporary inflection to Kaprow’s action, and, as such, illustrates how new works, as information scientists Christina Manzella and Alex Watkins call reenactments by other artists (2011, pp. 28–29), help capture anew the critical power of the original artistic performance and the potentialities it had opened up at the time. There lies, perhaps, the potential for a new form of community as two actions separated by a time span of several decades enter into deep resonance, one with another.

Further reading Auslander, P., 1999; Borggreen, G., and Gade, R., 2013; Debord, G., 2011 [1967]; Gianacchi, G., and Westerman, J., 2018; Jones, A., and Heathfield, A., 2012; Kirby, M., 1984; Phelan, P., 1993; Schneider, R., 2011; Taylor, D., 2003.

19

3 AUTHENTICITY Vanessa Agnew and Juliane Tomann

Concerned with uncovering fundamental truths, essences, and origins, authenticity is a key concept in disciplines ranging from philosophy, anthropology, and music to psychology and law. Yet, it is in the practice and theorization of reenactment that authenticity holds the greatest sway. Lacking the markers of corroboration enjoyed by traditional historiography, reenactment adopts authenticity as both its subject matter and its object of inquiry. Reenactment seeks to advance historical understanding through an authentic simulation of past objects, events, practices, and experiences, yet its epistemological claims rest on the selfsame assertion of authenticity. This puts a troubling circularity at the heart of reenactment’s authenticity imperative. As a form of social practice and an emerging academic field, reenactment calls for a method that integrates inductive and deductive approaches, even as it latterly upholds the critical potential of embodied and affective knowledge predicated on the authenticity of the (individual) performing subject (body and embodiment; performance and performativity; emotion). Authenticity will thus pose fundamental challenges for the future of reenactment studies (introduction) as the field comes to articulate falsifiable criteria for the production of historical meaning and the evidence upon which this might be based. As a discourse of self-referentiality, authenticity implies internal coherence (things or people are true to themselves) and/or fidelity to some other original thing or being (Varga and Guignon, 2017). In both cases, the discrepancy between what that thing is or was, and what it appears or professes to be, narrows as authenticity attempts to conceal or eliminate the mimetic principle underscoring all reenactment (mimesis). This helps explain why authenticity is a vital mechanism within reenactment, which depends on closing the spatiotemporal distance between the past and present (Phillips, 2015) for constructing what reenactors and their audiences perceive to be powerful historical experiences. The discourse of authenticity has historically distinguished between subjects and objects, encapsulating elements of authorship, authority, credibility, and accreditation. A four-part typology proposed by Bruner (1994) identifies, in the first instance, authenticity that relies on verisimilitude. Such an understanding is prevalent among museum professionals, whose aim is to produce historic sites that are convincing because of their “mimetic credibility” (1994, p. 399). The second understanding also encompasses the nature of a copy and its appearance as “true in substance, or real.” The New Salem Historic Site, for example, seems credible not only to present-day visitors; it also aims to conform to the (assumed) expectations of a person from the 20

Authenticity

1830s (p. 399). A third notion of authenticity asserts that a reproduction cannot, by definition, be authentic, while the fourth involves questions of power: copies are authentic if they can be certified as such.The latter shifts the focus from the original object, event, process, or experience to the question of who is authorized to determine the version of history that will be accepted as correct or authentic. Under this perspective, both the original and copy are “continually being constructed in an endless process of production and reproduction” (p. 400). The history of the discourse can thus be seen as a contest between authenticity as a hermetic attribute of a thing or person, and authenticity as a negotiable attribute, reliant on an external imprimatur. While postmodern interventions call into question the status of origins and even the ontological status of the past itself, many elevate the perceiving and performing self to the position of arbiter of knowledge.We will find that reenactment draws on various understandings of the term, resorting to assertions of verisimilitude and mimetic credibility in relation to objects and sites, and (self-)accreditation in relation to experiences. The authenticity of objects concerns the relationship between the original and copy (or counterfeit) and is assessed and arbitrated by experts in the field, who inquire into a thing’s status as genuine, true, trustworthy, or reliably documented (materialization of the past). Consequently, authentication is a “process, by which something—a role, product, site, object or event—is confirmed as ‘original’, ‘genuine’, ‘real’ or ‘trustworthy’” (Cohen and Cohen, 2012, p. 1296). This makes authenticity central to fields which seek to establish by empirical means the authorship, origin, genesis, and provenance of texts, compositions, paintings, artifacts, and other aspects of tangible and intangible cultural heritage. The term authenticity is commonly used to describe a superlative quality, something that is more genuine, real, or true than anything with which it might be compared and is thus associated with the metaphysical. Reenactors and their audiences, in contrast, measure a reenactment’s achievements—whether knowledge, emotion, or credibility—in terms of degrees of authenticity, establishing authenticity as a relative property. A less authentic reenactment might, for example, be characterized by ill-informed and unserious participants dressed in anachronistic costumes; authentic reenactments, in contrast, by hardcore reenactors pursuing a high degree of fidelity to past modes of dress, speech, and behavior (amateurism and expertise; authenticity practices). Reenactment’s authenticity imperative also applies to the historic sites, landscapes, and buildings used for the theatrical, filmic, novelistic, artistic, or museal restagings of the past, and such places are often considered a kind of ne plus ultra of historical fidelity. The Hungarian national exhibit at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim, Poland, is a case in point. The exhibition designer, Lásló Rajk, seeks to draw the visitor into a reenactive experience. “The building itself is the objective reality,” he stresses, for “It bears testimony to all the horrors that happened there and [to] everything that followed” (2013, n.p.). Foregoing the use of the depersonalized historical objects—human hair, suitcases, clothing, tallits (prayer shawls), spectacles, and other personal effects—that are on display elsewhere at Auschwitz, Rajk’s exhibition depends only on replicas rendered in glass and steel, for example, of a cattle car that transported people to the death camps.Visitors’ shadows—their “ghost images”—are cast upon historical footage of the death marches or of people awaiting selection. Webcams installed at Birkenau capture additional ghost images from the ruined crematorium, selection ramp, and barracks for projection into the museum.Thus, he says, though the distinction between the past and present is preserved in a space of remembrance, meditation, and reflection, “visitors become part of the past themselves, for a moment” (2013, n.p.). Yet, even at Auschwitz, doubt is cast on the capacity of the site’s “objective reality”—its authenticity—to adequately convey the historical record within a museological context. Walls in the entryway to the Hungarian exhibition have been treated with a special preparation of 21

Vanessa Agnew and Juliane Tomann

l­inseed and bitumen, the dank smell of which is the first thing to confront visitors as they descend into the subterranean space. This smell, Rajk reports, is intended to convey an impression of “aging” and a “perception of the past” (quoted in Scandura, 2010), and so elicit concomitant affective responses in the visitor. Elsewhere, historic footage of Nazi selections for the crematoria is projected onto a screen, along with an accompanying soundtrack of a pounding heartbeat, a sonic device that generates a sympathetic somatosensory response in the visitor. Historic sites are often assumed to convey forms of historical knowledge that cannot be replicated or faked, with the ontology of the place assuming an epistemological function (Agnew, 2009). The Auschwitz exhibition’s “aged” walls and its other somatosensory effects reinforce the point, however, that authenticity is a delicate artifice. Authenticity does not assert itself, but it can be facilitated by smoke and mirrors and by the affective and intellectual responses of accrediting reenactors and observers (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 The permanent Hungarian exhibition, The Citizen Betrayed, Block 18, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, in which the wall covering of the entryway has been specially treated to smell “aged.” Source: Lásló Rajk.

22

Authenticity

If the authenticity of objects and places has been established as fundamentally constructed and mutable within reenactment, we might consider authenticity’s other pole—that of the subject. As the heritor of notions of authenticity dating to the emergence of the modern individual in the 18th century, contemporary reenactment prioritizes the subject’s perception and immediacy of experience.The authentic experience—whether of wild nature, a traditional way of life, an exotic ritual, or edgy band—appears spontaneous and unmediated; it promises deep engagement, untarnished by the dictates of commerce or the demands of a fickle subject. Its uniqueness generates powerful emotions, and these are assumed to yield higher insights. The authentic historical experience encapsulates all of these properties, but also appears to spring directly from the past. Reenactors experiencing “period rush,” for instance, may be convinced that their immersive experience is tantamount to what was actually lived and felt in the past. Such “authentic historical” experience is, however, orchestrated by the structuring narrative and the mise-en-scène of the reenactment itself, making staging a precondition for the assertion of authenticity, as well as authenticity’s occult mechanism. Thus, while reenactment quests after authenticity and acknowledges that, ultimately, the historical referent—the past itself—can never be attained or sufficiently well represented, reenactment lacks a mechanism for defining authenticity in affirmative terms. Instead, reenactors often negotiate among themselves, and in dialogue with their audiences, as to what constitutes an authentic representation of the past. Stephen Gapps points out that this process of negotiation serves an important social function within reenactment groups (practices of authenticity). At the same time, the negotiation of authenticity highlights the constructedness of historical representation itself. While original objects are generally deemed authentic, this status is often reserved for replicas in reenactment, not historical objects per se. What is authentic is that which appears to most closely approximate something irrecuperable from the past—not old and genuine objects, which would appear anachronistic within the context of the reenactment, but things that create the appearance of temporal coherence and, to use comedian Stephen Colbert’s term, “truthiness” (“Truthiness,” 2005). Reenactment’s historical mise-en-scène must convey the appearance of being true, real, and genuine. Reenactment’s authenticity imperative belies a prevailing skepticism among reenactors and their audiences about institutional authority and transmitted knowledge. In the unstable world of untruths, rumors, and conspiracy theories, we find a correlative embrace of what might be called “reliable” knowledge. “Authentic” reenactments lay bare originary processes—the sourcing of materials, acquisition of manufacturing skills, manufacturing processes, and the proper handling of things. Living history displays and historical reality television shows, for example, foreground the manufacturing of stone tools, techniques for navigating with a logline and sextant, or the codes for properly handling cutlery at a manor house dining table. In so doing, reenactments recover modes of being, doing, and making that have either been forgotten or inadequately transmitted. At the same time, we can think of this emphasis on the authentic as a defense against radical relativism and the fickle perceptions, feelings, and bodily experiences of individual subjects. What can be known about the past is reduced to the haptic and embodied, and to what can be made, manipulated, and tested by reenactors and, by extension, their audiences. Authenticity in reenactment is that which seems beyond interpretation and simply is—a source of experience and knowledge available to all. Reenactment’s authenticity imperative demands that the reenactor testifies to a genuine experience. On the one hand, this arises from the circumstances orchestrated by the reenactment itself: the reenactor testifies to the fog of war, hunger, cold, bewilderment, or technical mastery, experiences that seem directly correlated to historical ones. On the other hand, the reenactor testifies to something about his or her inner life. Consequently, there emerges a 23

Vanessa Agnew and Juliane Tomann

potential conflict between the expression of the true self and historical experience. Such tension is often resolved through the confession. Testifying to acute suffering and/or other powerful emotions takes the form, in the case of historical reality television, of pieces-to-camera. While the very setup of television reenactments like The Ship, a 2002 documentary on Captain Cook’s 1768 Endeavour voyage along the northeast coast of Australia, would seem to obviate the need for confessional moments, the piece-to-camera is a common structuring device. Participants in the BBC reenactment address the camera with their fears of going aloft and complaints about the salty diet, communal sleeping, and ablution arrangements. Breaking with their historical personages, reenactors affect an intimacy by directly addressing the audience. Such confessional moments, with the reenactor often in a state of costumed dishabille and secluded in a liminal space such as a toilet or washroom, profess to reveal the true state of the reenactor’s inner self. This voicing of the contemporary self—the expression of physical hardship, discord, and mental disarray—is followed by introspection and revelation. By peeling away the “mask” imposed by the reenactment, the confessional moment posits the journey into the past as risky to the self, yet ultimately rewarding. By asserting itself via these confessional moments, the present acts as a warrant for the reenacted past. What makes the reenactment appear to be “true” history, then, is the spontaneous herniation of the authentic present in an otherwise contested and potentially unreliable account of the past. Reenactment’s confession, proffered in the form of a pact with the viewer or reader, constitutes part of its appeal: audiences and readers enjoy the asides that break the theatrical or novelistic fourth wall and filmic outtakes that supplement the final cut. Metalepsis, this mixing up the world of the telling with the world of the told, returns us to the troubling circularity at the heart of reenactment. It acts as the warrant for the authenticity, and hence historical reliability, of reenactment. In the Collingwoodian sense, the metaleptic confession “pegs down” the reenactor’s imaginative facility not to the interpretation of historical sources, but to his or her own authority (1999, p. 154).Yet we might inquire into the implications of elevating the authentic to a defining feature of historical reenactment.What, we must ask, are the implications of a form of historical representation predicated on an ever-asserted, psychologized, and embodied self that secures a pact with the viewer or reader, but which, because of its ultimate grounding in the apparently real and true, brooks no interrogation?

Further reading Adorno, T. W., 1973; Barbara, A., and Perliss, A., 2006; Handler, R., 1986; Kerz, C., 2017; Lindholm, C., 2013; Malpas, J., 2015; Saupe, A., 2017.

24

4 BATTLE Mads Daugbjerg

The recreated battle is the iconic form of reenactment. Indeed, the popular interest in and growth of the broader phenomenon of reenactment has largely revolved around the battle—the spectacular confrontation of quasi-historical armies comprised of devoted hobby historians performing for an audience. Even in cases when the grand battle itself is not actually dramatized, an interest in war history and warfare is very often a main motivation for reenactors—for instance, among World War II living historians who concentrate on the daily life in camp or the maintenance of historical vehicles. Given this, it is perhaps unsurprising that a set of martial, gendered (male-dominated), and patriotic ideals and values saturate many hobby reenactment milieus, implicitly or explicitly (Turner, 1988; West, 2014). The widespread fascination with reenacted war reflects broader trends and conceptions of history and testifies to the general mass appeal of wars, which many understand as (the) pivotal events of the past. In certain popular-cultural contexts—for instance, magazines or TV channels devoted to historical themes—the very notion of history often implies war history. This is paralleled in the heritage sector, for instance in European museums and sites connected with World War I and World War II, where the rendering and commemoration of armed conflict and its consequences remain central. Battle reenactment is often considered a modern-day phenomenon. It is certainly the case that a particular surge can be identified from the 1980s onwards, so that nowadays all imaginable past conflicts are being performed again, including very recent or even ongoing ones. Battle reenactment societies are organized according to the conflict or period in question, with major groupings focusing on the Viking and Medieval periods, the English Civil War, the American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II. However, antecedents of modern-day battle reenactment date back to antiquity. In ancient Rome, imperial victories in faraway territories were routinely re-staged for the public, including elaborate naval battles—called naumachia—in which rivers, artificial lakes, and amphitheaters flooded for the purpose were used as stages for full-scale recreations involving thousands of participants (Hammer, 2010; Coleman, 1993). Much later, medieval pageants and “mystery plays” across Europe blended sacred and secular elements in dramatic performances of biblical episodes and struggles, linking these with aspects of everyday life (Rogerson, 2017; AronsonLehavi, 2012). During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as new paradigms of exhibition and entertainment developed across the Western World, the use of reenactment-style demonstrations became increasingly popular. The Great Exhibitions of the period often included folk displays 25

Mads Daugbjerg

in which “savages” and other colonial subjects were enlisted to typify exotic cultures under Western domination, supporting the racialized hierarchies of the era (indigeneity).The traveling Wild West shows, organized by entrepreneurs like William “Buffalo Bill” Cody from the 1880s onwards, unfolded along similar racist and colonial rationales, as key battles and episodes from the American Indian Wars were replayed in a circus-like framework in which both the white protagonists and Native Americans performed essentially as (stereotypes of) themselves (Rydell and Kroes, 2005; Ashby, 2006). Similar trends can be seen in other former colonial societies, including Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Namibia. New technologies and media, including large-scale panoramas and magic lantern shows depicting key battles, and of course, later, the cinema offering moving pictures, revolutionized the ways audiences could experience and immerse themselves in bygone events, including dramatic battles (Griffiths, 2003). An interesting example of a spectacular “battle” reenactment at the nexus of mass culture, politics, and early cinema emerged during the early years of the Soviet Union. In 1920, just three years after the October Revolution, theater director Nikolai Evreinov staged a grand recreation of the 1917 Storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd (today’s St Petersburg). The event involved some 10,000 participants and an estimated 100,000 spectators—more than a quarter of the city’s population at the time. The reenactment dramatized and exaggerated what had originally been a rather unspectacular takeover in “a performance that not only recaptured, but became greater than reality” (Geldern, 1998, p. 139). In turn, this simulation would inspire key scenes of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1927 propaganda film October, which, over the years, came to be pedestalled in the USSR as a key representation of the revolution. These circus-style and cinematic spectacles from the late 19th and early 20th centuries were not organized or driven by hobby groups like those dominating today’s battle reenactment scene. Yet they are obviously related to modern-day reenactment societies and to their urge to memorialize and revive violent moments and significant upheavals while also possessing dimensions of both entertainment and education. The birth of modern-day battle reenactment is most often understood as having grown out of the anniversaries of the American Civil War (1861–1865), with the 1963 centennial of the Battle of Gettysburg constituting a particularly key event (Figure 4.1). Historians have noted that the Gettysburg Centennial rested on a problematic political outlook stressing the reenactment as a “white” reconciliation between North and South, while largely ignoring the issues of race and segregation so central to the original conflict (Blight, 2001; Weeks, 2003; Jordan, 2011). Certain tenets of such reconciliatory rationales—the idea of the American Civil War as a brother’s war with white heroes on both sides—can still be found among contemporary reenactment groups insisting that they seek to honor the war participants of both sides equally. This is part of a wider discourse of heroism and purity, in which participation in the recreated battles is sometimes proposed as a patriotic duty or pilgrimage and the sites of battle understood as sacred or “hallowed” ground (see Daugbjerg, 2014). Such a stance is very often coupled, on the American Civil War scene and elsewhere, with a conviction that the common privates portrayed by reenactors were but pawns in a political game, with little individual interest or complicity in larger ideological concerns. For instance, Daugbjerg found that American Civil War reenactors often deflected questions regarding political and moral dimensions, such as those connected with the role of slavery; their responses circled around the celebration of the typical, average, or common man, uninformed in politics and merely “fighting for what he believed was right” (Daugbjerg, 2014, p. 727). This parallels the findings of Jenny Thompson, who studied World War I and World War II reenactment groups and identified a widespread “fascination with this mythic common man” (2004, p. 88).

26

Battle

  Figure 4.1  Rifles and other American Civil War

reenactment equipment arrayed between battles at the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg in 2013. Source: Mads Daugbjerg.

The idea of the real and unfiltered experience is central to battle reenactors (Handler and Saxton, 1988; Daugbjerg, 2014, 2017). A widespread conviction exists that the physical re-animation of battles can provide real glimpses unattainable through more conventional approaches to learning about history. One thus finds a dominant idea that “history as it is found in books” (Handler and Saxton, 1988, p. 243) may be interesting or even necessary but ultimately cannot provide the insights promised by physical presence and bodily experience. In some cases, this is coupled with disdain toward more traditional didactic institutions, such as the school or the museum, which many reenactors see as presenting boring or elitist versions of history. In contrast, reenactment is stressed as attractive because it provides a sense of being in history, a sense of ownership, of having a go or “a say” in the production of historical meaning (Thompson, 2004; de Groot, 2009). This is the fascination of the past as “unfinished” business or, in Rebecca Schneider’s formulation, as “never complete, never completely finished, but incomplete: cast into the future as a matter for ritual negotiation and as yet undecided interpretive acts of reworking” (Schneider, 2011, p. 33, original emphasis). In the quest for the ultimate reenacted experience, the so-called “magic moment” upholds a special and almost mythological status. Also known among battle reenactors as “period rush”— and, in some cases, constituting something akin to a “wargasm” (Horwitz, 1999, p. 209)—these rare experiences constitute reported flashes of almost revelatory temporal connection. One American Civil War reenactor reported: I remember coming out on the field for the Sunday battle. And the way the smoke hung in the air, there were so many muskets firing you couldn’t hear the individual shots. You couldn’t distinguish them in your ear. It was just a roar, and you could see

27

Mads Daugbjerg

the battle flags waving in the breeze, with everyone yelling and screaming. And in the background, there’s a band playing Dixie over it all. Just for a split second it was a surreal moment. (Daugbjerg, 2017, p. 161) The chaotic moment of battle confusion, the perceived immersion in the fog of war, is a recurring motif in such descriptions, entailing a lack of overview and often a misty or smoky haze in which temporal registers are felt capable of blurring. Steven Cushman has described these yearnings among reenactors as an urge “to lose track of time, to fool themselves, to experience a mystical moment when the seemingly impermeable boundary between the present and the past suddenly dissolves” (Cushman, 1999, quoted in Amster, 2008, p. 21). When it comes to the actual organization and planning of battle reenactments, a key distinction is made between so-called scripted and tactical battle scenarios. As the name suggests, the first type of engagement is governed by adherence to an already agreed-upon script modeled over the course of a specific historical battle. Hence, the scripted version of the Battle of Waterloo aims to be a reconstruction of the original event, with maneuvers, breakthroughs, casualty records, and outcomes decided in advance and in relative accordance with the historical record (Figure 4.2). Scripted battles are usually staged to audiences fenced off from the action by rope or, in the case of the largest events, situated on grandstands. In practice, scripted battles almost inevitably involve several alterations and adaptations of various elements—or parts of the scripted scenario which simply go wrong—so that the final show rarely lives up to the script; however, its principle is to remain faithful to the course of the historical battle. In the case of the

Figure 4.2 Artillery crew reenactors engulfed in smoke at the 2005 Battle of Waterloo, Belgium. Source: Stephen Gapps.

28

Battle

tactical scenarios, on the other hand, a much more liberal perspective on historical fact is upheld. These events are often performed out of public sight. The main idea here is that, while remaining observant of historical structures and logistics of battle organization, order giving, and so on, the officers in charge are given more of a free rein to steer and “fight” the battle as they wish, and outcomes are not predetermined. These two different setups matter in how they facilitate certain atmospheres and experiences. While in a certain sense of the word, scripted engagements are certainly (meant to be) more authentic, and while they are often couched in a more solemn and commemorative context— paying due respect to those who fell in the historical battle, for example—reenactors often describe them as less exhilarating and absorbing than the tactical ones. The main reason for this is the pre-inscribed knowledge of the scripted battle’s outcome, which is, of course, radically different from the confusions, fears, and thrills of the soldiers who fought in the original event (see also Kelly, 2009). This fixed feature of the scripted battles thus lends them an artificial quality of temporal overview and reassurance that differs from the relative openness and insecurities inherent in their tactical counterparts. These two key battle modalities can be said to reflect deeper debates at the heart of the hobby, including the ever-present quests for and debates over authenticity so prevalent in heritage and tourism studies more generally (MacCannell, 1973; Handler, 1986; Wang, 1999). While scripted battles seek a visual or material correspondence to the event in question—“mimetic credibility,” as Edward Bruner has put it (1994, p. 399)—the tactical engagements instead provide participants with an introspective “authenticity of experience,” in Handler and Saxton’s (1988) terminology. Perhaps ironically, given the zealous strivings for authenticity so widespread among its practitioners, the field of battle reenactment continues to be steeped in accusations of misrepresentation––as well as commercialization, political bias, and sometimes outright jingoism. Even so, battle reenactors persist in their quest for realness, physicality, and “magic moments,” as they seek to nurture, emulate, and connect to the past by reperforming its wars once more.

Further reading Daugbjerg, M., 2014; Handler, R., and Saxton,W., 1988; Horwitz,T., 1999; Schneider, R., 2011;Thompson, J., 2004.

29

5 BODY AND EMBODIMENT Amanda Card

Bodies are research tools. They can be put to work in concert with other sources to explore the past. Bodies are also archives.They are of the world, (re)created within the same contexts as the objects they use, the places they inhabit, and the times in which they live. Available technologies often represent the past in drawings, writing, paintings, photography, sculptures, and film by recording the activities of living bodies. Dead bodies can also give up the secrets of the past when archaeologists, historians, and physical anthropologists learn about the health and habits of humans through the examination of exhumed remains. Contemporary bodies can also help reveal history by doing things that have been done before. Reenactors use their bodies in this way. They perform the past by relating their bodies to past activities and engaging with material culture—buildings, weapons, furniture, clothing, books on etiquette, recipes, descriptions of practices, and lists of purchases. They also recreate these objects for research through performance. In these situations, contemporary bodies stand in for formerly living bodies, asking questions of the past from the vantage point of the present. But no body, whether past or present, is a tabula rasa; all bodies are made in cultures. This affects what can be known about the past through the contemporary embodiment of historical practices. The normative practices of any body are developed within a particular place and time. The body’s shape and actions are transfigured by what a culture considers to be natural, proper, and authentic in the world. As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would have it: we inhabit the world and the world inhabits us. This he calls habitus: “history turned into nature” (1977, p. 78). From this perspective, society dictates what it is possible to be and do. What can be done is contingent on the status and distinction given to familial relations, gender, age, body type, and sexual orientation (among other things), and these contingencies affect a life, its living, and its reenacting. The value, censure, or ignorance of certain attitudes and attributes are dictated by social, cultural, and economic circumstances, but the way of doing things becomes naturalized within any given circumstance through repetition. Through the accumulation of tastes, expectations, and understandings of the world, bodies are made and dispositions are embodied. Ways of being create, restrict, and enable how the world is knowable. Bodies are accumulations of what the world is, is thought to be, or ought to be, and they are also the very means through which one can have a world at all (Bourdieu, 1997; Dreyfus, 1996). To claim this is to accept the ontological and epistemological acuities of existential phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and those philosophers who use his ideas. For these thinkers, speech, gesture, 30

Body and embodiment

action, thought, and subjectivity are embodied (Merleau-Ponty, 2002;Young, 1990; Noë, 2004; Noland, 2009; Spatz, 2015; Smith, 2017; Cheng, 2018). As the aforementioned scholars insist, environments are structured around a set of embodied assumptions.Table-construction, the presence or absence of chairs, and even the designs of toilets, are all predicated on presumptions of what a body is or what it can or should be able to do. A lack of ramps where there are stairs presumes two-legged enablement, whereas ramps into buildings and curb cuts on sidewalks promote the presence of the differently abled in a city. For visual artist and disability activist Sunaura Taylor (Taylor and Butler, 2009), this means that city life is lived differently for all abilities. Access promotes presence and, as Taylor sees it, presence promotes access. To take another example, film theorist Vivian Sobchack lost one of her legs to an above-theknee amputation after a cancer diagnosis. Sobchack can get about very well on her remaining leg or by using a prosthetic limb or crutches. Her skill with crutches may belie the assumptions of the able-bodied, for whom crutches appear cumbersome, but for Sobchack: “If one learns how to use crutches properly they are extraordinarily liberating” (2005, p. 59). Taylor and Sobchack remind us that humans are skillful copers. They adapt commonalities and differences in body structure to the world as they find it by acquiring skill within a culture or society (Dreyfus, 1996). No matter their abilities, humans learn to deal with the world through engagement, improvisation, and repetition. People adjust and remake what they are given—their body/brain architecture—as they engage with the world. The word embodiment represents how values, dispositions, and preferences from the world (re)make the body through practice and performance. The problem that presents itself when attempting to embody the past arises because one’s habitus is particular to a time, place, and social system.This means that embodying past practices will only ever be partial, but performances that fail to replicate the actions and activities of the past in the present are often the most informative (Johnson, 2014).To do the past is to come arm to sleeve and leg to skirt with embodied difference, i.e., to feel the distance between one’s own body and the material objects of the past. Wearing Regency dress, performance theorist and historian Katherine Maree Johnson found the “restrictive clasp of the corset and the encompassing length of the gown heightened my awareness of the garments I wore, and the way I moved” (2015, p. 200). They impressed on her “the way clothing shapes not only the physical appearance of our bodies, but also the ways in which we can/not move” (ibid.). In stumbling over her hem, or sitting uncomfortably in her corset, Johnson added a dimension to her research through experience. It is often in the gap between ways of being and doing—where embodied presumptions of comfort, access, propriety, and practicality produce the shock of the old—that embodied research is most instructive within historical research. Being with others on a dance floor or on the battlefield, watching dancers or soldiers amass for a charge up a hill or down a hall, invigorates archived remains of the past. Embodied practices and an embodied engagement with objects help enliven the semiotics of the mise-en-scène: enhancing the what, where, and why, with how. But these are not histories per se, they are performances of histories. Bodies do not necessarily produce indubitable facts or evidence in the usual sense of the word. They can vitalize, enhance, confirm, and conflict with the facts from other archives and modes of research. The steel collar or the string of pearls under glass in a museum are given shape, structure, and substance when imagined around someone’s neck—be it one’s own or another’s. Putting on these objects can reveal what others may have experienced of them in the past, in the tightening of the steel or the clink of the pearls. This may be a carnivalesque equivalence or even a disneyfication of facticity—there are no severed limbs and real blood on the reenactment battlefield (in live performance or on film) but there is still something unique in the relationship between contemporary bodies and historical objects or the embodi31

Amanda Card

ment of historical practices. Even as the dancers employed in the BBC documentary Pride and Prejudice: Having a Ball (2013) warmed themselves up in their usual way with footwork and stretches from a 21st-century classical/modern dance class, they found their fitness challenged as they produced cotillions (French social dances popular in 18th-century Europe) (Figure 5.1). The dancers were left sweaty and sore. They were surprised by the dances’ complexity, rigor, and vigor. They commented on the way the intricate patterns taxed their memory, and how the raised heels of the skipping steps strained their calf muscles. The realizations which became theirs through doing—not through merely watching others perform the dances or by looking at images and reading descriptions of the dances composed by others—provided each dancer with evidence of how different bodies were called on to perform in the Regency period (Figure 5.2). As this suggests, approximating the experience of others has pedagogic utility not through its ventriloquizing success but often through surprise and failure. But (re)enactor beware. The acquisition of skill may stymy the pedagogy of practice. One acquires the dexterity to perform actions over time—those cotillions will no longer surprise with their pace or cause sore muscles, the hem of a dress no longer trips its wearer, and the reenactor acquires the ability to breathe and sit simultaneously in a corset. When this happens, historically specific activities run the risk of becoming contemporary skills, embodied to the point of naturalization. These actions and activities may become incorporated into the world of the performer, the skillful execution blunting the oddities of historical corporealities, and the reenactor runs the risk of no longer being able to notice differences. Performances become a representation, an imitation, a simulacrum (Franko, 2017, pp. 10–14): skilled embodied action

Figure 5.1 Historical dance expert, Stuart Marsden (center back), rehearses with dancers and one of the program’s hosts, Alistair Sooke (center left), for the Regency ball in Pride and Prejudice: Having a Ball (2013), a documentary produced by Optomen with the BBC. Source: Andrew HayesWatkins.

32

Body and embodiment

Figure 5.2 Performing a cotillion in Pride and Prejudice: Having a Ball (2013). Source: Andrew HayesWatkins.

without authentic historical context. Therefore, learning a skill but never becoming entirely skilled has its advantages. Our ways of doing—of walking, talking, eating, sleeping, marching, and dancing—are products of time and place. As Simone de Beauvoir’s oft-quoted work declares, “one is not born but becomes a woman” (1988 [1953], p. 295). If this is true, then engaging with the practices and objects that constructed, produced, and maintained what it meant to be a woman (or a man) can be revelatory of the embodied practices of another time and place. To claim the body as archive and tool for research is to offer reenactment as a form of performance as research. Here performance is meant in its widest sense, anything on a continuum from framed actions with witnesses, to staged fictions with audiences (Lewis, 2014). Defining performance as research offers practice as a method of inquiry with performance as the evidence of that research (Nelson, 2013). This kind of enquiry favors ontology over epistemology, the “how” over the “that” (May, 2015). It does not claim bodies as infallible witnesses; performing bodies and their audiences are always situated. Bodies embody culture in time; performance (re)enacts time out of place.

Further reading Card, A., 2011; Card, A., 2012; Carman, T., 2008; Foster, S. L., 1995; Ruspoli, T., 2010; Schneider, R., 2011.

33

6 CONJECTURE Jonathan Lamb

In the history of representation—in which philosophy, experimental science, art, fiction, history, and its reenactment have all played their parts—the relation of conjecture to the production of knowledge has been complicated by the rivalry between Platonic and empirical approaches to finding things out. It is fair to say that all the great achievements in epistemology depended on two conjectures, a positive and a negative. The positive was the challenge faced by the Royal Society empiricists: “What if what I don’t know, I did?”The negative was used by Descartes and the Neo-Platonists in order to see whether it was possible to have an idea derived from a source other than sensory perception: “What if what I do know, I didn’t.” In the history of reenactment theory, it is clear that R. G. Collingwood tried to formulate the possibility of recovering history by means of ideas, whereas it seems that the bulk of reenactment in recent times is founded on varying degrees of sensory perception and affect.This is not merely a difference between a priori deduction and a posteriori induction; rather it is a question of aesthetics, and of the degree to which what is known to be the case is felt, viewed, tasted, and heard rather than conceived.Yes (pace Collingwood) we can recover the scents of the flowers in the garden of Epicurus. Since reenactment supposes an action or model prior to the performance intended to corroborate it, there ought to be no need for conjecture, which supposes what is not yet known, or still to be experienced, in order to approach it as if it were a fact. The one looks to the past, the other to the future. Moreover, reenactment makes its bid for attention on the basis of a decisive and impressive resemblance to whatever scenes it reproduces: this is what it was like, this is being there, what happened then is happening now. Conjecture, on the other hand, has to give a provisional account of what might someday come about, and all its verbs are conjugated in the conditional mood.Yet contemporaneous with these conjectures of empiricists were others that animated the minds of political philosophers such as Pufendorf, Hobbes, and Locke, and they all concerned the past: “What if human beings once occupied a state of nature where everyone had a right to everything, resulting in a continual state of war?” “What if the only way to terminate such a war was to draw up an original contract between the people and the sovereign?” “What if the state of nature was actually very pleasant?” Nobody had any evidence to suggest that any of these hypotheses had an historical foundation.Yet Hobbes said valiantly in defense of his version of the conjecture, “It may peradventure be thought, there never was such a time, nor condition of warre as this; and I believe it was never generally so” (Hobbes, 1996, p. 89). But, he added, a probable fiction was as sound a basis for civil society as any other:“More is not therefore 34

Conjecture

demanded … than that what was supposed or feigned … should be imaginable, and through the conceding of these things the necessity of the phenomena should be demonstrated” (Hobbes, in Shapin and Schaffer, 1989, p. 156). He went further, “There are few things, that are uncapable of being represented by a Fiction” (Hobbes, 1996, p. 113; Kahn, 2004). Rousseau took this as his license to suppose a state of nature antithetic to all forms of society. History began to find its way forward as an impartial mode of enquiry by narrowing the range of its speculations. Immanuel Kant said that reading accounts of the original contract was like reading a novel, and just as insubstantial (Kant, 1991, p. 221). So historians such as Lord Kames in his Sketches of the History of Man (1778) and William Robertson in his History of America (1778) tried to specify the links between the tribal structures recently discovered in the Americas, Caribbean, and the South Seas, and the growth of European civil society. They carved historical development into four distinct stages: hunter-gatherer, itinerant pastoralism, agriculture, and commerce. This conjectural history became known as stadial theory and relied for its evidence upon news from explorers. Naturalists on James Cook’s second voyage—Johann Reinhold Forster and his son Georg—believed they had supplied it by tracking the cultural differences dividing very primitive societies such as Tierra del Fuego’s from more sophisticated ones such as Tahiti’s. Cook himself became a participant in local rituals and dances. On Tonga, he watched half-naked as an extensive chain of men marched in honor of the high chief ’s son, bearing palm fronds woven so as to represent sacrificial gifts. Evidently it was a reenactment, possibly of human sacrifice, and it left Cook strangely disoriented, aware he had witnessed a representation, but of what he could not say. J. R. Forster occupied a more stable viewing platform, but he too was observing in effect the performance of history in its various stages, each in a different location. In this respect, the alignment of conjecture with historical reenactment becomes much closer, for if the aim of the latter is to make the veil between the real past and the present performance as immediate and transparent as possible, no less does the former seek to obliterate the difference between the fiction of “what if ” and what is presently the case. If everything can be represented as a fiction, as Hobbes claims, then there is no part of the real that is not exempt from being merely probable, the semblance of the truth. This is especially true of historical conjecture aimed at the future, either as counterfactual history, such as Philip Roth’s novel, The Plot Against America, or in a more sinister fashion, T. R. Malthus’s statistical exercise, An Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society (1798–1806). Just as the Trump presidency confirms much of what Roth foretold in his rewriting of the history of Roosevelt’s presidency, news of methods of population control in the Pacific brought home by 18th-century British and French reporters— by means of war, expulsion, and infanticide—corroborated Malthus’s speculation that the pursuit of happiness leads inevitably to its opposite: depravity, famine, and death (Bashford and Chaplin, 2016). Malthus’s conjecture was supported by evidence from the same island where Forster had located the apex of Polynesian society—Tahiti—where the aristocratic sect of performers and reenactors called the Arioi practiced free love and infanticide. In the early novel, conjecture had an important function, but different from that which corroborates stadial theory or the increase in population. In the latter cases, the eyewitness confronts what is inevitably experienced as a reenactment—of past time in a present space, of the sacrifice of the effigies of gifts, of the social cost of the lavish displays of histrionic skill—and may even be confounded with the performance itself, as it was when Captain Cook fatally inserted himself into the Makahiki festival at Kealakekua Bay in Hawai’i (Sahlins 1985). But the point of the sight of the performance was to confirm what historians had imagined about the origin and growth of civil society. It is a moment in that series plucked from the past and experienced as a current event. 35

Jonathan Lamb

In Samuel Johnson’s fourth Rambler paper, he set out a program for novelists which is still largely cognate with theories of fiction today. Johnson was aware that an increasing number of novels were being written by women for a female audience, the bulk of which was largely ignorant of literature and the world. So it was the job of the novelist to present these readers with hypothetical situations not remote from the ones they might encounter in real life, lending them experience on tick, so to speak, and thus aligning a fictional knowledge with a real competence; or, as Johnson put it, “to initiate youth by mock encounters in the art of necessary defense, and to increase prudence without impairing virtue.” What seems like reenactment in reverse—“I shall imaginatively perform what hereafter I shall actually do”—is in fact a laminate of two conjectures and a corroboration: the fiction of the story, the fiction of the reader’s imaginative identification with it, and the real vindication of both in the subsequent life of the reader-heroine. So rather than provide evidence of the large sweep of national history supplied by voyagers to strange lands, the novel is limited to the education of individual readers and an outcome that is still provisional. What ought to have been a perfect exemplification of this scheme in Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen’s contribution to Cervantine fiction, comes unstuck because the heroine is hopeless at conjecture and uneasy with the subjunctive. Henry Tilney encourages her to employ suppositions and surmises, either by way of pleasant analogy (dancing and marriage) or rational suspicion (Isabella Thorpe never had a heart to lose). But he has a bad pupil. For example, when trying to teach Catherine a lesson about conjecture—“How is such a one likely to be influenced. What is the inducement most likely to act upon such a person’s feelings, age, situation, and probable habits of life considered?”—she is blank: “What do you mean? … I do not understand you” (Austen, 1995, p. 126). What a rich vein of speculative grief she ignores when she takes Henry’s sudden disappearance from Bath at face value: “Not seeing him anywhere, I thought he must be gone” (70). She has failed to understand how novels were read then, but she reveals how we understand them now. Catherine Gallagher points out that readers were urged “to make suppositional predictions … to speculate upon the action, entertaining various hypotheses” until it becomes clear that “the reality of the story itself [is] a kind of suppositional speculation” (2006, p. 346). As opposed to Catherine’s unsubtle absorption in the immediacies of The Mysteries of Udolpho, this kind of split attention to fiction as a mirror of the real and as a product of the imagination constitutes the full extent of reality—of the story, of the characters, and eventually of life itself. But the unconditional reading that Austen’s Catherine exemplifies has a relation to reenactment much closer than Gallagher’s “cognitive provisionality … a competence in investing in contingent and temporary credit” (2006, p. 347). For when reading Udolpho, she feels nothing can make her unhappy despite all the horror and agony of mind it represents; and the reason is that she is reading without supposing herself in the same situation as the heroine; that is to say, she is reading without sympathy. Instead, she is enjoying the pleasure of Lord Kames’s “ideal presence,” which occurs when the reader is thrown into a reverie “and forgetting that she is reading, conceives every incident as passing in her presence, precisely as if she were an eyewitness” (Kames, 2005, vol. I, p. 69).This is the kind of attention the 18th-century explorers and naturalists, Cook and the Forsters, applied to the anthropological data Kames found so valuable, and the kind of reading that, according to Hobbes, led Don Quixote so badly astray. When Catherine exchanges absorptive reading for wild surmise, she draws a conclusion so shocking that Henry is forced to rue his role as her pedagogue. Possibly the most famous poem of the 18th century, Grey’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard, was composed of layered conjectures about the past, one on top of another. What if the unlettered

36

Conjecture

poor buried in unmarked graves had enjoyed the opportunities of their betters and become eminent? What if we could see the unnumbered treasures concealed in the dark caverns of the ocean? What if we could have communion with people who no longer exist? (realism). The poet posing these hypotheses dies in the course of the poem, leaving nothing but these lines and his epitaph behind him, and placing the reader in the same position vis-à-vis his corpse that he adopted toward the dead during his evening in the churchyard—and initiating a cult of graveside meditation that was prominent throughout the Romantic age. Adam Smith explains how conjecture works when we feel sympathy for the dead. The imagination carries the mind beyond the illusion that reading is seeing, beyond Smith’s first assumption about sympathy, namely that you can never really feel someone else’s agony, and into the zone of feelings much more terrible: It is from this very illusion of the imagination, that the foresight of our dissolution is so terrible to us, and that the idea of those circumstances, which undoubtedly can give us no pain when we are dead, makes us miserable while we are alive. (Smith, 1979 [1759], p. 13) This is when we realize that the poet who speculated about the lives and talents of the village dead has now joined them, subject to speculations in his turn, and that we shall be next. There is an equally terrible example of negative Malthusian conjecture in Dickens’s Great Expectations when Jaggers deploys a series of hypotheses to disclose secrets of a past that make the happy future Pip promised himself utterly impossible. I’ll put a case to you … Put the case that a woman held her child concealed … Put the case that [her legal adviser] held a trust to find a child for an eccentric rich lady to adopt and bring up … Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil … put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business life, he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net … put the case, Pip, that here was one pretty little child out of the heap who could be saved … Do you comprehend the imaginary case? (Dickens, 2002, p. 377) Kames admits he finds it hard to explain the dynamics of ideal presence, concluding simply that “Of all the means for making an impression of ideal presence, theatrical representation is the most powerful” (2005, vol. I, p. 71). However, between them, Smith and Austen show how disruption—either of a narrative based on conjecture or one on the passive spectatorship of reverie—provoked by an intrusion of the imagination that implicates the subject in the predicaments of the object, causes a reaction that neither fiction nor history can manage on their own. In a novel about the ambience of the theater and techniques of acting entitled At Freddie’s, Penelope Fitzgerald (2014) shows how accidentally this disruption can occur, and what a surprising effect it sustains. Boney Lewis is a middle-aged actor, very competent but given to drink and not at all fond of children. Mattie Stewart is a precocious child actor, showy but shallow, and given to practical jokes. He is playing the part of Prince Arthur in Shakespeare’s King John, whose eyes must be put out with hot irons by Hubert, played by Boney. Prior to the first night, Boney has been given some advice by a colleague about cutting down his intake of alcohol in a note he has crumpled up and thrown away. Retrieved by Mattie, the note reappears on the first night in the warrant when Hubert holds it out to the Prince, “Can you not read it?” Well

37

Jonathan Lamb

Boney can, and what it says is as follows: “Just a little hint on Cutting Down. Today, have your first drink ten minutes later; tomorrow, twenty minutes later, and so on. Every day will be a little easier.” Then we read: “Boney Lewis … achieved the moment of electrifying contact with the audience in front of him which may only once or twice in a lifetime be the actor’s reward.”The critics are rapturous: “As Lewis first produces and later tears up the crucial document which orders the blinding of an innocent child totally at his mercy, the dialogue between unthinking political obedience and human decency springs to dramatic life.” Mattie’s speculative theft of the scene and Boney’s fit of pure exasperation are both recruited for a moment neither was trying to achieve, but which keeps an audience of 1700 people rivetted for three minutes: “The quality of the attention, even the texture of the silence, changed. The theatre had bound its spell upon them” (Fitzgerald, 2014, p. 175).This sort of conjuration, no matter how fortuitous, brings the audience into touch with an experience it has not yet enjoyed—a challenge reenactment is always rising to meet. Is there is a stadial model applicable to the various forms of conjecture rehearsed here? First there is conjectural history where a private observation (often of an anthropological slant) confirms an imagined case of social development as credible, even if it is not true; for the confirmation itself may come in the shape of a ritual performance, and the eyewitness may greet it as an absorbed spectator rather than a critical inspector. Thus, the degree of imagination involved in the original speculation is matched by the imaginative participation of the beholder in the performance. Conjectural fiction offers the public access to virtual experience whose vindication is entirely private and lodged in the future; here imagination encourages a temporary identification between (say) the heroine and the female reader, but it promotes the growth of a probable case into an ultimate experience of whose reality only the reader will be aware. Ideal presence is purely private with no direct public value at all: it is purely a work of the imagination, close to reverie and dreaming, in which probability exerts no influence and no margin exists for conjecture. Finally, there is the negative conjecture, which removes the sensory component of experience in order to expose the illusion that pleasure taken in light, color, textures, odors, and sounds has any bearing on the “future improvement of society,” as Malthus puts it. The dead are the only vindicators of these conjectures, and conversations with them offer no promise except that of closer communion with them some time in the future. Here, imagination has nothing to perform but the dismal task of picturing annihilation.

Further reading Gallagher, C., 2006; Kahn, V., 2004; Kant, I., 1991; Poovey, M., 1998; Sahlins, M., 1985; Shapin, S., and Schaffer, S., 1985;Vaihinger, H., 1925.

38

7 CORROBORATION Jonathan Lamb

The most obviously utilitarian application of reenactment for purposes of investigation, ­corroboration, and proof is to reconstruct a crime scene to jog the memory of the public, who may have forgotten details of it or even the whole scene.Television shows that staged such reenactments had a great vogue two decades ago, but they have always been popular.When, in 1806, Luisa Calderon was asked by her defense lawyer to demonstrate for the jury of the court of the Kings Bench exactly how the pulleys, cords, bonds, and a wooden peg combined to place the whole weight of the body on the surface shared by the big toe and the peg in order to produce the excruciating pain of the punishment called picketing, the jurors were most attentive, and gave their verdict against her tormentor, General Picton (Pickering, 2010, pp. 124–125). Most recently, an independent agency known as Forensic Architecture has deployed digital recording equipment, satellite imaging, data-sharing platforms, and 3D modelling to produce ecologies of the spaces of injustice—for instance, Syrian prisons reserved for torture and the bombing of Rafah in Gaza—each so densely filled with simultaneous cross-corroborating evidence that something like crowd-witnessing replaces the accumulation of testimonies from single perspectives (forensic architecture). Not only is open-source citizen-led enquiry able to confront state-sponsored violence, but it also does so by means that are as much aesthetic as forensic. One of the pieces of evidence in Forensic Architecture’s investigations was a finalist in 2018 for the Turner Prize (Counter Investigations, 2018). All of these corroborative reenactments are founded on the assumption that a real event in the past has been obscured either by the imperfection of our senses and memories, or by fictions and even outright lies. Its recovery restores the truth of history, or at least it restores the irrefutable facts of sensation. This has always been a contentious issue, for the ontological status of history has never been ascertained, while the craft of historians has thrived owing to the variety of judgments it is capable of sustaining. Why, in Homer’s Odyssey, does the hero need the tragic song of Demodocus to remind him that he not only had a plan for the ruin of Troy, but also led the fighters who demolished it and slaughtered the inhabitants? If an eyewitness in his senses cannot be trusted to give a full and true account, who can? In George Orwell’s 1984, O’Brien asks Winston Smith, “Do you believe that history really exists?” (1981, p. 48), posing a question that no one could confidently have answered in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany during the 1930s, since it was clear that reason of state required infinitely flexible histories which, with each successive metamorphosis, it was treachery to doubt. So narratives of an identical historical event excised details 39

Jonathan Lamb

inconvenient to present policies and inserted fictions in their place that could scarcely be called fictions since the criterion of truth had already been sacrificed. As US politician Rudolf Giuliani has recently observed, “Truth isn’t truth.” The same pressure to make the past suitable for the requirements of political power have provoked the “alt” history of shameless fibs in the America of President Trump, which nevertheless is taken for true and real by the gullible part of the electorate. Historical truth under these circumstances is not what is known to be a fact but what one needs to believe is a fact: “President Obama was not born in the United States.” Article of faith. Lucretius, the inspiration behind the materialism of the New Science of empirical proof, did not believe in the being of history; it amounted to no more than an accidental collocation of ideas and images in the public mind, subject to rearrangement and decay, and by no means indisputable. He was, however, certain that the surest warranties of a past event were the sense organs: All reason’s false, unlesse a certeintie Be in the sense. Can th’eare, the sight denie? Shall th’eare, or tast, the feeling sence oppose? Or shall the eie, dispute against the nose? (Lucretius,1996,4.507–510) Members of the Royal Society, such as Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, were attentive readers of Lucretius and trusted entirely to their senses. For them and their gentlemanly fellowship, an experiment was such a faithful record of sensory information that even a virtual witness, reading the account in the Philosophical Transactions, would recognize its truth and be able to corroborate it by repeating the very same experiment. Far from one sense disputing the evidence of another, each was involved in mutual vindication. Joseph Addison was not alone in believing that sight was a more diffusive kind of touch; nor George Berkeley in declaring that a simple matter of calling and entering a coach was a collaboration of three senses: “Sitting in my study I hear a coach drive along the street; I look through the casement and see it; I walk out and enter into it; thus, common speech would incline one to think, I heard, saw, and touched the same thing, to wit, the coach” (Berkeley, 1709,p. 51). Synesthesia enriches experience for these materialists; it does not muddle it. How differently the dualist Cartesian ontology of Collingwood construes this matter for reenactment. If by rigorous thinking the historian can enter the being of an historical figure, as Pythagoras entered the soul of the dead hero Euphorbus, and as Collingwood usurps the identity of the dead cleric Thomas a Becket, the price paid for such a metempsychosis is the same paid by Descartes for the certainty of his cogito: a shutdown of the senses. “We shall never know how the flowers smelt in the garden of Epicurus, or how Nietzsche felt the wind in his hair as he walked upon the mountains” (Collingwood, 1994, p. 296). The correspondence between John Locke and William Molyneux concerning the question of sight acquired by persons born blind, whether they would instantly recognize the cube, cone, or sphere they formerly knew by touch, sparked a century-long debate between those who believed, like Locke and Molyneux, that the optic nerve would have to learn to translate the signs of tactility into those of vision, and those who believed, like Robert Hooke, George Berkeley, David Hume, and Erasmus Darwin, that the eye would see directly what the hand had felt, and corroborate it (Kramnick, 2015, pp. 317–319). The more distant the experience the senses are called on to certify, the more reliant is the mind upon imagination. Hobbes called imagination “decaying sense,” a process not yet complete; when the sense is finally decayed, “fading, old, and past,” it is called memory, and is no longer vivid. By means of an image, however, the mind can recover the life and color of experience in dreams, reveries, and novel-reading: internal reenactments where there are no waking 40

Corroboration

impressions to weaken its force (Hobbes, 1996, p. 16).This is Kames’s “ideal presence,” an important constituent of reenactment, except that it always makes its appearance in Hobbes’s account as the reverse of real presence: As natural kindness, when we are awake causeth desire; and desire makes heat in certain other parts of the body; so also, too much heat in those parts, while wee sleep, raiseth in the brain an imagination of some kindness shewn. In summe, our Dreams are the reverse of our waking imaginations. The motion when we are awake, beginning at one end; and when we Dream, at another. (Hobbes, 1996, pp. 7–18) Very economically, Hobbes shows how causes and effects can change places in the imagination, with vast implications for reenactment and those who regard the senses as corroborators of imagination. For it may well be that sensory stimulus is not the cause but the effect of imaginative activity, and it may be that the two occur so closely together that it is impossible to say which came first.This is when, according to Coleridge, “images act upon our minds … by their own force as images” (Coleridge, 1930,1.129; see Hacking, 2002, pp. 227–54). Imagination, for instance, is predominant in war psychoses where the image of a dreadful scene of war only narrowly survived by the dreamer is replayed every night at its original pitch, again and again. This is the negative instance of Lord Kames’s “ideal presence.” W.H.R. Rivers probed its psychopathology, using an archive of notes made when treating shell-shocked patients at Craiglockhart, including Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen. Like Freud, Rivers found that the trauma is cured by diluting the force of the sheer image (or sound, smell, taste, or touch) into narrative, contextualizing the shock in time and space and necessarily rendering it fainter than the original (1923). The same is true of nostalgia, where home appears so warmly colored and resonant with symphonies of pleasant sounds that the patient desires to be nowhere else and, it was commonly believed, would die if the wish were not granted. However, Immanuel Kant thought the best cure for such fantasies was indeed to send the patient home, where he or she would wake up to how dull and ordinary it really was. In cases such as these corroboration acts to normalize extraordinary experience, taking it out of compulsive dreaming or reverie and into the zone of the customary. On the other hand, the triumph of imagination is the final proof of divine beneficence,Addison argues in his 413th Spectator. Handling Locke’s division of the world into primary qualities—the abstract properties of number, point, line, and extension—and the secondary ones of light, color, sound, tactility, and taste, Addison arrays God’s creation of the beauties of the world alongside our enjoyment of them as a feat of divine imagination in order ironically to salute “the great Modern Discovery … Namely, that Light and Colours, as apprehended by the Imagination, are only Ideas in the Mind, and not Qualities that have any Existence in Matter.” Colors are a mere delusion, he avers, in mock obedience to the new dualist orthodoxy, intended to divert us from the exiguous truth of the real nature of things. When he was younger, Montaigne declared that his physical pleasures were full and immediate: “When I sleep, I sleep … when I dance, I dance” (Montaigne,1711, vol.3, p. 452); but later he used to approach them in a more ruminant frame of body and mind, encouraging ideas and sensations to illuminate each other: To the end, that even Sleep its self should not so stupidly escape from me, I have formerly caus’d myself to be disturb’d in my Sleep … that I might the better and more sensibly relish and taste it … to weigh, esteem, and amplifie the good hap. (vol. 3, p. 459) 41

Jonathan Lamb

He calls this presence, but it is the presence of attention combined with sentience, running experience in slow motion by using reflection to double the weight of sensation. He calls such correspondence of the mind and the body corroboration: “Let us repair and corroborate it by mutual Offices, let the Mind rouze and quicken the heaviness of the Body, and Body stop and fix the Levity of the Soul” (vol. 3, p. 463). Corroboration in this sense of a simultaneous engagement of the mind and the body in the one adventure of appetence and satisfaction is suitable to the conception of the human organism as “an hydraulo-pneumatic Engin,” as Boyle called it, capable of taking the impressions of matter into itself and beaming energy outwards, so that desire and relish are reciprocal impulses. Walter Charleton’s sense of corroboration is derived from Hobbes via Lucretius, namely that the sensations and the images of “kindness shewn” can act both as causes and effects. Charleton’s example refers, like theirs, to erotic love, when fierce desire prompts the soul to cherish the image of a dreamt or fancied object, and the heart to send auxiliary animal spirits into the brain to “corroborate the Idea of this Desire, as that whole brigades of them may be from thence dispatched into the Organs of the Senses, and into all Muscles, whose motions may move especially to conduce to obtain what is so vehemently desired” (Charleton,1670, p.109). His colleague Thomas Willis explained the dynamic of what follows in chaster terms: We imagine the Drinking of excellent Wine, with a certain Pleasure, then we indulge it; the Imagination of its Pleasure is again sharpened by the taste, and then by a reflected Appetite drinking is repeated. So as it were in a Circle, the Throat or Appetite provokes the Sensation, and the Sensation causes the Appetite to be sharpened, and iterated. (Willis,1683, p. 49) This is a fine definition of corroborative reenactment as it goes both ways, in and out. Of all machines improved by scientists to emancipate the senses from the limitations and depravities of the Fall, the ship was the most compendious, being a platform for all manner of experiments that could move the investigator’s senses as close to exotic objects as it was possible to get; likewise, it was in voyaging that the corroborations of discovery were most extensively pursued. To take a single example, Magellan’s discovery of a western route into the Pacific exposed him in Patagonia to the sight of human creatures much bigger than the average size of Europeans; this prodigy was corroborated by Amedee Frezier in the 17th century, and again by John Byron in the 18th, whereupon Horace Walpole wrote a satire that entertained two contrary propositions: (a) that the romance of navigation is spoiled by attempts to authenticate marvels; and (b) that the truths of discovery have nothing to do with romance. It would be a mistake to assume that Walpole was hewing to an empirical standard of authenticity, having written some very extravagant fictions on his own account about dead princesses marrying princes who have not yet been born. He was exploiting a genre of reenactment in the maritime sphere contrary to the standard methods of corroboration used, for example, by Vancouver in his hydrographic surveys of the American Northwest Pacific, or Flinders in his circumnavigation of Australia, where the exactness of the reenactment added supplementary confirmations of the importance of Cook’s pioneering explorations. On the contrary, Walpole’s “An Account of the Giants lately discovered” (1766) was amplifying the imaginative opportunities allowed by supplemental discovery; Diderot did the same in his Supplement au voyage de Bougainville (1796); likewise the Abbe Coyer in his Supplement of Anson’s Voyage (1752) and the anonymous author who built a fantastic tale (The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman [1778]) out of the cannibal scene encountered by the crew of Cook’s consort, the Adventure, during the second voyage of the Resolution (John Mack, 2011, pp. 105–135). 42

Corroboration

These fictional corroborations relied on a model of fantastic voyaging that began with More’s Utopia, finding its most ingenious manifestations in Bacon’s New Atlantis and Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines, both of which contain a voyage of discovery mounted upon a prior discovery of the same place. In the difference between the “authentic” original report and its supplemental shadow, freedom is allowed the imagination to explore the ecstasies and despairs that lie behind often minimal and attenuated accounts of discoveries, such as Cook’s brief but fascinating remark about his own: “Were it not for the pleasure that naturally results to a man of being the first discoverer, whether it be but of shoals and reefs … this service would be insupportable.” Supplements resituate imagination alongside ideas that otherwise would be too sparse, abstract, and neglectful of the particulars of the body’s appetites and delights. This is why Forensic Architecture includes aesthetics in its retinue of concepts to corroborate the truth of events, and why one of its counter-investigations nearly won the Turner Prize.

Further reading Collingwood, R. G., 1994; Hacking, I., 2002; Kramnick, J., 2015; Pickering, P. A., and MaCalman, I. (eds.), 2010; Rivers, W. H. R., 1923.

43

8 DARK TOURISM Vanessa Agnew

Reenactment is often drawn to the cloaca of the past—its slop buckets and sluices, bandages, trenches, and killing fields. In simulating people’s pinched lives and untimely deaths, it foregrounds dirty materiality in order to affect an understanding of the past that casts the present in a light that is at once brighter and dimmer.Yet the phenomenon referred to as “dark tourism” since the 1990s (Lennon and Foley, 1996; Seaton, 1996) pursues the investigation of past calamities and suffering to new levels. Concerned with more than the merely base, the dark tourist seeks sites associated with death, slaughter, genocide, tragedy, crime, and environmental disaster (Hohenhaus, 2019).The medialized nature of the catastrophe affords the site itself a special status in the public imagination (Cottle, 2012). At Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chernobyl, and Ground Zero, the dark tourist is exposed to a frisson of danger and depravity.This both allows for contemplating individual mortality and contributes to a sense of collective identity. Dark tourism wrangles with the conflictual present while forging narratives about the past. Sometimes referred to as “difficult” or “dissonant” heritage (Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996; Logan and Reeves, 2009), dark tourism emerged as a subfield of heritage and tourism studies in the late 1990s and saw a surge of interest after 9/11 (Light, 2017, pp. 276–277).With its emphasis on spectacle and mediality, some scholars regard it as a postmodern phenomenon, albeit one with a long history (Rojek, 1993; Lennon and Foley, 2000, p. 147; Light, 2017, p. 278). Since it does not necessarily restage calamity, dark tourism is generally held distinct from reenactment, which spans broader representational possibilities and modes of inquiry. Rather than using reenactment as a framework, dark tourism scholars favor analytic categories such as site interpretation and visitor management, the commodification and marketing of “dark” sites, tourist motivations for visitation, ethical dilemmas associated with the subject matter, dark tourism’s contribution to collective memory, and its potential role in post-conflict resolution (see Stone et al., 2018; Reynolds, 2018; Bathory, 2018; White and Frew, 2013). Dark tourism typologies have variously distinguished between penal, genocide, disaster, grief, suicide, atrocity, poverty, favela, atomic, conflict, and other species of dark tourism, and proposed gradations of suffering (dark, darker, darkest; pale versus dark) (Miles, 2014).Yet as Duncan Light adds in a comprehensive review of the field, there is little scholarly consensus: since its inception, the field has broadened to encompass various forms and dispositions (2017, p. 281). These typologies and subtypes are united mainly by their concern with places and things associated with death and suffering.

44

Dark tourism

Yet public interest in death and suffering is not limited to the chopping blocks and burial sites of bygone times. Passively observing material residues of past suffering is often augmented by a desire to restage and vicariously experience the cataclysm. Commercial dark tourist sites incorporate reenactment into tourist packages. Visitors to Latvia’s Karostas Cietums military prison, for example, can “live the part of a prisoner,” while “fans of especially extreme adventures” are invited to spend the night in a prison cell and eat a prison meal (quoted in Tézenas, 2015, pp. 93–98).Tourists to Rwanda can venture into the highlands to observe mountain gorillas before being led to sites of human mass killing, where reenactment was incorporated into the 20th-anniversary genocide commemoration, and blood-soaked clothing and bodies remain on display (Hohenhaus, 2013, p. 142; Wosińska, 2017, p. 199). American Civil War reenactments, generally construed in terms of national heritage and commemoration, draw thousands of participants and tens of thousands of spectators to places like Gettysburg. As early as the mid-19th century, slave auction reenactments mounted by abolitionists like Henry Ward Beecher fostered antislavery sentiment, even while such events underscored the institution of slavery by inviting antebellum audiences to participate in the purchase of slaves and to revel in the affected role of slave owner (Auslander, 2013; Beecher and Scoville, 2006 [1888], p. 296). Mock slave auctions, like lynching reenactments and slavery tourism, persist into the present (Lelo and Jamal, 2016) and exemplify what is at stake in reenactive dark tourism. Whereas the dark tourist characteristically engages with the dead by visiting burial grounds, battlefields, ruins, and disaster sites, the task of the “dark” reenactor is to seemingly make dead or be dead (realism). This shift in emphasis provides us with a compelling argument for examining dark tourism within the context of reenactment. More than merely spectating sites of catastrophe, reenactive dark tourism blurs boundaries between spectator and spectated, living and dead, perpetrator and victim. In this sense, reenactive dark tourism goes a step beyond what Susan Sontag critiqued in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)—the tendency of photography to present suffering for the titillation of the viewer, thereby exhausting the viewer’s sympathy and moral outrage. Resignation, she concluded, was the lamentable outcome of proliferating violent images. Reenactive dark tourism similarly highlights the problem of agency. In the Brechtian sense, restaging dark events is a form of “culinary” theater, but a performance of the past in which eater and eaten may be difficult to differentiate. Without a distinct space of reflection, eroded is the position of otherness that is usually reserved for the dead. It is an open question whether this is to be thought of as aesthetically ingenious, prurient, or significant to processes of historical reckoning. Further, the medialization of “dark” events foregrounds problems of mediation and narration. As Daniel P. Reynolds argues in Postcards from Auschwitz (2018), there is a tendency among dark tourists to blur distinctions between the original event and later representations (p. 22). Such undermining of historical evidence has implications for historical representation and for the ways in which we come to view the painful past. What is at stake, we might ask, when calamity and suffering are done over again.What kinds of cultural and political work is reenactive dark tourism meant to do and what work does it do? While the term dark tourism is comparatively new and contested within the scholarly community, the phenomenon has an ancient pedigree. The assigned place of religious rites, funerary rituals, and memento mori in daily life, and the visibility of corporal punishment and public executions have long ensured the quotidian familiarity of suffering, dying, and death. Recognizing this, along with the fundamentally Western underpinnings of dark tourism, many scholars make a formal distinction between contemporary dark touristic practices and thanatourism, a historical phenomenon characterized by visiting places associated with death and suffering (Light, 2017, p. 277). Eighteenth-century writer James Boswell, to take an example, observed that the

45

Vanessa Agnew

“irresistible” spectacle of an execution served a private as well as public function, for, he averred, dying in one’s bed or at Tyburn were “only different Modes of the same thing; both [were] death” and attending an execution had the effect of “quiet[ing] and fortify[ing] [the] Mind” (2014 [1768], p. 80). Such regard for death sometimes served as an augment to the grand tour in the 18th and 19th centuries and to pilgrimages which took in culturally significant sites, including visits to ossuaries and repositories of saintly relics, as at the cathedrals in Santiago de Compostela and Canterbury (Seaton, 2002, p. 73). Reenacting death and dying was and remains part of ritualized spectacles like the Christian Eucharist and the stations of the cross staged at Easter (see The Wintershall Players, 2018). In its modern, secular form, dark tourism is dominated by a concern with conflict. GermanJewish philosopher, Hannah Arendt, returning from exile, stressed the necessity for Germans to take stock of what had been destroyed by the war: Amid the ruins, Germans mail each other picture postcards still showing the cathedrals and market places, the public buildings and bridges that no longer exist. And the indifference with which they walk through the rubble has its exact counterpart in the absence of mourning for the dead … This general lack of emotion … is only the most conspicuous outwards symptom of a deep-rooted, stubborn, and at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened. (Arendt, 2005, p. 249, quoted in Hell, 2008, p. 124) Only by inspecting the sites of destruction and practicing a form of domestic dark tourism would mourning be possible. Such reckoning was coupled with historical understanding. Differentiating between what had been lost and what remained—ruined cities, the human carcass, elapsed time—was preparatory to commemoration, but also to the possibility of reconstructing civil society. We find similar gestures in recent examples of World War II commemoration. German artist Yadegar Asisi’s mammoth panorama, Dresden 1945, displaying the Allied firebombing of that city, attempts to bring a productive dimension to the dark touristic experience. The visitor takes in a 360o view of the destroyed city at a “1:1 scale,” in what is billed as a “journey back in time.” Arrayed around the 15m-high tower are flattened buildings, raging fires, columns of smoke, victims, and survivors. At the same time, the panorama draws attention to “interactions of Europe’s war-torn history,” interactions that relativize the Allied destruction of Dresden and other German cities through reference to the German bombing of Rotterdam, Coventry, Stalingrad, and Warsaw (Dresden 1945). Yet if the panorama contributes to a universalizing discourse of wartime devastation through topographical correspondences that simultaneously relieve and inscribe German culpability, it also affects a temporal sleight of hand. A complementary panorama, Baroque Dresden, shown biannually at the same site and in alternation with Dresden 1945, is the un-dark corollary of the city before the cataclysm. Here, Dresden’s Renaissance and Baroque architecture is enlivened by cacophonous street scenes showing sedan bearers, market-goers, and jesters in the town square. Asisi’s twin panoramas of the same city at the turn of the 17th century and in the mid-20th are an historic-aesthetic instantiation of what Freud called fort-da (gone-there). Not unlike the postcards criticized by Arendt, the Dresden panoramas allow what was destroyed to be made whole again, and what was dead, alive. Gunter Demnig’s Stolperstein Projekt (Stumbling Stone Project, 1996–) likewise attaches significance to place and plays with notions of past versus present.The project commemorates Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, the politically persecuted, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and euthanasia ­victims

46

Dark tourism

who were expelled and murdered by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945 (Stolpersteine in Berlin). Unlike state-sponsored commemorative forms that incline toward the impersonal and monumental, the Stolpersteine are noted for the ways in which individual agency is mobilized in the creation of a cultural landscape: private citizens and communities research, commission, and tend their own plaques (Cook and van Riemsdijk, 2014). Specifically, the Stolpersteine take the form of small brass plaques set among cobblestones on pavements in German and other European cities. Decisive is the coupling of victims’ names with their former places of residence: each text opens with the words “Hier wohnte …” (Here lived …). The plaques thus link the past with the present, and current inhabitants with former ones, giving a sense of intermingled Jewish and non-Jewish households, and of once-Jewish neighborhoods evacuated of their inhabitants. Acting on the viewer today, the Stolpersteine facilitate what Alison Landsberg refers to as prosthetic witnessing, the possibility of testifying about past events that were never experienced firsthand (2004, p. 149). Walking the streets of Germany’s capital, mindful pedestrians swerve to avoid treading on the brass objects. Footfall is suspended and forward progress retarded, as pedestrians are momentarily disrupted from their purpose. This stumbling reenacts the victims’ own faltering steps decades earlier, victims disrupted in their daily lives and dragged from their homes to trip into the street. Through this manipulation of the body’s motor responses and the perception of a shared physiological disposition, past and present appear to collapse. The stumbler’s body gives a sign of something it seems to know—perhaps the pupils dilate, heart rate increases, and goosebumps appear on the skin (authenticity). In the Stolpersteine, memory of the genocidal past is thus not relegated to the lieu de mémoire, where, according to Pierre Nora (1989), the past can be deposited and forgotten. Rather, the Stolpersteine appear where they are unexpected and unwished for.They lack decorum. And they produce a bodily encounter with earlier traumatic events that surprises and disturbs. This aleatoric dimension opens a window of receptivity that is a precondition for knowledge about the painful past (Figure 8.1). Indicative of the growing interest in dark tourism are reality TV series like David Farrier’s Dark Tourist (2018), in which the New Zealand journalist visits “places made famous by death and disaster.” Organized according to geographic location rather than thematic content or commemorative context, the series casts the presenter in the role of naive participant-observer with a gormless manner and incongruous pink shorts. He participates in a simulated illegal crossing of the Mexico-US border, where he is “captured” and roughed up by “border guards.” In the US, he participates in a JFK assassination tour in Dallas and tours the urban wasteland of deindustrialized Detroit. While in Japan, there is a visit to a radiation-contaminated town and to Aokigahara forest, notorious for its suicides. The TV series also investigates World War II-themed reenactments like Paddock Wood in Kent. This so-called “Glastonbury of war” is designated the world’s largest military reenactment, attracting 80,000 spectators annually.Viewers learn that participants enjoy “running around and shooting people” and “hang[ing] out in the mud.” Such discomfort seems to be a marker of historical fidelity: “I’m a muddy mess. This is authentic,” a reenactor is heard to proclaim. At the same time, reenactive dark tourism is caught in a bind: “It’s a bit of a catch-22,” observes the presenter, “They want all this to be as authentic as possible without the inconvenient parts of history.” But, he concludes, “I’m not sure making a ghastly piece of history fun is the best way to understand it. Or to avoid repeating it” (episode 5, entire paragraph). If dark tourism encapsulates a desire to engage with the finality of death, the reenacted dark event is about the future as much as the past. In reenacting, the dark tourist practices a form of counterfactual thinking that allows the ending to be imagined differently. It is a future that does

47

Vanessa Agnew

Figure 8.1  Vanessa Agnew, Refugee Plaque, 2016, granite, brass flashing. Recalling Demnig’s Stolperstein Project, Refugee Plaque invokes the Nazi past to draw attention to the situation facing refugees in Europe today. Plaques are inscribed with details of the refugee’s futile search for a new home: “Habibullah A. wanted to live here DOB 1983 Fled Afghanistan 10.2015 Denied housing in Berlin on 20.7.2016.” Source: Jobst von Kunowski.

not end with the annihilation of an entire ethnos or the extirpation of anthropotita itself, but in which biodiversity can be revivified from the global seed vault and the dead commemorated to rise again.

Further reading Macdonald, S., 2015; McDaniel, K. N. (ed.) 2018; Puff, H. (2009); Schult,T., 2018; Sion, B. (ed.) 2014; Stole, B., 2018; Willis, E., 2014.

48

9 DOCUMENTARY Stella Bruzzi

Reenactment has been part of documentary since its inception, although not always a welcome one; it has also, of late, made something of a comeback. In the first part of the 20th century, technology compelled documentary filmmakers like Robert Flaherty and Humphrey Jennings to reconstruct events, lives, and dialogue. With infinitely superior equipment and technology at their disposal, however, later documentary filmmakers have made a conscious choice to use reenactment as a means of representing and getting at the truth, although, as Bill Nichols counsels, “reenactments are clearly a view rather than the view from which the past yields up its truth” (Nichols, 2008, p. 79). Reenactment is a wide-ranging, somewhat nebulous term when applied to nonfiction film, spanning simple and functional reconstructions to the exaggeratedly stylized reenactments exemplified by the work of Errol Morris, whose The Thin Blue Line (1988) changed conceptions of reenactment irrevocably. As Nichols intimates, it has more than a whiff of subjectivity or selectivity about it; reenactments are undertaken, the form’s detractors might argue, when there is no “enactment,” no authentic actuality footage to be had. The resurgence in interest in reenactment in films as diverse as The Battle of Orgreave (Jeremy Deller, 2001), Man on Wire (James Marsh, 2005), The Arbor (Clio Barnard, 2010), Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012), and The Jinx (Andrew Jarecki, 2015) suggests, however, that reenactments are far more than prosaic, literal reconstructions of otherwise inaccessible events not captured on camera.Whereas historically, reenactments often presented a clear differentiation between past and present, more recently, reenactment has been mobilized to interrogate, even reformulate a troubled past with its unreconciled future(s), to destabilize the very notion of closure or resolution and go beyond the simple dialectics of pitting a past against a present. Reenactments in documentary can achieve many things: they can plug narrative gaps; they can be used to embellish or add texture and nuance to personal accounts (for example, in the form of interviews) or archival footage which might otherwise appear dry or incomplete; they can, as in The Thin Blue Line, offer alternative, even contradictory versions of the same memories or events; they can simply take the form of restaging events (as in living history historical reenactment). The reenactment’s relationship to documentary is complex. If, as was argued in New Documentary (Bruzzi, 2006), all documentaries are performative acts, a shifting triangulated negotiation between filmmakers, text, and audiences underpinned by the acceptance that the only “truth” captured on documentary film is the performance in front of the camera, then it is also possible to see all documentaries as enactments—as representations and repetitions of actions 49

Stella Bruzzi

that occurred in the past.This relationship between act and enactment is a foundational block of all documentaries. However divergent documentary films are from each other, they all present the difference between act and enactment; what changes is the level of performative display of this foundational difference (performance and performativity). The term reenactment presupposes the existence of a prior enactment, and so is the filmic articulation of temporal displacement; but is not documentary always, in some sense, a reenactment, as Paula Rabinowitz articulates, “a graphing of history, in and through the cinematic image and taped sound, onto the present” (1993, pp. 119–120)? This looser conceptualization of reenactment might be exemplified by a sequence such as Michael Peterson’s dynamic account of his dead wife’s final evening in the first episode of Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s The Staircase (2004), in which, pursued by a handheld camera, Peterson follows Kathleen’s path from the family pool to the house moments before he discovered her near death at the bottom of a flight of stairs. (It ought to be noted that although Peterson here and elsewhere in the series protests his innocence, the original trial found him guilty of Kathleen’s murder.) This is not a classic reenactment in that it lacks dramatization, but the interviewee’s active “walking through” of actions she/he is describing for the camera offers a compelling example of the therapeutic, emotive value of documentary reenactment. Useful to think of enactments and reenactments as points along a continuum, as constituent parts of the documentary process, reenactments are so attractive to the documentary filmmaker because, in spite of their demonstrable detachment from the original “acts” they dramatize, they bring remote past actions and events to life and into the present. A restaging, even of a manifestly completed action, thereby unfolds filmically in the present tense; it is being enacted now. This active presentness characterizes all reenactments. The documentary reenactment is only relatively rarely a straightforward re-telling, a literal dramatized iteration of a historical event; more frequently it offers a re-opening, a re-visiting or a re-interrogation of an event. This critical dimension is one of reenactment’s most compelling features, a status directly attributable to Errol Morris, the documentary filmmaker who elevated reenactment to an altogether different plane. Reenactments, he believes, “burrow underneath the surface of reality in an attempt to uncover some hidden truth” (Morris, 2008a); they are not just about looking again, but offer the opportunity to discover, unravel, and re-examine anew (evidence; production of historical meaning). At first glance, it may seem that Morris’s preoccupation with unearthing “what really happened” is at odds with the film noir-ish style of his reenactments, from the infamous slow-motion chocolate milkshake flying through the air in The Thin Blue Line to the controversial dramatizations of torture in Abu Ghraib in Standard Operating Procedure (2008). And yet in his oeuvre he has deployed dramatization as an investigative tool to express the unreliability of memory, which, as articulated in one of his New York Times blogs, he conceives of being “an elastic affair” (2008a). “We remember selectively,” Morris continues, “just as we perceive selectively.” Reenactments are the documentary’s ultimate tussle with the past. Three recent British documentaries illustrate, in different ways, this characterization of reenactment as a site of struggle with the past: Jeremy Deller’s and Mike Figgis’s The Battle of Orgreave, Clio Barnard’s The Arbor, and Carol Morley’s Dreams of a Life (2011). Turner Prizewinner Jeremy Deller restaged a “living history” site-specific performance of the pivotal and violent clash at the coke plant at Orgreave, South Yorkshire, on 18 June 1984, at the height of the 1984–1985 Miner’s Strike. The Battle of Orgreave was Deller’s site-specific reenactment of 16–17 June 2001, now only accessible via Mike Figgis’s Channel 4 documentary, which added a significant amount of material (principally interviews and archive footage) to the original reenactment. As the overarching documentary makes clear, Deller’s choice to restage the

50

Documentary

clashes at Orgreave between some 6,000 picketers and 8,000 police signaled a decision to use reenactment not to restage benignly a potently symbolic historical episode but to reopen a barely healed wound. The reenactment of Orgreave is inherently political, as well as being an audacious, entertaining work of art; it pulls together diverse groups of people—former miners (veterans of the pickets of 1984–1985), emergency services personnel present on that day, local residents, and members of more than 20 historical reenactment societies—and its effects are charged and complex. Deller’s motivation for putting all these groups together was to remind his audiences “that history didn’t end in 1945” (quoted in Slyce, 2003, p. 76). The past and the present are not distinct domains here; reenactments position the two in perpetual, frequently violent, dialogue. The performance of 2001 was a simulation; but although it was putatively not a refight, tied to the fear that it might get out of hand (at one point, one of the ex-miners involved in the reenactment threatens, “Fuck the £60! We’re going for it!”) there was a collective awareness that this was a painful and pivotal turning point in history which should not be forgotten. During the course of the documentary Deller warns that reenactment is not therapy, that “it’s going to take more than an art project to heal wounds.” For Deller, reenactment, as he states directly to camera, was about “confronting something” (memory and commemoration). The Battle of Orgreave took place as close as possible to the site of the original “battle.” Although no blue plaque marks its spot and the plant itself is now buried under a new housing estate, the backdrops in the 2001 documentary are still identifiable today. Site-specificity lends a peculiarly symbolic resonance to reenactments; it brings us—the observer or viewer— into the historical events, not so we embody them, but so that they gain emotive resonance. Concomitantly, the multiple restagings in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, of the Kennedy assassination in The Eternal Frame (Ant Farm and T. R. Uthco, 1975) or the actual 9/11 air traffic controllers reprising their roles in the Newark airport control tower of the events of the day of the terrorist attacks for Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (2006), bring the supposedly closed events of the past into the/our present, so the relationship to history becomes fluid and dynamic. Site-specific reenactment is the ultimate reliving of an event; it embodies presentness at the same time as it practices historical scrutiny. Clio Barnard returns to the Buttershaw Estate, Bradford, where playwright Andrea Dunbar grew up, for The Arbor, a documentary that interlaces layers of reenactment in a kaleidoscopic frenzy of “presents” that bring to life Dunbar’s life and her work. Many reen-actments prioritize acting as a means of breathing life into the past; in the case of The Arbor, there are two specific uses of professional actors: to lip-sync, as stated at the outset of Barnard’s film, to the voices of the interviewees, and to perform extracts from Dunbar’s autobiographical plays on the green at the heart of the Buttershaw Estate. The Arbor is thereby both closely aligned to the past it reenacts and intent on signaling its divergence from it. The faultless, seamless lip-syncing of the faceless interviewees’ words function as a metaphor for the present’s embodiment of the past, while the minimal staging and actorly performances of scenes from the stage play The Arbor in front of current estate residents more clearly enact the collision between past and present. The Arbor opens with Dunbar’s daughters, Lorraine and Lisa, offering conflicting accounts of shared childhood memory: a fire in their bedroom. The girls could not escape because Dunbar, asleep in her bed, had locked them in, and as the actors lip-sync to the daughters’ words as they struggle to remember how the fire started, flames build up around them. In this surreal collage, levels of truth and reenactment dislodge each other like a series of restless tectonic plates, all nevertheless treated as components of the same contiguous physical space. Throughout, the fluid interweaving of various narrative strata carries us through the film’s dialectical tensions. To return to site-specificity, there is a moment when the actor playing the brother in The Arbor is dragged, still in role, by a policeman across the green and behind the (different) actor who has

51

Stella Bruzzi

been lip-syncing Dunbar’s real brother David’s words.The uninterrupted flow from one brother to another, from one reenactment domain to another, irons out dialectical differences. By eliding the differences between fact and fiction, action and enactment, Barnard constructs a radical form of reenactment. Dreams of a Life offers a moving example of another form of reenactment—as the hypothetical representation of an irretrievable, unknown past. Joyce Vincent died in her North London bedsit in 2003, her body only discovered three years later. Alongside dramatized reconstructions of versions of what interviewees have told her of Vincent’s childhood and earlier life, Carol Morley places reenactments of her subject’s entirely mysterious final hours. With their absence of dialogue, these haunting sequences concretize, give image-life to pure speculation. When they entered Vincent’s flat, local council staff found a body in such a bad state of decomposition that it could only be identified by comparing dental records to a holiday photograph found in her flat. There was no body, were no clues. The elliptical, mute reenactments of Vincent’s last moments can only be hypotheses, and they expose the limitations as well as the emotive potency of reenactments. Vincent is shown drinking milk directly from a carton, possibly to relieve the pain of her stomach ulcer; she is depicted wrapping Christmas presents, but we do not know for whom. For all their empathic catharsis, Morley’s dreamy reenactments cannot get at the cause of death; they skirt round the issue, as the mystery that motivated Dreams of a Life remains unsolved. Documentary reenactments provide the thread that makes sense of a fragmented narrative; they reveal truth(s), but lack the “lookalikeness,” the indexical bond “between the photographic image and the object in the real world to which the image refers” (Gaines, 1999, p. 5). However, reenactments should not merely be characterized as lack. A useful framework is offered by Freud’s 1914 essay “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through,” with its invitation to understand the similarities and differences between the repetition or acting out of a memory and its fully therapeutic “working through.” Documentary reenactments reconstitute the past to ensure that it is not forgotten, but also to ensure that it is understood. Freud pondered whether or not the “compulsion to repeat … replaces the impulsion to remember” (150); reenactment at its best works as well as walks through the histories it airs.

Further reading Freud, S., 2001 [1914]; Kahana, J., 2009; Nichols, B., 2008; Schwarz, B., 2004.

52

10 EMOTION Juliane Brauer and Martin Lücke

Reenactment is among a series of performative practices that treat history as an e­ xperience and thus as something that can be (re)created. Corporeal experience, empathy, sensory immersion, traveling through time—these are central motifs of popular history writing and its reception in a performative way. Suspense, enjoyment, and entertainment are seen as things that might spark laypeople’s interest, curiosity, and enthusiasm for the past. These performative practices are based on an appeal to “authentic” feelings, which promise that the reenactor will be able to approximate the actions, thoughts, and emotions of historical actors (authenticity). As such, reenactors ascribe greater authenticity to non-linguistic phenomena such as feelings and perceptions than to the kinds of linguistic narrative practices traditionally associated with historical representation. Reenactment can thus be seen as indicative of “history’s recent affective turn” (Agnew, 2007, p. 300). In the following, however, the concept of affect is dispensed with in favor of the concepts of emotion and feeling, used here as synonyms. In the neurosciences and psychology, an affect is a purely physical reaction to an external stimulus. Emotions and feelings, in contrast, have come into use in cultural studies, particularly history, during the past two decades (Plamper, 2015, p. 12). Reenactment scholars still prefer the term affect. Agnew calls reenactment “a form of affective history” (2007, p. 301; McCalman and Pickering, 2010b, pp. 6f). The various positions from cultural studies on emotions (Plamper, 2015) can be distilled into the following definition: first, emotions are culturally specific and change over time; second, they are inextricably bound to the body; third, they are learned, mediated, and communicated through practices of the body (Scheer, 2012, p. 199). Thus, emotions are neither cultural constructs in a social-constructivist sense, nor are they anthropological constants as often understood by neuroscientists. They are to be located on the border between the body and the psyche, inside and outside. In this way, emotions form a contact zone between self and other. They are “impressions” that the outside world leaves on the body (Ahmed, 2004, p. 28). Thus, emotions mediate between the body and mind, on the one hand, and the subject and society on the other, constituting a central dimension of experience and knowledge. Constantly new perceptions moving from inside to outside and vice-versa mean that emotions are always subject to change. The same goes for the “mindful body” (Scheper-Hughes and Lock, 1987, pp. 7–8), which changes with the emotional impressions made upon it. From all this follows the most important insight: the history of emotions is a history of practices (Frevert, 2016, p. 56). Monique Scheer coined the notion 53

Juliane Brauer and Martin Lücke

“emotional practices” (2012, p. 209), which both follow from and are transformed by bodily knowledge. Accordingly, emotions are something that we learn, experience, manage, and, above all, something we do (Scheer, 2012, p. 195). This definition of emotions as an expression of malleable knowledge embedded in the body leads to problems for contemporary historical-cultural attempts to re-experience or re-feel history. This entry thus explores the significance and function of emotions in the performative practices of reenactment. Viewed as a reproduction, re-creation, or “meticulous reconstruction of a historical event or artefact,” reenactments of historical events are supposed to serve as a “cultural and performative time machine” that makes it possible to “repeat and reanimate” “the past in the time and space of the present” (Hinz, 2011, n.p.). As a historical genre and form of historical representation, reenactment is per se an emotional mode of the acquisition of history. Reenactments are a peculiar object in the analysis of “the functions of emotions and their systematic place in the multifaceted processes through which individuals learn about past realities as history” (Brauer and Lücke, 2013, p. 11). Reenactment is a “participatory reconstruction of history” that enables “reenactors and their audience to have an aesthetic experience of the past in their own body and as a collectively experienced live event” (Hinz, 2011, n.p.). This means that reenactments—here in the specific form of live events—are a particular form of historical-cultural objectification in which emotions play a constitutive role on multiple levels. In general, there are two different aspects of emotions in practices of learning about the past and acquiring historical knowledge. First, the emotions of historical actors are objects of historical learning, as are emotions qua forces of history. We might thus inquire into the emotions that motivated historical persons, asking which emotional rules or “emotionology” structured social relations in a given period (Stearns and Stearns, 1985, p. 813), and which practices of showing and communicating emotions were dominant in certain periods and societies, or how groups were shaped by common emotions to form “emotional communities” (Rosenwein, 2002, p. 842).These questions shed light on the role of emotions in history in a way that opens novel, yet accessible, perspectives on historical events and persons. For instance, one might think about the contradictory emotions felt by soldiers fighting in the American Civil War and the role feelings like pride, rage, and loyalty might have played in determining their actions. Thus, considered as part of the historical object, emotions can provide the reenactor with experiences of alterity. On this level, it is important to analyze why the significance of certain feelings has changed over time and how the reenactor’s contemporary conception of emotions differ from those of historical persons. This makes clear that the emotions of historical persons can be an object of historical study, while, at the same time, it underscores the point that feeling the identical emotions they felt or empathizing with them is impossible. After all, feelings have a history: our contemporary forms of interpreting them and our own cultures of emotions differ from historical forms too radically to ever re-experience the thoughts, feelings, and actions of historical persons. People living in the 21st century cannot experience the terrible fear of the plague experienced by people in the Middle Ages. We can get a sense of these emotions through our own experiences; we cannot, however, know how these emotions were felt and communicated by historical persons.We have grown up in different circumstances and bring along our own personal emotional memories, expectations, knowledge, and cultural practices when interpreting the past. Such impressions structure our understanding of historical events and actors and help determine our emotional reactions. Aside from this dimension of emotions as historical objects, however, subjective emotions— which is to say, the emotions of those doing the learning—also play a role in learning about

54

Emotion

history. It is on this level that the interplay of emotions and historical simulation is most apparent in reenactments: “Reenactment is fun. It [involves] … work and play” (Agnew, 2004, p. 327). This emotional involvement in the production of historical meaning constitutes the appeal of reenactments, which are “less concerned with events, processes or structures than with the individual’s physical and psychological experience” (Agnew, 2007, p. 301). A defining feature of reenactment is the way in which it blurs the lines between object and subject, which, from the perspective of historical pedagogy, makes it problematic. Reenactments seek to reproduce historical events as authentically as possible—from the most accurate period shoes to the reconstruction of old ships—all with the aim of mastering the same challenges as those living centuries ago. Despite such strategies of authentification, reenactors “can never be them [historical persons]” (Cook, 2004, p. 489). Nevertheless, Cook sees “a persistent tendency to privilege a visceral, emotional engagement with the past at the expense of a more analytical treatment” (p. 490). The privileging of emotional reliving underpins the work of philosopher, historian, and archaeologist Collingwood, one of the pioneers of the idea of reenactment (Collingwood, 1946). Nevertheless, reenactors might not really care whether Collingwood was thinking of reenactment as “sympathetic identification with the past” or as “nonintuitive, constructivist methodology” (Nielsen, 1981, pp. 4, 31; Dray, 1995, pp. 123–132). Instead, they might, as in 2001, undertake a six-week journey on a reconstruction of the Endeavour that is supposed to feel as real and authentic as the one Captain James Cook took in 1770 (Cook, 2004, p. 488). The subjective emotions at play can be more accurately grasped by considering the ways in which different groups of people participate in reenactments. First are the reenactors themselves, those who embody history during the reenactment and in doing so express emotions. One might ask how much members of this group reflect on the ways they appropriate the emotions of the historical persons and to what extent this appropriation (conscious or not) contributes to the production of a particular historical identity. Other participants include spectators and visitors. For them, the reenactors are already part of the (representation of the) past, simply because they embody the historical narrative. One might ask whether viewers consciously seek out emotional-aesthetic pleasure when attending reenactments or if they are capable of seeing the emotional force of the reenactment as an aesthetic strategy used to give the event a veneer of authenticity. It should be added that during the reenactment, both reenactors and spectators experience emotions not only as individuals, but also as a collective.The reenactment of historical events and the act of viewing a reenactment are both concrete encounters with the past through which emotional communities are produced. Additionally, those working behind the scenes constitute a third group within the reenactment. Just as there are directors, costume designers, and dramaturges, along with actors and audience members in the theater, so too are there people responsible for the planning, research, set, and costume design of live event reenactments. This group may be partially or wholly identical with the actors. Still, it is worth asking whether those working “backstage” consciously employ emotions as an aesthetic strategy that is geared toward lending the reenactment the appearance of authenticity. How is this strategy concretely realized and what aim is it intended to serve? Is the point of such strategies to increase the aesthetic pleasure the audience takes in the reenactment, to increase its didactic value, or to make the actors identify more with their roles? Reenactments blur the line between the emotions of the object and those of the subject. Reenactments’ intention to re-enact and re-create makes it difficult for participants to distance themselves from the emotions of the historical object. This turns encounters with history into an experience of identity founded on strategies of entertainment and, in doing so, elides the task of triggering the kind of reflection on the difference between the contemporary world and

55

Juliane Brauer and Martin Lücke

historical realities necessary for learning about history. Melanie Hinz says actors should “reenact instead of act,” but one might ask whether a mere reenacting of history can even work without an element of acting, or if this would not rob reenactments of their real appeal. Notwithstanding the fact that reenactments are predicated on a belief that historical events can be re-experienced, their capacity to stimulate people’s emotions cannot be denied. Indeed, such forms of performative historical learning contribute to increased public interest in history. Reenactments have the potential to make people sensitive to historical alterity—to see, feel, and possibly reflect on the fact that past realities were different from our present world: “The real question is not whether the experience of reenactment allows us to simulate the mentalities of the past; it is whether the exercise can help improve our understanding of a different world and of the behavior of its inhabitants” (Cook, 2004, pp. 491–492).

Further reading Brauer, J., and Lücke, M., 2013; Frevert, U., 2016.

56

11 EVIDENCE Paul Pickering

For the student of reenactment (as for reenactors themselves), evidence is one of the central issues to ponder. The question is not ontological: does reenactment produce evidence? It does. The question is: what kinds of evidence does it produce? And, by extension, is the evidence produced by reenacting the past epistemological: does it allow us to distinguish between opinion and justified belief? A more detailed interrogation of these issues, however, is hampered by the fact that the concept of evidence itself has been something of a theoretical wallflower. Indeed, with a few exceptions, the definition of evidence (both as a noun and a verb) is often taken for granted and rarely problematized. It does not, to take one notable example, rate an entry in Raymond Williams’s seminal Keywords (1976). Nevertheless, a glance at the longer Oxford English Dictionary (OED) makes it clear that the word has had many and varied definitions and usages over many centuries. A capacious definition was stultified early in the 19th century when Leopold von Ranke’s assertion that mining the archive for sources would shackle evidence to empirical data and present it as historical truth. Alongside empiricism, the promulgation of other “scientific” approaches to the study of history—such as an orthodox application of the Marxist concept of historical materialism—subsumed evidence into a pre-existing hierarchy of ideological certainties. Subsequent generations of post-empiricist historians have derided the search for truth based on so-called factual evidence as an epistemic folly, deeming all historical narrative to be nothing more than a fiction hide-bound to understandings of the present on the part of the historian, a symptom of fatally flawed praxis. The debates over truth need not detain us here, except to note that they have pushed the stand-alone notion of evidence further to the margins. When examining the concept in relation to reenactment it is important to return to the OED. As well as introducing the notion that documentation constitutes evidence, which can establish facts (in a legal context), the Latin and French etymons (ēvidentia and évidence) of the English word encompass a range of meanings—empirical, corporeal, and ethereal—relevant to reenactment: that which is evident to the eye; manifest to the senses; a rational thought; an act of imagination; or an article of faith. The idea of evidence intersects with the physical reenactment both before and after the performance itself. To pursue this point, it is helpful to think of reenactors along an authenticity axis. Many reenactors are hobbyists and weekend enthusiasts (sometimes called FARBs for their “fast and research-less buying” of costumes and related paraphernalia (Lee Hadden, 1999, p. 8) (expertise and amateurism). Typically, they are, both individually and collectively, seeking an 57

Paul Pickering

adrenalin rush, escapism, community, fun, or some combination of the above. It is fair to say that evidence here is at best an incidental consideration. Other reenactors, however, are regarded as hardcore or extreme and in pursuit of total immersion. For them, a precondition of the embodied performance itself is the relentless pursuit of evidence. They seek to undertake the “most historically accurate” reenactments possible, which is achieved by “constant studying” to “keep increasing the level of historical correctness” (Pickering, 2016, p. 196) (Figure 11.1). Within the reenactment community, hardcore reenactors are known variously as “thread counters,” “garbsnarks,” and even “stitch-Nazis” on account of their obsession with authenticity. Sometimes dubbed the “authenticity police,” they also take on the role of monitoring other reenactors by “pointing out all the historical errors in someone else’s clothing and accoutrements” (“A CrossDisciplinary Glossary,” 2010). For hardcore reenactors, then, evidence comprises even the tiniest fragments of information about inanimate and intangible features of the world they seek to enter, which are accreted and, by so doing, bring history to life. Without replicating the world down to the finest detail, living history cannot live. Having pursued evidence as precondition, hardcore reenactors seek to produce two forms of evidence. The first is contextual. By reconstructing a siege engine, home, Church, or musical instrument, or by recovering funereal rituals, festivals, or songs—to take but a few examples—they seek to open up possibilities for insights into how lives were lived. Here, reenactors work hand-in-hand with a range of practitioners from bio-anthropology and earth sciences and others collecting biometrical data to musicologists, archaeologists and, of course, historians. Increasingly, there have been roles for artists and those involved in the creation of virtual reality and gaming. The multifarious methodologies employed here clearly overlap (so, often, do the

Figure 11.1  Anglo-Saxon reenactors taking a break from the Battle of Hastings in 2006. Source: Stephen Gapps.

58

Evidence

personnel) and at one remove it seems arbitrary to separate reenactors out for special treatment (and oft-time derision). Second, for hardcore reenactors the purpose of total immersion is the pursuit of affective evidence: by recreating the past at the most granular level, the contention is that it is possible to know what it felt like to ride in a chariot; the fight from a trench; to attend a medieval feast; or to walk the route of those fleeing from persecution (suffering). The affective knowledge generated by immersive performance is experienced individually as an ecstatic moment of self-transcendence as well as collectively, producing what sociologists have long since termed “frameworks of social memory” (Halbwachs, [1925], 1992). Moreover, affective evidence is communicable to those who have not participated in the reenactment—and experienced the rush—much as divine revelation is readily accepted second-hand as evidence of the existence of God. Here those engaged in performative reenactments separate themselves out. A third form of reenactment, regarded with even greater suspicion by the academy, is selfconsciously non-realist. Indeed, it is practiced by those who embrace the impossibility of realism. They seek comparative truth between present experiences of the knowable past, to the extent that it can be known, and the then; reducing the distance between past and present by embracing the present. Anathema in the eyes of the “authenticity police” (and the guardians of the walls of the academy) as it undoubtedly is, this admixture of self-consciously presentist history and radically experimental non-realist reenactment nevertheless shares with the hardcore immersives the search for affective evidence. Experiencing an event in the present raises the possibility of better understanding how it felt when it first happened. The theoretical pivot point for a consideration of what constitutes evidence and what are the conditions and the manner in which it is produced in relationship to reenactment, is the work of philosopher and archaeologist, R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943). In The Idea of History (based on an incomplete manuscript published posthumously in 1946), Collingwood asks: “How, or on what conditions, can the historian know the past?” “In considering this question,” he continued, “the first point to notice is that the past is never a given fact which he can apprehend empirically by perception. Ex hypothesi, the historian is not an eyewitness of the facts he desires to know” (p. 282). For Collingwood, the solution for arriving at an understanding of the “idea of history” was reenactment: “the historian must reenact the past in his own mind” (Collingwood, 1946, p. 282). Reading words, he argued, “does not amount to knowing their historical significance;” to discover thought, “the historian must think it again for himself ” (Collingwood, 1946, p. 283). By rethinking Thomas Becket’s thoughts, Collingwood famously suggested, he became Becket: “For Becket, in so far as he was a thinking mind, being Becket was also knowing he was Becket; and for myself, on the same showing, to be Becket is to know that I am Becket, that is, to know that I am my own present self reenacting Becket’s thought, myself being in that sense Becket” (Collingwood, 1946, p. 297). In this most famous chapter of his treatise, therefore, Collingwood’s conception of reenactment is both prescriptive and proscriptive; reenacting thought to know the past is distinct from experiencing the past. There is, it seems, no cause to pick up a rifle or a lute or don a suit of armor or soften leather thongs with urine in order to engage with the past. Indeed, Collingwood goes beyond Descartes’ famous elevation of the intellect over the senses and the imagination: Cogito, ergo sum is transmogrified into I think, therefore I can become someone else (Descartes, [1641] 1901). Ostensibly at least, between Collingwood and hardcore (and non-realist) reenactors there is thus a perfect antilogy about how to reenact. For all that immersive reenactors are profoundly committed to the highest standards of fidelity to authenticate the historical knowledge they produce when they create a mise-en-scène, what appears to be an insoluble equation vis-à-vis Collingwood has undoubtedly weakened their claims to a seat at the epistemological table.Yet, all the forms of reenactment outlined here clearly fall within a capacious definition of evidence 59

Paul Pickering

as capable of being seen, felt, imagined, and thought both individually and collectively by mutual reinforcement. Moreover, upon closer examination, the apparent dichotomy between Collingwood and the hardcore reenactors is fallacious. Notwithstanding their commitment to authenticity, there surely comes a point for the stitch-counters when they go beyond performing past lives and attempt to rethink the thoughts of others. Often this takes the form of creating second lives (Pickering, 2016, pp. 205–206). At some point, for immersives, reliving history becomes a matter for their imagination; they think, therefore they are someone else. It is here that they cross into Collingwood’s world. It is not often understood, however, that Collingwood also relied upon the material world for evidence. In The Idea of History, Collingwood does not directly contemplate physical reenacting as an adjunct to the cerebral process (although he does ponder the implications for the process if the thinker of the thoughts he is seeking to rethink was sitting on an uncomfortable chair). Moreover, as Marnie Hughes-Warrington has noted, the crucial passages in The Idea of History are atypical of what he had to say about reenactment elsewhere. For example, she quotes him from his earlier Outlines of a Philosophy of History (1928): To write the history of a battle, we must rethink the thoughts which determined its various tactical phases: we must see the ground of the battlefield as the opposing commanders saw it, and draw from the topography the conclusions that they drew: and so forth. The past event, ideal though it is, must be actual in the historian’s reenactment of it. (Hughes-Warrington, 2003, p. 73, original emphasis) Try as we might, we cannot rethink topography; we need to see it, sense it, experience it, either directly or via second-hand evidence. Collingwood’s doubts about the uncomfortable chair are more pronounced in his Autobiography, first published in 1939. Here he ponders the impossibility of rethinking Lord Nelson’s thoughts if the historian is not standing on the deck of a manof-war, from which he concludes that there in fact are two thoughts, that is he has not become Nelson as per the famous construction (Collingwood, 1989 [1939] ed., pp. 112–114). Further, when reflecting upon his practice as an archaeologist, Collingwood distinguishes between his laboratory and his study. For much of his career, Collingwood was in the field sifting the earth for evidence of the past. Once recovered, the evidence went to his laboratory, where he attempted to understand how it worked, its purpose, and its significance. In this process, which Collingwood calls historian’s work, the senses are crucial. Only later does he go to his study to do his rethinking of thoughts. Admittedly, Collingwood does not refer to historian’s work as reenactment, but it is clear that we cannot fully appreciate his famous construction of reenactment without accepting that a lot of fieldwork is a precondition for rethinking thoughts. And, of course, historical work in the sense that he meant it, is inevitably underpinned by affect. A revealing example of this relates to music. As Kate Bowan has shown, the experience of performed music was central to Collingwood’s formative conception of historical reenactment. In 1928, he had written that one could not acquire “a good imaginative hearing of a Beethoven symphony without having heard an orchestra from Beethoven’s time perform it” (Bowan, 2010, p. 137). Confronted by this impossibility, Collingwood was prepared to compromise: if a person “could not read a symphony of Beethoven in score with any chance of obtaining a good imaginative hearing of it … the sine qua non of writing the history of past music is to have this music re-enacted in the present” (in Bowan, 2010, p. 137) (historically informed practice). At the same time, it is important to note that Collingwood was a devotee of detective fiction, which he links directly to the issue evidence. Notably, his famous methodological ­injunction

60

Evidence

was preceded by a section entitled “Who killed John Doe?” Here, he discusses at length the relationship between the physical evidence that can be gleaned from a crime scene and the imaginative process at the core of seeking to understand it. To characterize the latter, he borrows the well-known phrase coined by Agatha Christie’s Poirot, using “the little grey cells” (Collingwood, 1946, p. 281). Arthur Conan Doyle’s alter ego, Sherlock Holmes, appears elsewhere in The Idea of History; indeed, the fictional detective is also offered as a model: “The hero of a detective novel is thinking exactly like an historian,” Collingwood writes, “when, from indications of the most varied kinds, he constructs an imaginary picture of how a crime was committed, and by whom” (Collingwood, 1946, p. 243). Crime fiction developed in parallel with the burgeoning science of criminal investigation. It is no surprise therefore that reenactment—physical and cerebral—has a longstanding place in the criminal justice system. As early as the 1910s, the potential of deductive reasoning based on reconstruction seemed almost limitless. Edmond Locard, one of the pioneers of forensic science, made a direct link between the criminologist and the archaeologist: the investigator “re-creates the criminal from the traces the latter leaves behind, just as the archaeologist reconstructs prehistoric beings from his finds” (Chisum, 2000, p. 3). Similarly, a well-known textbook argued well before Collingwood that, following an exhaustive collection of the physical evidence, the investigator must “reconstruct the occurrence, build up by hard labour a theory fitted in and co-ordinated like a living organism”; even in difficult cases, “if one conjures up in the mind’s eye, quietly, prudently, and thoughtfully, the ways in which events have occurred, one will always arrive at a safe conclusion as to the circle or class in which persons who know something will be found” (Kendal, 1934, p. 37).The sequence here is telling: the consideration of physical evidence is a precondition to exercising the “little grey cells.” The process of conjuration Collingwood invoked by using this glib quotation is significant in that it blurs the lines between the intellect, the imagination, and the senses in the production of evidence. Moreover, fictional detectives and actual criminal investigators alike resort to reenactment to produce evidence. Based on the concept of context-dependent memory, reenactments have long been firmly established in the field of crime detection. According to one commentator, “In an attempt to jog the memories of possible witnesses, crime reconstructions are often organized in which every effort is made to replicate the original events and context of the crime as exactly as possible” (Groome, 1999, p. 120) (forensic architecture). The advent of television increased the potential application of this approach. As early as 1967, a German series featuring reenactments, Aktenzeichen XY ungelöst [Case XY Unsolved], was launched. From this humble beginning, an entire genre emerged: Britain’s Crimewatch in 1984 was followed by America’s Most Wanted in 1988. The latter ran for 1800 episodes (1988–2012) and boasted 1154 arrests (Martin, 2011). Similar series have been screened in numerous countries. Exponential advances in computer-generated imagery used to recreate scenarios in three-dimensional virtual reality mean that the production of evidence by living history is migrating to hyper-reality. However, the process is the same: generating evidence by reenacting past events. The effectiveness of the evidence produced by mimetic reenactments is reflected in concerns about its use. First, what is called “unconscious transference” arises from the use of actors. An American study found that viewers tend either to blend features of the actor’s face with those of the perpetrator or to remember the face of the actor who plays the suspect, rather than the criminal (Roesch et al., 2001, pp. 242–243). Reenactment is also used in litigation. As early as 1841, lawyers in an infamous murder case in New York staged a reenactment to prove the innocence of the accused. And, of course, the genre of trial reenactments, from Robert Emmet and Louis Riel to Clarence Darrow and Alan

61

Paul Pickering

Turing, presented on stage, in mock courtrooms, or on radio or television, has appeared consistently in the Anglophone world from the 1800s to today.Viewers are invited to reassess the evidence when it is presented anew. In Australian courts, the use of reenactment is subsumed under the broader rules that relate to evidence. A judge has considerable discretion in what can be admitted, including moving pictures; they also enjoy considerable latitude in relation to whether jurors are taken to the location of an incident to see it for themselves. The assumption is that physical experience of the actual location will assist the process of understanding (Arenson and Bagaric, 2005, pp. 283–294).The debate about whether such visits produce evidence is amplified in relation to the use of computer-animated crime reenactment, which is regarded by some as fraught with “evidentiary problems” and “unfair prejudice” (Cock, 2003, pp. 3–4). In the US, the opportunity to utilize animated reenactments in court has spawned a growth industry. Providers, sometimes engaged by both parties, offer jurors competing visual reconstructions of the “facts.” Unsurprisingly, the use of reenactment has generated important case law in the US and several courts of appeal have overturned convictions where reenactment had been used (Hennes, 1993, pp. 2142–2143). That the evidence produced by reenacting events has been judged to be flawed is unsurprising; it touches a raw nerve for jurists and historians alike. But, how different is evidence such as this from that which arises from the labors of historians who scour through innately imperfect sources in an inevitably partial archive or from archaeologists, including Collingwood, who tease meaning from shards of pots laboriously aggregated from digging in the dirt? The conclusions of historians seeking to understand the past by examining what people did are based upon multifarious accounts of their actions read in context, often against the grain. The process is akin to reenacting the past in one’s mind. But such accounts are inevitably at one remove (at least) from the action as it unfolded in real time. Reenactments, informed by the same meticulous engagement with the archive, are arguably no more or less distant from the past. All things being equal, does it matter if the search for evidence of the past in the present takes place in a study, a laboratory, during a mock battle or a revivified feast, on a computer screen, or any like imaginative moment of ecstatic self-transformation? Surely not.

Further reading Bryan, J., 2016; Chisum, W., and Turvey, B., 2011; De Groot, J., 2009, Munslow, A., 2006; Nichols, B., 2016; Walton, D., 2006.

62

12 EXPERIENCE Anja Schwarz

Participants in popular TV-reenactment shows from the early 2000s frequently alluded to an immediate, corporeal experience of the past when asked to explain what had motivated their involvement.They described the sensation, sometimes labeled a period rush, in terms of a “complete absorption in the reenacted event” (Agnew, 2004, p. 330), one that let history come alive for them. Such claims might all-too-easily be disregarded as the naive delusions of self-fashioned living historians, and yet the argument here is primarily based on an analysis of the popular programs in which they took part.While not every reenactment relies on the participants’ identification with the historical personas that they embody to the same extent, the assertions made by these hobby reenactors get to the heart of reenactment’s epistemological project at large. Positioning itself in opposition to book learning and dusty historical scholarship, reenactment’s claim to knowledge rests on a different and allegedly more immediate access to the past being revisited. This access, reenactors maintain, is provided by means of the intense and supposedly unfiltered experiences of earlier times that result from immersion in an interactive historical environment. Based on their experiences, reenactors might claim to know what it would have been like to run a middle-class Victorian household, to take part in the class struggle on a Prussian country estate in 1900, or to live on a mid-19th-century Australian sheep station (1900 House; Abenteuer 1900; Outback House). Intense bodily and mental exertion are at the center of reenactment’s historiographic methodology (embodiment). After all, it is largely through sensory impressions and psychological challenges that reenactors seek to understand the past, experiencing first-hand what former times would have smelled, sounded, looked, and felt like (Agnew, 2004, p. 330). This fundamental dependence on the senses goes some way to explain reenactment’s antiquarian obsession with the authenticity of props and settings: their materiality is taken to work on the body in a manner not corrupted by retrospective interpretation (authenticity; materialization of the past). The TV-reenactment shows mentioned earlier clearly exhibit this fetishization of material culture when, time and again, they foreground the significance of period clothing in their storylines. In the different incarnations of the popular House format, it was often the body of the female reenactor and its subjection to historical dressing routines that propelled the shows’ narratives. In Australia’s Outback House (ABC, 2005), for instance, voyeuristic images of female participants getting dressed were supported by the voiceover’s claim that “1861 was the age of the tight corset, the crotch-less pantaloon and the looped crinoline. Our wardrobe department has recreated everything down to the 63

Anja Schwarz

finest period detail.” Female undergarments of the Victorian age were presented here as regulatory and disciplining contrivances that impress on 21st-century bodies so as to provide the show’s volunteers with an immediate experience of the past (gender) (Figure 12.1). In the light of the malleability of reenacting bodies that is foregrounded by such statements, it might be tempting to describe them, with Foucault, as nothing but the “inscribed surface of events” and the attached subjectivities as “totally imprinted by history” (1977, p. 148), produced by the disciplining regime of period clothing and other props. This is hardly the case, as reenactors seem to undergo reenactment’s many psychological hardships as well as the rigid fashioning of their bodies with their fundamental sense of self intact. In spite of the genre’s fixation on moments of crisis (Agnew, 2004, p. 331), reenactors do not become the historical personas they embody. Treating their exposure to staged historical conditions as a means of knowing and bearing witness to the past, reenactors’ subjective experiences rather become “the bedrock of evidence on which explanation is built” (Scott, 1991, p. 777). In Outback House, participants corroborated their insights into historical sheep station life in this vein and spoke of themselves as “very rare people who have actually lived in the past,” adding that “what you’ve got to think about is that we lived it. We actually lived 1861. It was three dimensional for us.” It is certainly not by chance that these and similar assertions by those professing to know history “from the inside” (Agnew, 2004, p. 331) resemble the testimonial speech acts of eyewitnesses.Testimonials have long been codified in religious and juridical practice, thereby endowing the act of witnessing with extraordinary moral and cultural force. In both of these fields, a witness is an observer who has a privileged proximity to facts, about which the witness is authorized to speak by having been present at the event (Peters, 2009, pp. 25–26).The role assumed by reenactors is often very similar: having “actually” experienced the past as eyewitnesses, Outback House’s participants, as cited earlier, understand themselves as authorized to testify to life in 1861. Looking at reenactments through the lens of witnessing also throws light on their recurrent privileging of intense experiences. Civil War reenactors are known to seek out p­ hysical

Figure 12.1 Female reenactors in Victorian undergarments in Channel 4’s 1900 House. Source: Christopher Ridley.

64

Experience

discomfort, fatigue, and hunger in their quest to become convincing Confederate soldiers. Correspondingly, no production of TV shows in the House format would have been complete without the exhausted breakdown of at least one of the participants. Clips advertising the series’ prototype 1900 House, for instance, enticed viewers to witness a family’s exposure to Victorian hardships, culminating with the mother’s tearful emotional breakdown on her third day as a Victorian middle-class housewife: “I knew it was going to be tough, but I thought I’d be much better than this. […] Everything takes three times as long, like the cooking and everything. It’s dirty, hard work.” Only through hardship, it seems, can the veracity gap between history and its reenactment be overcome and the past rendered knowable. Acts of witnessing, similarly, often resort to the body—frequently the body in pain—as a seat of truth (suffering). Religious martyrs testify with their tormented bodies to their belief, and to this day, the body language of witnesses strapped to a lie-detector is taken to vouch for the veracity of their statements (martyr). In reenactment-as-witnessing, the indisputability of intense bodily experiences accordingly becomes the central means by which to persuade others of the truth of one’s insights. However, contrary to their claim to a more immediate understanding of the past, historical reenactments seldom produce new historical insights. After all, they pride themselves in meticulously reproducing events and material conditions that have been recorded in historical sources. At best, this attempted historical realism reaffirms what is already known. Combined with its epistemological dependence on experience, however, reenactment also runs the danger of not so much illuminating as actually hindering a better understanding of historical events and life worlds. One of these dangers is the result of a circular logic according to which the reenactor’s experience of the reconstructed historical setting can never do more than validate already accepted, regimented, and institutionally sanctioned assumptions about the historical past. Here, reenacted history runs the risk of becoming nothing but “us in funny clothes” (Dening, 2004, p. 19). Another problem tied to the foregrounding of experience relates to the observation that, apparently, not every past is there to be embodied by anyone. Reenactment frequently ties its experiential access to historical periods or events to present-day identity markers, and more often than not, the successful embodiment of historical personas is taken to rely on the supposed stability of gender, age, race, or class across the temporal divide. There is something inherently limiting in assuming that true insights into the past are available only to those who share the same, supposedly ahistorical, bodily features: that only white men can successfully embody Confederate soldiers; that only a middle-class British woman is guaranteed to understand what it was really like to have run the household of a Victorian home; and that only those whose biographies are entangled with Australia’s settler-colonial past can come to “actually” experience this period. Such presentist memory practices remain oblivious to the fact that the seemingly stable categories of race, gender, and class are themselves the products of historical processes. In light of these serious flaws in reenactment’s epistemological project and the frequent usage of experience to essentialize identities, what is clearly needed is a critical interrogation of the “evidence of experience” (Scott, 1991) that underpins the genre’s historiographical claims (evidence). Raymond Williams has famously questioned the supposed authenticity of experience. Although “taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating,” he explains that experiences are fundamentally social in nature, located between feelings and structured social formations. As soon as something is experienced, it is therefore always already “a social material process” (1977, p. 132). And Joan W. Scott, writing about the category of experience in historiography, cautions that it is “precisely this kind of appeal to experience as incontestable evidence as an originary point of explanation” that weakens the critical thrust of enquiry: 65

Anja Schwarz

“Questions about the constructed nature of experience, about how subjects are constituted [...] are left aside” (1991, p. 777). From Williams and Scott, we learn that it is vital, therefore, to question the supposed e ­ vidence of reenactors’ experiences and to pay attention instead to their role in the production and naturalization of essentialized historical subjectivities. Seen in this light, their experience “becomes not the origin of our explanation, not the authoritative (because seen or felt) evidence that grounds what is known, but rather that which we seek to explain” (Scott, 1991, p. 780). Returning these insights to the examples of the House format, it might be productive to ask what kind of understanding of the Victorian Age is foregrounded when it becomes knowable solely through the experience of dirty, hard, female middle-class household life (Müller and Schwarz, 2008); what might it mean to see Prussian class conflict mapped onto Germany’s post-unification negotiations of its recent socialist past (Agnew, 2007); and we might come to investigate what it entails to learn about Australia’s settler-colonial past through the psychological strain of having to enact white Australian’s complicity in indigenous dispossession (Schwarz, 2010b). In each of these instances, the reenactors’ experiences would tell us very little about the actual past, but they would grant insights into the memory politics of the present (memory and commemoration). What, then, remains of reenactment’s experiences? It has been argued that experiences are key to the practice’s claims to knowledge about the past. Their perceived immediacy is the central means by which reenactors persuade themselves and others of the truth of their insights. Museum pedagogy, as one of the variety of fields in which reenactments thrive, frequently draws on this affective force in the attempt to raise learners’ interest for distant pasts and places (emotion). However, here, as in other contexts, this promise of an unmediated experience of the past frequently obscures reenactment’s ideological character: it interpellates practitioners, as well as viewers, in terms of essentialized subjectivities and entrenches teleological interpretations of history. How might reenactment’s ideological underpinnings be better exposed? We might begin by asking whether the persuasive effect of reenactment’s experiences could not also be employed to break with the very notion of a unified history. Attention to the disruptive potential of pasts that defy reproduction or to those experiences of the simulated past that have no historical precedent might encourage more pluralist approaches to history. A focus on these moments in reenactment practice and reception could potentially liberate the past from its reduction to “us in funny clothes,” thereby encouraging reenactors as well as audiences to critically engage with the historical processes that have shaped the present.

Further reading Bérube, M., 2005; Lash, S., 2006; Scott, J. W., 1991; Williams, R., 1983.

66

13 EXPERIMENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY Gunter Schöbel

What is an experiment? What is experimental archaeology? There is in fact scholarly ­consensus about the answers to these questions (Callahan, 1999; Coles, 1976; 1979). Experimental archaeology involves examining craft techniques and the traces of usage on tools and materials, as well as retracing the correlations between events, techniques, and everyday life in the past. Experimental archaeology does so by conducting scientific, methodologically designed studies in which the size of the variables can be altered and empirical data and information can be gained. The process is completed by the formulation of research questions, the design of an experimental setup, measurements, documentation, and repetition of the experiments. This approach makes it possible to make statements and formulate hypotheses, which can in turn be subject to further testing. Reenactment and living history draw on aspects of experimental archaeology and its findings, but also extend these. They are coterminous with experimental archaeology but do not (only) focus on experimentation, and thus constitute separate fields of inquiry. Among the founding fathers of the scientific experimental method are Galileo Galilei (1563– 1642) and Francis Bacon (1561–1626) (Richter, 1991). The modern natural sciences emerged from the combination of knowledge and technology in the 16th century. Here, deduction and induction, the natural sciences and the humanities, and experimentally acquired insights versus analogizing were all set in opposition. The empiricist Bacon formulated the methodological steps necessary for acquiring knowledge: formulation of a question, development of hypotheses, experiment, falsification, hypothesis, report, and always: “Think, try it again.” The conflict between inductive and deductive methods is evident in contemporary debates over experimental archaeology and some of its methodological approaches. This is particularly so in the question of who invented experimental archaeology. In Switzerland, experimental archaeology dates back to early research on prehistoric pile dwellings. As early as 1856, the Antiquarian Society of Zurich commissioned looms from textile craftsmen and, after 1860, for example, commissioned model houses for the Paris World Exhibition in 1867 (Andraschko and Schmidt, 1991; Schöbel, 2019). In 1877, stone saws and drills were added. In Germany, by 1867, the Roman-Germanic Central Museum had already cast and reproduced 2500 archaeological objects. In the same year, in Austria, there is evidence of 6 kg of Noric iron having been cast in 26 hours using a replica oven by Count Wurmbrand. In Scandinavia, Frederik Sehested’s “Stone Age” house near Odense in Denmark marks the beginning of experimental archaeology in 67

Gunter Schöbel

1879, although this undertaking was not accompanied by any documentation or publication (Ahrens, 1990). The aim here was rather for an experience, an architectural structure, but not an experiment in the contemporary sense. On the occasion of the World Exhibition of 1893 in Chicago, the Viking, a replica of the Gokstad ship from Norway, crossed the Atlantic in 27 days, but regrettably only once and with inadequate documentation. Between 1844 and 1866, the Briton Edward Simpson, alias Flint Jack, produced flint tools using modern methods. These tools even made it into the British Museum. Later, however, he had to appear before a scientific tribunal for falsifying archaeological finds. In France, as early as the mid-19th century, there already existed an archeologie d’expérience which replicated stone objects in order to better understand the manufacturing processes. Jacques Boucher de Perthes, Eduard Lartet, or Henry Christy can be cited as the main proponents of this approach. The manufacturing techniques were not described; the reconstructions and replicated artifacts are, however, available for scrutiny. In the late 19th century, prehistoric archaeology was in search of a disciplinary home within the academic world. Archaeology has always been a composite of many sciences and was still in search of its disciplinary belonging and a binding methodological approach. This was particularly true for experimental archaeology. Within the context of its institutional formation at the beginning of the 20th century, it was not consistently associated with the methods of Virchowian cultural anthropology, nor was it anchored in the natural sciences and in experiment, as was initiated, for instance, by R. R. Schmidt’s Tübingen Institute of Prehistory in the 1920s (Schöbel, 2005), which led to building the first reconstructions in the open-air museum Unteruhldingen (Figure 13.1). Counted among this is also the pragmatic, educational archaeology of the Weimar Republic, including, for example, Hans Hahne’s 1918 construction of a Stone Age house in Rössen near

Figure 13.1 Silent film Natur und Liebe in the Pfahlbau Museum, Unteruhldingen 1926, premiered Ufa 1927, Berlin. Scientific advisors R. R. Schmidt, University of Tübingen, and Wilhelm Unverzagt, Berlin Museum. Source: Pfahlbaumuseum/G. Schöbel.

68

Experimental archaeology

Halle/Saale. Such work was done in the spirit of folk studies and the folkloric settlement archaeology of Gustaf Kossinnas in Berlin, which clearly did not correspond to any recognized discipline in Germany. The National Socialists misused archaeology in the 1930s by construing “living prehistory” as evidence of national superiority, and this resulted in the discreditation of experimental archaeology as a method of illegitimately reconstructing the past (Kandler, 2000; Schöbel, 2013; Sénécheau and Samida, 2015) (Figure 13.2). Although German “model workshops” and “publishers of teaching aids” continued to produce thousands of replicas and reconstructions for teaching purposes until the 1950s, this approach, albeit adeptly presented, was no longer called for in German-speaking archaeology after 1945. It was stigmatized as being a falsification of science. German archaeology, formerly leading in the sector of experimental archaeology in Europe, withdrew almost completely from experimental archaeology until the 1970s. It only permitted descriptions in the form of typologies, analogy, and deduction as its scientific approach. At the same time, the natural sciences in general had a hard time in archaeology. Above all, in the attempt to reconstruct experimentally, they were unjustly charged with being positivistic. The impetus for a new take on the experimental approach in archaeology came—as it had in the 19th century—from the archaeological open-air museums of Scandinavia (Weiner, 1991; Andraschko and Schmidt, 1991; Schöbel, 2013). Hjerl Hede and Lejre (in Denmark) set new benchmarks for experimental archaeology, with Asparn (Austria), Butser Farm (UK), and Berlin-Düppel (Germany) joining them in the 1970s (Ahrens, 1990). The archaeological open-air museums carried and developed experimental archaeology, providing research venues

Figure 13.2 National Socialist exhibition Lebendige Vorzeit (Living Past), of the Reich’s League for German Prehistory, Technical University of Berlin, 1937. Source: Pfahlbaumuseum/G. Schöbel.

69

Gunter Schöbel

(Figure 13.3) and experimental sites, and brought the field back to universities, scientific discourse, and teaching. In Europe, this is to be seen today in Vienna, Zurich, Tübingen, Hamburg, Leiden, Madrid, Exeter, and Dublin. Experimental archaeology’s main research foci include textiles, metals, house construction, ceramics, agriculture, plants, the environment, stone, wood, cooking and nutrition, tar and charcoal, transport, bones and horn, pigments, salt, hunting, music, graves, glass, animals, leather, chalk, and living history—according to their frequency in European publications. An overview of current research can be found in the literature databanks compiled by Roland Paardekooper and Dirk Vorlauf. The Yearbook of Experimental Archaeology in Europe (1990–) and the EXARC Journal (2004–) provide regular updates on developments in the field. Since the days of the early studies, the concept and methods of experimental archaeology have finally been established, yet debates over the definition and scope of the field continue. The question arises as to whether all archaeologists mean the same thing when, in good faith, they employ experimental archaeological methods. Today, apart from pure scientific empiricism, humanistic and combined scientific/humanistic approaches address the research questions of archaeology. Some apply analogy and methodologies drawn from the humanities, drawing peripherally on experimental archaeology and ethnology. The craft, reenactment, and living history scenes are used to support and illustrate the cases in point by examining and presenting them. Interpretation, however, remains the prerogative of the humanities—at least according to the traditional point of view (Lüning, 1991; Lammers-Keysers, 2005; Eggert and Samida, 2009). The second group concedes ground to the experiences and interpretive viewpoints of museum pedagogues, “archeo-technicians,” and reenactors. It combines general and specific

Figure 13.3  Steinzeit, das Experiment: Leben wie vor 5000 Jahren (Stone Age, The Experiment: Life as it was 5000 Years Ago). Film production of SWR and the Pfahlbau Museum, Unteruhldingen. Source: Pfahlbaumuseum/G.Schöbel.

70

Experimental archaeology

insights, making it difficult to competently test the findings in a scientific discourse.Their motto seems to be: “everything is experimental archaeology.” There are, however, different degrees of exactitude distinguishing amateurism and expertise (Reynolds, 1998; Schindler, 2018). And, finally, there are the experimental archaeologists (Coles, 1979; Fansa, 1990) who follow strict guidelines and seek to document and clearly define where they stand—whether at a pre-stage of the reconstruction, at the stage of conveying results, or during the actual experiment itself. This is the approach followed by the natural sciences, one which must finally prevail and which currently holds the greatest sway in central European research (Kelterborn, 1994; Schmidt, 2014; Mattieu, 2002; Outram, 2008; Weller, 2010; Schöbel, 2019). According to this approach, experience and experiment are to always be kept distinct from one another, as Callahan (1999) and Rasmussen (2007), for instance, and archaeologists in the 19th century already postulated. This is confronted by the rapidly developing movement to enliven history through the incorporation of elements like reenactment and living history. These are far more focused on the immediacy and durability of the experience on the event, and “lived” history. Reenactment and living history foster new insights without, however, providing new knowledge, and thus serve education and personal development. At the same time, these fields have disadvantages in relation to the verifiable scientific experiment, when, say, their methods are applied to historical processes. It is for this reason that experimental archaeology distinguishes the clearly defined experiment from the kinds of experiences brought into play by living history. The engagement with old things and events is common to all these avenues of inquiry; they do not, however, adopt the same methods. Only by adhering to set rules and through a possible discussion of the results will they become verifiable sciences. Yet what differentiates scientific reconstruction from reconstruction that is not based on archaeological finds? Where does the experiment begin? And how can the results be conveyed in such a way that sensible statements can be made about prehistoric reality? From 1995 to 1999, Erret Callahan formulated a three-step model that drew on the work of Hans-Ole Hansen, John Coles, Peter Reynolds, and others. Callahan identified the “non-authentic game” as the first step, the “non-scientific experience” as the second, and finally the “experiment” as the completion of the process. Monitoring the processes, observation, and documentation were, in his view, of uttermost importance. As a method, reenactment belongs to the first two steps. Peter Kelterborn (1991), supported most recently by Bill Schindler (2018), identified six steps within experimental archaeology, and this definition and philosophy were adopted by the international organization the Network of Experimental Archaeology in Europe (EXARC). The steps are: 1) emotional experiences; 2) the teaching and learning of archaeological techniques; 3) displays and demonstrations; 4) replications and reconstructions for research and museums; 5) the true experiment; and 6) the reporting of results. Reenactment encompasses steps 1–3, since reenactments are mostly undocumented or the results unpublished. Thus, the findings can neither be inter-subjectively followed nor tested and, as such, do not constitute part of scientific discourse. EXARC (Weller, 2010; Schöbel, 2013) ascribes a three-part structure to experimental archaeology that follows the scientific tradition of the 19th century and the suppositions of John Coles (1973; 1979). Like the other approaches, it sees the classical experiment as the main part of experimental archaeology. The second part is the reconstruction, which is seen as a preparatory step.The third part, conveying the findings, delineates living history and reenactment as experiential and game modes, since they do not operate on the basis of archaeology’s results and its methodological modus operandi. A distinction can be made, however, contingent upon the qualifications of the respective participants. In instances in which reenactment or living history practitioners are found to work experimental-archaeologically and to document appropriately, 71

Gunter Schöbel

then their work might also be labeled experimental archaeology. Following the definition of Rasmussen (2007), Hansen (2014), and Schindler (2018), reenactment is conducted as experimental archaeology in its pursuit of experiment (controlled approach) and not only experience (contextual approach) in the social field. European scholars differentiate between living history (Anderson, 1982), reenactment (Collingwood, 1993), LARP (live action role-play), experimental archaeology, histotainment, and historical theater (Hochbruck, 2009; Walz, 2010) (Figure 13.3). In other countries, other distinctions pertain. In the US, for instance, living history and reenactment are seen as one (Seiz, 2015; Gallup, 1999) and serve to educate both the public and their own practitioners in various branches of history. To this end, historical events are often minutely reconstructed using historical documents, props, contemporary music, speeches, photographs, and the findings of experimental archaeology. The older the reconstructed scene, the more the participants must rely on experimental archaeological results in order to portray the past with the highest degree of historical fidelity. After all, more ancient cultures are generally non-literate, and their reconstruction is dependent upon material objects, archaeological finds, and the interpretation thereof. The historic antecedents of reenactment lie in antiquity. In 46 bc, Julius Caesar had an artificial lake constructed on the Campus Martius and staged a battle involving 22 ships and 6,000 participants. The passion plays of the Middle Ages, historic pageants, 18th-century reenactments in North America for the training of officers in military academies (Steinecke, 2007), and Stone Age people in lake dwellings of Switzerland around 1870 or Lake Constance in 1926 all perpetuated this tradition (Schöbel, 2011). Illustrative of this movement are history performances like the Roman soldiers in the reconstructed Saalburg Fort around 1922; the Landshut Wedding pageant, reenacted since 1903 with 2,000-odd participants; and the Roman games

Figure 13.4  Roman reenactment at the Unteruhldingen Museum, conducted by experimental archaeologist Markus Junkelmann in 2009. Source: Pfahlbaumuseum/F. J. Schultz-Friese.

72

Experimental archaeology

with thousands of observers, put on in Murrhardt, Germany in 1925. The 1961 staging of the Battle of Bull Run from the American Civil War in Manassas,Virginia, with 2,500 participants and 55,000 observers, constitutes the beginnings of reenactment in the modern sense. Firstperson history portrayals are highly popular with the public and are a permanent feature of open-air museums in the US, as at Plimoth Plantation, which has referred to itself as a “living museum” since 1969, or at Colonial Pennsylvania Plantation (Anderson, 1982). Most scholars regard the kinds of performative approaches adopted by living history and reenactment as eminently well suited to reflecting the insights of the participants and conveying information to the public (Figure 13.4). Such “time travel” is a reliable tool for conveying history and generating rudimentary historical insights. However, with regards to the authenticity debate, the methods and insights of experimental archaeology always ought to be considered when staging historical events. Doing so will help ensure the scientificity of the findings, avoid alienating the historic material, and avoid spectacles with dubious historic content. Translated by Vanessa Agnew

Further reading Agnew, V., 2018; Coles, J. M., 1973; Schindler, B., 2018; Schöbel, G., 2017; Sénécheau, M., and Samida, S., 2015; Sibum, O., 2009; Walz, M., 2010.

73

14 EXPERTISE AND AMATEURISM Anne Brædder

Questions of professional authority, credibility, and standards have long preoccupied historical studies. Beginning in the 1970s, public historians took traditional historians to task for what they saw as an elitist approach to historical inquiry. Public history, they argued, constituted a democratic desire to remove the hierarchy between the lay and traditional historian’s interpretation and use of the past (Ashton, 2010, pp. 3–5; Jensen, 1995, p. 13; Jensen, 2000, p. 223). As public historian Raphael Samuel argued, “If history was thought of as an activity rather than a profession, then the number of its practitioners would be legion” (2012 [1994], p. 17). Since at least the early 2000s, similar questions have occupied scholars of historical reenactment as well as reenactors themselves. In the absence of official credentialing bodies and tertiary degree programs, however, reenactment’s concern with authority, credibility, and standards has focused instead on the relative status and identity of experts versus amateurs. This has been examined primarily in analyses of American Civil War reenactment (Strauss, 2002; Farmer, 2005; Amster, 2008; Hart, 2007; Daugbjerg, 2014), but also in World War II (Thompson, 2010 [2004]) and medieval reenactments (Sandström, 2005; Esmark and Nielsen, 2015). Important in establishing terminology within the field was Strauss’s pioneering work on the behavior and dress of American Civil War reenactors. Strauss combined techniques from visual anthropology and visual analysis with ethnographic studies of Confederate reenactors. He showed that Civil War reenactors typically fall into four distinct categories that vary according to levels of perceived dress (authenticity). In order to arrive at this typology, Strauss asked a review panel of three experienced reenactors to analyze photographs he had taken of other Civil War reenactors, and to classify the subjects according to categories they themselves had devised—“hardcore,” “progressive,” “mainstream,” and “farb.” According to Strauss, these categories were in widespread use among Confederate reenactors (2002, pp. 99–103). Reenactors classified as “hardcores” by Strauss’s review panel were those whose imitation of the past was perceived to be nearly flawless. The photographs taken by Strauss in 1999 looked like genuine period photographs because the reenactors wore almost perfectly reproduced, convincingly “weathered” period uniforms and accoutrements, and topped this off with period hairstyles and facial hair and studied postures (2002, p. 103). Following Strauss’s typology, reenactors who were classified as “progressives” were slightly lower on the scale of dress authenticity. The panel argued that these reenactors differed from the hardcores because of minor flaws in their uniforms or personal appearance. Examples included reenactors being deemed “too clean,” “too 74

Expertise and amateurism

neat,” or “too together.” Their uniforms did not accurately correspond to historical examples. A reenactor’s jacket cuffs, for example, were found to be “a little too big” or his hair “too long.” Notwithstanding such departures from historical fidelity, to be considered a “progressive”, only minor details tarnished their otherwise faithful simulation (Strauss, 2002, pp. 103–104). Within Strauss’ study, the review panel classified the majority of reenactors as “mainstream.” These individuals were equipped with standard uniforms and equipment but were found to exhibit “serious authenticity flaws in their impressions.” Examples included the use of inauthentic materials, such as stainless steel for canteens, incorrect fabric color on uniforms, and inappropriate footwear. Other “authenticity flaws” related to behavior. Uniforms and other accoutrements were worn incorrectly—too low or on the wrong side of the body, for example—or uniforms were adorned with inappropriate embellishments (Strauss, 2002, p. 105). Lowest in the typology were “farbs,” who could be categorized as amateur reenactors. Individuals in this category showed “seriously compromised forms of dress authenticity,” and, according to Strauss’s informants, perpetrated “egregious” flaws (p. 105). These flaws were defined by the panel as deviating so flagrantly from an authentic look as to almost ruin the credibility of the reenactor’s performance. Examples of such egregious flaws were the use of non-period knives and eyewear, excessive weaponry or other oversized equipment, modern-day clothing and footwear, or material from other historical time periods. The reenactors on the panel viewed such “egregious” anachronisms as assaults on the very integrity of reenactment itself (Strauss, 2002, p. 105). The term “farb” is well known to many other kinds of (English-speaking) reenactors, with “farbism,” “farbfest,” “farbicity,” and “farby” all deriving from it. Strauss (2002) writes that “farb” is a shortened form of the expression “far be it from me to criticize your impressions” (p. 105). The etymology is, however, contested, with other reenactment scholars arguing that it is shortened from similar expressions, such as “far be it from me to tell them what they are doing wrong” (Gapps, 2009, p. 399), “far be it from authentic” (Daugbjerg, 2014, p. 737), or “far be it from reality” (Thompson, 2010 [2004], p. 291). Among American World War II reenactors, Thompson also encountered another—albeit less widely accepted—etymology of the term, which has “farb” coming from the German word “Farbe” (color), referring to wearing uniforms of an incorrect hue (p. 291). Scholars agree that the origin of “farb” has been much debated among reenactors, although no one seems to know exactly where the term originated (Gapps, 2009, p. 408; Daugbjerg, 2014, p. 737; Thompson, 2010 [2004], p. 291). Like Strauss,Thompson (2010 [2004]) conducted in-depth analyses of reenactment practices, with research that built specifically on ethnographic studies of American reenactors of 20 century wars. Her book Wargames (2010 [2004]) dedicates an entire chapter (pp. 206–230) to the question of how World War II reenactors position and judge one another on issues of authenticity.Thompson’s hierarchization similarly contrasts “hardcores” with “farbs,” but she also employs categories like “stitch Nazis” and “moderates” to explain how questions of professionalism, authority, and historical credibility are handled within World War II reenactment communities. Thompson argues that World War II reenactors do not have established criteria for identifying “farbs” (pp. 210, 212). Nevertheless, she settles on this definition: “A farb is a reenactor who is judged as having failed to establish a legitimate link to history” (p. 216). As in Strauss’ 2002 study of American Civil War reenactors, the designation farb denotes a level of amateurism in respect to representing the past. Accordingly, World War II reenactors are judged to be farbs if they commit a whole range of infractions—sport a beard and hair that is too long, wear modern eyeglasses, improper footwear, and digital watches, smoke filtered cigarettes and eat chips, or are too clean and appear insufficiently tired. Donning flashy medals or representing themselves as high-ranking soldiers might also be described as “farby,” since medals and rank are considered distinctions to be earned within a reenactment group. Reenactors are also criticized for being 75

Anne Brædder

amateurish if they make errors like wearing anachronistic equipment from late in the war when the reenactment event calls for “early war impressions,” carrying arms while portraying a medic, or carrying a weapon belonging to a nationality that differs from that of the reenacted soldier (Thompson, 2010 [2004], pp. 212–214). Within this hierarchy, “hardcores” are contrasted with farbs.To most World War II reenactors, being a hardcore is considered in a positive light, because the hardcore possesses considerable reenacting expertise. “A hardcore reenactor … is concerned with authenticity, takes reenacting seriously, and/or puts the most time, money, and energy into reenacting” (Thompson, 2010 [2004], p. 215). The alternative moniker, “stitch Nazi,” is a category closely related to hardcore, but with a negative connotation. Contrary to its apparent association with National Socialism, the term is not limited to, nor does it derive from, the portrayal of German soldiers within historical reenactment. It designates reenactors who are highly preoccupied not only with their own appearance, but also with that of other reenactors, and who attach undue significance to both the look and materiality of costume. Stitch Nazis explicitly and publicly voice their opinions on standards of appearance and can drive away people who do not conform to their own high standards (Thompson, 2010 [2004], pp. 210–212). “Moderates” might be thought of as the opposite of stitch Nazis. Such reenactors take a pragmatic approach to reenactment and believe that complete historical accuracy is never achievable.They criticize the formalism of stitch Nazis as more destructive to reenactment than the presence of farbs. Although moderates and stitch Nazis disagree on questions of pragmatism, according to Thompson, they concur that too many reenactors are farbs (2010 [2004], pp. 211–212). Clearly, historical accuracy is one of the primary concerns within reenactment communities and the negotiation of authenticity is a topic of regular debate.Thompson argues that authenticity is often judged as the ability of reenactors to have an experience so impactful that it seems to somehow place them in the actual past they are reenacting—or to have a “magic moment” as reenactors often term it (2010 [2004], p. 207). Thompson defines “magic moment” as the “illusive pinnacle of the hobby, when a reenactor experiences a completely ‘authentic’ moment while reenacting” (2010 [2004], p. 293). This might be one of the reasons why a reenactor’s appearance is not of sole importance to him or herself. The performance has significance to other reenactors, to the community they establish, and to their audiences. This is also why some reenactment groups hold inspections (2010 [2004], p. 209), with implications for establishing the criteria by which reenactors may be judged (Figure 14.1). Strauss’s (2002) and Thompson’s (2010 [2004]) studies were among the first to explicitly tackle the issue of historical fidelity—as it applied to reenactors’ superficial appearance—and to associate this with markers of credibility and authority. While the terminological questions may have been largely addressed, professionalism persists as a significant issue within reenactment. A handful of more recent reenactment scholars have contributed to the debate over expertise versus amateurism. In his research on American Civil War reenactment, Hart (2007), for example, describes experts in terms of “hardcores,” “authentic campaigners,” and “campaigners.” Amateurs, in contrast, are referred to using the conventional term “farbs.” Esmark and Nielsen (2015) have shown that the hierarchy applies not only to individual reenactors, but also extends to entire groups and events. These findings are based on ethnographic studies of medieval reenactments in Denmark. Overall, the studies show that there is often consensus about what constitutes expertise within respective reenactment communities. A key question for scholars of reenactment interested in quasi-professional gradations involves determining what is perceived as authentic within any given reenactment ­community.

76

Expertise and amateurism

Figure 14.1  In the Danish World War II reenactment context, the group “Regi­mentet” is considered highly expert due to their con­ vincing representation of German Wehrmacht soldiers in Denmark, 1942– 1943. Among other things, the group has restored the vehicle depicted in the photograph, contributing to their expert status. Source: Anne Brædder, Bunker Museum Hanstholm 2014.

In the communities studied by Strauss and Thompson, authenticity was closely connected with appearance, which is why expertise was primarily negotiated through the accuracy of the reenactors’ costume and the impressions they made on their audiences. However, standards of authenticity in reenactment are not always related to appearance. Research has shown that ideas about authenticity are constructed and negotiated differently within different reenactment milieus (Brædder et al., 2017). While some reenactors might judge authenticity in relation to convincing, functional fabrics (Esmark and Nielsen, 2015), others do not care as much about materials, attaching greater significance to the proper use of period tools and the mastering of manufacturing techniques from an earlier time (Brædder, 2016). For yet other reenactors, imitating the past has to do with feeling connected to what they perceive as past and authentic values regarding family life. This has been studied among Iron Age reenactors (Warring, 2015). Reenactment expertise is such a hotly contested issue among reenactors in self-organized leisure reenactment activities, as there is no one else but the reenactors themselves to ensure and adjudicate the quality of their reenactment. In open-air museums, where living historians simulate past lives, the museum is the professional institution that guarantees that reenactment expertise is practiced. In theater performances and reenactments staged for fictional or documentary film, the director, historical advisor, and production company all help establish professional standards. This coheres with reenactment scholar Bruner’s argument (1994), when he stresses the importance of questioning who has “the authority to decide which version of history will be accepted as the correct or authentic one” (1994, pp. 400–401). Authorities may be formal and institutional, but they can also be shared among “multiple competing voices” (1994, p. 400), as Strauss’s and Thompson’s research showed. In the end, public historian Samuel’s implication

77

Anne Brædder

that everyone is potentially a historian provides a guiding voice: all historians (whether academic historians, museum professionals, or self-organized hobby reenactors) should discuss their interpretations of the past and evaluate their own criteria of what counts as historical expertise.

Further reading Amster, M. H., 2008; Ashton, P., 2010; Ashton, P., and Kean, H., 2012; Bruner, E., 1994; Brædder A., Esmark K., Kruse T., Nielsen C. T., and Warring A., 2017; Daugbjerg M., 2014; Esmark K., and Nielsen C. T., 2015; Farmer J. O., 2005; Gapps, S., 2009; Hart, L., 2007; Kean, H., and Martin, P., 2013; Strauss, M. D., 2002; Thompson, J., 2010.

78

15 FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE Fabrizio Gallanti

The expression “Forensic Architecture” corresponds to two complementary entities. The first is a multidisciplinary group of researchers, part of Goldsmiths College, University of London, using architectural expertise and various means of visual representation to provide and analyze evidence gathered from a wide array of cases of institutional violence, breaches of human rights, and environmental crimes. The second could be considered as a novel disciplinary field at the edges between architecture, environmental studies, law, forensics, history, and legal medicine, initially established by the practical applications of architectural expertise, and now proving the efficacy and success of a concept that can be translated to numerous other subjects. In fact, in various parts of the world, there is currently a multiplicity of disciplines that exercise different forms of “forensic architecture” applicable to diverse cases analogous to the ones investigated by the London-based group. The group was created in 2010 within the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, around a research project dedicated to investigate the killing of Palestinian protester Bassem Abu Rahma, hit by a tear gas grenade fired by soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces during a demonstration at the separation fence in Bil’in on April 17, 2009.The investigation was requested by the human rights lawyer and activist Michael Sfard to present evidential findings to the Supreme Court of Israel. The research that then led to the coalescence of a more formalized unit within the university was initiated under the direction of Eyal Weizman, who was then the director of the Centre for Research Architecture and who currently acts as the director of Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths. In 2011, the European Research Council granted funding for four years to support the activities of the unit, followed in 2013 by a second grant dedicated to the implementation of a multimedia data-aggregation and visualization platform called Pattrn. It is relevant to underline how the notion of “forensic architecture” has been circulating since the early 1980s, generally in connection with the freshly minted profession of “forensic architect,” a category of building surveyor specializing in presenting evidence to courts handling insurance disputes over defects in buildings (Paegelow, 2001). Under Weizman’s guidance, Forensic Architecture has widened the semantic range of the concept beyond the sector of building insurance, where expertise is customarily used to determine contested responsibilities between designers and contractors. The term is now mobilized to extract from buildings and spaces objective information that can be presented as complementary evidence in disputes 79

Fabrizio Gallanti

concerning state violence and the breach of human rights. Still consistent with Paegelow’s definition, where forensic architects deal with “the application of architectural facts to legal problems,” Weizman and his colleagues—architects, artists, filmmakers, journalists, scientists, and lawyers—are developing the profound transformation of what “legal problems” mean. These are no longer qualms about leaking ceilings or collapsed structures but a whole body of facts, frequently charged with deep political significance.The key notion that allows the performance of forensics from architecture is that architecture and the built environment thus could be said to function as media, not because photographs of buildings might circulate in the public domain, but because they are both storage and inscription devices that perform variations on the three basic operations that define media: they sense or prehend their environment; they hold this information in their formal mutations; and they can later diffuse and externalize effects latent in their form. (Weizman, 2017a) A very schematic characterization of a research project developed by Forensic Architecture since 2010 may be given as follows: a non-governmental agency or a subject, such as the family of a victim, contacts the unit to ask for support with a case which may be undergoing litigation in a national or international court, or coming to the attention of public opinion. The aim is to supply such a “client” with an interpretation of the facts generally opposed to the official version provided by authorities. Once Forensic Architecture accepts the task, its members will gather as much data and information as possible: maps, images, oral testimonies, sound recordings, satellite content, legal transcripts, and found footage. The collection of raw material often clashes with the insurmountable difficulty of not being allowed access to the sites as recognized forensic experts, generally forced to operate with a significant delay of weeks, months, if not years after the event has occurred. As the investigations conducted by Forensic Architecture collide with the official and sometimes fabricated versions provided by powerful interested institutions such as the state, the police, the army, and intelligence services, they are pitted against an extensive administrative and informational apparatus. A consequence of such disproportionate resources means that only in rare instances are artifacts, objects, and other material proofs included in the collection of exhibits used for the investigation and presentation of evidence. While the process of assembly of information is under way, different experts proceed to generate reconstructions, using visual tools derived from architecture, engineering, urban planning, and cinema. These reconstructions, composed from the fragmentary elements that are available, can be seen as “architecture in reverse,” a crucial concept that underlines the ideological approach of the group. By comparing photographic pictures taken from different angles, by subjecting leaked official imagery to deep reading by dedicated software, or by carefully analyzing raw sound footage, sometimes just downloaded from YouTube, it is possible to discern how a room collapsed or to trace the trajectory of a bullet. Forensic Architecture then generates threedimensional digital models and a complex set of analytical drawings that constitute an accurate depiction of a specific space or building, caught in the precise historical moment of an event. In the transition from the initial meaning of “forensic architecture” to the new concept explored at Goldsmiths, a significant change occurs. Within conventional insurance procedures, the object of the study is the building itself, and the goal is to identify the causes of its malfunction (is the collapse of a slab determined by a flaw in the design, the inaccurate calculation by consulting engineers, or by the poor execution of construction by the contractor?). However, in 80

Forensic architecture

the new Goldsmiths model, the building becomes instead a set or medium traversed by actions and bodies whose traces and effects may be identified, interpreted, and understood. The first relevant public appearance of the group’s work occurred on November 12, 2012, when a report about the use of white phosphorus artillery shells by the Israeli army during the 2008–2009 Gaza conflict was presented at the Annual Meeting of State Parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) in the United Nations Office at Geneva. The report was produced at the request of the human rights group Yesh-Gvul with the intention of forcing the Israeli military to suspend the use of such weapons. By studying the morphology of the smoke plumes caused by the explosions, registered by various images available in the public domain and by the use of photogrammetry, then comparing the relative heights of existing buildings with the position and profile of the smoke, Forensic Architecture developed a parametric three-dimensional model comparable with known formations of exploding white phosphorus artillery shells used by US forces during the siege on Fallujah in Iraq in 2004. The report concluded that the type of anomalous explosions registered in Gaza was consistent with the use of such munitions not to create smoke screens as initially claimed by the Israeli army, which had denied their use, but rather as a deliberate assault on the civilian population. Not in the position to confute this conclusion of the report or the veracity of the evidence on which it was founded, the Israeli attorney general opposed its admissibility, minimizing the relevance of the architectural expertise employed in the case. But on April 25, 2013, the Israeli army issued a statement announcing that it would cease to use white phosphorus ammunition in populated areas on the bizarre grounds that it “does not photograph well.” Since then, these munitions have not been used in Gaza. “Forensic architecture” as conceived by its exponents is an emergent field. As in other moments in history, it is moving at an accelerated speed, constantly experimenting to establish its protocols of operation, its objects of action and research, and its moral obligations and rules. This exhilarating moment is akin to the beginning of radiology within medicine at the end of the 19th century or the progressive affirmation of international human rights law since the second half of the 20th century. To accumulate a critical mass of information and to then read it analytically in order to constitute a new area of knowledge, the members of Forensic Architecture and a growing number of allies and stakeholders are following three complementary lines: testing tools and methodologies, creating a theoretical framework, and understanding the different contexts in which the products of the investigation will circulate. Since 2010, the intensive production of investigations, solicited by third parties or initiated by the group itself, can be seen, on one hand, as an immediate response to the pressing needs and conditions specific to each case; and, on the other, as an expanding depository of ideas, methods, and technological advances that will be available for later use. The totality of the work performed and being performed to date is experimental by nature: it does not derive from preconceived methodologies and techniques, as if the know-how was already present, but rather it revolves around temporary alliances of different experts formed according to the circumstances peculiar to each case. While each challenge experimentally discovers a hidden truth, it also generates feedback loops identifying what methods work well and what not so well, what could be implemented again or discarded. The multidisciplinary skills concentrated around each project encourages the application and adaptation of techniques originally devised for a specific discipline to this new evidentiary procedure. Tweaking a drone to fly over a site with an infrared camera is not just a technical issue; it corresponds to a deeper need of understanding the potentials of machines and software. In that sense, the slow accumulation of knowledge from a widening pool of specialized information, generated and generously shared by Forensic Architecture, is analogous to the beginning of the digitally assisted design practices for architecture in the 81

Fabrizio Gallanti

early 1990s, when machinery or software coming from other areas such as medical scanning or engineering three-dimensional materials calculations were adapted to the needs of designers. The investigations vary in scale: they can extend to the entire area of the Mediterranean between Libya and Sicily in order to establish the accountability of European governments in the death of migrants crossing the sea on makeshift boats (Forensic Oceanography, 2011 with Situ Research); or they can be narrowed to the interior of a room such as the one in Miranshah, North Waziristan, where four people were killed by a drone strike on March 30, 2012. They consider very different objects of inquiry, such as the vegetation captured in satellite images in rural areas of Guatemala between 1979 and 1986, the transformation of which provided clues to the deliberate devastation of the resources of local communities by the army and paramilitary forces.They collate thousands of pictures and footage found on social media to reconstitute the bombing of Rafah, in Gaza, between August 1 and August 4, 2014. They employ different techniques of representation to generate a compelling and clear visual narrative that can then be presented in public.This often occurs through films, where digital animations and reconstruction may be crucial to support the argument, as in the investigation of the shooting of Nadeem Nawara and Mohammad Mahmoud Odeh Abu Daher in a Nakba Day protest outside of Beitunia on May 15, 2014. A common thread across all these different endeavors is the one of the “reenactment.” In order to convert the mass of information into an intelligible account, it becomes necessary to devise a mechanism whereby a specific space is calibrated to an event that occurred there. Such an objective, derived from criminal investigations, where the crime scene is revisited to recreate the sequence of events, sometimes including potential suspects and witnesses, was clearly illustrated in the investigation conducted into the murder of Halit Yozgaton on April 6, 2006, in his family-run Internet café in Kassel, Germany. For this investigation, Forensic Architecture recreated a 1:1 scale model of the original police reenactment scene.This demonstrated that the police failed to assess the veracity of an eyewitness statement made by a member of the Hesse Office for Constitutional Protection (Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz). In this example, the reenactment of another reenactment took a physical form, and it can be said that every single investigation by Forensic Architecture is just such a reenactment of an official reenactment of the circumstances of the case. What changes are detectable, the motives and methods of their creation, and what asymmetries appear in the media of their presentation in regard to the storage and release of data? One reenacts the truth as a lie; the other recovers the truth by reenacting the reenactment, seeing how the lie was constructed. This is reenactment in reverse performed by architecture in reverse. The second line of thinking guiding the efforts of Forensic Architecture involves the establishment of a philosophical framework for this field. Such an objective is achieved through texts, essays, and public appearances where, by means of a braid of narrative lines, different investigations are used to corroborate more abstract reflections. Especially in Weizman’s texts and lectures, it is possible to discern a very sophisticated balance between philosophical and historical references on the one hand, and mundane yet telling examples on the other. His writing style is fluid and allows for a continuous oscillation between philosophical reflections derived from his readings of scientific or legal literature, and historical facts. In its literary strategy, it recalls Michel Foucault’s attempts to determine novel areas of inquiry for philosophy, whether the history of repression in 19th-century Europe or the history of sexuality, both based on an open and voraciously curious use of disparate sources. The theoretical apparatus of Forensic Architecture is therefore composed of a series of concepts that can also become operative angles with which to analyze reality. These include first, the concept of a “threshold of detectability,” namely the position that felonious or violent acts are concealed before and frequently after the fact if interested parties find it convenient to do so. Second, the concept of a “material witness,” applied to an object treated as a witness within 82

Forensic architecture

a legal procedure owing to the marks that it made or sustained at the scene. Third, the concept of “negative evidence,” used when the absence of a certain type of evidence is itself telling as evidence (the dog that did not bark). Fourth, the concept of “before-and-after images,” when the comparative reading of pictures produced at different moments of the same event allows an indisputable inference to be drawn. These are some of the key ideas that are slowly establishing the practical and theoretical basis of the enquiries of Forensic Architecture. So, following some of the protocols of the scientific method, each investigation can also be seen as an experiment that will verify or falsify the theoretical hypothesis with which it began (corroboration). The third line of reflection deals with the modes of disseminating the knowledge accrued from investigations. Forensic Architecture identifies two principal sites for its action: fields and forums. The field is the place where the investigation is conducted; for example, the state prison in Syria, the rural outskirts in Mexico, or the village in Afghanistan. The forum, from where the word forensics derives, is the public sphere, often a court, where the results of such investigations are presented, debated, and contested. None of them is a neutral entity, with each enmeshed within a specific context. Concentrating on the notion of “forum,” it is important to appreciate how the impact of Forensic Architecture is registered outside the limitations of conventional legal procedures. In fact, the admissibility of their findings has varied. Their principal “victories” have been won in the public sphere, outside the judicial arena of the court, as in the case of the white phosphorus used in Gaza. This was demonstrated again when the German authorities released confidential documents in 2017 confirming the hypothesis advanced in the Kassel investigation. The mobilization of public opinion has proved the strongest instrument of moral and political pressure developed so far. It is not incongruous, then, that Forensic Architecture has often presented its work within the framework of art exhibitions. Such were “Forensis,” curated by Amselm Franke and Eyal Weizman and presented in Berlin and Buenos Aires in 2014; “Forensic Architecture: Towards an Investigative Aesthetics,” presented at MACBA in Barcelona in 2017; and “Counter Investigations: Forensic Architecture” at the ICA in London in 2018, which led to a nomination for the 2018 Turner Prize. These exhibitions of the plastic dimension of the work of Forensic Architecture at biennales, galleries, and museums, accompanied by screenings, lectures, workshops, and, of course, forums, expand both the versatility of the group and its appeal to the public, offering to worldwide audiences hybrids of artistic and evidentiary techniques, all of which may be adapted and modified by other stakeholders. These exhibitions also explore how to refine the myriad ways audiences may be engaged by the visual impact of forensic material, either through infographics or even sculpture: for instance, when replicas of the plumes of smoke of the Gaza bombings were rendered as solid shapes. The format of the exhibition also permits a rapidity and openness that contrast with the ritual slowness of legal procedures and the confidentiality insisted upon by security agencies: they have a swifter and clearer route to the counter-narrative that is the key instrument of the group. Indeed,Weizman’s writings frequently underline the intention to “wrestle” with evidentiary material, to destabilize the monopoly on the term “forensic” enjoyed for so long by official professions and agencies, and to move toward a democratic and shared collective use of such a term. More ambitiously, it is to instigate the reversal of partial and disingenuous reenactments by bringing to the surface of a second reenactment the facts the first concealed.

Further reading Heller, C., and Pezzani L., 2018; Weizman, E., 2017b.

83

16 GAMING Pieter Van den Heede

Historical settings have played a prominent role in digital games for several decades (Mol et al., 2017; Schwarz, 2010a). In first- and third-person shooter games (FPS/TPS) such as Call of Duty (2003–), Battlefield (2002–), and Sniper Elite (2006–), players are seemingly able to step into the role of a soldier on the frontlines of historical conflicts, particularly World War II. In strategy games such as Civilization (1991–), Total War (2000–), Crusader Kings (2004–), Anno (1998–), and Making History (2007–), in contrast, players are asked to take control of and successfully lead a political entity such as a nation-state or city by using various economic, diplomatic, and military means. And in action-adventure games such as Assassin’s Creed (2007–), players can explore historical virtual worlds which are rendered with a high degree of historical fidelity—at least according to the marketing (Shaw, 2015)—ranging from the Greek city-states during the Peloponnesian War and the “Holy Land” during the 12th-century Crusades to the cities of Boston and New York during the American Revolution. In order to understand the playing of these historical games as a form of reenactment, it is important to recognize reenactments as acts of self-referential performativity. Reenactment as a concept refers to a variety of practices in which participants act out behaviors and attitudes that are believed to have existed in the past, in order to personally and affectively experience this past and seemingly access it in a direct manner (Agnew, 2004; 2007; Cook, 2004). Following this definition, historical digital games, too, can function as sites of reenactment, as they aim to let players virtually act out past behaviors and attitudes as part of a mediated experience (Rejack, 2007). However, as the activity of playing digital games also differs from other forms of reenactment, questions arise about the possibilities and limitations of the medium in comparison with other reenactment formats. Digital games can best be understood as algorithmic artifacts that dialectically provide a mediated representation, requiring active input from the player in order to move that representation forward. As Chapman argues, playing digital games involves two broader sets of actions. First, it involves reading, i.e., the reflexive process of meaning-making that arises when players interpret a text, as with books, documentaries, and films (mediality; documentary). Second, it involves doing, i.e., the active engagement of the player with various rule-based phenomena. Essential for this dichotomy is that the doing-activities of the player should be seen as configurative, in that players actively co-determine aspects of the representation that are produced and appropriated through play. As a result, historical digital games, as a format for historical 84

Gaming

meaning-making, are characterized by a sense of shared authorship not seen in other formats: the performances and narratives that are produced through play are always the outcome of decisions made by both the creators of a game and the actions undertaken by the player (for the entire paragraph, see Chapman, 2016, pp. 30–37). Following this characterization, it is important to investigate how game creators structure the authorial and performative agency of the player while playing a historical digital game, and how players can confirm or subvert these constraints. Here, it is useful to look at the contexts in which digital games have been produced, and how the conventions that have been adopted in these contexts have shaped the referential performances that players can enact. From the onset of gaming as a cultural phenomenon in the 1950s and 1960s, the creation of digital games has been firmly embedded in a male-dominated and commercial, entertainment-oriented production network that is militaristic in origin and reproduces Western-centric conceptions of history. Digital games have traditionally been created by and for adolescent and middle-aged males, and they often revolve around heterosexual male fantasies (Kerr, 2006; Kocurek, 2015) (gender). At the same time, creators of historical digital games have adopted a design approach that is goal-oriented and centered on quantifiable winning conditions and meritocratic achievement. This has a significant impact on the ability of digital games to function as sites of reenactment, as many of the actions that players perform are integrated into a ludic structure that narrows the possibility of virtually enacting other past behaviors and attitudes. When playing the game Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate (2015), for example, by exploring the historical virtual game world as imagined by the creators of the game, players can seemingly observe life in 19th-century London in the throes of the Industrial Revolution. At the same time, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate as a ludic experience is centered on exploration and fighting activities, which players must pursue to obtain game points, access virtual equipment, and progress through the narrative. In the game, for example, players are asked to fight child labor by virtually killing factory owners. However, this provides no explanation as to why children were required to work in factories in 19th-century London. Furthermore, in order to let players easily navigate the virtual environment, the factories in the game are constructed as well-lit spaces with multiple entry points, in contradistinction to the architectural layout of factories at the time (Gilbert, 2017).These examples show how the ludic design of Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate not only prioritizes goal-oriented behavior, but also impacts the virtual world itself, as it is adapted from the historical record to accommodate ludic activities. Furthermore, digital games are a product of military, techno-scientific innovations that came about during the total wars of the 20th century and the nuclear age initiated by the Cold War (Crogan, 2011). Partly as a result of this, militaristic scenarios in which players take on the roles of soldiers or military commanders and virtually engage in historical battles have dominated the content of historical digital games. War scenarios in digital games can be divided into three types: reenactment scenarios, revisionist scenarios, and proleptic scenarios. In reenactment scenarios, as depicted in the FPS-game series Call of Duty and Battlefield, players try to accurately recreate and reproduce specific wars, battles, armies, and equipment (Figure 16.1). In revisionist scenarios, as included in the game Kuma/War (2004), players are given the chance to reconfigure past events; in Kuma/War, for example, players can capture Osama Bin Laden in 1998 and forestall 9/11. Proleptic scenarios, as depicted in the strategy game Conflict of Nations: World War III (2018), are set in a fictional present or near future, with the aim of intervening in current “hot spots” (Smicker, 2010). What most of these ludic renditions of war have in common is that they do not represent the realities of wartime violence, but instead depict a sense of realism which focuses on technical and organizational details, like the rendition of weaponry and military strategies, rather than the troubling lived experiences of battle (Agnew, 2010; Galloway, 2006; 85

Pieter Van den Heede

Figure 16.1 Screenshot from the World War II-themed first-person shooter (FPS) game Call of Duty WWII (2017). Source: www.mobygames.com/images/shots/1/927111-call-of-duty-wwiiplaystation-4-screenshot--sneaking-up-on.jpg.

Payne, 2016). By adopting this focus on select elements of realism, these war-themed games aim to bring about a “reality effect,” as described by Barthes (2006). As a result, these virtual reenactments of war closely mirror the practices of real-life battle reenactments, albeit with significant differences. Players of reenactment war-games do not physically interact with historical materials, although historical games do allow for the rendition of expansive and detailed interactive environments and the virtual performance of transgressive actions such as killing. Finally, ludic battle reenactment also enables other forms of community, in that players can virtually enact battles individually or in group settings, according to preference. In terms of social organization, digital wargame groups are often similar to traditional reenactment groups (Crabtree, 2013) (practices of reenactment). Finally, one might also highlight the Western-centered dimension of many historical digital games on the market. A notable example hereof are the games from the Civilization series, which, according to the promotional materials for the game, allow players to lead a “civilization” over a period of thousands of years (Firaxis Games, 2016). However, as players are asked to research a fixed sequence of technologies in the game and progress from an “Ancient Era” through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, up to the “Information Age,” the actions of the player are embedded in a historical grand narrative of Western progress, which offers little room for alternative conceptions of history (Ghys, 2012). Partly due to a democratization of game creation in recent years, several independent creators have tried to provide alternative ludic scenarios as sites for virtual reenactment. In the game This War of Mine (2014), players inhabit the position of civilians trying to survive a fictionalized rendition of the Siege of Sarajevo during the 1990s (trauma). In 2016, Kors et al. (2016) designed the multisensory mixed-reality game, A Breathtaking Journey, which allows players to assume the embodied first-person perspective of a refugee through a virtual reality (VR) installation and simulates the feeling of fleeing from war violence (dark tourism) (Figure 16.2). The design

86

Gaming

Figure 16.2 The mixed-reality game A Breathtaking Journey, as showcased during the Dutch VR Days (Amsterdam, 2015). In A Breathtaking Journey, players are placed in the position of a refugee who is fleeing from a war-torn country by hiding in the back of a truck. To achieve this, the virtual reality experience of the game is augmented with a number of physical elements, such as a tangible contraption that mimics the inside of a truck. The game was created by researchers of the Delft University of Technology, The Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, and the Eindhoven University of Technology. Source: Kors, MJL, Ferri, G., van der Spek, ED, et al. (2016). “A Breathtaking Journey: On the Design of an Empathy-Arousing Mixed-Reality Game,” in Proceedings of the 2016 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play – CHI PLAY ’16, New York, 2016, pp. 91–104. ACM Press.

of the game follows the premises of serious gaming, which is centered on ludic engagement for purposes other than entertainment, namely education and training (Ritterfeld et al., 2009). More broadly, scholars such as Flanagan (2009) have argued for the creation of games that aim for artistic expression, critical reflection, and social change.This effort has been supported by, for example, the New York-based organization Games for Change, which has stimulated the creation of social impact games since 2004 (Games for Change, 2018). It has resulted in digital games that may have limited outreach, but which nevertheless provide a significant counter-message to the masculine, militarized, and entertainment-oriented digital games discussed previously. In light of these developments, one can reflect on the possibilities of digital games as sites for players to reenact the past more generally. Here, it is useful to adopt the framework of ecological psychology and analyze the affordances of digital games—in other words, how digital games as virtual environments allow players to act in specific ways (Linderoth and Bennerstedt, 2007). Based on this approach, Chapman argues that historical digital games, and especially ones that offer players a first-person perspective, allow for engagements with heritage that are similar to visiting museum and living history exhibitions. Specifically, players of these games are able to observe and manipulate, albeit virtually rather than haptically, objects in a pre-structured environment, as is the case in many heritage museum exhibitions. In addition, Chapman argues that 87

Pieter Van den Heede

the same first-person perspective games can allow for a form of actualized reenactment, in that, due to a certain overlap in sensory perceptions between represented historical agents and players, the latter can gain insights into the perceptual and physical challenges that historical agents faced. Here, however, it is important to emphasize that these ludic experiences mostly fail to provide insights into the socio-cultural and economic contexts of a given historical scenario. Neither creators nor players of historical digital games can overcome their presentist epistemologies, as is also the case for most other forms of reenactment (Agnew, 2004). In relation to other types of games, such as strategy games, Chapman argues that these can allow for exploratory reflection (albeit strongly abstracted) in which, for example, counterfactual scenarios can generate insights into processes of historical causality and contingency. At the same time, however, these exploratory insights are mostly predesigned by the creators of the game and rely on an exaggerated sense of player agency and access to information not available to historical actors (for the entire paragraph, see Chapman, 2016, pp. 173–230). Finally, the extent to which historical digital games can foster unforeseen insights through virtual performativity has mostly remained underexplored until now. Here, for example, the occurrence of a virtual epidemic that led to massive virtual death in the online game World of Warcraft (2004)—initiated by a software bug implemented by the developers and purposefully aggravated by players—suggests that emergent historical insights could perhaps be gained through digital ludic engagement in an abstracted form (for a discussion of the epidemic, see Lofgren and Fefferman, 2007).

Further reading Apperley, T., 2010; Chapman, A., 2016; Keogh, B., 2018; Kerr, A.; 2017; Stahl, R., 2010.

88

17 GENDER Stacy Holman Jones

Reenactment is a form of performance that does both public and personal work. Investigations of particular events, processes, and structures must attend to how the personal, psychological, and emotional experience of reenactment speaks to matters of ethics, politics, and power (Agnew, 2007).Thus, if reenactment is concerned with the personal and affective as a means and mechanism for speculating performatively about the past (Agnew, 2007), gender is a particularly fruitful site for exploring what historical reenactment teaches us about ethics, politics, and power. Indeed, the role of affect and the personal is central to performance studies scholarship in general (Schaeffer, 2015; Hurley, 2014; Hurley and Warner, 2012) and specifically to work that focuses on the performance and performativity of gender in reenactment (Jones, 2014; Schneider, 2011; Merrill, 2005; Taylor, 2003). Contemporary understandings ask us to consider gender alongside notions of sex and sexuality. Sex is defined by a person’s biological assignation at birth, including genitals, chromosomes, and hormones, and is considered a physical characteristic. Sexuality refers to a person’s attraction to another. Because gender is culturally, rather than biologically, determined, it is not always synchronized with or related to one’s physical sex, and one’s gender identity can be fluid, fixed, or multiple. Joey Sprague (2016) reminds us that gender research values a recognition of the centrality of gender as an organizing principle in all social systems, including work, politics, everyday interaction, families, economic development, law, education, and a host of other social domains. As our understanding of gender has become both more social and relational, so has our awareness that gender is experienced and organized in race- and class-specific ways. (p. vii) Thus, gender is both the nexus around which social, political, and cultural institutions are organized and one factor among many in the performance of identity. In other words, gender is but one component of the intersecting experience of identity. Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) coined the term intersectionality to call attention to how oppressive institutions, attitudes, and actions in cultures both historically and in the present—including racism, xenophobia, sexism, heteronormativity, classism, religious and spiritual fundamentalism, ageism, and ableism—are connected and mutually influencing in and through time. 89

Stacy Holman Jones

Intersectionality asks us to recognize the impossibility of untangling the multiple strands of individual identity, sociality, and temporality. Reenactment performances explore histories, artifacts, and norms around gender as they intersect with race, sexuality, and other identity categories in a given context or era (Merrill, 2005; Gallagher and Greenblatt, 2000). Judith Butler’s theorization of gender as performative explains how gender in reenactment creates a space for both seeing subject positions as constituted and intersectional. She argues that gender is a repetition of stylized acts, or reenactments and re-experiences of established social meanings around gender identity (p. 191). Gender performativity challenges the idea that there is some “essential” and singular gendered self that then gets communicated socially; rather, gender is a co-constructed and ephemeral performance of emergent selves. Drawing together the speech act theory of J. L. Austin (1962), which distinguishes between speech that describes action and speech that incites action, and Jacques Derrida’s (1977) deconstruction of the notions of the singularity of speech contexts and the intentionality of the speaker, Butler (1990) writes, “There is no gender identity behind the expression of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (p. 25). That is, gender is not the expression of identity, but a becoming and an effect of repeated acts “that harden into the appearance of something that has been there all along” (Salih, 2007, p. 58) (performance and performativity). Thus, gender and other performatives are not expressions of the “true” or essential nature of identities (or representations of how such identities have operated in the past and so might or should operate in the future). Rather, performativity is a manifestation of gender, race, sexuality, and class so engrained in the way we understand and organize social behavior that we come to think of these performances as natural, right, and authentic. However, because performativity is itself a cultural and historical construction that is both inscribed on and performed through the body, when gender and other performances do not mimetically re-present social or historical conventions, we see plainly the workings and the potential for resistance within performativity (body and embodiment). As Elin Diamond puts it, “as soon as performativity comes to rest on a performance, questions of embodiment, of social relations, of ideological interpellations, of emotional and political effects” and of history “become discussable” (1996, p. 5). In reenactment performances, the constructed and intersectional nature of gender is both embodied and presented to performers and audiences as a site of questioning and contesting identity and history. When a performer and a performance fail to repeat, are discontinuous or “de-formed,” or are in some way a parody, the illusory persistence of a singular identity is exposed as “a politically tenuous construction” (p. 192). In other words, when performers fail to “do” gender “correctly” or do gender differently, we see the constructed nature of identity. The performativity of gender, as one facet of the intersectional constitution of the subject, makes possible the destabilization of what passes as normal, coherent, and stable in reenactment performances. In this sense, some performances of gender might work to performatively queer the reenactment of a particular historical era, event, or set of relations. In this sense, queer means a practice designed to “disturb the order of things” by calling attention to creating dissonance around what passes for true or authentic or in reappropriating language, artifacts, events, and actions for resistive and liberating purposes (Ahmed, 2006, p. 51). If queer is “that which is deployed, twisted and queered from prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes,” then queering reenactment underlines how performative engagement of intersectional subjectivities, including gender, might transform not only understandings of the past and history, but also the present and the future (Butler, 1993, p. 220). In other words, gender performativity queers reenactment as a “site of collective contestation, the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and future imaginings” (Butler, 1993, p. 220). Such queering occurs 90

Gender

across a range of reenactment performances—from those which destabilize “fixed” or “natural” gender roles by failing to precisely or exactly repeat them in performance, to those which, for example, place women in roles not historically filled by women, to those which feature nonbinary or trans* persons who challenge or confuse the very notion of gender in distinctly gendered roles. When we consider how performative embodiments of “straight things”—“common things that at first pass as natural,” including gender, become “re-enactment[s] when recognized as composed in code, as always already a matter of reiteration” (Schneider, 2011, p. 32), we see how reenactments of the personal, the everyday, and the present might enable us to take up an ethical and political stance on the past (Agnew, 2004). The leaky and radical potential of performativity—that is, the very impossibility of fidelity and completeness in the continual reiteration of experience—or what we might consider a social or political fidelity by means of a calculated infidelity—opens up a field of possibility for generating nuanced, complex, and critical understandings of social relations and historical events. As Rebecca Schneider (2011) puts it, it is getting something slightly “wrong” in reenactment performance that gives us access to “fidelity, to a kind of touch across time” (p. 112) (Figures 17.1 and 17.2). Understanding the constitutive effects of gender performativity as a “becoming” might also “queer” historical time, focusing our attention instead on affective time. Where modernist notions of time organize history and individual lives as a long march toward and through events that fulfill normative notions of “progress” in the “cycle” of life: birth, growth, labor,

Figure 17.1 Mama Alto, gender transcendent jazz singer and cabaret diva. Such queering occurs across a range of reenactment performances—from those which destabilize “fixed” or “natural” gender roles by failing to precisely or exactly “repeat” them in performance, to those which, for example, place women in roles not historically filled by women, to those which feature non-binary or trans* persons who challenge or confuse the very notion of gender in distinctly gendered roles. Source: Jacinta Oaten.

91

Stacy Holman Jones

Figure 17.2  Women reenacting at Colonial Williamsburg. Source: Harvey Barrison, CC BY-SA 2.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0.

reproduction, and death (Freeman, 2010; Puar, 2007; Halberstam, 2005; Edelman, 2004). What happens, then, when we interrupt, slow down, delay, or refuse that cycle in time and in history, affectively reworking “our habitually time-marked (time-imbued) categories against their own grain” (McCallum and Tuhkanen, 2011, p. 5)? In the space opened up in time and embodiment (gendered and otherwise) in reenactment performances, for example, in the moments when performers simultaneously can and cannot hit the precise note or strike the exact pose, we feel a leak of affective engagement between the then and the now that brings time travel, as it were, into the fold of experience: shimmering on an edge, caught between the possible and the impossible, touching the interval itself. (Schneider, 2011, p. 112) When we deliberately delay or otherwise queer enactments of historical and normative time, we open up space for new forms of relationality, making visible the ways in which subjectivities and events are “imbued with meanings and investigate whose interests were served by those meanings” (Agnew, 2004, p. 335). The seeming contradiction of such “delayed performatives” situates gender (and other intersectional subjectivities) in a history of marginalization, oppression, and violence while simultaneously materializing their resistive potential (Harris et al., 2017). Agnew (2004) notes that, “Paradoxically, it is the very ahistoricity of re-enactment that is the precondition for its engagement with historical subject matter” (p. 328). Performance scholar Theron Schmidt (2015) describes the process of theatrical rehearsal as movement that recollects the future. He writes, “we recollect forwards whilst remembering 92

Gender

backwards” (p. 5). Rehearsal enacts the “strange temporality” of preparing for an experience in the act of its making. We begin “as if we are looking back at a previous action, a repetition, a re-enactment, even as we look forward to an event that does not yet exist” (Schmidt, 2015, p. 5). Reenactment is a process of rehearsing the past in order to “understand the present … a gesture of utopianism as well as one of witnessing” (Agnew, 2004, p. 329). When reenactment performances lay bare the performativity of gender, any utopian vision of the present or future based on the historical past is grounded in an understanding that, to extend José Esteban Muñoz (2009), the past and the “here and now is simply not enough” (p. 96). Bringing together gender performance and performativity, affective understandings of time and history, and queering practices and utopias underscores how paying attention to gender in reenactment scholarship enables us to critically and responsibly attend to matters of ethics, politics, and power.

Further reading Schneider, R., 2011; Taylor, D., 2003.

93

18 GESTURE Jonathan Lamb

Joshua Oppenheimer’s film The Act of Killing (2012) begins with a troubled man fishing from a wharf on a dark night. He is holding the line in his hand and he says, “Now, look around and it is all darkness. So very terrifying.” This sets the scene for a reenactment of various scenes incident to the extermination of one and a half million individuals in Indonesia, alleged members of the Communist party, during the military coup of 1965–1966 that brought General Suharto to power. At a period when Communist insurgencies had just ended in Malaya and the Vietnam War was in full swing, there was very little objection to what happened, and no attempt to punish the perpetrators or console the children of their victims. Astonished by a silence that has lasted almost 50 years, Oppenheimer thought it time to bring this shame to the attention of the West as well as Indonesia, and possibly to set in train a sequence of the apologies and testimonies similar to those presented to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Oppenheimer’s plan for reenactment was to re-present history by using the actual people involved in making it. Not ghosts, then, but actors in the events were to play themselves, performing in front of us what they had done, experiencing it for the second time. A remarkable cast of former murderers put themselves at his disposal, along with the Pancasila Youth Movement, a paramilitary organization that was very busy during the massacres. Oppenheimer used a repertory of reenactment scenarios, ranging from sheer fantasy to the miming of torture and killing. He relied on three gifted amateurs: Herman, a young man with a large figure and a penchant for wearing women’s clothes, too young to have been actually involved in the extermination but a passionate reenactor; Adi, an intelligent and wealthy beneficiary of the mayhem, who refused even to pretend that he felt guilt or remorse—“winners are always right, there’s no reconciliation,” he said; and finally Anwar, an aging dandy who recollected vividly the movies, dances, and clothes that were fashionable in those days (“for massacres I usually wore jeans”), and who showed no reluctance at all in demonstrating exactly how he put Communists to death. Anwar is the central character because he is so good at explaining and acting out what it was like, how they would come out of an American gangster movie with their imaginations on fire and move smoothly from watching violence to committing it. For him, the whole business had

94

Gesture

been a kind of costume drama filled with song, dance, and killing, so he was eager to re-enter the world of movies this time as a star, drawing on his vast wardrobe for effect and carefully inserting his false teeth before every scene. However, Anwar has had bad dreams. He is troubled especially by the memory of cutting off a man’s head and not bothering to close the eyes after it was severed. A short exchange with Adi, the Machiavellian materialist, who tells him it is all just his nerves and to go and see a shrink, precedes a series of reenactments that move from realism (how to garotte a Communist, burning a village, interrogating the stepson of a man who was actually assassinated) to fantasies that are meant to probe the vulnerable spot in Anwar’s psyche, first by a mock-beheading, followed by various lurid scenes involving Anwar’s own head, apparently amputated, witnessing some extraordinary cannibal feats performed on his own body by Herman and a troupe of monkeys. This is history punching back with a little help from Oppenheimer, who obviously thinks Anwar is his best bet for some kind of sympathy with the dead, provided the right contingency is applied. So he has Anwar garroted, a scene done twice. The first time it leaves Anwar claiming some kind of sympathy with his victims, a sentiment Oppenheimer did not find convincing. The second time, Anwar is truly shaken: “I feel like I was dead for a moment. I can’t do that again.” When agents become actors in representations of events they actually perpetrated, two possibilities of gesture emerge. The first is a histrionic control of the body designed to reinforce the verisimilitude of the historical scene, pure work of the will; the second is the involuntary accompaniment supplied by the body to performances of the past that provoke unexpectedly intense reactions. What is happening to Anwar happened long ago to Ulysses at the court of King Alcinous, when he listened to Demodocus, the bard, sing so vividly of the destruction of Troy that he remembered his own part in those terrible scenes and began to weep.Virgil copied the scene in reverse for the lacrimae rerum episode of the Aeneid, where Dido shows Aeneas the paintings of the ruin of the city and the deaths of its inhabitants and he cries, but not so copiously as Ulysses. As he describes the scene with Ulysses at the Phaeacian palace, Homer evidently moves along a similar track to Oppenheimer vis-à-vis Anwar, expecting remorse, pity, some kind of gesture toward the people he has left dead. But, in fact, what happens is something different in both cases: here is the description in Chapman’s translation of the effect on Ulysses of Demodocus’s song: This the divine Expressor did so give Both act and passion that he made it live, And to Ulysses’ facts did breath a fire So deadly quickning that it did inspire Old death with life, and renderd life so sweet And passionate that all there felt it fleet— Which made him pitie his owne crueltie, And put into that ruth so pure an eie Of human frailtie, that to see a man Could so revive from Death, yet no way can Defend from death, his owne quicke powers it made Feele there death’s horrors, and he felt life fade. In teares his feeling braine swet: for in things That move past utterance, teares ope all their springs. (Homer, 1956, p. 147)

95

Jonathan Lamb

The gesture toward pity (“which made him pity his own cruelty”) is supplanted by an intuition of his own mortality that has him oscillating between feeling what it is to be alive, and what it is to be dead. Adam Smith had this to say about such a predicament: It is from this very illusion of imagination, that the foresight of our dissolution is so terrible to us, and that the idea of those circumstances, which undoubtedly can give us no pain when we are dead, make us miserable while we are alive. (1979 [1759], p. 13) Ulysses weeps so copiously because, as Smith would say, he has brought the matter home to his own bosom, inhabiting at the same time the horror of his own death and the horror of having put so many people to death, just like Anwar. The physiological reaction is justified in Homer by a detailed parallel between Ulysses’ case and that of an imagined Trojan woman trying hopelessly to protect her family from their enemies—a version of Hecuba. If her grief expressed itself in convulsive gasps that made her bark like a dog, Ulysses’ horror emerges in the uncontrollable flow of liquid from his eyes and his brain: brain-sweat. A similar parallel makes way for Anwar’s convulsive moment. The second to last scene of The Act of Killing returns to the space upstairs where the garroting used to be done and in which the reenactment began: it is not Anwar’s lungs, eye, and brain that empty themselves, but his stomach. The scene is so lengthy that two reactions are possible. The first is that the emotion caused by the reenactment must be utterly excessive, as excessive as the limitless cruelty it mourns and the inexpiable guilt it confesses. A tsunami of remorse, like Ulysses’. The second is that Anwar has finally figured out what Oppenheimer was after and is faking it.

Further reading Buruma, I., 2015; Melvin, J., 2018.

96

19 HAJJ Maryam Palizban

The annual pilgrimage of the hajj comprises three different types of ritual—Tamattu’ (minor:ʿumra), Qirān, and Ifrad (Narāqī, Mustanad al-Shīʿa, vol. 11, p. 208). The latter two are reserved for Muslims living in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, while the first, Tamattu’, is what is normally thought of as the hajj, a practice that is considered to be among the five pillars of Islam for Sunnis, one of the so-called ancillaries of the faith for Shīʿa, and one of the seven pillars for Ismāʿīlism, a branch of Shīʿa Islam. Although regarded as obligatory for the faithful, the hajj is only supposed to be performed by those Muslims who are healthy in mind and body, mature, and able to afford the expense of traveling there (Quran 6:25–37; Ḥadīth; Hamedani, 1983, p. 145). Muslims are instructed to travel to Mecca during the first ten days of the last month of the Islamic calendar (dhū al-Ḥijjah) to join other pilgrims from around the world at least once in a lifetime. The hajj begins on the 8th of dhū al-Ḥijjah and ends on the 13th of the same month. Prior to starting the hajj, pilgrims don white irḥām clothing, which is identical for both men and women. This is an important first step in the hajj since it symbolizes absolute equality and anonymity within the Muslim community. The act of undressing and putting on special clothing marks an attempt to usher believers into a new epistemological state, one in which they are reminded of a forgotten past, whether it be birth or pre-existence (anamnesis). Iḥrām should be donned no later than when the pilgrim is approximately six miles from reaching Mecca (Ḥadīth; Hoiberg and Ramchandani, 2000, pp. 237–238). The first ritual is ṭawāf, which involves walking seven times around the Ka˓ba, the huge cube in the middle of the Great Mosque yard in Mecca. Pilgrims must perform ṭawāf at least twice. This first ritual of reenactment is supposed to be connected to Abraham (Ibrāhīm) and the Abrahamic religions. Specifically, it reenacts the way in which Abraham worshipped God, with God in the center and his creatures circling around a single creator, both literally and metaphorically. However, the pre-Islamic role of Ka˓ba and Mecca indicates that the history of hajj, and specifically ṭawāf, draw on other, earlier traditions. Prior to the rise of Islam, Ka˓ba was a holy place for pagan practices, and the cube form is known to have been widespread in the region (King, 2004, pp. 227–228). Sometime before Muhammad was born in the city, the statue of Hubal, the main idol in Mecca, was placed inside Kaʿba along with other sculptures and paintings (King, 2004, p. 219). In addition to elements of fetishism, including kissing and touching the holy black stone attached to Ka˓ba, there are early reports that fertility rituals and female deity worship formed part of the history of Ka˓ba and the reenactment of ṭawāf (Ibn Ishaq, 1955, p. 38).Yet, according to the Islamic 97

Maryam Palizban

narrative, mostly derived from the Quran, Ka˓ba was built as the house of God by Abraham and his son Ishmael (Ismāʿīl), and the black stone that is attached to Ka˓ba was delivered by the angel Gabriel (Jibrāʾīl) from heaven (Quran, 2:124–127 and 22:27–30). The hajj can be considered a historical reenactment in the sense that pilgrims imaginatively believe that they are retracing the footsteps of Abraham—the father of the faith—and of the prophet Mohammad, who established the hajj as the most important social ritual within Islam. The significance of Mecca derives not only from the centrality of the hajj and Ka˓ba in Islam; Mecca was the birthplace of Mohammad and his first revelation in ad 610 is said to have occurred in a cave on a mountain near Mecca (Quran, 53:4–9). Moreover, Ka˓ba in Mecca was decreed the second qibla (fixed direction of praying, after al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem), which unites the physical orientation of Muslims all over the world during their daily prayers. The decision was made in ad 642 and is narrated in Quran verses 2:142–151. Continuing in Abraham’s footsteps, after ṭawāf, pilgrims experience the emotional high point of the hajj when they perform Sa’y. This is a reenactment of Abraham’s wife and Ishmael’s mother Hagar’s (Hājar) tragic search for water for her infant, as she runs helplessly between two hills (Ṣafā and Marwa). For many pilgrims, this is the essential moment that de/reconstructs the foundations of their individual faith. The act challenges the strength of the believer’s faith, as it places them in a desperate position that makes them question whether God is looking after them or not. At the same time, it reconstructs the foundation of the believer’s faith by reenacting a fundamental experience—one of Abraham’s most important challenges as a founder of the faith. Many clerics have even stated that pilgrims should cry while reenacting the Sa’y; crying is Mustahabb (“recommended”) (Sistani, 1993). According to the story of Hagar, water suddenly flowed from the ground after she had run seven times between the hills searching for it; the spring was subsequently named the Well of Zamzam (Ḥadīth). Having reenacted Hagar’s struggle, the pilgrims drink from Zamzam. Today, the entire area between the two hills has been covered and is constantly air-conditioned. After reenacting Sa’y, all pilgrims enter the Mina area, which is covered with a large number of tents, and where they remain until the following day. Mina is an occasion to talk with other Muslims from all over the world and so to constitute Muslim community (Bianchi, 2004). The 9th of Dhu al-Ḥijjah sees an immense gathering of millions of the faithful on Mount Arafat. This massive event is supposed to be a reenactment of a historical occurrence—the last sermon given by Mohammad. At the same time, the atmosphere and all the signs suggest apocalyptic narratives: uniformly dressed in the same type of clothing, people gather in an almost empty field, praying and asking for forgiveness. This act, referred to as wuquf, means “standing before God.” After sunset, all pilgrims are instructed to leave Arafat. After leaving Mount Arafat and spending a night in the Muzdalifah area, the pilgrims prepare themselves for a two-part reenactment of Abraham’s story—the challenge of sacrifice. The first part takes place as the pilgrims throw seven small stones at the highest of three pillars, which represents the devil on the day when Abraham was ordered by God to sacrifice his son Ishmael (jamarāt). According to Abraham’s story, the Sat appeared three times (the first time to Abraham, the second time to Hagar, and the third to Ishmael) to prevent Abraham from sacrificing his son (Ḥadīth). As an aspect of the symbolism and meaning of ritual, reenactment can be seen not only as a repetition of actions, but also as a re-experiencing of familiar emotions and memories. Stoning the devil is intended to reenact Abraham’s fight with the devil himself; but at the same time, it symbolizes the individual’s confrontation with their own despair and faith. The last part of the ritual, an animal sacrifice, reenacts the victory of Abraham’s faith, with the sacrifice of a goat or sheep in place of Ishmael. The sacrificial festival is not only celebrated in Mecca during hajj, but by Muslims all over the world (ʿĪd al-aḍḥā). After the animal sacrifice, the 98

Hajj

pilgrims demonstrate that they have completed the hajj by men shaving their hair and women cutting the ends of their hair. The following two or three days consist of repeating some of the rituals, such as ṭawāf, Sa’y, and stoning the devil (stoning all three pillars). The hajj may thus be thought of as a reenactment of a number of rituals that derive from stories about the Islamic prophet Mohammad, the Abrahamic religions, and from earlier pagan (non-Abrahamic religious) practices. The hajj is a reenactment in two different senses: it is both a reenactment of historical events and a reenactment of memory. Yet there are other forms of reenactment constantly being added to the hajj. The representation of political empowerment related to conflicts in the Islamic world—mainly between Sunni Islam and other traditions, especially Shi’a Islam—has become a central issue in the annual hajj. Thus, while its founders used the hajj to demonstrate the unity and solidarity of the Muslim world, modern political factors undermine these aims in many ways. The domination of the Saudi Arabian government in Mecca poses serious issues for the neutrality of the hajj as an existential ritual of faith.

Further reading Agnew,V., 2004; Momen, M., 1985; Sturken, M., 2011; Wüstenfeld, F., 1861.

99

20 HERITAGE Julie Park

Bolsover, a 17th-century castle in Derbyshire, England, managed by English Heritage and built on the site where a 12th-century medieval castle once stood, has recently incorporated reenactment into its programming as a method of engaging wider public interest and drawing more visitors. Exploiting the site’s medieval past, English Heritage stages knights’ tournaments where visitors have the opportunity to “immerse” themselves “in medieval life in the encampment,” meet with “people from the Middle Ages,” and “try on a knight’s armour” themselves (Knight’s Tournament at Bolsover Castle, 2019). This form of medieval reenactment, along with a 17thcentury one in which “Cavalier” horsemen costumed in high boots and feathers bring “to life” the castle’s Riding School, appear to demonstrate bald commercialism. Yet the impulse to make believe that the heritage site’s environment is situated in a long ago past was in fact indulged by at least one of its original owners as a fundamental form of pleasure afforded by inhabiting a historical setting. In the 17th century, Sir Charles Cavendish (Bess of Hardwick’s son and William Cavendish’s father) recruited architect Robert Smythson to reconstruct the dilapidated castle as a Norman keep, urging inhabitants and visitors to imagine they have entered the age of chivalry when surrounded by its “fanciful, impractical turrets, battlements, lodges” and “battlement walkway” (Worsley, 2007, p. 45). Used as a holiday home and place of entertainment, and called “the Little Castle,” Bolsover was recreated as the architectural embodiment of 17th-century fantasies about life in the Middle Ages. In fact, even throughout the reigns of James I and of Charles I, tournaments were still being held. William Cavendish would carry on with John Smythson (Robert’s son) the work begun by his father Charles of building and designing the Little Castle. He purportedly referred to it as his “little romance,” an acknowledgement of the fact that for his father, Bolsover gave architectural expression to the days of chivalry imagined in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590–1596) and Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furiosio (1532) (Durant, 2011, p. 171). As Bolsover demonstrates, cultural heritage sites perform the reenactment that was already part of their history.Yet more interesting is the way that heritage can emerge through a process of reenactment, which in turn is executed through the use of different materials, from human bodies and actors in costume to clay bricks, glass, and ironwork (body and embodiment, material culture). This entry will trace the role of reenactment in the 18th-century antiquarian practice of supplementing printed books with one’s personal collection of engravings as a form of preserving cultural heritage, known as “extra-illustration.” In this practice, heritage is both 100

Heritage

reenacted and preserved through the rearrangement of paper, printed words, and images of historically significant sites and personages. But first, what constitutes heritage? If we understand heritage as the “material remains” of the past, or history rendered not in the information gleaned from textual documentation but in the traces left by material culture, then what kind of materials does it encompass? They can be, as the fields of conservation and archaeology inform us, any material entity that is changed by human modification or interaction. These include monuments, churches, tools, landscapes, gardens, books and manuscripts, costume, and pictures. Heritage can also be located in embodied practices, such as storytelling, rituals, performances, and festivals. And heritage can go beyond human-formed buildings or enacted rituals to include natural environments such as marine sites and forests, as initiatives in UNESCO’s World Heritage program indicate to us. In this way, heritage may be further defined as an act that continues the action of viewing, shaping, handling, preserving, and enjoying material substance that was similarly treated by earlier generations. In contemporary life, heritage has become linked to sites of tourism and consumerism, as a visit to Williamsburg, Virginia, in the United States or Blenheim Palace—a recently named UNESCO World Heritage Site—in the United Kingdom can remind us. In this sense, one appreciates heritage, as Rodney Harrison puts it, as “the formally staged experience of encountering the physical traces of the past in the present” (Harrison, 2013, p. 1). It is in this sense that heritage may be considered a branch of historical reenactment. But what was heritage before it reached this definition for itself? What preceded the current awareness of what it does? How did it come to be what it is now? The primary dictionary definition for heritage identifies it as land or property that is inherited, a meaning derived from the old French eritage. Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia: Or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences of 1728 affirms the legalistic meaning and usage of heritage by presenting it not as its own entry, but within the entry for “inheritance,” which is defined as “a Perpetuity in Lands and Tenements to a Man and his Heirs.”The remainder of the definition indicates that “heritage,” like “descent,” is one of the means by which land and tenements come into someone’s possession: this word … is not only understood where a Man hath Inheritance of Lands and Tenements by Descent or Heritage, but also every Fee-Simple and Fee-Tail, that a Man hath by Purchase, may be said to be by Inheritance, for that his Heirs may inherit after him. (Chambers, 1728) Responding to this aspect of Chambers’ definition, the following entry attempts to trace how heritage in the English tradition (unlike, for instance, indigenous traditions) functions as a vehicle for passing down a property from one generation to the next in a chain of conditional ownerships, each impelled by the mortality of every successive possessor. In feudal law, all heritable property entailed a right to real estate and an obligation not to waste or destroy it. The same is true of most heritage now, except it refers to a common property, whether regional or global. In other words, it is a method and a means of transfer by which a relation of the human to material circumstances is created and defined. These sedimented transfers constitute its history and its consciousness of itself. However, David C. Harvey has discerned that in its bias toward the present, the study of heritage today “tends to hide a much deeper temporal scope in dating heritage activity,” erasing its “rich historical contextualisation” (Harvey, 2001, pp. 323–324). The solution he proposes is to desist from repeating the oft-told story that heritage as we know it now came into being in England with the passing of the Ancient Monuments Act in 1882, preceded shortly beforehand by William Morris’s founding of the Society for the Protection of 101

Julie Park

Ancient Buildings (SPAB) in 1877. Instead of “a particular modernist strand of heritage from a 19th-century icon,” Harvey prefers a history of the “heritage process” broadened “over the longer term” (Harvey, 2001, p. 326). In the spirit of Harvey’s call for a heritage chronology that began well before 1882, the remainder of this essay looks back at least a century earlier, to the 18th century. The relationship between architecture, land, and text is central to the life of heritage in cultural history and enshrined in the homophone monument/muniment, the stone memorial and the documentary archive in ancient houses. In 18th-century Britain in particular, heritage in the guise of antiquarian pursuits played a prominent role in cultural life. A social identity emerged: that of the antiquary, or person whose love for the past inspired him or her to study its material remains in the surrounding sites of stone circles, battles, barrows, and bones of extinct elks and mammoths. More specifically, an antiquarian was someone curious about his national historical past as it was reflected in ancient artifacts and buildings. By means of collection (of fragments and curiosities), restoration (at Stonehenge, for instance), and exhibition (as museum or pageant) the local population and the nation became aware of what belonged to them as heritage, a feat Rosemary Sweet believes “deserves greater appreciation” (Sweet, 2001, p. 182). Antiquarian texts focused on local places, including the repositories of records in towns, parishes, and counties, or the more solid traces of rulers and families, such as collections of coins, heraldry, funerary inscriptions, marriage articles, and title-deeds (Sweet, 2004, p. 5). The locales chosen were mainly in Britain, and areas significant to British history, such as Normandy. When arguing that antiquarians were proto-archaeologists, Stuart Piggott points out that the fundamental distinction between history and archaeology lies in the kind of evidence each favors—written versus material and tangible.Whereas “historical research” derives from “obtaining knowledge of the human past from written records,” archaeology turns to “material remains” for the same purpose (Piggott, 1976, p. 2). Thus, antiquarianism, with its focus on records of the past that are materially manifest, is highly sympathetic to the historical reenactment practices of heritage, from latter-day performances of druidic ceremonies to the restoration of Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill with its original stucco formula and Renaissance stained glass panels. Tracing heritage to its antiquarian roots shows that it was a medium for imaginative creativity from its outset. Whereas antiquarian tours such as William Stukeley’s or Thomas Pennant’s were sympathetic to picturesque objectives and stimulated the fancy of the traveler as eyewitness, written accounts and maps associated with sites of antiquarian interest demonstrate how the textual forms of documenting heritage involved imagination at a different level. I will look closely at a particular example of an antiquarian text and its material use as a means by which heritage is treated as a material construction and practice. It is a practice not only of visiting and studying old sites pivotal to cultural history, but also of writing, reading, and making texts that attempt to preserve one’s experiences and imaginings of them. The object under question is an extra-illustrated copy of Anglo-Norman Antiquities Considered in a Tour Through Part of Normandy (London, 1767) by Andrew Coltee Ducarel (1713–1785) (Figure 20.1).The folio-sized (19.25 × 12 inches) book’s beautiful light brown calf binding with elegant gold ornamentation and the Beckford family crest can be easily attributed to one of its owners, the famed novelist and connoisseur William Beckford (1760–1840). As a text, Ducarel’s book is a fine example of the antiquarian genre of travel writing, making apparent its antiquarian leanings in its accounts and images of antique seals, coins, monuments, castles, and cathedrals largely related to William the Conqueror (c. 1028–1087), as well as its topographical descriptions of Caen and Rouen.Though in a foreign country, Normandy had many relics of England’s ancient past for Ducarel to discover. As the inhabitants of Normandy themselves claim, according to Ducarel, “when the English were obliged to forsake that province, they left behind them 102

Heritage

Figure 20.1  Extra-illustration prints of the Abbey of St. Stephen in a copy (once belonging to William Beckford) of Anglo-Norman Antiquities Considered in a Tour Through Part of Normandy by Andrew Coltee Ducarel. London, 1767. Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

many valuable treasures” (Ducarel, 1762, p. i). The book’s copperplate engravings, some that originally came with the book and some that were added to it, illustrate these treasures. On one hand, Ducarel presents his tour as a serious archaeological excursion in which he sets out to “view and examine such ancient remains as might tend either to illustrate the history and antiquities of the province, or to point out and characterize the piety, valour, and magnificence, of our ancient kings and nobility.” On the other, his tour and the written account of it serve as an archival act of memory-making: the design therefore, of the following sheets, is to lay before the reader such observations as I made when on the spot, and to preserve the memory, at least, of several remarkable monuments of Anglo-Norman antiquity, which, either from their great age, or the disregard and inattention of their present possessors, are in danger of being intirely destroyed. (Ducarel, 1762, p. ii) That Ducarel was self-conscious about the preservational aspect of his book makes the book’s survival centuries later, with its memories of his direct encounters with intact Anglo-Norman antiquities, both dramatic and moving. It is fitting that an author with such an archival impulse was not only a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (founded in 1707), but also a librarian at the Lambeth Library and archivist of state papers. Many members of the Society of Antiquaries 103

Julie Park

throughout the 18th century in fact held positions as librarians and archivists. These positions included keeper of records in the Tower (George Holm), librarian to the earl of Oxford (Humfrey Wanley), keepers at the British Museum (Samuel Ayscough, Richard Penneck, and Francis Douce), and Historiographer Royal (Thomas Madox) (Sweet, 2004, pp. 48–49). Sweet points out that it is impossible to tell whether record keepers and archivists forged their careers out of a desire to “satisfy antiquarian leanings” or if the men became antiquarians as a consequence of their occupations (2004, p. 49). As a privately owned object, Ducarel’s book exemplifies the type of visually annotated volume that is known as the extra-illustrated book. Throughout the period, it was a pastime for owners of books concerning biography, local history, Shakespeare, travel, and topography to supplement its descriptions with engraved prints from other sources to illustrate visually what was being described in words. On the same principle as the lengthy antiquarian notes in one of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, such as the detailed account of the function of the court “dempster” in The Heart of Midlothian, readers inserted extra pictures and texts into the printed book. Instead of antiquarianism at second hand, this actively delegated the reader’s imagination in the pursuit of corroboration and correction. The prototype for this activity was James Granger’s A Biographical History of England (1769), whose “methodical catalogue” of the portraits of notable English figures in history, published without illustrations, unwittingly encouraged readers to add their own engraved portraits to copies of Granger’s book. The practice, also known as “grangerizing,” became extremely popular, and extra-illustrators/grangerizers moved on to other types of books, especially tour books such as Ducarel’s. A common practice of antiquarianism, extraillustration was both a “novel method of enjoying texts on England’s past” and a symptom of “the prevailing perceptions and popularization of antiquarianism” during the 18th century (Peltz, 1999, p. 115). More than that, grangerizing was the closest that textual study came to reenactment, demonstrating how people in the Enlightenment practiced a form of heritage that involved a visual participation in the re-writing of historical texts. I will suggest that heritage was not just preserved but created in the owning and expanding of this sort of book, not merely metamorphosed by a single reader but handed down from one to the other. It formed the constitutive production of cultural heritage. The technique of supplementation, by which a print produced separately would be glued onto a page in the book or bound into it, is called “tipping in.” In Beckford’s copy of Ducarel’s Anglo-Norman Antiquities, there are 27 plates that are bound or “tipped” in, with a number of prints noted in the catalog as missing, both original and added. The tipped in pages, though, are not all necessarily the extra-illustrated ones, for a printed list at the back of the book providing directions for the placement of designated engravings indicates what was usually the case with printed books of the period: its engraved plates were not part of the original printer’s gatherings and were meant to be added separately when having the book bound. Yet the basic procedure of extra-illustration is one of altering the original composition of a book as well as using handiwork either to paste in new engravings or dismantle the original binding and putting it back together to incorporate the additions. Given this, one might say that an extra-illustrated volume is as much the creation of the book owner as it is of the original author. Among the prints that are clearly extra-illustrated (the borders outlined with glue traces on the back of some of the pages on which they appear help reveal them) are three nearly identical images of the Cathedral Church of Rouen, described on page 12 of Ducarel’s text; Ducarel’s frontispiece portrait; and an illustration of a section of the Bayeux Tapestry that appears in the book’s appendix. There are at least two possibilities for who created the extra-illustrated version of Ducarel’s Anglo-Norman Antiquities that is in the holdings of UCLA’s Special Collections. Six owners are listed in the library catalog entry for the book, beginning with Benjamin Thomas Pouncy (d. 1799) 104

Heritage

and ending with Charles K. Ogden (1889–1957). Beckford, after Pouncy, was the book’s second owner. Because the book appears in Beckford’s binding, it is safe to assume that its extra-illustration was performed either by him or by Pouncy. An inscription written in a neat 18th-century round hand on the fly-leaf of laid paper (part of the original gathering) states that the book was given to B.T. Pouncy, the first owner, by the author, “Dr Ducarel,” on July 31, 1778. While it is thrilling to imagine someone as renowned as Beckford being the one to add the book’s extra-illustrations, it is in fact even more appealing to consider that it was Pouncy, in consultation with Ducarel himself, who chose and inserted the extra prints. Even if he himself were not the owner responsible for grangerizing Ducarel’s book, it is evident that Beckford had enough regard for the extra-illustrated copy to buy and have it beautifully rebound for his own library. Regardless of which owner was responsible for the extra-illustrations, their status as interlocutors with the text is clear. Their presence in the book furthers the dialogue between word and image already initiated by the original plates. The language of Ducarel’s guide cries out for visual supplementation, for it is highly descriptive of the spatial and material details belonging to the buildings and topography that he encountered in his tour of Normandy. For example, about the landscape of Caen he writes: The ramparts of the town are covered with trees, which form most delightful walks, and, together with the vast length of the cours, the great plenty of water, and the abundance of beautiful outlets, yield the eye a pleasure which it does not often enjoy in flat countries, or where the prospect is much limited. (Ducarel, 1762, p. 49) Such a sentence reminds us that a significant aspect of 18th-century tours of antiquities was the visual pleasure they gave. And yet the careful insertion of an owner’s corresponding prints from his own collection into the book suggests the pleasure was extended to a tangible one as well. An example of this palpably emitted “echo” of the book’s visual supplementation of Ducarel’s writing appears in the two identical small engravings (see Figure 20.1) of the Abbey of St. Stephen described on pages 50–52 and already illustrated by the book’s original engraving. Extra-illustration not only allows further pleasure to the eye to be yielded through an act of handiwork, but also gives the book owner an opportunity to contribute to the book’s word and image system of providing information, making meaning, and preserving memory. The effect is one of visual and material doubling—an act of reenactment that demonstrates heritage is passed down as much through the material creation and recreation of texts as it is through passing the text itself from one set of hands to another, eventually landing in the heritage institution of the library, the traditional residence of antiquarians themselves. In such an institution, the extraillustrated copy of Ducarel’s book demands to be read as a heritage document—that is, read not so much for the information it yields textually, but for the material traces of its prior owners who have creatively worked to recreate its meaning in the present as a flexible record of the past.

Further reading Harvey, D., 2001; Peltz, L., 2017, Samuel, R., 1994; Sweet, R., 2004.

105

21 HISTORICALLY INFORMED PERFORMANCE Kate Bowan

Western art music has long escaped the present and performed music of the past.This retrospective tendency can be traced to the early 18th century and found expression at the turn of the 20th century as Early Music Revival. During the 1960s, early music performance emerged as a distinct movement and marketable entity and has gone on to find a place within the classical music industry and exert a lasting influence on mainstream performing practices. Known variously as Early Music, period performance, and more recently Historically Informed Performance (HIP) or historical performance practice, it is founded on a principle of historical fidelity with the central aim of reconstructing as closely as possible original performance practices. Historical performance is arguably history brought to life, enlivened by sound. HIP practitioners explore repertoires from antiquity to the late 19th century. Ranging from lost traditions demanding profound sonic reimaginings to the defamiliarizing of canonical repertoire, HIP has produced a vast body of musical performance, recordings, and scholarship. Unlike mainstream performance, which understands itself as being part of an unbroken tradition, HIP began with a focus on earlier repertoires unmoored from their interpretative traditions and has sought to historicize its approach through engagement with a range of sources. Nick Wilson notes that while the diverse movement has at its core “a deliberate attempt to recreate the sounds of an original performance for music of earlier times,” its methodological framework could sustain almost any music written up to the 20th century where a historically appropriate style of performance is reconstructed on the basis of surviving instruments, treatises, and other evidence (Wilson, 2014, p. 3). Shaped by 1960s counterculture, HIP has reached beyond classical audiences with repertories that share similarities with some so-called world musics, leading some to characterize it as a musical “Other” (Shelemay, 2001, p. 5; Wilson, 2014, p. 39). In its myriad forms, HIP relies on collaborations between performers, musicologists, historians, and instrument makers, as well as broader networks of “editors, publishers, collectors, curators, dealers, librarians, teachers and record producers” (Lawson, 1999, p. 1). While the scholar-performer has emerged as a distinct type, the relationship between scholarship and creative performance within HIP is fraught. Any performance of a historical notated musical work is inescapably an historical reenactment.Why then is HIP different? The answer lies in approach. Mainstream classical performance, epitomized by “modern symphony musicians” has understood itself as part of an “unbroken” tradition and has undergone gradual, often unconscious change (Haynes, 2007, p. 9). Some have 106

Historically informed performance

argued that this approach reflects the notions of “classical” as being timeless or taken out of history; period performers have turned to historicism as a way to reinsert music into historical time (Haynes, 2007). It is this historicizing bent that draws HIP into contact with contemporary reenactment studies. The relationship between the mainstream and HIP has been marked by suspicion, but the so-called “turf wars” (Sherman, 1997, p. 5) also reflect the breadth of HIP. The movement, as Joseph Kerman observed, “has always flourished within an atmosphere of multiple controversy” (Kerman et al., 1992, cited in Sherman, 1997, p. 4). Some of these issues are inherently complex and have therefore been subjected to debate. Chief among them is authenticity and its relationship to affect. In recent years, some scholars (Agnew, 2007; McCalman and Pickering, 2010; Schwarz, 2010b; de Groot, 2011; Mikula, 2015), influenced by the memory boom and renewed interest in emotion and experience, have turned to reenactment to gauge how reenactment might work as a “genuinely new form of historical representation” (Agnew, 2007, p. 309) that offers an alternative mode to the “all-encompassing, authoritative historical mainstream” (de Groot, 2011, p. 588), and through performance allows room for the conjectural, provisional, and speculative. Because of the requisite specialist knowledge, music is often missing from general historical and humanist discourse, but HIP offers much to those interested in how affect, embodiment, and experience can inform historical understanding as these are essential to period performance for both player and listener. While HIP practitioners may not often consider the relationship between their work and historical reenactment, HIP has produced insightful scholarship on issues such as authenticity, expression, historical understanding and its relationship to creative performance, and the relation between past and present. In many ways HIP stands as readymade. It has radically questioned mainstream practices and offers an alternative mode of performance that through the combination of imagination, creativity, and fine-grained historical research seeks to reveal the unknown and make new what we already know. In this way, it resonates with the reenactment scholar’s search for alternative modes of history telling and recognition of embodied performance as providing a space for the conjectural. Authenticity lies at the heart of HIP.This was apparent in work of the Early Music Revival pioneers Arnold Dolmetsch and Wanda Landowska (Figure 21.1). Dolmetsch’s urge to recreate the past extended beyond musical content to costume and setting; and Landowska, a renowned harpsichordist, is remembered for her challenge to those less informed, “You play Bach your way and I’ll play him his way” (quoted in Edidin, 1998, p. 1). If the former revealed a desire for reenactment that went beyond sound, the latter professed a belief that she could channel a dead composer. For Robert Donington in 1963 “the doctrine of historical authenticity” was still to match “our modern interpretation as closely as possible to what we know of the original interpretation” (cited in Walls, 2003, p. 2). For Wilson, five decades on, it remains the movement’s “integral premise” (2014, p. 38).The notion of authenticity has generated discussion on a variety of issues to do with music historiography and performance practice, including the composer’s intentions, the “work concept,” and Werktreue (fidelity to the printed score as the medium between composer and performer), all of which raise questions about the relationship between notation and interpretation. The 1980s and 1990s produced a battlefield of ideas. Donington’s “doctrine” experienced a major challenge in publications such as Early Music’s special issue, “The Limits of Authenticity; A Discussion” (1984), and the edited collection, Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium (Kenyon, 1988). For many practitioners, the term became “taboo” (Sherman, 1997, p. 8) and the concept came to be seen as “highly problematic” (Walls, 2003, p. 1), characterized variously as “distracting and tiresome” (Dolata, 2004, p. 453) and even “hopeless” (Williams, 2002, p. 69). 107

Kate Bowan

Figure 21.1 The Dolmetsch family in costume outside Jesses, Haslemere, c.1919. Source: Reproduced with permission of the Dolmetsch family.

This response foreshadowed developments in historical reenactment. As Stephen Gapps reminds us, authenticity is reenactment’s “holy grail” (Gapps, 2010, p. 52), and reenactors who exhibit a dogmatic and obsessive concern with historical accuracy are denigrated as being authenticity fascists (p. 53) (authenticity; practices of authenticity). HIP’s position caused a rift with many mainstream performers, who remained unconvinced and felt “their own sense of personal authenticity” under attack (Wilson, 2014, p. 14). As the movement gained ground, debates around authenticity attracted the attention of some powerful musicological minds; 1995 was a “watershed year” (Butt, 2002, p. 37). It saw the appearance of Richard Taruskin’s transformative set of essays on authenticity and historical performance, Text and Act and the philosopher Peter Kivy’s Authenticities. Taruskin pointed to the presentist agendas underpinning the early music endeavor, noting that aesthetic decisions and performance style reflected prevailing modernist tastes despite the quest for historical accuracy. This assessment foreshadowed Anja Schwarz’s more recent work that explores how “presentist agendas … shape reenactments” (2010, p. 25).Taruskin’s assault on the ethos of the movement transformed the parameters of the debate. Many of the questions he raised during the 1990s continue to resonate today (Butt, 2002; Walls, 2003; Haynes, 2007; Wilson, 2014). Although different in key respects, Kivy and Taruskin both lament what they perceive as the constraining effect of historical musicology on emotion. Spontaneity and imagination were sacrificed for historical rectitude (Butt, 2002, p. 24). Bernard Sherman is another who identifies an irreconcilable tension between scholarship and art (Sherman, 1997, p. 4). Notwithstanding the timeliness of Taruskin’s critique, for others it has since become tired and simplistic. For Tess Knighton, the “concept of authenticity as strict adherence to the letter as opposed to the 108

Historically informed performance

freedom of interpretative creativity” is an “old chestnut” (1996, p. 548); likewise, Walls sees “the inherent contradiction” set up by performers between “scholarship and musical expressiveness as problematic” (2003, p. 146). Rather than restricting creativity, historical sources can,Walls suggests, “enrich our understanding of the music and stimulate the imagination” (p. 167). Despite the objections, early music is characterized by a relationship between practice and scholarship, and when trying to reproduce music for which there is no sounding record, historical documents assume paramount importance. In a 2017 keynote address, Margaret Bent reminded her audience that “we can never have access to original sounds,” that “claims of ‘authentic’ recreation are unavoidably false,” and that the “only access” is from manuscripts which have lost “the rhetoric of performance.” Thus, she issued a call for “closer collaboration and in some cases improved mutual respect, between scholars and performers.” Accepted unquestioningly in her assessment is that historical performance is for “the here and now” (Bent, 2017). More recently, performers, acknowledging musical notation as an “incomplete record” (Walls, 2003, p. 10), have tried to free themselves from what they see as a kind of “text-fetishism” (Haynes, 2007, p. 3) in order to reengage with past performance practices that often have a different relationship to the printed page and are dependent upon improvisatory practices. For one practitioner, the fascination lies in the not knowing: “the beauty and attraction of early music is that we don’t ultimately know, despite all the notation … how it sounded. We have to recreate it” (Shelemay, 2001, p. 10). Reinvention moves into the realm of the imagination and, like reenactment, mobilizes the “conjectural” and “speculative.” Lost sound worlds and broken traditions abound. The chasm that can quickly open between current taste and that of the not so distant past has been powerfully demonstrated in research on early recordings.These are evidence of an older performance tradition, which although considered unbroken, reveals constant, unconscious change so that the performance style of the early 20 thcentury sounds “shockingly foreign” to our ears (Peres Da Costa, 2012, xxviii). These historical recordings can help fill the gap between notation and interpretation, revealing “unnotated practices” (Walls, 2003, p. 76) and invoke the provocative concept of the “period ear” (Burstyn, 1997). The moot question of whether modern audiences can hear like those before them raises the related question of whether they feel as older ones did. If affective history is, as Agnew (2007) suggests, a form of “historical representation that both takes affect as its object and attempts to elicit affect,” then reenactment’s potential for “sensual and corporeal access to the past” (Schwarz, 2010, p. 33) provides a way of imagining how people felt (emotion). Reenactment’s “two ‘reals,”’ described by Pickering and McCalman as a “desire to learn from the literal recreation of the past, and, at the same time, a yearning to experience somatically and emotionally” come together in HIP (2010b, p. 6). How and why music moves human beings has been a concern since antiquity, and affect is central to Western art music. More generally, music and emotion is an expanding research field that crosses disciplines ranging from cognitive psychology and neuroscience to sociology and philosophy (Juslin and Sloboda, 2011). The immediacy of the temporal art creates a sense of being there. The same is true for reenactment with its focus on “performance, empathy and embodiment.” For John Brewer, this is inherently dangerous (Brewer, 2010). He warns of the perils of conflating the “sentimental and ‘naively somatic’ with a ‘real’ experience” (p. 79) and questions whether “feeling and somatic experience are in some sense timeless, an adjunct of human nature” (p. 81). Musicians have also questioned whether “an identical acoustical and visual event will produce an identical experience” (Butt, 2002, pp. 195–196). Ironically, while historians’ and scholars’ turn to reenactment was motivated by a desire to engage with feeling, the turn to historical restoration in music has had the opposite effect. Taruskin, however, showed that this was a response to contemporary taste, reminding us that 109

Kate Bowan

emotional detachment was part of the modernist aesthetic. Arguably, the very sounds of period instruments have extended the emotional palette. For example, the reclamation of historical distance brought about by the performance on original instruments of Mozart’s and Beethoven’s orchestral music produces a different sound world with its own affective qualities, thereby defamiliarizing this canonical repertoire. Although the emotional responses elicited will not be historically accurate, these performances offer new affective experiences. For one performer, historical performance is “a journey” that can “open some door of perception that will allow a new feeling about something I’ve never had before” (Shelemay, 2001, p. 25), supporting the claim that “reenactments have a powerful and immediate impact on a visceral register and can reveal the past in a way that words cannot” (McCalman and Pickering, 2010, p. 13). HIP has tended to distance itself from the heritage industry’s more kitsch forms of reenactment (Knighton, 1996, p. 549), and the term reenactment is scarce in HIP literature. HIP is not only historical reconstruction but a creative art, and artistic performance should not be judged on the same criteria as historical scholarship (Butt, 2002, p. 14). It is also important to consider that visual aspects of reenactment do not travel through the sound waves of sound recordings and broadcasts (Haynes, 2007, p. 145). Nonetheless, two scholar-performers have recently contextualized HIP with its focus on preservation and restoration within the heritage and “living history” movements (Butt, 2002; Wilson, 2014). Certainly, Raphael Samuels understood the performance of Early Music as one of an array of postwar “resurrectionary enthusiasms” (Samuels, 1994, p. 23). And, as we see in the case of Dolmetsch, there has often been an urge to engage more completely with the past. There are still musicians who demand that the wood for their instruments comes from the exact region as that of the original or eschew electric light for candles “in order to better understand the mentality of the Middle Ages” (Sherman, 1997, p. 18). Walls notes that learning about period-appropriate dress can illuminate aspects of musical technique and interpretation (Walls, 2003, p. 10). For Butt, the “precise nature” of the “remarkable restoration project of instruments, old scores, performance practices” goes “well beyond the general conception of restoration projects in museums, art history classes, or the grounds of country estates” (cited in Wilson, 2014, p. 216). In recent performances, he has undertaken a more holistic approach to recreate first performances. One review notes that the “value of these recordings lies not in archaeological reenactment so much as undermining our tendency to think of these familiar pieces as stable and perfected” (Sherman, 2014). Butt’s focus on the recreation of a single event rather than a practice brings the undertaking closer to historical reenactment. HIP’s decades-long debate comprises “a continuous, reflexive critique” that despite its acrimony offers an alternative and potentially fruitful perspective that resonates with and extends reenactment studies. For nigh 20 years, it has been possible to claim that “in today’s musical climate historical performance in theory and practice has truly come to form part of mainstream musical life” (Lawson, 1999, p. 2). Not only has period style been adopted by mainstream players, but the players themselves often cross over. Historical performance has found its place in the mainstream and so offers an example for the future of reenactment studies and related areas of research. Despite its widespread acceptance, the movement remains sufficiently capacious to allow “radical freedom from mainstream convention” (Dulak, 1995, cited in Sherman, 1997, p. 20), and the “fantasy of recreating a lost original” (Schulenberg, 2010, p. 177) continues to produce a rich and diverse body of music and scholarship.

Further reading Butt, J., 2002; Haynes, B., 2007; Kenyon, N. (ed.), 1988; Kivy, P., 1995; Peres Da Costa, N., 2012; Sherman, B., 1997; Taruskin, R., 1995; Walls, P., 2003; Wilson, N., 2014.

110

22 HISTORY OF THE FIELD Ulf Otto

Reenactment studies is a new field and its institutionalization is still in its early stages. While the practice of reenactment has long been organized around clubs and societies, reenactment studies has yet to exhibit the typical features that lend academic fields their shape—professional societies, specialist journals, and professorships. However, with burgeoning interest, the field of reenactment studies is gaining disciplinary recognition. Since the history of the field is still in the making, what lies in its past might be best described as a prehistory. It is linked to the question of how the perception of reenactment has shifted from an amateur pastime to a subject worthy of serious scholarly attention within the humanities, and hence to the publication of this Handbook. This includes the question of how reenactment has become a stable epistemic object and how it is articulated as a subject of theory that promises to contribute new knowledge. During this constitutive phase, the field has generally been defined by three interconnected developments. First, formerly disconnected things are being grouped under a common heading: what is referred to as reenactment comprises a plethora of things that were formerly seen as radically disparate, including historically informed performance, reality television, performance art, and experimental archaeology. Second, the things newly grouped together under the umbrella of reenactment are now being discussed using a shared framework of questions and concepts. Third, a common genealogy is being constructed to give the concept of reenactment a shared heritage, pointing back to traditions of historical pageant, revolutionary festivals, or medieval passion plays (Otto, 2010b). This constitution of the field has not followed a single line of development; rather, it has been characterized by parallel processes and interdisciplinary entanglements. What might be called the dominant strand of reenactment studies emerged at the juncture of literary scholarship and contemporary history. In 2004, a special edition of Criticism put reenactment on the intellectual agenda; this was followed by a special issue of Rethinking History in 2007. Both journal issues were edited by editors of this volume. They forewent using reenactment in the title, but reenactment served as the central concept connecting all of the articles. The Reenactment History series, published by Palgrave Macmillan, shares key similarities with these early journals: Settler and Creole Reenactment (2009), edited by Vanessa Agnew and Jonathan Lamb, and Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn (2010), edited by Iain McCalman and Paul Pickering, set forth a line of thought that draws upon perspectives from primarily Anglophone and Continental literary studies and is informed by postcolonial discourse. It focuses on various media and deals with 111

Ulf Otto

issues concerning the popularization and consumption of history. Its point of departure was a contemporary boom in reenactment—on the one hand, historically framed docu-soap formats like the internationally successful House franchise (i.e. 1900 House, UK, 1999; Outback House, Australia, 2005; Schwarzwaldhaus 1902, Germany, 2002) that became popular at the end of the 1990s, and, on the other, a renewed public interest in Civil War reenactments, represented by works like Tony Horwitz’s 1999 [1998] bestseller Confederates in the Attic. Noteworthy is Agnew’s 2004 advocacy for taking up the challenge posed by amateur historians, rather than simply dismissing their claims because of their apparent shortcomings and contradictions, including their ahistoricity, their positivism, and their naive concepts of authenticity. By accentuating the fact that history is constantly experienced aesthetically—be it in novels, television, or computer games—scholars began dedicating their energy to studying the doing of history as a cultural practice in the everyday. Turning their attention to reenactment, scholars emphasized that history is more than the end result of narrative constructions (White, 1973). History is itself a historically contingent concept (Koselleck, 1989) and has to be contextualized within broader memory cultures, their mediality, and their performativity (Assmann, 1992). It was precisely this situatedness of reenactment at the crossroads of memory, performance, and media that drew the attention of scholars already interested in the relationship between performance and media. Around 2010, the term reenactment became trendy, the number of publications referring to it as a general concept rose dramatically, and new perspectives emerged that married different theoretical backgrounds and drew on new kinds of source material. Research in the areas of fine arts, dance scholarship, and performance studies—all concerned with the representation of history—contributed new perspectives on reenactment. Performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider’s widely received 2011 publication, Performance Remains, marked the climax of these interventions, pointing to a shifting conceptualization of performance within contemporary theory. In the fine arts, two points are noteworthy. First, the term reenactment is often used in the field to refer to the repetition of seminal performances from the 1970s. Second, the significance of reenactment in the visual arts is most convincingly articulated in a number of important exhibitions that have exerted an outsized influence on the field: A Little Bit of History Repeated at the Kunstwerke Berlin, taking place on two days in 2000–2001, was a new production of historical performances; it served as a precursor to Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim in New York in 2005. In the same year, Sven Lütticken’s book Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art broadened the perspective, bringing together works by Mike Bidlo, Bik Van der Pol, Rod Dickinson, Omer Fast, Andrea Fraser, Robert Longo, Eran Schaerf, Catherine Sullivan, and Barbara Visser; the volume also included seminal essays by curator Jennifer Allen and performance studies scholar Peggy Phelan. Two years later, in 2007, came History Will Repeat Itself, an exhibition curated by Inke Arns and Gabriele Horn in Berlin (KW) and Düsseldorf. Comprised of a series of works concerned more with history proper rather than just the history of art, the exhibition opened new perspectives by posing pointed questions about the ongoing relevance of the past for the present. Both Arns and Lütticken showed convincingly how the reenactor’s toolkit had entered the arts, and they used it to reflect on the agency of the past in the present. Understanding the works as personal and embodied attempts to re-appropriate objectivized image worlds, Arns described artistic reenactments as an ambivalent operation of sublating distance to the past and at the same time reestablishing this distance. By including a photograph of the 1920 Petrograd mass spectacle Storming of the Winter Palace by Nicolai Evreinov in an exhibition of otherwise exclusively contemporary artworks, Arns furthermore suggested that the other works presented had a shared genealogy with past events that

112

History of the field

constructed history in and through the media. Not to be underestimated is the contribution of these exhibitions—and of the artists and curators involved in them—in shaping and formulating the concepts on which the burgeoning field of reenactment studies is built. It took longer for the term reenactment to be accepted in the world of dance. The reason was simply that there already existed a long tradition of reconstructing seminal dance pieces, giving cause for a broad discussion on where exactly to pinpoint the differences between these reconstructions and “reenactment,” and whether the concept actually brought something new to the field. Against the backdrop of the general 20th-century Western tendency to conceive of dance as an expression of the “natural” body and therefore as a practice that evades the rationality and modernity of Western societies, the writing of the history of dance and questions about how to keep this heritage alive became an important topic. Central to these discussions were the manifold attempts at reconstructing historical dances and the theoretical underpinnings of the transfer from body to archive and back. These issues were practiced and discussed in a series of events, such as Archive tanzen in Salzburg in 2002, Wieder und wider: Performance Appropriated in Vienna in 2006, Archive/Practice in Leipzig in 2009, and most importantly, a multi-million-euro German funding program for dance heritage that ran between 2012 and 2017. Under the heading of reconstruction, projects were partially driven by a nostalgic longing for the recuperation of the lost original, and debates focused on whether a reconstruction was an old or a new work (Franko, 1989) and on the degrees of authenticity that a work might achieve (Guest, 2008). The extensive adaptation of the term reenactment, as documented in the Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment (Franko, 2018), has been accompanied by a turn toward the materiality of the archival documents and an insistence on the gaps between the document and the body (de Laet, 2010; Kruschkova, 2010). The aim of dance reenactments is not the more or less objective reconstruction of a heroic past, but the personal appropriation of a past whose meaning can only be found in the present. In this view of dance reenactment, the body emerges as an archive in itself. In contrast to the housed collections of written documents, the body as archive preserves a different kind of tacit knowledge that has long been neglected. Most interestingly, similar to the (visual) arts, here too reenactment is conceived of as a bridge between theory and practice. The archive is a central point of departure in performance, art, and the study thereof. Rebecca Schneider’s 2001 article “Archives: Performance Remains” and Diana Taylor’s 2003 monograph The Archive and the Repertoire reconsider the history of gesture and analyze the ontological status of performance. They address Abramović’s concerns over how performance can enter the museum and become part of heritage culture. Perpetuating a long tradition going back to Lessing that associates theater and performance with ephemerality, Peggy Phelan in 1993 conceived the “liveness” of performance as a form of absolute being in the present, one that contradicts and resists the mass media logics of recording and reproduction. Challenging this clear-cut distinction between a singular, immediate, vanishing “now” and an already concluded, inefficacious, recorded past, Schneider draws on Susan Sontag to argue for a concept of “syncopated time,” a present that is always haunted by other (past and future) times. Referring to Derrida’s critique of the archive as a social power that regulates what is permitted to be remembered and governs how what is remembered enters collective memory (1995), Schneider argues that thinking of performance as a vanishing “now” subscribes to an uncritical conception of the archive, reducing performance (again) to a reserve of reason. Calling the logic and power of the archive into question, she proposes that scholars conceive of performance as an alternative form of embodied cultural memory: “By this reading, the scandal of performance relative to the archive is not that it disappears (this is what the archive expects, this is the archive’s requirement), but that it remains in ways that resist architectonic ‘house arrest’ and ‘domiciliation’” (Schneider,

113

Ulf Otto

2011, p. 105). Thinking about performance from the vantage point of reenactment opens a new way for the past to exist “differently or in difference,” making it into a practice that stages counter-memories. Schneider’s theoretical survey of the artistic potential of reenactment and her claim that embodied performance is of key significance for cultural memory in modern media cultures can therefore be read as a reply to Agnew’s earlier proposal that historians take up the challenge of reenactment. It offers an explanation as to why reenactment is engaged with historical traumata—be it colonial rule or the experience of violence. To illustrate the point, this short history concludes with probably the single most influential event for the development of the field of reenactment studies: Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave, a 2001 reenactment of the 1984 miners’ strike that was put down brutally by the police. The government had denounced the strikers as the “enemy within” and newsreels had been edited in a way to prove this take. Reenacting the event by bringing together contemporary witnesses, amateur reenactors, and media professionals, and using film to bring it back into popular memory, Deller confronted mediated history with embodied memories. In a hybrid mixture of high art, popular culture, and professional history, he brought together bodies and images in a festive performance that broke with traditional distinctions: popular culture appeared as high art, a hobby turned progressive praxis and aesthetic play became part of real history. It is within events like these, outside of written history, that the field first constituted itself, giving legitimacy and reason for the writing of its history in a handbook on an academic discipline.

Further reading Agnew,V., and Lamb, J. (eds.), 2004; Arns, I., and Horn, G., 2007; Otto, U., and Roselt, J., 2012; Schneider, R., 2011; Franko, M. (ed.), 2018.

114

23 INDIGENEITY Penny Edmonds

There is growing interest in Indigenous reenactment as a subversive form of performative political action deployed to force social change. This is especially so within the nominally “post”colonial settler states such as Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, the United States of America, and South Africa, and various Latin America countries.Yet, until recently, Indigenous reenactment has been relatively ignored within the field of postcolonialism itself, thus obscuring a major aspect of the ongoing contestation and remaking of history at national and global political levels, where the stakes are high.There is certainly a long tradition, from the 17th to the early 20th centuries, of Europeans bringing colonized Indigenous peoples from the “new world” to Europe to be placed on public show in international fairs, zoos, and circuses in the name of curiosity, display, and spectacle. By the mid-to-late 19th century, in the name of ethnography and hardening racial taxonomies, the specular commerce of the European colonial gaze required Indigenous peoples in such exhibits to appear in the “ethnographic present,” frozen in time, thus reenacting an imagined, authentic “savage” past. Indeed, they were often made to reenact and “perform themselves” and their own cultural practices, where the quotidian was rendered as spectacle in a “staged authenticity” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1990, pp. 18, 47, 408) (authenticity). These colonized subjects were popularly known in Europe as “zoo humans” or referred to as participants in Völkerschauen (“ethnographic shows”), and in the industrialized cities of Europe and growing cities in the colonies, there was a hunger for the spectacle of such touring troupes of “primitive” peoples and displays of savagery in Wild West shows, circuses, zoos, and museums (Poignant, 2004, p. 116). Modernity sought out its own supposed mirror image, and desired Indigenous peoples to figure in the “backtelling of its own past” (Bennett, 1995, pp. 19, 188) (production of historical meaning). Correspondingly, there is a robust literature around the many ways that colonized Indigenous peoples were both contracted and coerced into various European historical reenactments during the 19th and 20th centuries. Enrolled to perform in battles, various national commemorations, and made to “play Aborigines” and too often with delimited agency, Indigenous actors were called on to perform a “savage” past as counterpoint to a teleological rendition of European modernity, conquest, and the birth of modern settler nationhood, thus heralding the future of the settler states (Nugent, 2015). Likewise, white Americans have “played Indian” using ideas and misrepresentations of Native American peoples to shape their national identity over generations (Deloria, 1999).

115

Penny Edmonds

Far from being marginal, Indigenous performance when it is an agentic form of self-representation is a complex transnational phenomenon of critical significance, addressing and protesting key political issues of sovereignty, dispossession, land and sea rights, European violence, stolen and removed children, genocide, and issues of environment at the national and global orders. Indeed, identifying a crucial gap, Helen Gilbert has argued that while mainstream postcolonial studies has “a great deal to say” about Indigeneity as an “intellectual conceptualization,” it has not attended much to Indigenous performativity and less so performance, including reenactment. Further, the fields of dance and theater studies have been “less nimble” in analytically connecting such performances to postcolonialism (Gilbert, 2013, p. 174). The push for countercolonial and liberatory renditions of history, and urgent political demands from Indigenous peoples and allied others for decolonizing approaches in settler states (Tuhiwei Smith, 1999; Swadener and Mutua, 2008) have compelled scholars to engage more fully with Indigenous-led reenactment as political performance, understanding these as critical and often highly subversive spaces of embodied cultural interchange. Until recently, this aspect of Indigenous cultural assertion has been misunderstood and “under-theorized through the lens of either romanticism or ‘salvage anthropology’ as cultural revival and survival, rather than as a seriously political and ethical practice” (Phibbs, 2009, pp. 28–30). The political urgency and potency of Indigenous public reenactment as an embodied form of protest in the face of ongoing injustice within settler states, combined with new analyses offered by the affective turn, means that it is now a subject of intense interest and scholarly inquiry (Figure 23.1). Contemporary forms of Indigenous reenactment can be subversive and unpredictable, they can both rewrite and interrupt entrenched historical narratives and remake them (production of historical meaning). The “double entendre” in Indigenous reenactment is registered here: it can deploy “resistive performances to challenge prevailing myths and representations”

Figure 23.1 Tame Iti shooting the New Zealand flag in 2005. Source: TVNZ.

116

Indigeneity

of Indigenous peoples (Denzin, 2016, p. 32). Speaking of North America, Denzin notes that Indigenous reenactment challenges white, colonizing narratives, and in this way, Hollywood myths of Native American peoples are “troubled.” They “unsettle history and do so from within history itself ”; they are “counterhegemonic performances” that use reenactment in “subversive and transformative ways” by permitting the “participant observer to step back in time into a moment in the past and see it through a critical lens” (Denzin, 2016, p. 33). Settler societies are generally resistant to decolonization as settlers do not go home, and in the quest to overcome the violence of the past, stabilize the present, and reimagine the future, reconciliation has become a political catch-cry (Wolfe, 1999; Edmonds, 2016). In recent decades, settler nations across the globe have endeavored to forge political compacts between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples to address past grievances and to forge new national socialities and new ways of being. In these settler nations, where Indigenous peoples and immigrants grapple with the ongoing and violent effects of colonization, movements for reconciliation have become prominent. Significantly, we find reenactment as a form of facing the past within many reconciliation and peace-building performances, and this marks out a potent new genre and subject of enquiry. Here, public Indigenous performance and reenactment address directly the dispossession and violence of the past and often call forth matters of genocide. In doing so, such embodied and cross-cultural acts seek to both expose and overcome the trauma of the past to chart new, affective socialities and postcolonial futures (Edmonds, 2016). Accordingly, and in line with Vanessa Agnew’s observation that “genocide representation” has emerged along with a new respectability for its reenactment as an investigative and commemorative genre (Agnew, 2019, p. 172), Indigenous reenactments of the settler-colonial past as performative political action offer a form of critical praxis within the paradigm of reconciliation. These performances variously embrace, participate in, subvert, and revision narratives of reconciliation, and sometimes refute them entirely. They publicly and performatively express reconciliation and its multiple discontents; they may revision the past, offer a new future in the form of moral compact, and simultaneously make claims on the state. Public cross-cultural performances of reconciliation brokered by the state are a utopic form of politics and can offer hope for a future built on the foundations of a sense of honor, obligation, and togetherness. Public performances in the name of reconciliation, which contain components of historical reenactment, can include Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples engaging in mass public handshakes, thousands of people crossing a bridge together or paddling jointly down a river in traditional boats, or the re-enlivening of a treaty moment, are extraordinary, embodied, and highly affective cross-cultural collective events. They are marked by intense feelings of goodwill, cross-cultural unity and generosity, pride, relief, and hope; such feelings are eudaimonic emotions that bespeak something social, of what it is “to live well” and which proffer valuable unity and “mutual relations of civic or personal love and friendship” (Edmonds, 2016; Nussbaum, 2001).These events are an important site of social experimentation and negotiation and offer “sites for exploration of fresh and alternative structures and patterns of behavior” (Carlson, 1996, p. 15). Such events are honored as genuine peace-building performances created by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Such performances selectively recruit, replay, and revision “conciliation” or treaty moments from the colonial past into the enactment. Often on the very sites of past violence, they offer a temporal bidirectionality as they commemorate, memorialize, and revision the past for the future. As Katrina Schlunke notes of the Myall Creek massacre, memorial and reconciliation performance in New South Wales, Australia, such sites become “places of possibility” where the commemoration services act as openings to a “multi-dimensional memorial.” They are “multi-timed” and “the past here is not so much ‘known’ as ‘performatively embodied’” (Schlunke, 2006, pp. 180–188). 117

Penny Edmonds

Such events often selectively reenact specific cultural memories and Indigenous and Europeans traditions of goodwill and diplomacy from the colonial past—for instance, the European and universal gesture of the handshake, or the North American symbols of exchange and agreement, such as the Native wampum belt or the cross-cultural tradition of the covenant chain (memory and commemoration). In this way, such “reconciliation performances seek transition to a new moral order and may be understood as critical rites of passage in settler societies, transformative moments embodied in specific local and cultural repertoires and traditions” (Edmonds, 2016, p. 8). Indigenous reenactment of past sufferings, trials, and violence may take on a particular tenor in the form of solemn, commemorative pilgrimages. For example, in North America, a ritual reenactment known as the Future Generations Ride, originally titled the Sitanka Wokiksuye, involves over 100 Lakota horse riders and allied others, who reenact the freezing and long journey of Chief Big Foot from Cherry Creek to Wounded Knee, the site of massacre by the US military on 29 December 1890. As a pilgrimage of suffering, it is offered as a public, transformative rite of endurance, which can be understood as a form of “solemn reenactment” and “ritual historicising” (Greenia, 2014, pp. 47–70, 51). All such performative reenactments are enlisted for powerful and affective processes of social transformation. They are thus crucial to the radical political work of reconstructing history for the purpose of building affective engagement between people and, when authorized at the national level, between citizens and the state, in moves toward new postcolonial socialities (production of historical meaning). At the same time, however, reconciliation is perennially fraught, and for some Indigenous peoples and allied others in settler nations, reconciliation has become a dirty word. With its heavy politics of consensus, reconciliation can be symbolic only, and shut down the space of the political. Reconciliation as a state-based and top-down social program, with its associated performances, can therefore be highly repressive and in fact reinforce colonial hegemonies as a poor symbolic substitute for actual and substantive reparations and real social change. Indigenous political activists may therefore use reenactment to radically challenge and reject the process of reconstructing the past that is so crucial to the consensus work of reconciliation in settler-colonial societies today. Veteran Maori activist Tame Iti’s fiery reenactment of the New Zealand Land wars during the 2005 visit of Treaty of Waitangi commissioners to Tūhoe lands, for example, sought to radically interrupt the consensus politics of the Treaty of Waitangi and the mythic representation of it as compact for the nation. Recalling the violent past that his people suffered in front of TV cameras, Iti’s aim was to have the commissioners experience fire and violence directly and be both witnesses to and participants in the colonial past. Harnessing the politics of anger and resentment (Coultard), the Tūhoe reenacted the 1860s-scorched earth policy of the New Zealand government and the raupatu, the confiscation of their lands, asserting “We did not sign a treaty … we did not surrender!” This was a strategic piece of history-making and mediatized protest—part play on the savage spectacle, part counter-colonial intervention, part retelling of the past (Edmonds, 2016, p. 159). Indigenous reenactors therefore both refute and revision reconciliatory performances in order to assert and re-enliven the historical and cultural dimensions of their sovereignties and work them into new forms of political action in the name of peace-building and countercolonial resistance. These performances frequently shift between the local, national, and global. While some events remain grounded in specific local concerns, others address issues of the national via localized issues and practices; yet others self-consciously locate themselves within globalized communication networks of media and Pan-Indigenous political action in order to strengthen their presence within a discourse of global rights and within rights-based institutions (Edmonds, 2016; Phipps, 2009). 118

Indigeneity

In a perceptive exploration of the encounter between history, performance, and colonialism, Diana Taylor reminds us of the critical political and interventionist work of embodied Indigenous performance, which “transmits memories, makes political claims, and manifests a group’s sense of identity.” Drawing attention to the asymmetries of political and public culture in colonized societies and her quest to examine the relationships between “embodied performance and the production of knowledge”; she argues that “if performance does not transmit knowledge only the literate and powerful could claim social memory and identity” (Taylor, 2003, p. xvii.). Clearly, such reenactment work speaks directly to the tensions between Indigenous voices and experiences, and their material and oral histories, as opposed to text-based European accounts of the past, where “writing has become the guarantor of existence itself.” Through embodied performance, including forms of reenactment, historical and social memory and cultural identity are reimagined by Indigenous people through affective performances both with and against the state. As Taylor asks, if we “look through the lens of performed, embodied behaviors, what would we know that we do not know now? Whose stories, memories, and struggles might become visible? What tensions might performance behaviors show that would not be recognized in texts and documents?” (Taylor, 2003, p. xvii). The stakes are high in these performances of reconciliation as they invite radical bordercrossings, which demand both trust and risk. They have a fraught and recursive dialogue with the past and are precarious cross-cultural meetings. Here, Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples frequently stand in for their own ancestors as they face past violence together (Edmonds, 2016, 2017). As Roxana Waterson (2009) notes, in such performances “we are at the extreme end of the risk continuum, since these are rites in which the stakes are high, there are no comforting precedents to fall back on, some might be at best reluctant participants,” and “participants cannot always know the outcome of the success of a performance in advance.” The intersubjective, experimental, and precarious nature of such reenactments is highlighted here. Such performances therefore emerge as new cross-cultural sites of negotiation, which draw on complex and nuanced genealogies of Indigenous diplomacy, culture, and knowledge, just as they draw on a European cultural repertoire of diplomacy. These are not akin to medieval reenactments, which are creative anachronisms that are distant from time and place. Rather, such enactments emerge as emotionally supercharged retellings or subversions of specific local histories; they are grounded in community, and in deep genealogies of family, communal memory, and place.They are highly risky events, where descendants of Indigenous peoples and settlers face each other, and/or work together, or walk together, refuse each other, call the state to account, and offer a different order of national justice and possible new futures. Embodied, affective Indigenous reenactments, then, as praxis, constitute a site of risk and exploration and exist as a critical postcolonial alternative to traditional linear, legal, and text-based renderings of history (archive). This emphasis on praxis treats performance not only as an “aesthetic medium” and a way of fashioning and declaring identity, but also as “a system of learning, storing and transmitting knowledge” (Taylor, 2003, p. 175). Further, as Gilbert writes, “communal memory, a key concern in many Indigenous societies, builds contingently from such knowledge systems, reiterating the embodied basis of cultural transmission” (Gilbert, 2013, p. 26). In these ways then, such powerful, embodied performances can reveal “the disparity between history as it is discursively transmitted and memory as it is publicly enacted by the bodies that bear its consequences” (Gilbert, 2013, p. 26).This is the vital, socially emancipatory, and transformative power of Indigenous reenactment.

Further reading Agnew,V., and Lamb, J., 2010; Casey, M., 2012; Coulthard, G., 2014; Johnson, M., 2011; Konuk, K., 2004.

119

24 LIVING HISTORY David Dean

Living history is both a movement and a practice that seeks to simulate how lives were lived in the past by reenacting them in the present. The impulse to embody the past in the present through performance, re-storying the past through poetry, prose, drama, dance, music, or ritual, is a shared human experience, found in all cultures and at all times. As a movement, however, living history is conventionally traced to the open-air folk museums that became prevalent in Europe, particularly Scandinavia, in the late 19th century. Associated with the nationalist project seeking to delineate boundaries and peoples, open air museums such as Skansen in Sweden (1891) and Norway’s Norsk Folkemuseum (1894) were also responding to fears that pre-industrial cultures (language, customs, practices of everyday life) were either disappearing or were threatened by external forces. Open air museums focused primarily on tangible heritage, particularly buildings and furnishings, although folk music performances, dances, and cultural events such as craft demonstrations were often staged. As an ethnographic practice, the construction of open-air museums involved the identification of representative period pieces that could be moved to a central location and reassembled in order to maximize exposure to local publics. As such, they can be seen as part of the larger project associated with other disciplinary impulses associated with governmentality, such as museums, world fairs, libraries, and shopping malls (Bennett, 1995). As forms of historical reenactment, open air museums were largely static experiences: visitors were passive consumers of reconstructed or reassembled heritage sites and of the dance, music, or craft demonstrations put on show. Similar nationalist, protectionist, and traditionalist impulses lay behind the formation of the first open air living history museums in North America. Sites such as Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia (1926), Old Sturbridge Village (1946), and Plimouth Plantation (1947) in Massachusetts featured costumed interpreters as well as heritage buildings, performances, and activities. Many more such sites were created after World War II, such as Fortress Louisbourg and Upper Canada Village in Canada (both 1961), Historic Fort Snelling in the United States (1970), and Beamish in England (1972), and can now be found in almost every country. Moreover, many museums have adopted living history reenactments as a regular part of the visitor experience. Seeking to reenact past lives by practicing everyday activities, using first-person interaction with visitors, living history is a self-conscious attempt to represent past lives as they were actually lived. Although aware of the limits of historical knowledge and the inability to fully

120

Living history

capture the experience of the dead through the simulations of the living, practitioners and advocates of living history often make claims that participating in these reenactments closes historical distance, enabling visitors to feel like they have stepped back in time (Anderson, 1984; Allison, 2016). In his reflections on “resurrectionism,” British historian Raphael Samuel observed that living history assumes “events should be reenacted in such a way as to convey the lived experience of the past” (1994, p. 176). For most living history practitioners, this translates into the belief that in order to redo past lived experience authentically, a good deal of effort and attention must be paid to historical accuracy (authenticity). Performing in the first person is considered to be the purest way of achieving this goal and practitioners have been especially preoccupied with accuracy and authenticity, usually conflating the two or assuming that the first ensures that visitors will experience the second (Snow, 1993; Handler and Gable, 1997; Gapps, 2010). First-person interpreters adopt a role, usually of a known person from the period and who has a certain relationship to the historic site. First-person interpreters wear clothes that are newly made but contemporary to the time their adopted persona lived.Their bodies are situated in spaces that are as close to the original as possible, they use objects that are authentic reproductions or originals in their daily activities, and try to replicate original movements, gestures, and actions. First-person interpreters speak in the present tense and refer to themselves as “I,” using only period appropriate accent, intonation, and vocabulary (embodiment). The degree to which such living history performers have the freedom to deviate from scripts and training manuals varies (narrative). New insights into the working lives of interpreters have been a feature of recent scholarship on living history reenactment. Like many workers, interpreters play games to get them through the workday, but uniquely at living history sites, these focus on authenticity, with interpreters trying to outdo each other with the accuracy of their costumes, accessories, or actions. This playfulness can, however, turn into a Foucauldian world of self-discipline and surveillance, where autonomy, spontaneity, and unauthorized scenarios are policed (Tyson, 2013) (play; gaming). Researchers who have conducted interviews with reenactors at living history sites, or who have participated in reenactments themselves, have observed that the pursuit of historical accuracy varies. All reenactors conduct research, or draw on research carried out by interpretative planners, and focus their attention on getting the look of the past right. This is generally achieved by turning to original sources for information about appearance, materiality, and behavior. Yet, as Hander and Gable (1997) found at Plimouth Plantation, and Tyson (2013) at Historic Fort Snelling, sometimes manuals offered to living history trainees contain secondary sources—modern historian’s interpretations—without distinguishing them from period sources. In effect, living history interpreters enact scenarios in which archive and repertoire become entangled (Taylor, 2003; Schneider, 2011) (archive). When it comes to manufacturing clothing or accessories, some living history reenactors will insist on using only original materials and methods, while others will compromise as they see fit or as their own needs might require. Scholars of American Civil War reenactors uncovered tensions between “hardcore” reenactors—those who were willing to go to any extreme to capture perceived historical accuracy (such as using real blood or reshaping their bodies to mirror bloated corpses)—and “farbs”—reenactors able and willing to permit elements of their own contemporary lives to intrude in their performances of the recreated past (Horwitz, 1999; Schneider, 2011) (expertise and amateurism). Visitors also have a role to play in this adventure in time travel: they are seen by interpreters as coming from another place concurrent with the time period, not from the future. The

121

David Dean

purpose of first-person interpretation is to capture the audience’s imagination, to make them feel as if they are witnessing everyday life as if they were really present in the past. Although on occasion visitors might engage in activities to be taught certain skills or assist with certain tasks, interactions between interpreters and visitors at sites that adopt first-person interpretation are generally verbal, usually taking the form of question and answer, and occasionally becoming conversational. Through first-person interpretation, rendering historical accuracy as much as is possible in appropriate spaces, living history reenactment navigates historical distance by collapsing past and present. This past/present performance event is fixed in a specific time and space, performed by those who are committed to embodying the past through dress, language, gesture, and action. In seeking to replicate an original, reenactors are engaging in what performance studies scholars call “restored behaviour” (Schechner, 1985, pp. 7–35) in which the original is re-performed, not in quite the same way and never exactly replicating it, but in ways informed by repetition. During the performance event, reenactors are living past lives somatically and living them anew. Borrowing from theater scholar Freddie Rokem’s 2000 study of theatrical representations of the past, we might say that reenactors become “hyperhistorians,” reliving and reexperiencing the past they perform not in the same way as the original historical actors but perhaps in a similar way (Rokem, 2000, p. 13). As participants in the past/present performance event, they are also witnesses to the past that unfolds around them. This allows for deeper historical understanding and may even make historiographical interventions, informing existing, or offering new, interpretations of the past (production of historical meaning). Historical distance is experienced differently in another performance strategy adopted by living history sites: third-person interpretation. Rather than playing a particular historical role, third-person interpreters act as informed guides to past lives lived. They may be situated in actual or reconstructed historical spaces, and they may be in period costume, but they are under no obligation to move, act, or speak in a time-bound fashion. They speak of the past using past tenses and are free to make observations about the past and engage fully with what happened between the past that is being represented and the current day shared by interpreter and visitor. Indeed, the point of third-person interpretation is to engage visitors in discussion about the similarities and differences between past and present, encouraging deeper critical thinking than is enabled by first-person interpretation. In third-person interpretation, living history as reenactment resonates with R. G. Collingwood’s well-known assertion in The Idea of History (1946) that all historians reenact past experience: they undo history by time traveling in their minds from their own present to the past they seek to understand. Although living history reenactments most commonly take the form of either first- or thirdperson interpretation (and it is not unusual for the same site to use both strategies), they have always had an element of the hands-on, learning from doing through an approach known as second-person interpretation. Conventionally this involves visitors trying out a particular activity, be it firing a musket, churning butter, or ringing church bells, all under the careful observation and instruction of an interpreter. They may even engage a first-person interpreter in conversation by themselves, acting the role of someone from the appropriate period. This participatory form of living history allows visitors a degree of agency, albeit limited and constrained because the experience is carefully designed for them. At Connor Prairie in Indiana, for example, the public takes on the generic role of a fugitive slave, and work its way around a 19th-century village through a series of carefully orchestrated and managed encounters to discover its likely fate at the end of the journey (Figure 24.1). Where visitors are released from such structured

122

Living history

Figure 24.1 Screenshot from Follow the North Star, a participatory museum theater experience that recreates some of the conditions faced by fugitive slaves in Indiana as they sought freedom in the North, Conner Prairie, Indiana. Source: www.connerprairie.org/things-to-do/events/ follow-the-north-star.

environments, able to exercise a higher degree of historical agency, then there is considerable potential for achieving a greater degree of historical consciousness and historical understanding (Magelssen, 2007; Walvin, 2010). There are many motivations that drive individuals and families to participate in living history reenactments. Some play roles from the past or visit the past as a form of escapism from the present, a therapeutic response to the trials, tribulations, and traumas of daily life. As well as learning about the past and developing new skills, many of those interviewed by researchers speak of living history permitting them to explore emotions and feelings that otherwise would be elusive. Others reference the satisfaction gained by indulging nostalgic urges, or that locating themselves in another time and space gives them a sense of belonging and community (Braedder et al., 2017) (practices of reenactment). Some reenactors experience a deep connection between their contemporary lives and those they perform, as did members of marginalized groups in Paris performing communards in Peter Watkins’s 2000 historical drama La Commune (2001). The ways in which living history reenactments negotiate historical distance, historical consciousness, and historical understanding are something they share with other forms of reenactment, be they formalized and carefully organized battle reenactments or the more informal cultural reenactments such as playing a medieval or Renaissance role as a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism (larp; battle; gaming). Living history is also found in historical reality television shows and historical simulation video games (gaming; documentary). What all these forms of living history share is a significant degree of theatricality, where it is not only

123

David Dean

the ­costumes, objects, and buildings that matter, but also the performers and performances ­themselves (performance and performativity).

Further reading Allison, D. B., 2016; Anderson, J., 1984; Braedder, A., Esmark, E., Kruse, T., Nielsen, C.T., and Warring, A., 2017; Johnson, K., 2015a; Magelssen, S., 2007; Schneider, R., 2011; Taylor, D., 2003; Tyson, A. M., 2013.

124

25 MARTYRDOM Martin Treml

The philosopher Socrates was sentenced to death by the People’s Assembly of Athens in 399 bc for allegedly seducing young people, and he, convinced of his innocence, calmly accepted this judgment. He has been regarded since then as the prototype for someone who is willing to die the “noble death”—the death in good conscience—of someone who refuses to relinquish their convictions even in the face of utmost violence (van Henten and Avemarie, 2002). In many religious cultures, a person who dies such a heroic death is called a “martyr,” derived from the Greek μάρτυς, “witness;” the Islamic martyr is also a “witness” (Arabic shahid). Ideally, the following happens: a tyrant inflicts on the martyr a heroic death that is violent, agonizing, public (as it takes place in the arena or on a main square), and therefore spectacular. The martyr’s death belongs to the “theatre of horror” (van Dülmen, 1991). It is not contingent, but always significant. Although there might be martyrs everywhere, it is only in the Western cultures of religion that they appear in an epidemic form—in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and their filiations such as the Baha’i, a new prophetic religion that emerged from Shi’ite Islam in Persia during the 19th century (Dehghani, 2011). Because they do not want to abandon the ancestral practices, the “laws of the fathers” (Greek πατρίοι νόμοι; Hebrew tora), martyrs act as examples of faith (Latin exempla fidei) or sanctify the name of God (Hebrew qiddush ha-shem) by their death. Whereas the tyrant is anxious to make the body of the martyr disappear following torture, interrogation, and cruel execution, the martyr’s relatives and followers try everything to save the body, at least partially, and to bury it solemnly. The mortal remains later become relics, just like the martyr becomes a saint. The martyr’s tomb turns into a place of pilgrimage where miracles happen and the sick are healed. Believers want to be buried there in order to eternally repose in the immediate vicinity of the now holy martyr. Christianity has long been credited with the origin and formation of the martyr cult. Since ancient times, it has harbored strong traditions of worshipping martyrs in images and text collections (so-called martyrologies), martyr acts, and legends. Christianity also knows long periods of martyrdom, such as during antiquity, the Reformation, and on modern missionary campaigns, as well as during the communist and Nazi tyrannies of the 20th century.Yet, science, philosophy, and politics also recognize the heroic death in terms of the unconditional task, self-conviction, or special mission undertaken by the martyr. Whoever dies in such a way becomes a hero of progress, truth, and ideological struggle, and is thus actually immortal, for the martyr lives on in cultural memory. Under secularization, the figure of the martyr has by no means disappeared 125

Martin Treml

(Weigel, 2007). On the contrary, since 2001, it has been possible to speak of its mighty return, even though 9/11 represents an epochal threshold only for secularized Christian cultures. Since then it has nevertheless been possible to observe how conflicts over religious symbols turn into political ones, with consequences for the figure of the martyr. The popular notion of the martyr was born in Rome, so it is the Latin church of the West that gave it its final shape and established the secularized forms that survived the schism of the Reformation unscathed. Within cultural memory, the martyr has ever since been firmly connected with the unconditional acceptance of suffering unto death by terrible torture, inflicted by tyrants’ servants, by wild predators, or by murderous apparatuses and devious devices. Churches are full of pictures of saints bearing both the palm, symbol of their final victory, and the instrument by which they were cruelly killed.Yet from its very beginnings, the figure of the martyr has occupied two diametrically opposed forms: the warlike martyr and the quietist martyr who renounces violence. The Jewish protomartyrs, the Maccabees (who were also quickly incorporated into Christianity), were both. During the 160s bc they opposed the profanation of the Jerusalem Temple and fought a war against the Hellenizing policy of the Seleucid overlords and their collaborators in Jerusalem (Bikerman, 1947). Not only were Hannah and her seven sons violently killed, but so, too, were fighters who wanted to eradicate this disgrace by the sword, hoping thereby for immortality (cf. 2 Maccabees 7). In modern Turkish, there is a linguistic distinction (going back to its Arab and Aramaic etymology) between şehit, a soldier who dies on the battlefield, and şahit, a witness, but both are martyrs and figures of the same rank. The victim who passively suffers violence and death is equivalent to the fighter who falls in battle, even if this distinction seems to fundamentally differentiate Christianity from Islam. As different as they may seem at first glance, the two versions of the martyr coalesce in the context of their struggles, albeit in different ways.Their fights are always absolute battles, whether waged against beasts, tyrants, Satan, or absolute evil. This applies to all Western religions, for even if the figure of the suicide attacker has only reappeared in Islam since the 1980s after its beginnings in the Middle Ages and the early modern era, it has been notorious for some time (Reuter, 2004). Christianity also knows the miles Christi, the soldier for Christ and faith: “In those religions in which the religious and the political goals come together as one, all religiosi are also milites and war is the ultima ratio of all” (Harnack, 1981, p. 28). Often the best, most eager, savage fighter became a martyr—at least that is what the military saints of the Byzantine church are like. One of them is Saint George, one of the most frequently depicted martyrs in Byzantine art since the 4th century, who killed a dragon and an emperor alike (Maisuradze, 2007). Within Christian martyrology, Saint George is often paired with Saint Demetrius, as on the west façade of San Marco in Venice (Horsch and Treml, 2011) (Figure 25.1). The relief there shows the saint in Roman uniform, which displays “the officer’s sash tied in the Hercules knot” (Kantorowicz, 1965, p. 20). Demetrius and George helped Western Christianity during the Crusades; they are both fighters and martyrs—at least for a Christian consciousness as far west as Venice. Conversely, on closer examination, one finds within Islam a multifaceted tradition in which the martyr in battle represents only one of various figures who have been shaped in specific historical contexts, handed down and transformed to the present day.The history of religion is here an echo of the different primal scenes, which for Christianity is the execution of the Son of God on the cross, and for Islam is the fratricidal war (a conflict that has even been repeated several times for the Shi’ites). Every culture of religion has a history of persecution, but each occurs in a different way. The figure of the martyr marks a transition between passivity and activity, pre-modernity and modernity, Orient and Occident, politics and poetics, violence and weakness. Positions that are otherwise generally fixed and appear to be non-negotiable are annulled or at least ­redefined 126

Martyrdom

Figure 25.1  Relief depicting Saint George, 11th century, façade of St. Mark’s Basilica, Venice. Source: Martin Treml.

by the martyr, who often connects the different cultures of religion more than separates them. Martyrs are hybrids, to use a term from current cultural studies. They die for a faith that is not only their own. The history of the origin and separation of Judaism and Christianity, in particular, offers numerous examples of this, up to the adoption of literary traditions and topoi. Sometimes it is unclear whether the noble death belongs to a Jewish or a Christian martyr (Boyarin, 1999). Martyrs make a connection with the unconditional and voluntary devotion of the sacrifice. Usually, this is solemnly and publicly carried out in the sign of the renunciation of the martyr’s own life for the survival of the group for which this sacrifice is offered; the group is often a mainly spiritual community, like most Christian confessions after the Reformation. However, the purpose for which the martyr dies is variable, and God may be replaced by the nation, love—a theme common to both Arabic poetry and European opera (Pannewick, 2004)—or something similar. Such a shift has occurred in secularized Christian culture, too. Saint Sebastian, a Roman centurion, has been converted recently into the main figure of a queer love cult, due to his bodily appearance and the fact that he was pierced by arrows which he did not resist. Pathos becomes passion, and Saint Sebastian, the military saint, turns into the sign of a joyous and pure will to suffer for love. This raises the question of whether martyrs are regarded as role models, or whether they just seem epidemic through infection. Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music, died as a martyr around 200 ce and was followed by 400 other young people from the Roman upper class. She has thus become uncanny and ambivalent; she might be difficult to control, like the undead, zombies who want to drink blood, or other evil spirits. Martyrs often appear in groups, but 127

Martin Treml

sometimes they are isolated, sacred, and cursed figures, in the double sense of the Latin sacer (Benveniste, 2016). Martyrs draw a trail of blood through the history of religion and culture, which often allows victims and perpetrators to interchange. As a rule, opposing religious cultures (confessions in Christianity or denominations in Islam) negate or deny each other’s martyrs during conflicts. These martyrs are considered only apostates or heretics whose deaths were carried out appropriately. The Church Father Tertullian compares the suffering of the martyrs with war for this reason (Apologeticum 50:1), and the rule of Saint Benedict describes the monks as a “spiritual army” (milita spiritualis). Already for ancient philosophy, life, especially that of the philosopher, is like the battle of the soldier (Plato, Apology, 28d; Socrates refers here to Achilleus, the Greek arch-hero). This cultural and religious-historical material suggests several approaches to a theory of the martyr-as-reenactment. The first arises from the fact that public and heroic dying often did not result in deterrence as anticipated by the tyrant. On the contrary, it contributed to the attractiveness of the martyr, in the sense of repetition and imitation. The famous statement of Tertullian, “the blood of Christians is seed,” implies exactly that (Apologeticum 50:13). The medium of this heroic death was the traditional text (Pannewick, 2004) or the local, stationary cult image (Belting, 1997). Now that the images have become secular, but also ubiquitous, they have lost their aura, but not their effectiveness. Their proliferation occurs directly and worldwide. They thus become components of a global pop culture that has absorbed the traditional cultures of religion, only to release them again as transformed images, whether as secularized or resacralized ones. In the latter case, images have become all the more powerful because they are now able to release the explosive power of the martyr within the realm of the political. René Girard pursues another line of thought on the martyr in his reflections on the scapegoat, the figure who is expelled or killed as a substitute. His starting point is the distinction between two types of texts: one in which the scapegoat appears as a structure without being thematized as such, and one that is able to uncover the mechanism of persecution itself. The former, so-called “persecution texts,” are mythological or historical and have a magical effect. The latter, exclusively biblical texts (Prophets, Psalms, and the Gospels), show that the scapegoat, who is de facto innocent, is always the sole victim who is killed for the benefit of all others. Notwithstanding the fact that Girard exhibits a Christian bias, his reflections are still illuminating because they point out various aspects of the figure of the martyr, which almost urge reenactment. The most important aspect is the connection between guilt and innocence and between murder and its revenge, which is both inscrutable and indissoluble, and therefore demand endless repetition. Further, because the martyrs of one side represent murderers for the other, the thirst for blood in reenactment only changes the mode and makes victim and perpetrator indistinguishable. Reenactment becomes forced repetition (trauma). Another theory of the martyr-as-reenactment can be derived from Michel Foucault’s late work. What he calls a “practice” historicizes certain forms of rationality and, like discourse, is always orientated toward power and “truth-telling.” Here, practice not only renews sets of disciplines but also is located beyond them. By it, moments of freedom also become possible. A practice in this sense is more closely related to what Foucault calls souci de soi, “care of oneself,” which lies somewhere between an ethics and an aesthetics of existence. The care inherent in the concept of practices appears not so much as a normalizing form of taking care of the self, but as a mode of self-fashioning which is not necessarily always fully conscious. It aims at different sets of subjectivity, not at one that is “normal” for everybody, even if it is established as a new norm for some. However, this self-care can also turn into its opposite (or at least does so from the outside) when, for instance, it becomes death for a martyr. Highest care of the self now becomes lethal. Of course, this is the ultimate act of every “truth-telling,” which Foucault called 128

Martyrdom

p­ arrhesia, drawing on ancient philosophical and Christian traditions. Although an individual practice, parrhesia can become generalized and thereby spawn reenactment, including reenactment of the martyr.That parrhesia and the martyr may form but one practice is best illustrated by the fact that at epochal thresholds, not only truth-telling but also the heroic death of the martyrs become epidemic, as in Antiquity, during the Reformation, and in the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.

Further reading Bikerman, E., 1947 [1935]; Dehghani, S., 2011; Dülmen, R. van, 1991 [1987]; Harnack, A. von, 1981 [1905]; Kantorowicz, E., 1965 [1961]; Maisuradze, G., 2007; Reuter, C., 2004 [2002]; van Henten, J. W., and Avemarie, F., 2002.

129

26 MATERIAL CULTURE Stefanie Samida

Things are our constant companions; they are all around us. One can perceive their color, form, weight, surface, and texture with all senses—one can look at them, touch or weigh them, and sometimes hear, taste, or smell them. We usually see them in terms of what they can do for us and how they affect us. We are dependent on things. This is not only true for everyday life, but also for numerous modes of historical enquiry, such as practices of reenactment. In this sense, doing history is always connected to things and our relationship to them. While material culture was once neglected by scholars and of interest only to disciplines like socio-cultural anthropology and archaeology, the field has gained ground since the 1990s, especially in the humanities. In the UK and North America, a whole new discipline has been established: material culture studies (Hicks and Beaudry, 2010; Tilley et al., 2006; Samida et al., 2014). However, neither material culture studies nor disciplines like anthropology and archaeology have dealt extensively with things, their use, and their specific meanings in historical culture. Only recently have scholars begun to analyze the meaning of material culture in reenactment (Daugbjerg, 2014; 2016; Kalshoven, 2010; Kobialka, 2013), in which reenactors temporarily immerse themselves in an imaginary past so that they experience it with their senses in the present. The experience of immersion depends in three ways on material culture, which includes costumes, equipment, historical sites, and built environments. First, in concrete reenacted historical situations, the social use of things, the aesthetic experience of them, and their meaning in particular moments are all of utmost importance for what Gumbrecht (2004) refers to as the “production of presence.” Things make cultural events and aesthetic experiences tangible, such that they can impact recipients’ senses, emotions, and bodies. Second, the relationship between humans and things in reenactment subcultures influences the degree and type of immersion that a given reenactment can achieve. Finally, things “communicate.”This is of great significance for reenactment, since it involves experiencing things, making things, and mediating history through things. “Thing,” “object,” “artifact,” “material culture,” and “materialized culture” are often used as synonyms both in everyday language and in scholarly contexts. “Material culture” is one of the most contentious among them. It implicitly suggests that there is also an intangible culture that might be considered to be of greater value.The alternative term, “thing,” can be understood as a primary category and includes manmade objects (artifacts), as well as natural things and immobile objects, like houses, monuments, and caves. 130

Material culture

When exploring human relationships with things, the anthropologist addresses their cultural and symbolic meanings, which involve the social and historical contexts of their use. Things are embedded in our lived environment, they affect us, and their meaning depends on their context. These are central issues because things are mute, thus making it impossible to interpret them in themselves or simply on the basis of their material composition and form. Scholars have the tools to describe things and their characteristics (material, shape, age, and wear) as well as their use, meaning in different phases of their existence, and how they are perceived. In his article “The Cultural Biography of Things,” Igor Kopytoff (1986, p. 66–67) pointed out that scholars should ask questions about things just like they ask questions about people. Thus, biographies of things make it possible to draw conclusions about manufacturers and owners of things. However, the significance of a hat, for example, is not, or only to a very limited degree, based exclusively on its shape and material, but rather on its function and on the interaction of shape, material, and function. In the context of reenactment, the shape, material, and function of things are important objects of inquiry; the same applies to their concrete practical use during reenactment. From a praxeological perspective, things are far more than mere objects of symbolization (Hörning, 2015, p. 170). In anthropological discussions about material culture, the French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour and his actor network theory (ANT) play an important role. Latour developed ANT in the context of science and technology studies in the late 1970s. The theory attributes things with the capacity to act, and things are thus referred to as “actants” (Latour, 1996, p. 369). In so doing, Latour raises things, or nonhumans generally, to the same level as social actors. In this sense, material objects are anthropomorphized and obtain subject status. Drawing on these ideas, other theorists emphasize the “obstinacy” of things (Hahn, 2015). Due to their material and morphological characteristics, things suggest to potential users, specific ways of handling them, a relationship called “affordance” by anthropologists. The close relationship between material culture and reenactment can be seen on three levels. First, there is the meaning of things for actors while performing reenactments: things do not lie “silently” in a museum showcase; instead, they are actively used and create an experience for actors. Second, there is the meaning of things within the reenactment community: here, the main focus is on the making of objects. And third, there is the meaning of things as presented to an audience, which involves a degree of mediation. All levels are interrelated because in all cases, the question of authenticity is key. The things used in reenactments are not usually originals but rather replicas or reproductions. In practice, this distinction is of secondary importance because the things in reenactments matter in ways far beyond questions of representation and symbolism (Daugbjerg, 2016, p. 159). They are key to experiencing the past, which means things have to feel “real” (Otto, 2011, p. 191). This directs attention to details like the scratchiness of the clothing, uncomfortableness of the shoes, or unfamiliarity of physical work. For reenactors, presence is created by their bodily involvement—of being present and experiencing—and its interaction with things. It is important for reenactors to be in touch with things that have a connection to (imagined) past times: “The physicality of sites and materials thus works in concert with their human invigorators in bringing about such multi-layered moments and experiences” (Daugbjerg, 2014, p. 730). Affective engagement, “authentic” feelings, or Gumbrecht’s notion of presence as mediated by things are central to reenactment. Cornelius Holtorf (2010; 2013), similar to Andreas Huyssen (2003), uses the term “pastness” to describe this phenomenon. Holtorf depicts pastness as the “contemporary quality or condition of being past” (2010, p. 35).This special quality comes with the “perception of something being past.” Hence, it is not so much a question of a thing’s age or authenticity, but rather of perception and experience—a kind of “emanation of the past” or an 131

Stefanie Samida

evocation of something that no longer is. This concept is based on the significance and power of things and places. However, things do not only play an important role in reenactments themselves, but also in the preparation for reenactments. Many actors create artifacts by drawing on their own knowledge and skills and often stay true to original processes of production. This kind of “do it yourself ” (DIY) attitude can take on obsessive qualities (Handler, 1987, p. 340), as many reenactors insist that every detail has to be right. Things are assigned an almost sacral status and are given greater value than things that are simply bought: Wearing an outfit that is “just” bought rather than homemade signals insincerity and, to many reenactors, merely a superficial interest in reenactment (Kalshoven, 2010, p. 64) (expertise and amateurism). The DIY approach is thus not only testimony to the labor-intensive nature of the hobby for some individuals but also provides evidence of “authenticity,” a core concept within reenactment. The recreated and therefore authentic costume has a similar function for the reenactor as the footnote does for the historian (Gapps, 2009, p. 398).This authenticity of objects functions as a kind of currency in the world of reenactment and is hence a mark of distinction. Object authenticity bestows reputation and prestige within this subculture, and, beyond it, in the reenactor’s relation to institutions like museums and a wider public (Gapps, 2009, p. 398). However, the DIY attitude should also be seen against the background of the distribution of historical knowledge. The acquisition of specific skills for making things is beneficial for more than just the individual. Reenactors also consider bodily experience and the haptic handling of things to be a key element of their performances in front of an audience. Here, things are seen as educational tools (Samida, 2017). Reenactors can only convey the artifact, explain its significance, and answer visitor questions about the artifact’s uses if they have intensively engaged with what they have produced. In this sense, reenactors emphatically see themselves as real-life “showcases” of historical knowledge. Future research into the status of things in reenactment could invoke taking a processual approach and to focus to a greater extent on moments of “becoming.” The entangled interrelationships of actors, as well as entities such as things, space, and atmosphere, need to be considered. It is precisely this complex and open network of relationships, interactions, and transformations that should be analyzed. This special assemblage of humans, things, and other entities creates something new.

Further reading Daugbjerg, M., 2014; Daugbjerg, M., 2016; Hicks, D., and Beaudry, M.C. (eds.), 2010; Kobialka, D., 2013.

132

27 MEDIALITY Maria Muhle

The question of mediality, which in itself is an ambiguous notion, is at the core of reenactment practices from at least two different perspectives—a duality that reflects back on the polysemy of the notion of mediality itself. The first, rather technical and more restricted perspective, concerns the mediality of reenactments, i.e., the complex question of what kind of medium a reenactment is (e.g., theater, performance, or film) and to what extent it relies on other media in order to be transmitted, accessed, archived, and re-reenacted (Lütticken, 2005). Considering classical historiographical reenactments (i.e., the authentic recreations of the pivotal events of Western history, such as decisive battles—Gettysburg, revolutions, the storming of the Winter Palace—or symbolic acts such as the planting of the American Flag in Iwo Jima), reenactments are to be understood as live mass media spectacles addressed to a wide public in order to transmit a specific understanding of historical events and therefore of history (battle; living history). Thus, the question of transmission becomes crucial: if reenactment is meant to function as a (mass) medium of history, it necessarily relies on the historiographical operations of reception, storage, and transmission (archive). To consider reenactment a medium of history means then to tackle the question of mediality itself and to widen the scope of the term beyond its purely technical dimension: mediality not only refers to the technical dispositif of representation (TV, video, painting, sculpture, etc.) but also addresses the idea of mediation, mediacy, or intermediation itself. Here, the relation between reality and an image needs to confront its necessary mediatedness—in other words, the fact that the medial reality of reenactment can only be understood if we analyze the way it mediates (represents) a historical subject, which is in itself already very specific since it refers most commonly to historical battles or other “great events” involving mostly white male heroes, considered as crucial turning points in Western history (realism). That is, we need to ask how it has gained access to the event that is being reenacted (through source study, oral transmission, analysis of historical documents, etc.) and in what way it tries to conceal its own representative character (often by means of over-authentic representation that pays attention even to minor details) (evidence). Therefore, the second perspective on mediality is epistemological, inasmuch as it concerns the claim to truth that historiographical practices of reenactment often imply. Moreover, it is a negative understanding of mediality that is at stake here, since the practices of reenactment precisely tend to abolish the mediation between

133

Maria Muhle

the present and the past, and therefore the mediatedness—or mediality—of all past experience within the present. Both these aspects of the mediality of reenactments unfold against the backdrop of another duality that opposes the analysis of historical reenactments to media artistic practices of reenactment that exceed the more traditional notion, therefore also putting pressure on it, or directly challenging it (here one might consider the example of the reenactment of the miner strikes in Thatcher’s England by Jeremy Deller, filmed by Mike Figgis, that inverts the roles of the strikers and policemen and tends to re-establish a historical truth obstructed by the official historiography) (Horn and Arns, 2007). It is precisely this double character of reenactments—historiographic as well as media artistic—that will allow us to gain further insights into the mediality of their practices insofar their difference evolves around the mediatedness or unmediatedness of the reality they represent through reenactment.While the classical historiographic reenactments aim at a true and authentic representation of the past, the media artistic reenactments tend to introduce some error, false note, or variation within the reproduction in order to shed light on the fact that authentic reproduction is impossible and that there is always a creative, or subjective, surplus that ultimately deconstructs the conservative understanding of reenactment—and of history (art). For insofar as reenactment first describes a historiographic practice, it is related to reality in a specific manner, and thus needs to negotiate its relationship to truth, which often translates into the vividness of the reenactment and thus poses the question of the mode (the medium) of experiencing history (experience). For insofar secondly it also designates a media artistic practice, the status of aesthetic indefiniteness or openness is negotiated in a specific manner, either in the critical model as a deviation intentionally incorporated into the repetition from the beginning (Deller and Figgis), or as something unsuspected—a chance event or an “accident” within the representation—happening in the course of the performance of the reenactment. This relates the practices of reenactment to the notion of the “optical unconscious,” as developed by Walter Benjamin for the media of technical reproduction, photography, and film (Benjamin, 2008). To put it more schematically, while the classical reenactment strategies reconstruct history as a whole—and therefore ensure the continuation of the eternal return of the same—their artistic reformulations deconstruct this very idea of history: such critical reenactments thus highlight the deconstructable character of the historical logic, as well as the fact that the medium by or in which a history is written always participates in the process of making history. And while classical reenactments rely on an aesthetics of immersion (Curtis, 2008) that aims to establish a situation in which the reenacting agent/spectator can relive a non-mediated reality in order to create the possibility of identification with the historical spectacle, the contemporary media artistic reformulation introduces, in contrast, an aesthetics of documentarian mediation that allows for a critical point of view for the spectator, and triggers its ideological-critical awareness as to the construction of a conservative and identitarian history, as well as to the methods of an aesthetic of immersion itself (Muhle, 2013a), see Figure 27.1. Nevertheless, it seems that most media are reenactments even though they are aimed at criticizing a specific, dominant historiography by deconstructing it (for example, through the inversion of roles), ultimately only re-establishing it from another perspective without problematizing the claim to historical truth and therefore omitting the specifically mediatic dimension of reenactments. This dimension is, however, addressed by those reenactments that do not take a formulated difference between the reality and its representation as their starting point but that put forward the idea of a surplus or an excess that is produced within the

134

Mediality

Figure 27.1 Video stills from Chris Marker, The Last Bolshevik, 2003. Marker points to the making of historical documents through reenactment, in this case, the reenactment of the storming of the Winter Palace by N. Evreinov in 1920, and how the images of these representations are incorporated into the historical narratives as “authentic” documents, for example, as a book cover of the French translation of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (1967). Source: Documentaire sur grand écran.

reenactment. In this sense, non-Western popular reenactment practices can be illuminating: first, they are not based on a Western linear concept of history, therefore evading the question of progress and the idea of considering the reenactment a truthful representation, or fulfillment, of a past event. This leads, secondly, to a different approach to the depicted reality which is precisely not a relation of representation but rather of appropriation: appropriation of the practices of reenactment as well as of the reality that is being reenacted. A most striking example would be Jean Rouch’s Les Maîtres Fous (1954), the filming of a Hauka trance ritual in Ghana during which the Hauka appropriate the roles of the colonial masters as well as their technical media, i.e., the camera that Rouch operates under their orders, becoming part of the ritual (Taussig, 1993, p. 241). As Vanessa Agnew has pointed out, classical popular cultural reenactment practices prevail primarily in the Anglo-Saxon context—the largest and most historically significant reenactment is known to be that of the Battle of Gettysburg—and encompass quite diverse historiographical media: from theatrical and living history performances to museum exhibits, television programs, films, travelogues, and historiography (Agnew, 2004, p. 327). Nevertheless, their common methodology can be summed up as understanding representation in the mode of immersion, which aims at the production of possibilities of identification with the depicted event by covering up the (aesthetic) rupture between the represented and the representation through an illusion of authenticity. Agnew maintains that while this epistemological claim is problematic, it also conveys an “implicit charge to democratize historical knowledge” and to open up academic historiography to a “history from below” (Agnew, 2004, p. 335). Reenactment thus channels a different, affective historiography that presumes a sympathetic identification with the past that had already been formulated by British philosopher R. G. Collingwood in the 1940s. Understood from this second, epistemological perspective, the question of mediality is thus also at the core of the first explicit occurrence of the notion of reenactment within a historiographic context, namely in Collingwood’s The Idea of History (1946), which develops a philosophy of history in terms of “reenactment of past experience.” Reenactment, for Collingwood, means the “rethinking of past thought.” He claims that a satisfying knowledge of history, that is, of historical events, can only be achieved by reenacting these events or rather the situation

135

Maria Muhle

in which decisions of historical impact were taken—decisions that resulted in the subsequent events: When an historian asks “Why did Brutus stab Caesar?” he means “What did Brutus think, which made him decide to stab Caesar?”The cause of the event, for him, means the thought in the mind of the person by whose agency the event came about: and this is not something other than the event, it is the inside of the event itself. The processes of history are thus not a sequence of mere events but rather “processes of actions that have an inner side, consisting of processes of thought. All history is history of thought” which is “the reenactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind” (Collingwood, 1946, p. 215). Therefore, philosophy of history understood as reenactment ultimately only allows for the reenactment of an intellectual history, since, for Collingwood, reenacting is nothing other than rethinking historical thoughts. In order to make this rethinking possible, i.e., making thought available for being rethought, Collingwood needs to take refuge in what Paul Ricœur has designated and criticized as an ontological principle that states the identity of thoughts throughout history (Ricœur, 1985)—and that can be reformulated as the belief in a total transparency and therefore unmediatedness between the past and the present. Collingwood introduces the notion of an imagination a priori in order to justify historical representation that bypasses the documentarian paradigm (“sources”) inasmuch as the historical truth emanates from the mind of the historian who is “one with his time.” Siegfried Kracauer has criticized this understanding for which “the present moment virtually contains all the moments preceding it.” It is, he adds, precisely the immersion of the historian in his present situation that leads him not to acknowledge the necessary mediatedness of the past in the present (Kracauer, 1969, p. 64). To see reenactment as a process of rethinking past thought thus means to free history from any material, historical or temporal influences and to consider it something atemporal, awaiting its reenactment by which, if accurate enough, the historical event remains unchanged and untouched—the mediation between past and present replaced by its identification. This radical (and rather improbable) belief in the unmediatedness of historical reality, however, resonates with the classical reenactment practices that aim at an authentic, historicist reconstruction of a past event in order to assure its revived and immediate experience. If, therefore, the epistemological perspective on mediality brought forth by traditional reenactments seems highly controversial inasmuch it is connected to the belief in history as a meaningful whole, it might be more fruitful to turn to those forms of reenactments that directly address the mediatedness of all experience by remediating it—the experience—in different technological milieus or dispositions, such as film, theater, or performance. It is here that the question of mediality becomes more interesting, to the extent that reenactments across different media show how malleable and deconstructable the notion of historical truth ultimately is, and how naive a realism that appears to suppress any mediation between the past and the present experience, and the past and the present subject. This brings us back to the technological perspective on mediality or to the question of what kind of medium the reenactment itself is. If we think of reenactment as the medium of history, we acknowledge that history is itself always mediated and that it is therefore impossible to directly grasp the historical past. What makes history history is the fact that it needs to be narrated, documented, represented, reenacted—in order to be transmitted or transmittable. But to consider reenactment the medium of history also means to reflect on its own ephemeral character, 136

Mediality

insofar as the life situation of the reenactment always depends on several other media—those which transmit the past experience (sources) and those which record, memorize or store the present experience in order for it to become available for future re-experiences. The epistemological negation of mediality that is at the core of classical reenactments is thus the productive misunderstanding that allows us to look at the multiple medial layers—both epistemological and technological—that unfold by challenging the identitarian, conservative, and authenticist aesthetics and historiography of those reenactments.

Further reading Farocki, H., 2009; Geimer, P., 2005; Koch, G., 2003; Rau, M., 2009.

137

28 MEMORY AND COMMEMORATION Juliane Tomann

Memory, commemoration, and historical reenactment are closely related to one another. In a theoretical sense, all three terms refer to ways of representing the past in the present, both on an individual as well as a collective level.Yet this relationship can also be understood in a practical sense: the motivation of reenactors to perform past events is often deeply rooted in a need to preserve memory. This ranges from remembering ancestors and their communities to the commemoration of specific historical events, including battles, encampments, massacres, and disasters.Thus, it could tentatively be argued that reenactment is a bodily expression of memory situated in a concrete space in the present. However obvious the connection between memory and reenactment might seem, it remains a challenge to precisely define the relationship between reenactment as a social practice and the theoretical discourse on memory. While reenactment has become an object of systematic study only during the last two decades, the study of memory has been flourishing for the past four decades in the humanities.The field of memory studies has been institutionalized and incorporated into teaching programs and have developed a complex theoretical and interdisciplinary framework. Scholarly interest in reenactment has also increased, and reenactment studies are developing into an autonomous field. This entry will describe the different theoretical approaches to memory and explain differences and overlaps with the emerging field of reenactment studies. The vocabulary of memory studies embraces a multitude of terms used to describe the object of study: individual and collective ways of recalling and representing the past in the present as well as the intersections, relations, and interdependencies between the individual and collective levels. The dichotomy between individual memory and collective approaches to representing the past is a bone of contention in the field.The contemporary discipline of memory studies has been largely inspired by the rediscovery and rereading of the works of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945). Halbwachs was Émile Durkheim’s (1858–1917) student, and was influenced by the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859–1961) and by his own critical engagement with the work of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). As early as 1925, Halbwachs had challenged the very notion of individual memory, claiming that social context has an overwhelming impact on what individuals remember. In his understanding of social memory, the individual act of remembering is closely intertwined with memories of other family members and social groups that are communicated or otherwise transmitted to the individual and in turn serve as his or her frame of reference. Halbwachs further laid the groundwork for ­drawing a 138

Memory and commemoration

strong distinction between the notion of collective memory and professional historiography’s concept of history. Almost 60 years later, French historian Pierre Nora picked up this idea. Concerned about the waning of French national collective memory, Nora’s concept of “sites of memory” (lieux de mémoire) can be characterized as a response to this development. According to Nora, memory and history are opposed. At one end of the spectrum, he situates professionalized academic history and its claim to objectivity, which he thought had become a mere “representation of the past,” a “universal” form of recounting detached from social groups (Nora, 1989, p. 8). At the other end, Nora placed his own view of memory as something that is always related to and rooted in a social group, where it is relevant for the construction of identity on both a collective and individual level. For Nora, the interest in sites of memory, which he mapped and described in a large-scale project on France, is a compensation for “the loss of authentic, embodied, and embedded memory” (Assmann, 2006, p. 88). While the social dimension of memory has not lost its importance in more recent theories concerning forms of collective memory, German scholars Jan Assmann (Egyptology) and Aleida Assmann (English Studies) analyzed a different, cultural dimension of the phenomenon in the 2000s. In his works on ancient Egyptian cultures, Jan Assmann drew on concepts developed by the Belgian ethnologist and historian Jan Vansina (1929–2017) and distinguished between communicative and cultural memory. The former is based on everyday communication about the meaning of the past and is characterized by instability and disorganization. Communicative memories are strongly related to those who were alive during the remembered event and are defined by a short-term durability of around 80 to 100 years. In contrast, cultural memory consists of objectified culture, which includes texts, rites, images, buildings, and monuments that are all made to recall important events in the history of a group. Cultural memory refers to events of a pre-biographical past, which cannot be experienced by living individuals and thus has to be mediated by culture.The key claim is that cultural memory of the past is not randomly produced by social groups, but is a product of cultural mediation, primarily via visualization and textualization (Tamm, 2013, p. 461). Cultural memory positions the individual within a community that refers to events in the past to gain meaning, sense, and orientation for the present. Aleida Assmann further elaborates on Jan Assmann’s theory of cultural memory and distinguishes between three dimensions of memory: neuronal, social, and cultural memory (Assmann, 2006, p. 33).The first term belongs to the realm of individual memory, while the latter two characterize processes of collective memory. Because neuronal memory is individual, it is the least durable. Social memory is constructed over multiple generations of people who share, communicate, and narrate similar perceptions and worldviews; it can vanish with its carriers as it is not institutionalized. Cultural memory, on the other hand, is materialized in symbols and institutions, in texts, rites, pictures, and monuments. This culturally produced dimension of memory is transgenerational and stable, and it has a strong influence on group identity. Collective memory is thus characterized by overlapping terms: Aleida Assmann’s concept of social memory is more or less synonymous with Jan Assmann’s communicative memory (Tamm, p. 426), and both scholars refer to cultural memory as the symbolic, materialized, and institutionalized system of referring to and representing the past. In order to understand how cultural memory comes into being, Aleida Assmann provides us with two more terms: functional memory and storage memory (2006, p. 55). Storage memory is defined as a cultural archive that stores the material remains of the past, which, in the present, have lost their vital force and can thus be considered as being temporarily forgotten.While storage memory can be conceived of as a set of temporarily unused and unincorporated memories, functional memory has an active component that relies on repetition and is primarily operative in various symbolic practices like traditions, rites, and processes of canonization. The key 139

Juliane Tomann

distinction between the two forms of cultural memory is that of actualization (functional) and non-actualization (storage memory), from which follows that functional memory has the ability to produce meaning, while storage memory does not. Based on these seminal definitions of communicative and cultural memory, other approaches highlight the relationship between past and present and attend to sociocultural context and its influences on the ways in which individuals remember (Erll, 2017, p. 6). Jeffrey K. Olick distinguished between “two radically distinct ontological [phenomena]” of collective memory, claiming that the analysis of “collected memory” and “collective memory” requires different epistemological and methodological tools (Olick, 1999, p. 336). Olick defines “collected memory” as socially framed, aggregated individual recollections (for instance, those collected during an oral history study). Based on the individualistic principle, its study requires the methodological tools of social inquiry (survey, interviews) as well as psychology. “Collective memory,” on the other hand, refers to the cultural frames (symbols, objects, public practices) that exist beyond processes of individual remembering and define collectivities over time. Reenactment is then strongly connected to individual and collective forms of memory. As a commemorative act, reenactments revive past events in the present and thus (re)shape the memory of these events. However, as a social practice, reenactment does not exclusively fit into any single dimension of memory, as defined by the theorists. Different kinds of reenactment contain elements of the various categories. According to Aleida Assmann’s theoretical framework, reenactments belong to the active mode of representing the past. Because reenactment seeks to actualize past events and establish connections between past and present, it can be conceived of as part of functional memory. By referring to important battles and events in a nation’s or group’s past, it also sustains and reshapes collective memory. As a performance of past events, reenactment further contains aspects of communicative memory, for example, when war veterans or other eyewitnesses take part in a battle situation. Studies of reenactment must therefore carefully examine the attribution of a given reenactment to a particular type of memory and provide empirical evidence to support the respective categorization. Thus, conceptualizing reenactment wholly within the discourse of memory studies does not provide sufficient insight into the specificity of reenactment as a social phenomenon that addresses and represents the past. Even though the practice of reenactment is closely related to memory and commemoration, the term reenactment as such is rarely used within memory studies, which seems to lack a deeper understanding of its characteristics. Aleida Assmann, for instance, states that the strategies of repetition observable in embodied performances of myths, storytelling, music, dance, and ritual can help establish temporal continuity and store information. However, she relegates such strategies of repetition (reenactment) to indigenous societies exclusively, believing that cultures that use writing rely on external, non-embodied systems like media, images, and texts to store information in an enduring way. In his seminal work How Societies Remember, Paul Connerton describes commemorative ceremonies as ritualized “re-enactments of prior, prototypical actions” (p. 61). In general, commemorations as a distinctive form of collective memory contain the most similarities to reenactment as a social practice. Commemorative practices are said to be a vehicle of collective memory: They help constitute collectivity by emotionally inducing “people to experience past events vicariously and thereby imagine their secondhand knowledge of those events as living memory that they possess as members of a social group” (Saito, 2010, p. 637). Commemorations make use of the affective power of ritual “to prompt participants to generate mutual identifications as members of a social group” (Saito, 2010, p. 630). Despite general agreement on the link between commemoration and processes of identity construction, scholars of commemoration still debate the question

140

Memory and commemoration

of how participants of a commemorative act can be agents of memory without possessing firsthand experience. Sharon Macdonald stresses the performative dimension of ritual commemoration, drawing an analogy with speech acts that, according to Austin, “accomplish what they utter” (performance). Second, Macdonald underscores the importance of a sense of performance in commemoration and its similarities to theater, pointing to the significance of staging, scripts, acting, and props (2013, p. 201). While commemorations reinforce group identities and focus mostly on positive events in the past, it is a much more difficult endeavor to publicly commemorate ambiguous or controversial events. There is a comparison with reenactment to be drawn here, as it is similarly difficult to properly address controversial events in hobby reenactments. Reenactments that adopt a more explicitly artistic approach, such as Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave (2001), have a greater ability to adequately grapple with controversial events of the past. To conclude, it can be said that despite their differences, memory studies—and scholarly work on practices of commemoration in particular—share some common features with the study of reenactment. With its emphasis on the personal, bodily experience of an imagined past, reenactment is often located within a larger shift from analytical to experiential ways of understanding the past and as a backlash against purely cognitive modes of historical representation. Reenactment’s representation of past events as a physical and personal experience and its inclusion of characters that history may have neglected makes it closely related to the discourse of memory.

Further reading Olick, J. K.,Vinitzky-Seroussi,V., and Levy, D., 2011; Connerton, P., 1989; Assmann, A. 2006; Zerubavel, E., 2003; Kannsteiner W., 2002.

141

29 MIMESIS Kader Konuk

The concept of mimesis sheds light on reenactment as an aesthetic practice of appropriating past realities and reveals the fundamental link between the past event and its representation in the present. The debate about the nature and function of mimesis goes back to Plato and Aristotle, who addressed the relationship between the idea, the real, and the represented in visual art, historiography, literature, and performance. Essentially, the debate shows that mimesis is the foundation upon which concepts of reality rest, focusing on the ways in which an object is translated into another medium.While Plato in the 4th century bc treats mimesis (derived from mimesthai, to imitate) as a process that is doomed to fail because it cannot overcome the difference between the original and its copy, his student Aristotle emphasizes the creative dimension of mimesis. To Aristotle we owe the identification of mimesis as a fundamental feature of human behavior, as well as the recognition of mimesis as a creative act. Aristotle defines the product of mimesis not in terms of its deficiency with regards to the original but rather in terms of its potential. Mimesis is central to understanding how reality is conceived of, interpreted, and represented. The heightened realism of 17th-century trompe l’oeil paintings, for example, aims to create verisimilitude through imitation and perspective; 19th-century realism in literature and art, on the other hand, not only conveys the ideal of mimesis in terms of resemblance and an emphasis on detailed representation but underscores the role of the writer as a mediator of everyday life across different strata of society.Within the context of 19th-century realism in Europe, mimesis expresses a particular ideological approach to literary and visual representation. Literary critic Erich Auerbach points out that the didactic purpose of French realist authors such as Balzac, committed to the serious treatment of everyday life, opened up criticism of the contemporary, bourgeois world ([1946] 2003, p. 490). Auerbach argues that reality is not a given but contingent upon a particular concept of the world. More importantly, however, he argues that the concept of the real is contingent upon a specific concept of time and history. Auerbach’s insight into the narrative dimension of time and history contributed to a decade-long debate among historians and philosophers Hayden White (Metahistory, 1973), Paul Ricoeur (Time and Narrative, 1984), David Lowenthal (The Past is a Foreign Country, 1999), F. R. Ankersmit (2000), and others about the relevance of literary theory for historical writing and theory. The practice of reenactment reveals various modes of relating to the past as a referent, ranging from imitating what is believed to be an intrinsic reality in the past to an imaginative play with the referent that suggests a less restrictive understanding of the relationship between 142

Mimesis

historical event and its representation. White’s understanding of history as a “certain kind of relationship to the past mediated by distinctive kind of written discourse” (1999, p. 1) may be expanded to include reenactment as exemplifying particular modes of experiencing history and establishing relationships to the past. In a variety of mimetic acts, reenactments bring the past into the presence, thereby revealing diverse ways of approaching the relationship between signifier and signified. Hence it is crucial to recognize the particular concepts of the past and the real that inform diverse reenactment practices. Reenactment employs mimesis via what Auerbach, and later White, identified as figural relationships between the past and the present, or the original and its representation, respectively. For the purpose of analyzing reenactment practices, these relationships may be extended to include reproduction, imitation (creating a mirror image), assimilation (gradually becoming the other), mimicry (creating similarity with a difference), animation (revival of specific elements), masquerade (performing a character), simulacrum (simulating reality), and at the other end of the spectrum, simulation (creating imaginary realities). Reenactment brings the past into the present via a variety of media, ranging from performances, pageants, living history displays, historical reality television shows, panorama museums, holograms, computer simulations, and games. The analysis of the figural relationships that underscore reenactment practices promises to highlight the means by which temporal relationships are established and history is written. Going beyond a narrow view of mimesis as the imitation of “real-life” events in the past, using mimesis as an analytic lens allows us to reveal not only the concepts of time but the ideological underpinnings that inform the reenactment and interpretation of the past. Over the course of the 20th century, mimesis has come to be discussed in a variety of critical contexts, particularly within cultural and postcolonial studies. While the debate returned to Aristotle’s initial insight that imitation is a fundamental feature of human behavior, it continued to challenge the commonplace assumption of imitation as mere copying. Literary critic Franz Bäuml went on to define mimesis as the representation of an imagined but canonically established reality. By the same token, however, he goes as far as to argue that reality does not itself precede mimesis. From a poststructuralist point of view, reality itself is the result of mimetic reproduction (Bäuml, 1998, p. 78). In Mimesis and Alterity (1993), anthropologist Michael Taussig engages with the concept of mimesis in yet another broad intellectual context and analyzes how mimesis informs the appropriation and performance of identities. For Taussig, the “wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and that power” (p. xiii). Taussig’s definition of mimetic faculty as “the nature that culture uses to create second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become Other” (p. xiii) opens up the possibility of analyzing cultural processes and the naturalization of identities on the basis of human’s mimetic faculties. Applied in this wider context, the imitation of earlier cultural models can be understood and examined as a form of reenactment. The revival of Greek and Roman learning for the Renaissance is a case in point. The figural relationship Renaissance scholars and writers such as Dante established to the ancient Greco-Roman culture constituted the conditions for transformation in the present. By drawing on Auerbach’s Mimesis, White points out that the “later figure fulfills the earlier by repeating the elements thereof, but with a difference” (1999, p. 91). By reviving—not reproducing—an earlier cultural model, Renaissance scholars appropriated elements of the past as an integral part of the present culture and simultaneously strived to transcend the past they admired. When David Lowenthal maintains that the purpose of imitation in the Renaissance “was to assimilate the past for the benefit of the present,” he takes recourse to Petrarch’s notion of the “proper imitator” as being engaged in 143

Kader Konuk

resemblance, not reproduction (Lowenthal, 1999, p. 79). It is this mode of imitation that, according to Lowenthal, makes change possible. Other processes of modernization and social transformation correspond to the way in which the Renaissance was established. Perhaps most importantly, nationalist narratives invoke historical events in order to constitute a national legacy and construct a linear heritage. Historian Benedict Anderson famously points out that national identity cannot be “remembered,” it must be narrated (1992, p. 204). National discourses hence enact heritages based on ethnic, racial, linguistic, or territorial claims. Westernization processes—whether under colonial, imperial, or autochthonous rule—similarly appropriate and reenact elements of another cultural (not necessarily earlier) model via a series of mimetic acts in order to establish a new cultural and political order. The reforms that followed the foundation of modern Turkey in 1923, for example, represent a state-orchestrated reenactment on a national scale. At the height of the Westernization reforms, Turkish cultural politics tried not only to emulate the achievements of Western Europe but revive the ancient Greek heritage in Anatolia as a method of appropriating the origins of European culture and constructing a notion of Turks as Europeans. The state-imposed reform of dress codes, educational and political institutions, script, language, and music was intended to enable the citizens of Turkey to embody, not merely imitate, Europeanness (body and embodiment). Cultural mimesis was going to ensure the metamorphosis of the Ottoman Empire into a new Turkey while creating a figural relationship between the ancient Greek past and the Turkish present (Konuk, 2010, p. 18). Almost a century later, the humanist reforms of the 1930s have lost their force. In its place, the Turkish state and stakeholders are funding projects to establish a relationship to the Ottoman imperial past, something hitherto unthinkable under Kemalist Turkey. A new phenomenon has emerged in popular culture leading to the revival of the Ottoman Empire on Turkish movie screens, in soap operas, museums, and entertainment parks. The soap opera Muhteşem Yüzyıl (Glorious Century) (2011–2014) on life at the 16th-century Ottoman Porte became one of the most successful television series in Turkey and in the Middle East. Faruk Aksoy’s 2012 movie Fetih 1453 (Conquest 1453) which glorifies the conquest of Constantinople, set another precedent for the visualization of Ottoman history. Museums such as Panorama 1453 provide new sites of identification for an ambitious Islamic middle class that yearns to root itself in a glorious past. The museum Panorama 1453 presents the story of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 3D, heightening the all-encompassing experience through the use of Ottoman military music. Following this example, another panoramic museum celebrating the conquest of Bursa in 1326 was erected in 2018 to give a wide-angled view of Ottoman victory. Istanbul is home to other examples of such popularized approaches to the representation of Ottoman history. The theme park Miniatürk and adventure park Vialand offer an avowedly entertainment-oriented approach to the past. In Istanbul’s Eyüp district (the historic entertainment district during Ottoman times), an Ottoman theme park allows visitors to relive the conquest of Constantinople in the form of a “Fatih (Conquerer) Dark Ride.” In the “History Zone”—a replica of an Ottoman street—visitors are invited to participate in Ottoman life. Animating certain aspects of everyday life and inviting visitors to masquerade in an entertainment setting exemplify ways of consuming, rather than critically engaging with the past. This relatively new phenomenon of reenacting Ottoman history invokes a lineage that the republican reformers of early Turkey tried to suppress by substituting the Ottoman past with a Westernized national narrative. Arguably, neo-Ottoman reenactment feeds a popular mania for glorious roots in a long-lost empire. Overcoming the ambivalence that early reformers felt at the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, a growing number of venues in the new millennium disseminate an idealized view of Ottoman achievements. 144

Figure 29.1  Panorama 1453, History Museum, Istanbul. Source: DGPHTD, ImageBroker, Alamy.

Figure 29.2  Panorama 1453, History Museum, Istanbul. Source: KGE1H6, Zhanna Tretiakova, Alamy.

Kader Konuk

The simulation of the Conquest in a panoramic setting is designed to conjure up the splendor of the Ottoman past as a spectacle and invokes emotions such as nostalgia, pride, and religious belonging. Since Panaroma 1453 is not constructed as a cylinder but has a dome, the experience falls between “visiting a mosque and viewing a motion picture” (Türeli, 2018, p. 30) (Figures 29.1 and 29.2). Reenactment, it turns out, is an effective strategy to establish a neo-Ottomanist view of history devoid of any critical engagement with the imperial past. It precludes the possibility of employing reenactment as a vehicle for rigorous historical inquiry (Agnew, 2004, p. 335) because it heightens the feeling of glory and fosters identification with the Ottoman conquerors and rulers by intensifying a feeling of religious belonging.The analysis of the kinds of imitation that underscores reenactment—be it imitation, assimilation, mimicry, animation, masquerade, simulacrum, or simulation—enables the interpreter to expose the temporal and ideological structures materialized in a range of venues.This is not to say that all reenactments are instruments of either clearly identified ideological approaches or tools of critical inquiry. Ambiguous, paradoxical, as well as investigative approaches toward the past can coexist in a single reenactment setting while employing a variety of mimetic practices. As an analytical lens, however, mimesis helps reveal the ways in which the relationship to the past is established in a reenactment setting.

Further reading Balke, F., and Engelmeier, H., 2016; Bhabha, H. K., 1984; Koch, G. et al., 2010; Konuk, K., 2011; Öncü, A., 2007; Potolsky, M., 2006.

146

30 MITZVAH AND MEMORIALIZATION Rick Hilles

In Jewish devotional practice, there are passionate repetitions of key moments of Jewish ­scriptural history, such as Passover, that reaffirm the structure of belief on which Jewish life and religion rest. The key word and key concept in the representation, memorialization, and reaffirmation of sacred Jewish purposes is the word mitzvah (plural: mitzvot) and the ideas it signifies. It means “commandment” and also “good deed.” The notion of the mitzvah has also come to include those acts that carry the spirit of the law “beyond mere legal duty,” endowing deeds with a surplus of affect that makes knowing what is right feel right too. The performance is intimately part of what is being remembered and acknowledged. This connects rather seamlessly to reenactment, recalling that the term’s first definition (in the Oxford English Dictionary) is “when a law or regulation is observed (and veritably brought to life) again.” There is one respect in which mitzvah may be compared with the Christian sacrament of marriage or baptism. Specifically, it is a moment in the lives of believers when the frame of belief is inhabited and animated as a form of reenactment. Although forbidden any knowledge of the future, Jews performing mitzvah fetch the history of Jews into a present moment of their lives that is suspended between what has happened, is happening, and may happen. The German Jewish philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin explores the sacramental possibilities of such a moment in his essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in the following passage: We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment succumb. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second was the gate through which the Messiah might enter. (1968, p. 263) It is worth dwelling on Benjamin’s assertion that the Jewish prohibition against investigating the future did not hinder Jews’ path to enlightenment. In focusing instead on remembrance, the experience is not qualified or distracted by premonitions and presentiments; it is full beyond measure. By directing Jews to the harder path of remembrance, their system of belief opens up

147

Rick Hilles

a moment of sacramental intensity that alerts each inhabitant of that moment to the presence of historical time (Figure 30.1). Of course, it has not always been Jews or those friendly to them who have built, composed, painted, and photographed memorials to Jewish life. Hitler planned to have a Museum of the Vanished Race situated in a Prague synagogue. While no such museum exists, four former synagogues in Prague have become museums of Jewish life, culture, and history. In the post-­ Holocaust era, the task of representation for the so-called Generation of Postmemory is complicated by the growing distance between Holocaust survivors and what they might recall. As Marianne Hirsch, who first coined the term “postmemory,” asks: “How (can) that ‘sense of a living connection’ be maintained and perpetuated even as the generation of survivors leaves our midst, and how, at the very same time it is being eroded?” (2012, p. 1). Hirsch goes on to ask: How can we best carry their stories forward, without appropriating them, without unduly calling attention to ourselves, and without, in turn, having our own stories displaced by them? How are we implicated in the aftermath of crimes we did not ourselves witness? (p. 2)

Figure 30.1 Karen Zusman, Hasidim Post Sukkah at Coney Island (Source: Karen Zusman). Sukkot (often translated as “Harvest Festival” or “Feast of Tabernacles”) is observed every year for eight days, beginning on the 15th day of the seventh month,Tishrei (usually occurring in late September or October) during which time Jews are “commanded to rejoice for the blessing of God’s provision and care” (Deut: 16: 14–15). These images of Orthodox Jews, Hasidim, taken on Coney Island at the conclusion of Sukkot, capture the spirit of rejoicing that this annual ritual demands as well as depicting the joy of attending observant Jews at having fulfilled the obligations of this sacred commandment.

148

Mitzvah and memorialization

And concerning what Hirsch calls “the memory archive”: “How can it offer what history alone no longer seems able to offer (p. 3)?” As well as reenacting the sacred passages of Jewish life and belief, memorialization has an additional definition in the OED: “a petition of objection, disapproval, disagreement, even protest.” Now that fewer survivors are alive to tell their stories, being able to see a Holocaust memorial of any kind as a palpable form of protest can spur the imagination of the secondary witness. Whether it is a museum installed on the grounds of a former SS concentration camp, a graphic film that draws the viewer into the horror, a memoir that emphasizes the loneliness of extreme suffering, or a puppet theater that makes pathos out of the very obviousness of its artifice, there is a Hebrew word for what this kind of representation demands: Zakhor.The word translates into a warning, “Never forget!” and a commandment: “Remember!” A plaque outside the former Polish Jewish shtetl of Nasielsk, just 35 miles outside of Warsaw, records the total absence of its former Jewish population. Such a spare notice of annihilation may seem perfunctory, but the absence of representational art instigates the imagination to fill the empty place. One work of dynamic imaginative recuperation and retrieval that has somehow robbed death at Nasielsk of its absoluteness is Glenn Kurtz’s non-fiction work, Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film (FSG, 2014). Kurtz’s book itself is a story within a story—intermingling his own tale of finding and restoring his grandfather’s original color film footage (taken during a family trip to Europe in 1938), and driving it himself to the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, to be digitized. What unfolds in Kurtz’s book is the way that his act of archival recovery sets in motion a whole chain of events. Kurtz is not only able to identify where these three minutes of color footage were originally taken; in the process of making the footage available to the public, he also meets a survivor of Nasielsk’s Jewish community who can tell him what happened to Nasielsk, as well as his own story of survival. Thinking of Kurtz’s project as fulfilling the edict (“Remember!”) makes it both a mitzvah and a dynamic instance of reenactment, as it brings what otherwise would have been lost abundantly to life again (memory and commemoration). Among the highest mitzvot that a Jewish person might enact is to tend to the proper care and burial of the dead. The Jewish mitzvah of tending caringly and lovingly to the remains of the departed also extends to the disposal of books that inform, enliven, and inspire Jews by performing the complexity and vibrancy of Jewish life. When a Jewish holy book—which has presumably illuminated its owner—wears out from use, the owner does not simply and thoughtlessly throw it out. Instead, the faithful tome’s owner disposes of it as if the bearer were returning some ancient debt of knowledge, insight, wisdom, and illumination. The Hebrew word genizah or geniza (plural: genizot—meaning storage or receptacle) refers to a place where sacred holy texts that are no longer usable are placed respectfully, so as to protect the sacredness of their inner contents—the veritable “inner life” of the closed book. Over time, genizot would become known as places to dispose of holy texts and where other texts—profane, heretical, sacrilegious, or otherwise deleterious—might also be taken to be buried, so that their hazardous contents would no longer cause harm. Imagine: not even the most harmful book was burned.This twin notion of the genizah—fleshed-out more palpably in Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole’s Sacred Trash:The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (2016)—may give the so-called “hinge” second generation a powerful way of regarding their own passionate acts of retrieval in the name of representation, memorialization, and the continued celebration of the rich diversity of Jewish culture and its traditions. Such reenactments are reaffirmations of passionate retrieval by which practitioners aim to reconnect to sacred aims and strategies of resistance and resilience, which are arguably more essential to Jewish life (and life in general) 149

Rick Hilles

than ever before, especially in light of the global rise in anti-Semitism and white nationalism. This should remind both Jews and non-Jews alike how vital memory (Zakhor) is as a value in itself, as well as how important observing the many mitzvot of Judaism—including the Hebrew concept of tikkun olam (healing the world)—can be, in what Bertolt Brecht (1979, p. 320) might have called “the [new] dark times.”

150

31 NARRATIVE Inke Arns

A narrative or story (Latin, narratio) is a reproduction of an event, real or imaginary, in oral or written form. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, “to tell,” which is derived from the adjective gnarus, meaning “knowing” or “skilled” (Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2007). A minimal definition of narrative entails someone telling someone else about something that happened. Narrative can be organized in a number of thematic or formal categories, including nonfiction (such as biography, journalism, and historiography), the fictionalization of historical events (such as myth, legend, and historical fiction), and fiction proper (such as literature). While narrative has long been considered a supposedly inferior form of cognition or knowledge transfer within the hierarchy of natural scientific models, it has recently undergone extensive rehabilitation. With the end of the “master narratives,” as described by JeanFrançois Lyotard (1979), narration has increasingly become a leading category of cultural studies and is used in fields as diverse as history, the history of science, memory research, film studies, sociology, psychology, and law. In a very broad sense, narration can be understood as a fundamental means of accessing the world, as a narrative “way of worldmaking,” as Nelson Goodman puts it (1988, p. 7). However, there exists a break, rather than continuity, between life (or event) and thinking (or representation). American philosopher Louis Mink formulated this concept in a nutshell: “Stories are not lived but told. Life has no beginnings, middles, or ends” (Mink, 1970, pp. 557–558). According to Aristotle’s Poetics, narratives are characterized first by the “assembling of events,” i.e., by establishing specific connections, and second by a genuine temporal structure, such that narratives can generally be understood as temporally structured representations of event sequences. A previously heterogeneous temporal event is assembled into a coherent whole—a story. However, in narratives, not only events or actions, but disparate elements—actors, actions, objects, times, places—are linked together in a “synthesis of the heterogeneous” (Ricœur, [1983/1985] 1984/88) and condensed into specific plots or fables (Bal, 2009). The specific strength of narratives can thus be described as follows: it is only as a result of their concatenation that individual elements of the narrative assume meaning, and through which contingent events are transformed into history. In structuralist narratology, narrations address changes of state or situation. The content is usually referred to as story, while such a mode of presentation is referred to as discourse. Another term—later prominently anchored in the historiographic debate by Hayden White—is that of plot. This designates a preexisting basic motif of a story that 151

Inke Arns

goes beyond the mere (chronological or episodic) juxtaposition of actions or events, and which relates the events to each other or allows them to diverge. A plot is, then, the cause-and-effect relationship between events in a story. Introduced and illustrated by a succinct example, this distinction was made by the British writer E.M. Forster: “‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief ’ is a plot” (1962, p. 86). Among theorists of history, Hayden White is certainly the best-known exponent of a narratological approach. In his 1973 Metahistory, White claims that historians only have a certain number of modes of presentation available to tell a story. Here, he introduces the term “emplotment,” which refers to a specific attribution of meaning to the narrated past. Historians, faced with a chaos of facts, first arrange events in chronological order (a simple form of narrative), after which they assign a beginning, middle, and end to the story, thereby constructing a plot. According to White, there exist only four “archetypal” narrative patterns—romance, comedy, tragedy, and satire or irony. For him, then, historical representations are ultimately based on a dramatization of historical events. White’s narrative constructivism was criticized for his supposedly postmodern relativism: after all, he pointedly described historical narratives as “verbal fictions,” “whose content was invented as well as found” (White, 1978, p. 82). The relation between historical and contemporary artistic reenactment and narrative is a complex one. A reenactment is not simply a story that is being (re-)told; rather, it is a narrative, or, rather, it consists of scenes of a narrative that are enacted by participants, making them “eyewitnesses” to an event that constructs or critically reflects on a specific (dominant) narrative. Affect plays a very important role here, since performative embodiment turns reenactment into something more than narrative. By participating in or by observing a reenactment, people can relate to the reenacted event in a more emotional and immediate way, i.e., by imagining themselves as agents in the historical context. However, in the two examples discussed here, reenactment possesses an even more intricate relationship to narrative: it actively constructs (or deconstructs) the plot of a dominant or official narrative, either by negating eyewitnesses’ accounts, or by making eyewitnesses’ accounts the basis for the plot of a counter-narrative (evidence). While The Storming of the Winter Palace (1920) could be called a form of “history from above” that helped the Soviet government create an official narrative of the revolution, The Battle of Orgreave (2001) deconstructed an official narrative put forth by the Thatcher government, and replaced it by “history painting from below” (Deller, 2000, p. 10). On its website, under the keywords “storming of the Winter Palace,” the commercial photograph agency Getty Images offers eight historical photos. Despite disparities regarding their “creation date” (1 January 1917; 7 November 1917; 7 November 1920; 1 January 1950) and slightly different image details, they appear to show the same event: the storming of the Winter Palace by the Bolsheviks at the beginning of the October Revolution in Petrograd in November 1917.Yet what the photographs (and Getty Images) do not specify is there are no photographs of this historical event. Even if a photographer had been present, he or she would not have been able to take the pictures offered by Getty Images, for the event did not occur the way it has been conveyed by Soviet historiography. The seat of the Russian Provisional Government was not stormed by revolutionary masses but rather by a handful of Red Guards, who captured a group of ministers who had long since surrendered. Thus, the event we see in the photographs never took place in this form. In retrospect, the fact that there were no pictures of this event proved advantageous for Bolshevik propaganda, for, to paraphrase Hans Mommsen (1964), the eyewitness is the propagandist’s greatest enemy. Instead, the “storming of the Winter Palace” was staged after the fact. The photographs offered by Getty Images show a “reenactment,” or, rather, a “preenactment” of the storming of the Winter Palace that was performed in 1920 in Petrograd for the third 152

Narrative

anniversary of the October Revolution. The notion of “preenactment” or “theater therapy” was coined by Russian theater director Nikolai Evreinov (1920). It describes how reality can be healed by a kind of acting cure, i.e., how theater can substitute situations that people cannot experience in real life. The storming of the Winter Palace was part of a mass spectacle that involved the participation of approximately 10,000 extras and 100,000 spectators. It was coordinated by a collective of directors under the leadership of Nikolai Evreinov (1879–1953). However, if one understands reenactment to mean the recreation or re-staging of an historical event, then in this case it was only an “as-if ” reenactment, and thus an “as-if ” replay of history that never in fact took place this way. Whether Evreinov was aware of this cannot be discerned from his texts. At least in this way he had the opportunity—perhaps even the assignment—to “inflate a small event by means of theatre into a large historical event. One could also say, he was supposed to create history in the first place” (Sasse, 2014, p. 82). Assigning to theater such a central role fit well with Evreinov’s concept of theater; after all, he had already called for the “theatricalization of life” in the 1910s. Under his guidance, the unspectacular capture of the Winter Palace was turned into a mass spectacle. As Sylvia Sasse notes, history was thereby repaired, and the Soviet Union received its originary narrative (p. 83). At the same time, the spectators—as many as 100,000, equivalent to one-quarter of Petrograd’s population at the time—were not merely spectators. Rather, they represented the revolutionary masses that were supposed to be directly infected by the event. Sasse writes: With regard to the history of theatre, this idea of the political mobilization of the masses dovetailed with the discovery of the spectator as actor. Or conversely, as formulated for the young Soviet Union: the discovery of the spectator as actor in theatre (actually a pre-revolutionary theatre project) corresponded with the political demand for the mobilization of the masses in the future dictatorship of the proletariat. (2014, p. 90) Anatoly Lunacharsky, then the People’s Commissar for Enlightenment, viewed the spectacle in historical terms of the festivals of the French Revolution, during which the masses were supposed to become self-aware.“In order to sense themselves,” Lunacharsky wrote,“the masses must reveal themselves externally; and this is possible only if—to use the words of Robespierre—they become a spectacle of themselves” (Lunacharsky, 1958, p. 193). Festivals such as this, according to film historian Richard Taylor, were supposed to “create a sense of identification between the audience and the event re-enacted through the spectacle itself and the act of collective memory that it both embodied and provoked” (Taylor, 2002). This “biggest mass spectacle of all times” was “not so much about recalling the past” (Clark, 1996, p. 122), but rather, as art theorist Steve Rushton has accurately noted, “about restructuring the past for the needs of a (contemporary) audience” (Rushton, 2005, p. 6). Considering how exactly Evreinov’s Storming of the Winter Palace affected participants in the 1917 event and eyewitnesses of the 1920 reenactment, it can be said that for those who attended the original (non-)event, the reenactment “repaired” or “corrected” reality. In this case, the goal of the reenactment was to overwrite individual memory with an official version of history. For those who had not been present at the original event, the reenactment allowed them to experience the “event” directly. Propagandistic reenactments like the Storming of the Winter Palace were, in other words, deliberately used to facilitate identification with ideological goals. The plot of the newly created revolutionary narrative went like this: It was the masses, or the majority (“bolsheviki”) of the population, and not just a radical splinter group, that stormed the seat of the much-hated Provisional Government. The October Revolution acquired its foundation myth. 153

Inke Arns

Whereas Evreinov with his Storming of the Winter Palace produces a spectacular picture of an entirely unspectacular event, contemporary artistic reenactments address precisely this mediatedness of collective memory (mediality). As Steve Rushton argues, reenactments involve a complex and in-depth reflection of the mediation of memory—which can be even described as the core subject of re-enactment as an art form. This tendency asks how memory is an entity which is continuously being restructured—not only by filmmakers and re-enactors but also by us personally, as mediating and mediated subjects. (2005, p. 10) The starting point for Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave was an official narrative situated not in Soviet but rather in English history. Triggered by the imminent closing of the mines, the 1984–1985 conflict between the conservative Thatcher government and the striking National Union of Mineworkers was the fiercest of its kind. In the mid-1980s, Margaret Thatcher was intent on breaking the power of the unions at any price, with the dispute peaking on 18 June 1984 in a violent confrontation near the coking plant in Orgreave, South Yorkshire. Horsemounted police units drove the protesting miners apart.Yet by altering the editing sequence of television reports (as directed by the political authorities), the events could be represented as “riots.” Against its better knowledge, the BBC announced that striking miners had initiated the violence, which justified the use of horse-mounted police units. Thatcher subsequently designated the striking workers and their unions “the enemy within,” heralding the end of the last great miner’s strike in Great Britain. With the support of Artangel, a London agency for art in the public sphere, Jeremy Deller returned to the site of the trauma 17 years after the original event. After several years of searching for information and conducting research, and with the support of more than 20 historical battle reenactment societies and the involvement of miners and police who had participated at the time, he arranged a reenactment of the “battle” of Orgreave on 17 June 2001. Deller characterized the event as “digging up a corpse and giving it a proper post-mortem, or as a thousandperson crime re-enactment” (2001). In 1984, British media reporting on the miner’s strike had been loyal to the government: the miners and their unions were not only accused of disorderly conduct vis-à-vis the police, but their strike was also blamed for paralyzing the British economy. Thus, for reconstructing the battle, Deller did not draw on reporting from the time, that is, on “the copious quantities of biased and misinformed newspaper articles that initially reported the story” (Blackson, 2007, p. 32). Instead, he relied on the personal memories of the former protagonists—both miners and police—as the basis for the reenactment. “By allowing personal memory to direct the course of the reenactment …, Deller’s work The Battle of Orgreave [was] effectively righting old wrongs,” wrote the critic and curator Robert Blackson (2007, p. 32), not without pathos. Along with the live reenactment on 17 June 2001, the project materialized in the following formats. Mike Figgis filmed a documentary movie for Channel 4 (The Battle of Orgreave, 2001, 61 Min.), which combined film footage from the 2001 reenactment with photographs from the confrontation in 1984 and interviews with participants, some of whom were speaking for the first time about the incidents. In addition, a publication appeared that documented the miners’ strike in the form of an oral history (The English Civil War Part II: Personal Accounts of the 1984–85 Miner’s Strike, 2002), and an archive was created, which the artist makes available in exhibits (The Battle of Orgreave Archive: An Injury to One is an Injury to All, 2004). According to Robert Blackson, specific to Deller’s project was the emancipatory role that the reenactment played in the northern England village communities that had been involved in 154

Narrative

the events. The reenactment, Blackson argues, corrected a (false) picture created by the media. Claire Bishop, however, questions whether the project had quite such a therapeutic function. By reviving the traumatic experiences of the 1980s, she feels that it did more to open old wounds for the miners (occupying, in part, the adversarial role of the police) than it healed (2012, p. 32). The reenactment brought “middle class battle reenactors” into direct contact with “working class miners.” This was very important, Bishop insists, because many members of the historical reenactment associations were actually afraid of the miners. Evidently, they believed everything they had read in the newspapers in the 1980s, now imagining that the men they were supposed to work with were either violent hooligans or staunch revolutionaries. Jeremy Deller also made use of something else for his performance, namely, the fact that the reenactment societies usually stage scenes from English history from the distant past and thereby create a safe distance from the politics of the present. By involving these groups, the events at Orgreave were symbolically incorporated into English history. The Battle of Orgreave thus generated new and different practices for historicizing recent and still sensitive events that even today remain relevant to Britain’s ongoing political and social conflicts. Moreover, by “allowing the miners’ memories to control the course of the reenactment, the performance provided languishing mining communities with a way for their actions to act outside of the historical script that was determined for them by the government and media. Thus, the artwork ‘became a part of [the strike’s] own history, an epilogue to the experience’” (Blackson, 2007, p. 33). Historical narratives are invented, or constructed retrospectively, post ipso facto. Not only do they assemble previously unconnected events, but they also link these events in a chronological way by creating plots—i.e., by making these events relate to each other and turning them into a coherent story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sometimes, these stories attain hegemonic power of interpretation, and then become “master narratives.” Both examples analyzed here either actively participate in the construction of such a “master narrative” (The Storming of the Winter Palace, 1920) or critically address the existence of a “master narrative” and replace it with a new narrative based on eyewitnesses’ accounts that had previously gone unheard (The Battle of Orgreave, 2001). The Storming of the Winter Palace “blows up” an unspectacular event (a clandestine putsch against the political enemy) to a people’s storming supposedly involving “the majority.” It thus “corrects” history by subsequently inserting the photograph of the theatrical event into history books and historical archives, where it passes as depicting the authentic event of the October Revolution. On the other hand, The Battle of Orgreave attacks and intends to erase the official narrative or plot (which resulted from a changed chronological sequence of events) by letting the miners’ memories direct the reenactment and leading to a reversing of the sequence of events. This allowed for a correction of the hegemonic master narrative. Contemporary artistic reenactments are—through their use of performative embodiment— powerful tools for directing the audience’s attention to the constructedness of historical narrative (production of historical meaning). However, in order to achieve this, reenactment itself has to rely on the form of the narrative, which at the same time could be seen as a constraint.

Further reading Abbott, A., 2007; Arns, I., Chubarov, I., and Sasse. S. (eds.), 2017; Heinen, S., and Sommer, R. (eds.), 2009; Herman, D., et al. (eds.), 2005; Herman, D. (ed.), 2007; Hühn, P., Pier, J., Schmid, W., and Schönert, J. (eds.), 2009; Kindt, T., and Müller, H.-H. (eds.), 2003; Saupe, A., and Wiedemann, F., 2015.

155

32 NOSTALGIA Jonathan D. S. Schroeder

Nostalgia designates a domain of historical practice that is often said to be antithetical to historiography’s production of historical meaning. Whereas this latter mode is typically predicated upon the exercise of reason, narrative figuration, historical distance, and a focus on shared experience, nostalgia designates a mode that prioritizes affect, imagery, intimacy with and absorption in the past, and autobiographical experience. In other words, nostalgia belongs to, as philosopher Steven Galt Crowell puts it, “spectral history—not the story of the public unfolding of a self, but an experience of the past as impossibly one’s own, a return of the dead, evidence of the ego’s resistance to the all-unifying structure of time” (Crowell, 1999, p. 84; emphasis in original). It is on the basis of its particular weave of desire with emotion, memory and commemoration, body and embodiment, and the quest for authenticity that nostalgia is frequently linked with practices of reenactment, and often distrusted by historians, anthropologists, poststructuralists, and others who use negative valuations of the concept to shore up their own group identities. When detractors describe reenactors as “nostalgic,” what they are usually doing is casting doubt upon a core premise of historical reenactment: “that history can be managed,” that “it can be framed, reproduced, brought closer, and it can be made part of our human experience again, in a reassuring way” (Agnew and Lamb, 2009, p. 1).This is because nostalgia has historically been used to label an individual’s memory as untrustworthy when it has been worked upon by the twin desires of home-yearning and escapism.To describe a reenactment as nostalgic, then, is to insinuate that the reenactor is not in control of her production but is controlled by it. Here, reenactment is not considered a rational act, but an obsession with recreating the past brought on by a refusal to accept loss—hence, the reason why Civil War reenactment is arguably the best-known example of historical reenactment. For the ex-Confederate Basil Ransom in Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886), it is precisely the stubborn attachment to the Lost Cause that compels him to reenact the Civil War by other means, by attempting to make a Boston suffragette into a southern wife. This case against nostalgia is basically a case against desire. For what supposedly makes the nostalgic naive is that she does not know that desire not only always misses its mark, but also invents objects and counterfactuals that seem like the real thing. Clichés like “you can’t go home again,” “there’s no place like home,” and “nostalgia isn’t what it used to be” speak to this longstanding Western belief that the desire for the lost object can become so intense as to invent an object that never existed in the first place. In an extreme version of this belief, Susan Stewart has written that nostalgia has no object at all. In this account, nostalgic longing for a pure context 156

Nostalgia

of lived experience at a place of origin does not retrieve the everyday past so much as give it a new narrative order to make it manageable and approachable (Stewart, 1984, p. 23). This case against nostalgia was originally a medical one. Indeed, “nostalgia” was first coined in 1688 by a Swiss medical student named Johannes Hofer to name a new disease category—a special type of deadly melancholy triggered by displacement from home. Initially conceptualized as a “pathology of travel,” it was defined in terms of a preexisting framework that explained which forms of motion and emotion were conducive to health and illness, and that physicians relied on to explain why travel made some individuals ill and not others (Goodman, 2010; Revill and Wigley, 2000). In Enlightenment medical writings of the long 18th century, victims of nostalgia were said to withdraw from the fear and loathing of their exile, becoming so absorbed in spiraling fixations on cherished images of the absent home that they grew insensible to other objects, refuse to leave bed, and finally, immobilized, starve to death, their last words almost always, “I want to go home! I want to go home!” (Hofer, 1688). What scholars have failed to recognize about nostalgia’s medical formation is its role in processes of racialization. In the 18th and 19th centuries, nostalgia was primarily diagnosed in European ethnics who were displaced from home by compulsory service, and who were said to sadden and die due to a natal weakness to forced mobility. Swiss mercenaries were particularly legendary, and supposedly they could be overwhelmed by nostalgia simply by overhearing a native folk song called the ranz-des-vaches. The Swiss soldier, “[i]f chance he hears the song so sweet, so wild,” the poet Samuel Rogers following Rousseau wrote in 1792, “His heart would spring to hear it when a child, / Melts at the long-lost scenes that round him rise, / And sinks a martyr to repentant sighs” (quoted in Starobinski, 1966, p. 93). By drawing upon geography, economics, and stadial history, physicians more broadly claimed that this flawed attachment to home was not idiosyncratic, but rather a trait of certain populations. Even as those who died from nostalgia were almost always migrants coerced into building empires—as soldiers, sailors, servants, and slaves—their deaths were ascribed to their ethnic flaw. In the Americas, nostalgia was introduced into slave medicine and racialized, resulting in a new version of the concept that assigned to black bodies a different manner of dying—suicide—and a different cause of death—weakness to forced immobility, i.e., captivity. Nostalgia was supposed to cause recently enslaved Africans to drown themselves in rivers and wells, go on hunger strikes, and jump overboard to their deaths, all so their souls could fly back to Africa. In the New World, nostalgia thus designated two different narratives of reenactment: the ethnic laborer who dies from wanting to return home, and the black slave who wants to die to return home. It is this history that has made nostalgia an important site of contestation at the intersection of the politics of home and the politics of foreignness. It was in a different form, however, that nostalgia assumed prominence. Following its derecognition in medicine in the 1950s and its entrance into mass culture in the late-1960s, nostalgia has become an increasingly popular historical emotion: a bittersweet, sentimental retrospect for lost times and places. In the 1970s, films like American Graffiti (1973) and Phantom of the Paradise (1974), bands like the New York Dolls and The Cramps, avid readers of Nostalgia Press reprints of 1940s comic strips like Flash Gordon, and collectors of memorabilia at “nostalgia conventions” all helped create what Time magazine already by 1971 called a “nostalgia craze.” Engaging performatively and sometimes reflectively with the newfound phenomenon of nostalgia, these cut-ups and collages of period styles galvanized new subcultures like glam and mod, rockabilly and New Wave. By the 1980s, major labels and Hollywood studios hit on a formula for nostalgia through works set in the 1950s and early 1960s that both anticipated and retreated from the turmoil of 1968 and after (Dwyer, 2015). In Kathleen Stewart’s words, nostalgia “rises to importance as a cultural practice as culture becomes more and more diffuse, more and more a ‘structure of feeling’” (Stewart, 1988, p. 227). 157

Jonathan D. S. Schroeder

The scholars who sought to explain this mushrooming phenomenon made use of much of what once made it pathological, especially nostalgia’s status as an anti-social, solipsistic, narcissistic, delusional, and naive form of behavior. What they found in the concept was a readymade resource for explaining the persistence and perpetuation of large-scale structural violence in the affective conditions of everyday life. For if the nostalgic is utterly captivated by her object of longing, and if she is convinced of its reality and does not know that it is fantasy, then she is duped and is oblivious to the external processes that she is a part of and that help form her fantasy. In the 1980s, particularly for scholars engaged in ideology critique, nostalgia promised not only insight into the cultural logics of capitalism, nationalism, and settler colonialism, but also a site where demystification would be especially effective. In the postmodernism debates, participants focused on nostalgia’s problematic relation to narrative. For Fredric Jameson, nostalgia is an epigone of historical consciousness and a symptom of the waning of affect in late capitalism, with its privatization of collective experience and commodification of the past. In contrast to “that older longing once called nostalgia,” the “nostalgia film” constitutes “a depersonalized visual curiosity and a ‘return of the repressed’ of the twenties and thirties ‘without affect’” (Jameson, 1991, p. xvii). In other words, films like Body Heat (1981) or Something Wild (1986) work in a compensatory mode, using recycled images to create the feel of the past because the feeling of belonging to a historical continuum is no longer available. For Slavoj Žižek, Jameson is, like all nostalgics, oblivious to his own nostalgia. Because historicism addresses historicity minus the Real, it needs “the nostalgic image … to fill out the blind spot,” since the Real is opposed to narrative and identity (Žižek, 1993, p. 81). Nostalgia functions to “conceal the antimony between eye and gaze—i.e. the traumatic impact of the gaze qua object—by means of its power of fascination,” providing historians and moviegoers alike with an illusion of “seeing ourselves seeing” and helping to create continuity with and ironic distance from the naïve other of the past (Žižek, 1992, p. 72). Anthropologists who sought to reckon with their discipline’s roles in colonial and imperial ventures found nostalgia similarly useful, as exemplified by Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1958). Drawing from his fieldwork among the Ilongot in the Philippines, Renato Rosaldo similarly noted that colonial officials displayed a peculiar combination of love, sadness, and disavowal when they returned to a culture years later and saw how much it had changed.“Imperialist nostalgia” names this structure of disavowal in which individuals mourn the passing of a culture that they helped destroy (Rosaldo, 1991, pp. 68–90). For anthropologists like Rosaldo invested in decolonizing their field, nostalgia raises the significant question of whether it is possible to escape complicity in imperialism, or whether each successive generation merely finds new ways of reproducing this structure of disavowal through reproducing the critical pose of the participant-observer. More recently, scholars have identified sites where nostalgia aids resistance to structural violence. Svetlana Boym’s distinction between reflective and restorative forms of nostalgia is justifiably well known (2001, p. xviii). In distinguishing between violent and liberatory types of nostalgia, Boym rallies attention around what Susan Stewart called nostalgia’s “utopian face”: the fact that it is always directed toward a future-past, a what-could-have-been. Against imperialist nostalgia, Jennifer Wenzel writes that “[a]nti-imperialist nostalgia” consists of a longing for what never was, yet a longing that is fully cognizant that its object of desire is one of the “ways it could have gone” but did not. This cognizance involves a confrontation with the forces that obstructed that lost future, a confrontation that has the potential to “immunize” … one from or mobilize resistance to similar forces in the present. (2006, p. 16) 158

Nostalgia

Figure 32.1 Kane’s snow globe, one of the most brilliant encapsulations of nostalgia. Source: Citizen Kane, dir. Orson Welles, 119 min., 1941.

For geographer Alisdair Bonnett, “melancholic ideas and practices” like nostalgia “are not just reactive responses to change but can also be forms of action and activism.” If Bonnett is intent on showing that nostalgia is as common to the left as to the right, the problem that philosopher Barbara Cassin sets out to solve is how to rework the relationship between nostalgia and the native land or patriotism “in order to make of nostalgia a completely different adventure, one that would lead us to the threshold of a much broader and more welcoming way of thinking, to a vision of the world freed from all belonging” (2016, p. 8). Philosophers and psychologists have sought to recuperate nostalgia by highlighting its role as a buffer against the shocks of dislocation, the “modern” condition of spiritual homelessness, and other varieties of alienation (Sedikides et al., 2008). Given reenactment studies’ relation to history’s affective turn, it is surprising that so little attention has been paid to the role of nostalgia in reenactment (Agnew, 2007, p. 309). Part of the trouble so far has been that scholars continue to use the term to moralize, rather than analyze its conceptual and institutional histories. Many scholars and artists, like Jeremy Deller in The Battle of Orgreave (2001), are ambivalent about nostalgia’s worth; yet if reenactment studies is to open up new horizons of affective history, it is vital that they turn away from using this popular historical emotion as a label and consider instead how it is made and how it works (Figure 32.1).

Further reading Bonnett, A., 2016; Malpas, J., 2011; Frow, J., 1991; Hutcheon, L., and Valdés, M., 1991; Schroeder, J. D. S., 2018; Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., Arndt, J., and Routledge, C., 2008.

159

33 OBJECTS Katrina Schlunke

The past is materialized in multiple ways. It is read and interpreted via texts in many shapes, displayed in the form of artifacts, and organized within institutional settings such as museums and heritage sites. It also appears to us via film, novels, and theater, giving societies what Alison Landsberg calls a form of “prosthetic memory” (2004, p. 2).The effects produced by these emergent pasts can be emotional, affective, political, particular, and collective. Material objects have often been understood as empty or blank and as requiring the narrative of history to let them truly appear and be known (narrative). Once known, the object is then often treated as indicative only of its historical context. A shoe from the 1870s is carefully examined to reveal traces of the tanning techniques used, the style of hobnails linking it to industrialization, and its color, purporting to tell us something about a previous period.This understanding of historical objects as being immediately knowable explains the dependency of reenactors on historical objects as proof of the reenactors’ authenticity. The risk of discovering and insisting on these historical essences is that they can foreclose the “social life” and extended history of the material entity. This means the multiple ways in which the object may have become entangled in diverse cultures and taken on different meanings or been returned to older ones is lost in a paralyzing focus on its life as belonging to only one time. This is particularly important when considering the ways Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures have taken up the objects of each other’s cultures.Yet these material biographies, while adding in a necessary multidirectional and multicultural context, continue to understand the object as a representation of human society. For thinkers like Latour (2005), this ignores the agency of the objects themselves and the ways in which material entities produce effects that are not dependent upon human control (material culture). In his formulation, nonhumans must be “actors” (p. 10). This might be as immediate as a land mine killing its maker or as prolonged as traffic congestion and shifting weather patterns, all referred to as more-than-human effects. For reenactment, this approach to objects means including both the nonhuman aspects (such as weather and animal life) in their appreciation of historical events, as well as the effects these nonhuman actors produce, including temperature and animal-derived effects (such as the speed of communication in a horse-driven time). The materialization of the past therefore marks a profound acknowledgment of the ways in which historicized materials are active in the production of the past as the past. Reenactment as a materialization of the past uses materiality in all the ways set out earlier, including being the site of agential acts by particular objects. However, the most common way 160

Objects

in which materiality is evoked within (nontheatrical) reenactment is as a direct presentation of the past. This is done through the careful sourcing and use of “original” materials (authenticity). Materials are tied to the scene that is being reenacted, as demonstrated by photographic record, oral history archive, and expert opinion. Unlike other ways of doing history (museum display, for example), reenactment is concerned with the activation of historicized materials. In many instances, research, thought, and craft go into not only the production of the items used but also care for the limits they impose. Reenactors learn how to move properly under the weight of chain mail or a World War I soldier’s equipment. Working properly with historicized materials is very important to produce what is seen as lacking in other historical forms, namely, the live experience of the past act. For such “temporal resonance” to occur, the individual must give a “good impression” (Daugbjerg, 2014, p. 725), and connect limbs and mind with the correct historical artifacts to connect with that past.This emphasis on an absolute fidelity that might be achieved with the right material props can then produce a direct sense of having “touched time,” contributing to what Rebecca Schneider calls the “effort to find ‘that was then’ inside ‘this is now’” (2011, p. 10). Such effort connects even the most traditional form of historical reenactment with much wider discussions on representation and its relationship with language and power. It also holds historical objects to an order of historical indexicality that is only one way in which objects can be understood. The demand for authentic materials with which to produce a correct reenactment has given rise to a small but seemingly growing market in both the United States and the United Kingdom. In this sense, the materialization of the past is also an economic activity related to the heritage and memory industries. As a niche market, reenactment produces community-scale capitalism where the means of production is fitted to local concerns and individual knowledges. As shifts happen in research on costumery, so a demand rises for detailing and invention from the producers. And yet these products of reenactment sit on the web attracting more than members of their known market. And in that way, some of these products will burst into the life of a commodity, arriving who knows where. Some items provide an immediate connection to more-than-human effects, which lets us follow the materials of reenactment beyond their human-centered imagining. One of the suppliers of medieval hoods for reenactors, for example, makes it clear that constancy is impossible, noting that the wool shades change every year because the sheep fleeces change (Cwmchwefru Wool). This is evidence of the different orders of time that might come to be seen through the acts of materializing the past by wearing copied clothing in orders of mimesis. As a copy of a medieval hood, the processes necessary to produce it have created an original, but something dependent for its form on the season, the sheep, and the way the particular animal has processed its conditions of being to grow wool of a particular kind. To wear such a hood is to wear an association with the temporal realities of different seasons, an echo of never having been modern and having always been tied to weather, and a minor reminder of the more-thanhuman. The hood exists because reenactors want to better experience another time, and yet in and of itself the hood already belongs to a different order of time. The materials of the past are often the materials of the present but transformed by the patina of age. The objects of reenactment, however, are put back into their own time, when they were “naturalized.” As Sherry Turkle writes, “naturalized” objects are historically specific, and so these objects become uncanny and the unfamiliar familiar (2007, p. 311). An example of this might be as simple as the use of a buckled shoe to show the period of reenactment, and yet the sight of that once ordinary object in the present moment sets off a destabilizing association with the current idea of what any ordinary shoe is.Yet what is this desire to take something from the past and restore and re-use it in a situation something like it was once used? Does that constant use 161

Katrina Schlunke

and re-use exercise the belief that objects “offer only a surface for the projection of our social needs and interests” (Latour, 1993, p. 52), or does something like the medieval hood take us as much into the rhythms of sheep life as it does toward the (reenacted) middle ages? If objects are understood “as densely compressed performances unfolding in unpredictable ways” (Pinney, 2005, p. 269), then it may be the materials of reenactment that provide the diverse temporalities that sustain the allure of these performed pasts. While reenactments are often posited upon the repetition of a known past, the objects used to complete those performances are never quite enough, never sufficiently disciplined to docility, to enable a simple repetition. In this way, the materialization of the past suggests that a material object may convey something about its cultural context or historical point of emergence within the tightly formulated script of the reenactment, or it may not. An object may remain stubbornly withdrawn or actively produce its own effects that impact humans. Ultimately, the materialization of the past is as likely to be experienced in the incoherent mélange and temporal trajectories of the recycling shop as it in a tightly scripted historical reenactment.Yet it is reenactment, with its focus on repetition and mimesis, that provides one of the most embodied experiments in crossing the multiple times of multiple materials to produce the past in the present (body and embodiment). A materialization of the past is a recognition of the excess that challenges teleology, or a unitary colonial time or overweening capitalist discourse. Accounting for the materiality of the past helps us acknowledge the unending stuff of the present and its time-making effects. Being able to see the intimate struggles of stuff and time and humans in the uncanny shape of reenactment may seem at odds with the project of indexical reproduction that reenactment often pursues. Yet in its repetitive impossibility, the materialization of the past that is exceeded in each reenactment suggests the more-than-human histories that may produce a present of more-than-human possibilities.

162

34 PAGEANT Amy M. Tyson

Twentieth-century historical pageants are often referred to as “Parkerian pageants,” so named for Louis Napoleon Parker (1852–1944), who wrote and staged The Pageant of Sherbourne in Dorset, England in 1905. Intended to commemorate the town’s 1200th anniversary, Parker drew on 900 locals who performed 11 historic episodes chronicling the town’s early history, and so began the historical pageant’s modern form. Not long after Parker’s early effort, communities across the globe were participating in these large-scale, historically focused performance spectacles. The pageant’s form borrowed from the tableau vivant genre (i.e., living pictures that were staged but static), as well as from the long-standing processional pageants (i.e., narrative plays performed on mobile structures, such as wagons) that preceded and overlapped with them. In a sense, they might be thought of as a series of dramatized historical reenactments, but whereas reenactments have tended to refer to stagings of a singular event or moments in time (as in, say, a battle reenactment), modern historical pageants were grand theatrical performances depicting chronological histories that unfolded in carefully crafted episodes intended for mass consumption (pilgrimage). Unlike earlier forms of pageantry that traveled, historical (née Parkerian) pageants were generally performed in fixed locations such as arenas or fields—and when possible, often took place in front of settings meant to evoke the aura of the past—for instance, in front of a castle’s ruins. At the helm of these pageants was the pageant master (and sometimes mistress), who was hired to write, organize, and direct the production. Depending on the production’s size, local citizens also formed committees to orchestrate areas such as finance, costumes, publicity, and the like. As with Parker’s inaugural effort, historical pageants enlisted the time and talents of hundreds and sometimes thousands of community participants who worked as the pageant’s volunteer amateur actors. Regardless of what history was being portrayed or where it was being portrayed—the many weeks of rehearsals leading up to a pageant encouraged face-to-face contact between community participants who might otherwise never have encountered each other. Thus, in an era where rapid advances in telecommunications dispersed connections beyond the local sphere, the pageant reestablished the increasingly tenuous bonds of community—at least, for those who were permitted to participate in them (Glassberg, 1990, p. 288). Finally, after many weeks of rehearsal the cast would dramatize their pageant over the space of an afternoon or several consecutive ones for massive crowds (for the larger pageants, spectators could be in

163

Amy M. Tyson

the tens of thousands), many of whom would take home a specially printed souvenir program (Figure 34.1). In a very real sense, historical pageants were meant as antidotes to the perceived problems of the modern industrial era. Like the folksy open-air museums that emerged in Europe in the 1890s, on the surface, historical pageants tended to evoke nostalgia for the pre-industrial past through historical narratives that erased the real dissonance between groups in the industrial present. Pageant participants intentionally drew on a broad cross-section of a community, with the thought that the communal histories that unfolded within the pageant would promote the cross-class unity mirrored in the pageant’s cross-class production effort. And yet, this art nevertheless tended to mimic life, with the most prestigious roles often going to the town’s elite or local gentry (Sheail, n.d.). That said, from a gendered perspective, the historical pageants of the early 20th century provided opportunities for both women and men to organize civic participatory activities and to perform in the public sphere, even while the historical narratives portrayed therein tended only to portray men as the agents of historical change (gender). The mammoth scale of these historical pageants did not lend easily to nuance. Most pageant writers assembled their historic episodes with an eye toward inspiring patriotic sentiment, fostering joyful civic participation, and also avoiding controversy. Louis Napoleon Parker even urged fellow British pageant writers to focus their efforts on histories prior to the British Civil Wars of the mid-17th century, in order to avoid civic discord.Thus, particularly in the era before World War I, most historical pageants focused on dominant narratives and canonical episodes in a town’s history (with American pageants making liberal use of allegorical interludes). In Hertford, England, their pageant episodes began in 673 with an episode dedicated to The Synod

Figure 34.1 Souvenir of the Oxford historical pageant: in aid of the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford Eye Hospital, etc. commemoration, 1907. Source: Oxford Pageant Committee.

164

Pageant

of Hartforde; the final and eighth episode was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I’s 1561 visit to Hertford Castle (Sheail, n.d.). In Cheshire, a 1914 pageant focused its efforts chiefly on Queen Elizabeth I’s 1589 “visit” to Cheshire’s Moreton Hall. Significantly, this latter Elizabethan visit is apparently not substantiated by any historical documentation, yet in the historical pageant that depicted it—like so many others—her presence was intended to boost local civic pride alongside promoting national unity (Bartie et al., n. d.). While most modern historical pageants were rooted in localism, pageant scripts were often mere variations on a theme, as the two mentioned English pageants suggest (narrative). In England, for example, the iconic Elizabeth I often came a-calling. Moreover, in settler-colonial societies such as Australia, South Africa, Canada, and the US, historical pageants worked not merely to inspire civic pride and patriotism, but also to uphold imperialist narratives. Peter Merrington describes, for example, how pageant scripts from both Cape Town and Quebec shared similar features with “the most significant historical episodes […] dealing with landfall and settlement; as well as moments of dedication, covenant between settlers and God, or the signing of treaties between them and the ‘natives’” (1998–1999, p. 140) (indigeneity). Given that modern historical pageants—whether dealing with imperialist themes or not— helped maintain the status quo, it is not surprising that subaltern histories tended to be excluded from pageant narratives. For example, in the US, when ethnic minorities were included among the cast of most modern pageants, it was only when such inclusion supported the pageant’s hegemonic themes. Historian David Glassberg observes that in St. Louis, Missouri in 1914, the pageant masters of Pageant and Masque assigned white ethnic groups (much to their chagrin) roles as “‘some peasant folks’ arriving as new immigrants … on the margins of the community, rather than having them appear in scenes depicting the making of St. Louis” (1990, p. 5) (Figure 34.2). Similarly, despite protest, the city’s 44,000 black residents were excluded from the pageant. Here, and elsewhere in most American historical pageants, immigrants and black Americans were considered people without history. By contrast, in settler-colonial societies, indigenous people were often represented because the generic episodic histories of historic pageants demanded either that indigenous peoples’ domination or their acquiescence be accounted for as a way to visibly demonstrate an inevitable ascendency of white settler-colonists. In many cases, the roles of indigenous people were played by white townsfolk. In Pageant and Masque, for example, local whites were chosen to “play Indian” despite offers from the Ojibwe’s William Hole-in-the-Day that his people be hired for the indigenous roles (Glassberg, 1990, pp. 178–179). Here, an actual indigenous presence would contradict the pageant’s dominant message that “conquered” indigenous peoples had stepped aside (or vanished altogether) to make way for the inevitable progress of white civilization. By the same token, even when actual indigenous people were included among a historical pageant’s cast, it was only to reinforce their perceived distance from white civilization. In the 1908 Quebec tercentenary, for example, Nelles describes how the hired “Natives” were dressed in “gaudy Plains Indian” feathered headdresses “and leather-fringed clothing, brandishing tomahawks and shouting war whoops,” borrowing heavily from the era’s popular Wild West theatricals, which—like the historical pageant—also staged canonical and mythic retellings of history (1996, p. 402). Here, while we find one episode of the pageant devoted to the Iroquois’ dramatic performances of disarray and murder, in the episode that follows, Nelles notes, “[o]rder is restored and civilization secured by the Church, reinforced by the secular power of the state” (1996, p. 404). By the second decade of the 20th century, groups seeking to counter dominant historical narratives also adopted the form. In 1913, activist, sociologist, and historian W. E. B. DuBois staged The Star of Ethiopia, a pageant honoring the 50th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, 165

Amy M. Tyson

Figure 34.2 Group of cast members from the Pageant and Masque, wearing colonial and American Indian costumes. Source: Missouri History Museum, 1914.

the presidential order during the American Civil War that declared the freedom of enslaved persons in certain parts of the American South (Figure 34.3). Premiering in New York City with more than a thousand participants, DuBois’s production, as historian David Krasner has noted, did not merely trace black history to pre-historic times through to the present, it represented African Americans’ experience with slavery as evidence of their resilience (2002). Earlier that same year, the countercultural Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913 took place in New York’s Madison Square Garden to support 26,000 striking silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey. With the support of the radical labor organization Industrial Workers of the World, strikers protested the replacement of skilled laborers by mechanized silk looms. To gain public sympathy for the cause (which it did) and to raise money for it (which it did not), leftist journalist Jack Reed took the role of pageant master and worked with his bohemian comrades from Greenwich Village on sets and publicity. Over a thousand actual strikers, many of them Italian immigrants, reenacted the history leading up to and during the strike. Activist writer Steve Golin sees this pageant production as a pivotal moment for understanding how a “fragile bridge” was forged between middle-class activists and working people: “once the strike was lost,” Golin writes that the Industrial Workers of the World “and its bohemian allies lost some of their vitality and hope and retreated into their respective spheres” (2005, p. 1). While the American Left never quite embraced the form again on any large scale, in Britain, in the era between the world wars, trade unions and the communist party made frequent use of historical pageantry in order to dramatize narratives wherein unionism or communism

166

Pageant

Figure 34.3  “The Star of Ethiopia” to celebrate the XIII amendment … October 11, 13, and 15, 1915 [Washington, DC] Goins printing co. 1344,You Street N. W. [1915]. Source: Library of Congress 1915-01-01.

(respectively) were portrayed as inevitable conclusions to the struggles of history (Wallis, 2000). At this time, however, historical pageantry was still embraced in mainstream culture, but the form expanded to urban centers with industrial backdrops. Also, during the interwar period in Britain, the form was sometimes adapted to incorporate commemorations of the recent war (memory and commemoration). These were performed both allegorically—as was the case with the 1919 Oxford Pageant of Victory, which “placed the conflict in a longer‐term historical context,” and hyper-realistically—as was the case with the traveling 1919 St. Dunstan’s Pageant of Peace, which focused entirely on reenacting episodes from the war (Bartie et al., 2017, p. 647). Thus, the British interwar pageants should be seen as “sites of mourning” even as they embraced the “‘truth‐telling’ of modernism [alongside] older forms and structures of historical performance” (Bartie et al., 2017, p. 640). American pageants at this time similarly reckoned with the recent war, but unlike their British counterparts, focused a good deal on how citizens on the home front supported the war from afar (Glassberg, 1990, p. 267). On both sides of the Atlantic, when interwar pageant narratives addressed the recent war, the local histories that were the hallmarks of the early Parkerian pageants were somewhat supplanted by more overtly nationalist and imperialist themes. In the long run, however, the modern historical pageant’s focus on local histories never fully waned, that is, until the form itself more or less was abandoned, receding sharply by the end of the 1950s in favor of other expressions of civic engagement and national unity, including other forms of historical reenactment that gained popularity in the latter half of the 20th century, such as living history and battle reenacting. Ultimately, the popularity of historical pageants in the early 20th century is testament that people en masse took pleasure in being both participants and

167

Amy M. Tyson

spectators in this form of historical reenactment. More importantly, these pageants tell us about the stories people wanted to tell themselves about themselves, while also prompting scholars of reenactment to consider who had the privilege to tell those stories, who was excluded, and what that means for any dramatized history.

Further reading Glassberg, D., 1990; Withington, W., 1920;Yoshino, A., 2011.

168

35 PERFORMANCE AND PERFORMATIVITY Katherine Johnson

Performance is, of course, fundamental to reenactment; to reenact is to perform again. Notions of performativity are thus crucial to examining the many practices that can be considered reenactment. Performance and performativity are, however, equivocal words and concepts, with diverse connotations in different fields and contexts. Perceptions of reenactment’s performativity, both within the practice and in academic and news media representations of it, thus vary considerably. Although perhaps most commonly associated with costumed history buffs restaging a historic battle or playfully competing in a tourney, reenactment actually encompasses a range of performance styles and methods, facilitating different ways of engaging with history. Given these variations of perspective and approach, what exactly is meant here by performance and performativity? Performance, theater, and their adjectival forms are often used interchangeably; indeed, reenactment has more frequently been discussed in relation to theatricality than performativity. In theater and performance studies and the cultural industries, however, the term theater usually refers to script-based productions that center around verbal dialogue, narrative, and a character or characters. Performance, on the other hand, can include theater but also encompasses devised performance, physical theater, live art, performance art, movement-based practices, and post-dramatic theater. The term can also be used as a demarcation from theater, framing work as beyond the conventions of the theatrical form.This distinction is important, for while all forms of reenactment can be productively analyzed as performance, many reenactments are not theater, in the above sense of the word. Furthermore, the word performativity carries an additional significance that theatricality does not. Performativity—literally, the quality of being performative—has been used in different and at times very particular ways, most notably by Judith Butler (1988) to assert that gender is constructed by the imposition of social norms through verbal and physical acts. Underpinning this is John L. Austin’s (1962) widely utilized understanding of the performativity of language, i.e., the capacity of some forms of language to “act”—to not only describe but also to effect social action. As will be discussed here, the terms performance/performativity and their synonyms have been used both in their broader sense —to explore reenactment’s creative (re)doing of the past—and, less commonly, in the more specific sense of performativity above, to consider the way historical experience, custom, and culture might be embodied by the reenactor (Johnson, 2016; Schneider, 2011).

169

Katherine Johnson

The most prevalent form of performance used in museum and heritage-site/event reenactment is first-person interpretation. This involves the reenactor acting the part of a real or imagined historical character, through whom they impart information and answer questions. This is usually performed in period attire and sometimes in period language, with varying degrees of accuracy.The interpreter might focus on a particular topic, occupation, or object featured in the exhibition or might take a broader approach, discussing what life was like for someone of their class, gender, or race in that period. Some hobby reenactors use a similar approach by adopting a historical persona that they perform, often playfully or even ironically, while participating in some activities and events (Figure 35.1). Variants of first-person interpretation in professional and leisure reenactment can be understood as forms of role-play (Agnew, 2004; Handler and Saxton, 1988; Snow, 1993). For example, non-professional persona-based medieval and Viking reenactments, such as those performed by the globally popular Society for Creative Anachronism, converge closely with LARPing (­role-play; gaming). LARPers also assume a persona or character, whose actions they perform (rather than describe, as they do in tabletop gaming) in settings that are often pseudo-historical. Crossover membership and events are not uncommon among some groups, and many reenactorLARPers express appreciation for the escapism they experience while performing historically inspired personas and/or pastimes (Erisman, 1998). First-person interpretation at living history museums has been understood by Richard Schechner (1985) and Stephen Eddy Snow (1993) as a form of ethnohistorical role-play, i.e., a representation of selected aspects of historical culture through performing research “in role.” In a similar vein, Jay Anderson (1982, 1991) suggests that, in many living history museums, “simulation” functions as an interpretive tool to not only represent but also research history.

Figure 35.1  A medieval forging workshop at reenactment festival Beorg Wic. Source: Katherine Johnson.

170

Performance and performativity

Such character-based reenactments often draw on techniques from naturalistic acting–the most prevalent form of acting in Western performance, pioneered by Constantin Stanislavski and developed into “method acting” by, among others, Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler. In both professional and hobby varieties, it is not uncommon to create a character profile and develop a backstory, based on both research and imagination. Reflecting on his own and others’ practice at the Plimoth Plantation living history museum in Massachusetts, Snow (1993) discusses the use of units and objectives, which are components of script analysis widely used by naturalistic actors, and of Chekhov’s psychological gesture, a movement that encapsulates the character’s psyche. This merging of performance and history is encapsulated by the term actor-historian, by which some professional reenactors describe themselves. Actor-historians deliver performative lectures as a character derived from the period and setting on which they speak, often working in a freelance capacity across museums, schools, heritage sites, and festivals. The Jane Austen Festival in Bath, UK, for example, has featured actor-historian John White performing as Regency butler Mr Adams to lecture on Regency dining, entertaining, and comportment. These performers often complement their primarily naturalistic approach with more Brechtian acknowledgment of the performance construct. Some reenactors move in and out of role to enable comment from a “period” and present perspective; others use what Magellsen (2006) terms the “my timeyour time” technique. For example, the aforementioned Regency butler Mr. Adams said of hosting and visiting friends and family, “in your time, you might be a guest for a weekend; in my time, the year of 1812, you would be a guest for several weeks.”This technique enables the reenactor to remain in-character yet still discuss similarities and differences between then and now. Such fusions of performance and history are prevalent not only in museums and the heritage industry, but also school education programs, documentaries, and historically-themed reality television, such as Victorian Slum House (2016) and The Ship (2002). Historical reenactment has also been used in other forms of performance, particularly performance art, often to revisit or reconsider events and issues. In The Battle of Orgreave, artist Jeremy Deller engaged approximately 200 former miners and 800 historical reenactors in a site-specific reenactment of the iconic 1984 confrontation between strikers and the police. The multidisciplinary nature and use of reenactment seem to reflect a wider blurring of disciplinary boundaries in the arts, humanities, and social sciences (Snow, 1993). In many forms of reenactment, performance functions as both methodology and record: an embodied archive of historical skills, trades, arts, and culture (Johnson, 2015; 2016; Schneider, 2011). Dancing with the performed nature of history, Diana Taylor asserts the importance of what she refers to as the repertoire—history in and as performance, performance as an alternative or complementary form of archive (2003). Prefiguring Taylor’s notion of the repertoire, Connerton (1989) frames bodies as vehicles for memory and remembrance, participating in and absorbing what he terms “bodily practices”—performative embodied histories that resist and refute what would otherwise be the dominion of the written record. The reenacting body can function as a mode of historical inquiry and representation, exploring and extending archival research through the embodied, experiential nature of performance. Reenactors have described intense moments of felt historical connection—moments when they feel almost as if they were in the past or as if they really were, for a moment, the historically inspired persona they perform. In such moments, the performativity of reenactment evokes a poignant but transitory affective response in the reenactor (emotion). Actors, too, prize such occasions, when self and character fuse. But they are temporary; in such performative moments, the (reen)actor is, to borrow from Schechner (1981), temporarily transported, but not transformed. Of stronger epistemological and ontological significance is the corporeal inscribing of culture which can gradually occur when reenactment is an ongoing and regular practice that molds present 171

Katherine Johnson

bodies with materials, movements, and mannerisms of past bodies. Here, we return to Butler’s concept of performativity, which asserts that cultural values and expectations accumulate on, in, and through the body. This “sedimentation” of cultural mores is produced by, and produces, a “set of repeated acts,” which inflict a “repeated stylization of the body” and embodied identity (Butler, 1999, p. 43). Working in correlation with the (re)production of gender “enacted on a large, political scale,” sedimentation occurs as part of a “more mundane reproduction of gendered identity [that] takes place through the various ways in which bodies are acted in relationship to the deeply entrenched or sedimented expectations of gendered existence” (1988, p. 524).While Butler focuses on gender and sexuality, social constitution extends to other categories of socio-cultural identity and experience. Hobby reenactors—through the regular repetition of historical martial and creative arts, crafts, trades, and other activities and skills—(re)create some of the “repeated, stylized acts” of past cultures, somatically (re)membering the historical customs, values, and practices which instituted these ways of doing (Johnson, 2016). This is enhanced by the framing and shaping of their bodily presentation, movement, and experience through the making and wearing of historically accurate “period” clothing and accoutrements. In this way, the reenactor’s body becomes a partial and far less politically significant microcosm of Butler’s understanding of body as “a manner of doing, dramatizing and reproducing a historical situation” (1988, p. 521). Recognizing the capacity of performance to function historiographically—to record and relate aspects of the past in, on, and through the body—carries significance for and beyond reenactment. Reenactment potentially enables more active engagement in the historiographic process and in the questioning of dominant ideologies and identities, facilitating a more dialogic critical engagement within a broader sector of society. This feeds into larger, more significant socio-historical issues. With so much of history (re)written by a Western male elite, the performed histories of Indigenous and other minority groups and cultures are a vital platform for voices, stories, and insights that might go unheard or be silenced if performance is not acknowledged as a valid way to share and stimulate knowledge (Taylor, 2003) (indigeneity).The centrality of performance is not particular to reenactment or even public history; it is at the core of all historical inquiry. If, as historian and philosopher R. G. Collingwood (2005 [1946], p. 282) asserts, the “task of the historian is to reenact the past in his [sic] own mind,” then we might say that the product of the historian’s work is a performance of the past. History is not simply a text to be read or written; it is a production that retells and refashions selected, pieced-together stories of periods, places, and people. As ethnohistorian Greg Dening argues: History—the past transformed into words or paint or dance or play—is always a performance. An everyday performance as we present our selective narratives about what has happened at the kitchen table, to the courts, to the taxman, at the graveside. A quite staged performance when we present it to our examiners, to the collegiality of our disciplines, whenever we play the role of “historian.” History is theater. (2002, p. 1) In short, performance, history, and reenactment are interrelated, inextricably. This suggests we need to further reconsider (and, perhaps, reconfigure) the relation between reenactment and academic historical inquiry—and the inherent performativities of both.

Further reading Magelssen, S., 2007; McCalman, I., and Pickering, P., 2010; Schneider, R., 2011; Smith, L., 2011; Snow, S., 1993.

172

36 PILGRIMAGE Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska

Pilgrimage is a phenomenon common to many faiths and found throughout history in many regions of the world (Coleman and Elsner, 1995). It may be defined as a journey to a sacred place that is intended to evoke a deep spiritual experience and enrich the person who undertakes it (Morinis, 1992; Turner and Turner, 1978). In numerous religious traditions, pilgrimages often concern the fulfillment of personal vows of penance and the search for hope in changing life circumstances. Although pilgrimage can be about individual spiritual needs, the majority of such journeys are undertaken collectively and occur within larger cultural frameworks, be they religious or political. In this respect, pilgrimages can simultaneously impact both individuals and communities. While not all pilgrimages should be conceived of as direct and literal reenactments, pilgrimages can be seen as reenactments in the sense that they are founded on established cultural scripts or “restored behaviors” (Schechner, 1985, p. 36). Furthermore, “rituals of religious replication” have the potential to bring the past into the present and, in a sense, help define the future (Bielo, 2016, p. 11). Reenactment can be defined as encompassing a whole array of human activities, both epistemic and practical. It often comprises a significant aspect of pilgrimages, because many pilgrimages involve restaging the life stories of saints or heroes or performing other sacred histories. Thus, reenactment can be found in religious rituals that are often based on repetition (Bielo, 2016). The term pilgrimage can, however, also refer to secular events and need not be understood in an exclusively religious context. Pilgrimage is an interpretative category applied to highly diverse phenomena, ranging from tourist trips to Disneyland and visits to the sites of famous battles to journeys to religious sanctuaries (Margry, 2008; Reader and Walter, 1993). Interestingly, the ultimate destination of a pilgrimage does not necessarily define it as either religious or secular, since traveling to secular places—for example, to the monuments of war heroes or the graves of Jim Morrison and Elvis Presley—may result in a deep spiritual experience for some individuals. A visit to a religious sanctuary, in contrast, may end with mere appreciation for the architecture or the beauty of the place. Thus, a pilgrimage may also be considered secular if it involves processes of secularization in the Western world. One key example is the transformation of religious sites into heritage sites, such that visiting them is motivated by something other than religious piety. Aside from being spiritual and/or touristic, pilgrimages can also assume a commercial character. Souvenir, food, and hotels at pilgrimage sites depend heavily on visitor numbers, which in turn depend on the 173

Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska

impression of authenticity generated by the particular site. The existence of commercial ventures around a place often contributes to tensions between the touristic or commercial goals of vendors and the spiritual character of the site (Eade and Sallnow, 1991). Because pilgrimages are so diverse in nature, scholars are particularly cautious in defining what a pilgrimage is. They often rely on pilgrims’ self-assessment about what kind of travel can be deemed a pilgrimage (Collins-Kreiner, 2010). The most widely accepted definitions stress that the constitutive feature of pilgrimage that distinguishes it from other forms of human mobility is its spiritual goal, and this despite the fact that the boundary between pilgrimage and tourism often remains blurred. Edith and Victor Turner’s definition of pilgrimage (1978) is one of the most widely adopted. The Turners stress the collective character of pilgrimage. Primarily focusing on Catholic pilgrimages of the past and present, they defined them as threephase rituals that involve: (1) embarking on a journey; (2) traveling and reaching the destination (the liminal phase); and (3) returning home. According to the Turners, the second phase generates a special form of social relations that temporarily suspends hierarchies and social divisions, which the Turners refer to as communitas. This state of communal being springs from the intense experience of the sacred. Nonetheless, the sacred remains an emic category, one that is defined from an internal point of view. It is, in other words, what pilgrims perceive to be sacred in a given moment, since the religious, sacred, and secular cannot be precisely defined without taking into consideration the particularities of their political, social, and cultural contexts. The Turners’ understanding of pilgrimage is based on the concept of so-called root paradigms, which “derive from the seminal words and works of the religion’s founder, his disciples or companions, and their immediate followers, and constitute the ‘deposit of faith’” (1978, p. 10). According to this understanding, modern-day pilgrimages are reenactments of the deeds of saints, understood broadly as spiritual teachers or figures important for a given religion. In this special form of reenactment, the faithful follow in the footsteps of these individuals by choosing to travel to places where they lived in order to evoke the founding stories (Figure 36.1).

Figure 36.1 Lourdes Cave with the figure of Our Lady. Source: John Eade.

174

Pilgrimage

Thus, in the Turners’ understanding of the term, the communitas brought forth by reenactment transcends not only existing social structures, but also time, forging a community of those who originally performed given rites and those who recreate the rites during pilgrimages. Pilgrims visit places that connect them to the past and in this way confirm their sense of belonging to the community through time and space. As a form of reenactment, pilgrimages intend to evoke the impression of historical continuity. Thus, pilgrimages can be said to gain a certain control over time. The temporality of the pilgrimage is circular in the sense that it involves the repetition of ritual practices. By the same token, when pilgrimage is seen as a means of achieving a higher purpose, it takes on a teleological dimension. Nevertheless, an orientation toward future goals does not change the fact that pilgrimages look to the past and produce knowledge about it that is shared by those participating in the ritual experience (Taylor, 2006). Furthermore, the stories reenacted and the knowledge invoked and/or constructed in pilgrimages are often central to the pilgrim’s personal identity. Similarly, the same stories can be used to construct national or ethnic identities. Thus, some pilgrimage sites become invested with religious, historical, political, or ideological significance.This is particularly true for shared sacred spaces in which various religious groups and nationalities struggle for dominance (whether symbolic or real) over a particular place. Pilgrimages can be an important means of gaining or validating power. The most telling example of such a shared pilgrimage site is Jerusalem, where the faithful of various religions reenact and venerate their pasts. In the very heart of the city lies al-Ḥaram al-Šarīf, or Temple Mount, a shared sacred space for Jews, Muslims, and Christians (Gonen, 2003) (Figure 36.2). It has been the central sacred space for Jews since the Ark of the Covenant was placed in the First Temple of Solomon, and in Judaism, pilgrimage to the site is believed to have been a divinely ordained duty. Although the temple itself no longer exists, pilgrims emphasize and evoke its significance in rituals. The only remaining part of the Second Temple, erected after the original temple was destroyed, is

Figure 36.2 The Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Source: Paweł Baraniecki.

175

Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska

the Wailing Wall, which evokes the history of the Jewish religion. The mount, the holy site of Judaism, holds a comparable status in Islam. Though the hajj is the most important pilgrimage in Islam, Muslims’ religious history is strongly linked to Jerusalem, because it is the home of multiple places associated with the life of the prophet Muhammad. He traveled to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in al-Ḥaram al-Šarīf and is believed to have ascended from the mosque for a one-night journey to heaven. Similarly, the Temple Mount is revered by Christians who pass through the site when on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, even though primarily they visit places related to Jesus’s life. The journeys recreate the origin story of the respective religions and thus reenact a custom of traveling to the Holy Land, practiced since the first centuries after the founding of each religion. It is central to Catholic and Eastern Christians’ pilgrimages as well as those undertaken by Protestants, albeit less frequently. Members of the various Christian denominations journey through the Holy Land in slightly different ways. Taking different routes and emphasizing different places, they create a representation of Jerusalem that stems from the religious imagery of the specific denomination (Feldman, 2016); at the same time, the believers of each Abrahamic religion manifest their claims to symbolic dominance over the pilgrimage site when they visit it. It is not uncommon for Christian pilgrimages to embrace aspects of other religions and spiritualities. One such example of a shared pilgrimage space are the various routes collectively comprising the Camino, which all lead to a sanctuary in Santiago de Compostela, believed by Christians to be the burial place of St. James. Here, there is no competition for religious control over the space. The Way of Saint James can be started and finished at almost any point; it is not necessary to reach the church. The aim is said to lie in the journey itself and in the transformation the pilgrim undergoes en route (Frey, 1998). Pilgrims retrace the steps of their predecessors, drawing from their experiences and using the tips published in countless guidebooks, memoirs, and blogs. Yet the essence of the Camino pilgrimage lies in what emerges through imitating the actions of other pilgrims. This imitation offers pilgrims an opportunity to transform their personal identities. Pilgrimages are entirely performative. They evoke experiences, meanings, and reinterpretations of religious or otherwise significant content. They also have the potential to alter social relations. They can influence gender relations within communities (Dubisch, 1995) by empowering women participating in the pilgrimage (Fedele, 2013), and they can be used by politicians to bolster their power. This was true of the Ram Rath Yatra, a large religious-political rally that took place in 1990 and lasted for over a month. The objective of its organizers was to gain votes for India’s Bharatiya Janata Party through a ritualized pilgrimage, the official aim of which was to support a campaign to erect a temple devoted to Rama (a Hindu deity) in Ayodhya in northern India next to a mosque, which was subsequently destroyed by Hindu nationalists in 1992. Pilgrimages may also be focused on specific political and social causes. The annual Refugee Tales Walk in the UK, for example, is an initiative intended to express solidarity with refugees, asylum seekers, and immigration detainees, one that symbolically reenacts their experiences of flight and incarceration and preserves their personal stories through discussion and literary expression (Herd and Pincus, 2016; Agnew, 2020). As such, the Refugee Tales Walk recalls the intersection between pilgrimaging and storytelling in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (written in the second half of the 14th century), which follows the ancient Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury and the shrine of Thomas Becket. Thus, while pilgrimages are strongly connected to memory, both personal and collective, they may also articulate desires to effect immediate social and political change. Remembering as a motive for pilgrimage may be discerned in journeys to the sites of battles, such as Gallipoli or the Somme, to war memorials (Eade and Katić, 2018; Hyde and Harman, 2011; Iles, 2006), or to Holocaust concentration camps (dark tourism). In such places, the past 176

Pilgrimage

is reenacted by visitors paying respect to those killed, reflecting on catastrophes, or by embodying experiences that bring them closer to the commemorated events. Reenactment can also constitute the literal aim of a pilgrimage, since many people travel to places to see religious theatrical performances, such as the Christian Passion plays or Easter pageants in Oberammergau, Germany (pageant), performances depicting the life of Krishna, such as those in Brindavan, India, or reconstructions of battles staged in their historical locations. Reenactment as a cultural practice is ingrained in many ways in practices of pilgrimage and forms one of its constitutive characteristics.Thus, pilgrimages enable their participants to make roots in the past and simultaneously find hope for changing their future.

Further reading Bielo, J., 2016; Coleman, S., and Elsner, J., 1995; Collins-Kreiner, N., 2010; Dubisch, J., 1995; Eade, J., and Sallnow, M. J. (eds.), 1991; Eade, J., and Katić, M. (eds.), 2018; Fedele, A., 2013; Feldman, J., 2016; Frey, N., 1998; Reader, I., and Walter, T. (eds.), 1993; Turner,V., and Turner, E., 1978.

177

37 PLAY Robbert-Jan Adriaansen

Reenactment is undeniably a form of play. Reenactments are performances in which reenactors play historical characters and in which historical events or situations are staged or improvised as play—not necessarily only in the sense of a theatrical production, but in the broadest sense of “play” as a verb. In some cases, reenactment can even be classified as a game when it is explicitly regulated and when an element of competition is involved, particularly when it takes the form of live action role-play (LARP).While the English language conveniently distinguishes between play and game, the latter of which may be understood as a formalized mode of play, the cultural theory of play has traditionally reflected on play in the broadest sense of the word, which includes theater only as one particular form of play. As easy as it is to recognize play, it is not easy to define. In consequence, theories of play tend to define the phenomenon by focusing on the functions, characteristics, or genres of play. One of the earliest theorists of play, Friedrich Schiller, conceptualized play as one of the essential drives of human nature, reconciling the human drive for the absolute with the human experience of being in, and subject to, time, concluding that “man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays” (Schiller, [1795] 1967, p. 107). In his Homo Ludens, another classic of the theory of play, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga understood play in cultural terms. Departing from the position that play is more than simply playing games, he argues that culture arises in and as play, and he recognizes an element of play in all cultural forms. Music, theater, dance, poetry, and rituals contain aspects of play, but so do war, science, and law. This does not mean that the latter are not serious aspects of culture and society. Rather, Huizinga claims that they can be carried out in the form and mood of play, which might be best understood as an agreement to accomplish something in a limited spatiotemporal setting while consenting to a set of more or less explicitly pre-established rules. In some cases, play may result in the relief of some tension. In this sense, defenses of doctoral dissertations, aerial dogfights, rap battles, and many elements of historical culture, including historical reenactment, are clearly conducted as play.To a certain extent, these cultural forms satisfy the definition Huizinga gives of play, in which he discerns seven characteristics. First, Huizinga claims that play is a “free activity” (Huizinga, 1949, p. 13), by which he means that play exists solely for its own sake. It is an expression of human freedom that answers to no demands beyond the demands it sets for itself. Second, play is not serious in the sense that it pretends and does not have to worry about the basic necessities of everyday life.This does not mean 178

Play

that play is not serious at all, however. Quite the opposite is true: engaging in play thoroughly absorbs the player—the third part of Huizinga’s definition. Fourth, there is no material gain associated with play, which reinforces the fact that play serves no purpose beyond itself. Fifth, play has its own specific spatiotemporal parameters. It takes place in a defined playing field and can be repeated over and over again. Sixth, play relies on a rule system.Whether the rules of play have been explicitly stated or not, every player abides by the rules voluntarily when deciding to play. Even the cheater acknowledges the rules by still pretending to play; it is only the spoilsport who breaks the circle of play by deliberately renouncing the rules. Last, play shapes community, as all players share in the spirit and experience of play. Historical reenactment facilitates forms of play in the sense that play may be a part of staging the past; children can play with historical toys, reenactors can joust, dance, or shoot craps. On a larger scale, reenactment itself is also a form of play, as it constitutes the spatiotemporal “playing field” and determines the “rule system” in line with which the past is staged. Advancing Huizinga’s work, Roger Caillois provides a useful taxonomy of forms of play, discerning between agon (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (simulation), and ilinx (play that effectuates a temporary disruption of perception) (Caillois, 2001). Acknowledging that particular games can combine a number of these forms, Caillois creates a rather versatile model that positions all forms of play on a continuum between two poles: ludus—games with explicit rules—and paidia—playful activities that are less structured and rely on improvisation. Although the theories of Huizinga (1949) and Caillois (2001) are not always consistent with each other and have been challenged and amended many times, criticisms of both theories converge around one important point: they both distinguish between play and reality. Setting play apart from real life involves a theoretical inconsistency, as it contradicts the claim that play is self-referential and cannot be reduced to anything exterior (Anchor, 1978). According to Jacques Ehrmann, this distinction is a hierarchical one, in which play merely represents a reality that exists prior to it and that serves as its standard measure (Ehrmann et al., 1968). In response, scholars like Eugen Fink have conceptualized play as an ontological category, arguing that in order to move beyond the modern dichotomy between play and reality, it is necessary to understand that play never occurs outside of reality (Fink, 1968). Play does have its own reality, but all the elements of play—the playing field, the objects of play, and the other players—are simultaneously part of the reality of play and the reality of everyday life. Based on the same critique, HansGeorg Gadamer made play into a central category of philosophical hermeneutics. As a concept, “play” was useful to Gadamer’s larger hermeneutic argument that the subject matter can never be objectively known, and that, instead, the aim of understanding is a broadening of the interpretive horizon of the interpreter. Play loses even the suggestion that understanding might have anything to do with the subjectivity of the author or the interpreter. 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. Therefore, play cannot be understood as a purely subjective act. For this reason, the concept of play became one of the main tools for Gadamer to explore a hermeneutics that did not rely on a self-contained rational subject (Gadamer 1986; 2013). This opens up the possibility to think of play as a dialogue that deepens understanding. The rise of historical game studies has been largely responsible for bringing the concept of play into the study of historical culture (Chapman et al., 2017). Game studies has been subject to ongoing debate between narratologists, who study games as narrative representations (Jenkins, 2004; Murray, 1999), and ludologists, who study games as ludic simulations (Aarseth, 2004; Eskelinen, 2004; Juul, 2001). Understanding games as simulations means interpreting them as systems (of rules) that model the behavior of an original system (Frasca, 2003). While ludology uses play theory to analyze game mechanics, gameplay, and the player’s immersion in the activity 179

Robbert-Jan Adriaansen

(Salen and Zimmerman, 2003), narratology uses literary theory to study the narrative that is expressed in the game. Today, there is a general consensus that the distinction between narrative representation and ludic simulation is an artificial one and that games contain both elements (Frissen et al., 2015; Murray, 2013). Noting that a strict distinction between representation and simulation is difficult to maintain, William Uricchio defines simulation as “a machine for producing speculative or conditional representations” (Uricchio, 2005, p. 333) and claims that historical representations and historical simulations constitute two ends of a continuum on which all forms of historical games can be situated. In games that have clear narrative structures, outcomes, and goals and that deal with particular events, the representational element is dominant. In such a game, the play element is restricted to playfully taking part in historical narration. In other games, such as strategy games, the simulation element is dominant. These games generally deal with the larger historical structures and developments that are represented in the rule system. They are, moreover, speculative and counterfactual, because players can determine the path of history through creative play, which is made possible by the rule system granting them a certain degree of agency through—for example—a decision tree model. In such games, players do not play a character in a historical setting that is determined through an established narrative, but can set the course of events themselves, as they can opt to act in ways that are at odds with historical reality (Figure 37.1). Several scholars of historical game studies have compared historical video games with reenactments and have argued that video games, as ludic simulations of the past, are digital versions of “analogue” historical reenactment (Chapman, 2016; Rejack, 2007; Vowinckel, 2009). However, although many scholars of historical reenactment do refer to reenactment as a form of simulation or mention the element of play, a systematic analysis of reenactment as play has

Figure 37.1 Cannon Hall Napoleonic Reenactment Day, 27 August 2009. Source: Bryan Ledgard.

180

Play

yet to be written.Viewing reenactment as a form of play offers a number of advantages to and possibilities for further research. First, it enables us to study historical reenactment as a relevant part of historical culture with its own epistemic, aesthetic, ethical, and—as Eugen Fink has argued—ontic relations with the past. This can help solve one of the key problems of reenactment studies, namely the fact that some scholars tend to take academic historical scholarship as a normative benchmark to which reenactment and other forms of popular historical culture are explicitly or implicitly compared, thus maintaining a hierarchic dichotomy between objective textual history and subjective bodily memory (Schneider, 2011). It is only in this comparison that reenactment appears as an amateurish activity susceptible to mythologizing and glorifying the past. A study of the play element of reenactment can reveal how the reenactor gains an understanding of history through his or her actual engagement with the game world of the simulated past. Second, play can help deepen the conception of reenactment as “affective history” (Agnew, 2007; McCalman and Pickering, 2010). While many studies emphasize that the immersive aspect of reenactment—the “period rush”—serves as a major drive for reenactors (Brædder et al., 2017; Daugbjerg, 2017; Kalshoven, 2015), this phenomenon is difficult to make sense of due to its apparently subjective nature. Analyses of such immersive experiences often result in thick description of them as sublime historical experiences in the sense that they seem to temporarily suspend historical distance but ultimately end up in the traumatic realization that the past is gone (Ankersmit, 2005).Yet such descriptions hardly solve the problem of interpretation, because they ultimately settle on the conclusion that experience is defined by unintelligible qualities. Play theory can offer new vantage points here. Mads Daugbjerg, for example, describes the difference between scripted battles performed in front of an audience and tacticals, in which Civil War reenactors improvise (2017). While the 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, as the format offers a plethora of individual choices that can be made, simulates the chaos of the battle, and provides a higher degree of immersion. One could say that historical representation governs scripted reenactment, while simulative and aleatory elements are predominant in the tacticals. Viewed as a form of play, experiencing authenticity during tacticals can be explained not as an experience of a distant past, but as the experience of immersion in historical simulation. Third, play enables us to study the educational value of historical reenactment. Currently, the field of reenactment studies tends to see reenactment as having minimal educational potential. If anything, historical reenactment is granted the capacity to contribute to “wanting to know more” about history (Hunt, 2004). Generally, it is argued, reenactors tend to rely on rather shallow notions of historical authenticity, which is thought to hamper an understanding of larger historical structures and connections. Whereas this focus is viewed as impeding a proper understanding of history, the enthusiasm reenactment generates is seen as being able to inspire reenactors to learn more about the past through an engagement with historical scholarship. Living history and artistic forms of reenactment have been treated more positively as responsible representations guided by professionals (Apel, 2012). From this perspective, historical reenactment has no educational value, but can inspire enthusiasts to conduct further, serious, and cognitive (as opposed to experience-based) historical studies. From the perspective of play, however, cognitive learning need not be prioritized over affective learning, because in historical reenactment, play constitutes both the context and the object of learning. This means that the simulation of the past relies on a rule system that creates the playing field and defines the modes of historical conduct—but in order to be able to play, one must also understand and comprehend this system. Being able to successfully play means that one knows how the model functions, and thus that 181

Robbert-Jan Adriaansen

one does not simply understand the model but can also apply it. This does not imply that no historical mythmaking takes place in reenactment—such mythmaking can be analyzed in the scripts, scenarios, and rules and regulations that have been drawn up and approved of within the reenactment community prior to the event. But it does mean that reenactment is an act of historical understanding in its own right and that this can be studied sub specie ludi. Fourth, as play, reenactment shares a number of aspects with other forms of play, such as ritual. One could argue that reenactment has always been intertwined with rituals, as the enactment of myths and the reenactment of deeds from the past have been part of rituals since time immemorial (Eliade, 1987). Ritual reenactment enables believers to experience the foundational events of a religion or a religious community, but it does so through an actualization, or de-historization, of the archetypical event, which brings the believer into the timeless realm of the sacred (pilgrimage). Such aspects are not lost in secular reenactment, and they may well explain that the quests for endurance, revelation, or atonement undertaken by the enacted person are at the same time experiences that the reenactor can personally identify with, because the play element of both ritual and secular reenactment enables the full identification of the self with the historical persona.

Further reading Caillois, R., 2001; Fink, E., 1968; Gadamer, H.-G., 1986; Huizinga, J., 1949; Salen, K., and Zimmerman, E., 2003.

182

38 PRACTICES OF AUTHENTICITY Stephen Gapps

Authenticity is a central, defining feature of the practice of historical reenactment. For ­reenactors, authenticity is a key measure of the success of their simulations and reconstructions of past events and things. The authenticity practices employed by reenactors have a powerful impact on the kinds of historical narratives used in reenactment and are strongly related to reenactors’ claims about how they experience the past. From the 1960s, with more leisure time and individual wealth in Western societies, a democratization of history-making followed, and the production of history was increasingly taken up by amateur history-makers and conducted outside the usual sites of state-sanctioned and scholarly history (amateurism and expertise). At the same time, a boom in tourism saw history theme parks such as Colonial Williamsburg and Plimoth Plantation in the US promote costumed history performers in evocative settings as immersive and authentic experiences of the past, despite these enactments being imitations of the past (living history). Schooled by changing museum and educational techniques and displays, and emboldened by new social history, self-styled historical reenactors literally began to take history into their own hands—conducting their own research, sewing their own costumes, and making replicas of historical objects. While there was crossover with a nostalgic revival of fading arts and crafts, such as blacksmithing and leatherworking, reenactment was closely aligned with new methods of public education. Particularly in the US, UK, and Australia, from the 1960s to the 1990s, reenactment spread beyond the domain of commemorative events and was promoted as a more accessible form of teaching and learning about the past through tangible objects, live performance, and public interaction (material culture; memory and commemoration). This was followed closely in Europe and has recently been taken up in educational practices in countries such as Turkey and Indonesia. For their audiences, reenactments appeared to offer a more genuine experience than other heavily mediated or curated versions of historical representation. The search for an authentic experience of the past was certainly a reason for the rapid growth and popularity of performed histories from the 1960s on. Because people were actually doing history—using artifacts just as they may have been used in the past—this gave simulation the credibility of genuine historical representation (Gapps, 2002; MacCannell, 1973) (performance and performativity). However, this public turn toward reenactment as authentic experience is not to be confused with reenactors’ own use of the term authenticity. The authorization of specific objects 183

Stephen Gapps

as g­ enuine or real (authentication) had long been the domain of museums and experts. In a similar vein to family history researchers from the 1970s, reenactors can be said to have helped democratize authentication processes. Historical reenactment communities developed a specific currency of authenticity that applied to the perceived quality of their performances and recreated objects, which in turn functioned as a means of quantifying the internal group status. Reenactors’ attachment to authenticity as an embodied physical experience of the past has often been overstated by critics of the practice and by traditional historians in particular. Historical reenactors, in turn, have focused on what has been described as one of the “multiple vernacular uses” of the term authenticity—“the authority to authenticate” (MacCannell, 1973; Theodossopoulos, 2013, pp. 340–341; Fillitz and Saris, 2013). From the 1970s, this context-specific conceptualization of authenticity has been a feature of the practices of historical reenactors and their formal staging of reenactments. Many reenactors aligned themselves with experimental archaeology, in which artifacts are reconstructed and put to use to see if this sheds new light on the ways in which such objects might have been used in the past. For example, some reenactors linked up with historical voyaging to recreate Viking-age longships and test theories of how far they could travel (Figure 38.1). In certain cases, such as the use of Stone Age footwear, testing by real people undoubtedly showed that reenactments could provide useful information unlikely to be found by laboratory tests. These investigative practices of historical reenactment have been critiqued for their claims to a more truthful—purportedly more real—historical method that is superior to academic history. However, this tends to overemphasize the influence of experimental archaeology on reenactments practices, which rarely occur in isolation from academic history (Agnew, 2018). By the 1990s, many individual reenactors were setting up their own mobile museums, which could be loaded into trailers and rolled out at public events. Reenactment groups carefully curated their living history encampments at public events and offered pop-up outdoor museum

Figure 38.1 A member of the Australian reenactment group The Huscarls demonstrates the Viking-age craft of tablet-weaving. Source: Stephen Gapps.

184

Practices of authenticity

experiences. For many reenactors, the perception of getting it right or being authentic contributed to an internal group bond as well as being a public crusade. While reenactors generally avoided questions over the nature of evidence and who adjudicates what is right, they focused on the fine and often missing details of the big-picture academic histories in museums and textbooks. This was a scale of history that could be managed by individuals and small groups and understood by their audiences. Despite questions over what constitutes evidence or getting it right in simulations, reenactment practices challenged historical thinking—a challenge only relatively recently formally addressed by historians (Agnew, 2018; Gapps, 2009). Attention to detail in reenactments added a rich, textual mise-en-scène to performances, but the focus on authenticity created other, at times unexpected, issues. By the late 1990s, reenactments had become known as a safe haven for expressing conservative political views—particularly in the US in relation to the Confederacy in American Civil War battle reenactments (Horwitz 1998). Reenactors could dress up politics as history, while claiming to be creating authentic reenactments. The claim to authenticity thus became a defense of, for example, including a minstrel band at an American Civil War event or Nazi soldiers in World War II reenactments. Many of these groups consciously focused on rigorous historical accuracy in order to shore up their acceptance by other reenactors. People who did not meet exacting authenticity standards could be excluded from events by organizers, but it was difficult to exclude highly accurate if unpalatable representations. The use of claims to authenticity in the politicization of reenactments led to a form of counter-politics not widely known outside reenactment groups. In Australia, when World War II German military reenactors appeared at public events, other reenactors engaged in often heated debates over ethical questions around the limits of reenactable histories (dark tourism). When Confederate American Civil War reenactment societies appeared in Australia in the 1990s, Union groups were established as direct political responses (Gapps, 2002). Indeed, some reenactment groups were established specifically to expand the range of histories represented in reenactments, to counter political assertions inside reenactment, and to assert the contested nature of historical events. Being authentic in 17th-century English Civil War reenactments, for example, meant that a spectrum of political allegiances from radical Levellers to conservative Royalists needed to be on display. The practice of reenacting has often been seen as essentially male-oriented and attractive to a nostalgic, conservative brand of politics. However, reenactments of early 20th-century suffragette demonstrations or the portrayal of African American soldiers at Civil War events have often worked as a form of counter-politics (Horwitz, 1998; Gapps, 2002). Ethical questions surrounding the performance of unpalatable pasts surfaced more dramatically in more public or officially sanctioned reenactments, in particular in living history museums. In 1994, the Colonial Williamsburg museum decided to recreate elements of 18th-century American history that had been underrepresented, namely the daily life of African Americans. The announcement that a slave auction would be introduced to performances was initially met with public outcry. But the performance went ahead and the liveness of the performance in fact worked against the unpalatable concept of a slave auction. As one protester who attended and subsequently changed his opinion of the reenactment said, “pain had a face, indignity had a body, suffering had tears” (Carson, 1998, p. 51). While reenactments may seem to outsiders to overly focus on the authenticity of props and costume, questions around the authenticity of performers themselves have also been central. Certainly, some reenactors asserted, for example, that gender roles should reflect historical ones: being authentic seemed to mean men should be played by men. However, reenactment groups faced real-world questions of discrimination if they refused to allow women to portray men and 185

Stephen Gapps

rapidly, if sometimes reluctantly, accepted women performing male gender roles (Gapps, 2002). These groups also often knew their histories of women passing as men. It took a court case against the US National Parks Service by a woman portraying an American Civil War soldier to convince others outside the reenactment community that her performance was in fact historically accurate (Blanton and Cook, 2002). The goal of authenticity has created other unexpected problems for reenactors, whose recreated objects are intentionally newly made and do not exude the qualities of pastness that audiences crave. The authentic object is usually understood as the original rather than the fake. Yet for reenactors, the museum artifact itself is inauthentic. The reproduction, with its fresh markings of manufacture, is a more accurate representation of how an object from the past would have appeared to people in the past. In public displays, audiences struggle to comprehend recreated objects that do not have the patina of age expected by people schooled in heritage preservation and museum displays (Gapps, 2002; Fillitz and Saris, 2013). The practices of reenactment have often been seen from outside the ranks of reenactors as an obsession over detail at the expense of context—to the point that reenactments have been regarded by observers as completely inauthentic (Hall, 2016). But these critiques often conflate scholarly understandings of authenticity with the specific currencies and uses of the term inside reenactment communities and have missed important internal political debates. As further ethnographic studies of reenactments emerge, however, these multiple meanings of authenticity will become clearer and add to our understanding of the continued popular interest in reenactment as a form of historical representation.

Further reading Brædder, A., et al., 2017; Gapps, S., 2018; Magelssen, S. and Justice-Malloy, R., 2011.

186

39 PRACTICES OF REENACTMENT Alexander Cook

Reenacting the past is a widespread human activity that takes diverse forms and serves a variety of purposes.When people think of reenactment today, many consider it an eccentric hobby that involves dressing up in period clothes and playing out a reconstruction of historical events—a battle, voyage, or moment of political crisis. It is often associated with escapist fantasy, nostalgia, and an acute interest in the minutiae of material culture in the olden days. To some it seems to be a peculiarly modern or even postmodern practice, reflecting a sense of contemporary alienation and longing for lost community.While forms of historical reenactment have proliferated in recent decades and reflect aspects of popular culture in many places in the world, reenactment is by no means a recent invention. Viewed anthropologically, reenactment can be seen as a deeply embedded part of human cultural life in many societies over the longue durée.Wherever behavior is codified, ritualized, and repeated, forms of reenactment can be said to be involved. In this sense, historical reenactments have been central to the establishment and sacralization of political authority for centuries across the globe, from Asia and the Pacific to Europe, Africa, and the Americas. They are embedded in the symbolism of coronations, rituals of office, and formal state events which seek to establish the historical continuity of governance. In zones of contested sovereignty, from Northern Ireland and the Balkans, to Australia or the United States, forms of reenactment can serve as devices for asserting or disputing ethnic rights (Agnew and Lamb, 2009). At times of political upheaval and innovation, forms of reenactment can also serve to sanction new arrangements. Revolutions are often accompanied by the semiotics of restoration, by allusions to the deep past and invocations of ancient precedent as Karl Marx famously observed (Marx, 2000 [1852], pp. 329−331). Reenactments are also integral to religious life. For Jews, the rituals of Passover involve a symbolic reenactment of the dietary experience of Exodus from Egypt. In Christian communities, reenactments from the Last Supper are played out every Sunday as members of the congregation take Holy Communion. Among Muslims, the hajj can be thought of as a ritual of reenactment that, via an act of anamnesis, makes the past and the future present to the observer (hajj; ritual; pilgrimage). Reenactment has also long played a significant role in popular culture. Scenes from the Trojan War and other episodes of Greek mythic history were regularly performed in the theatres of Athens. Epic battles from the recent or distant past provided a narrative frame for gladiatorial combat in the Roman colosseum (Auget, 2012). Traditionally, and indeed today, practices of reenactment may be conducted to appease the Gods, to expiate sin, 187

Alexander Cook

to commemorate the achievements of ancestors, to assert authority, to promote social unity, or to transmit technical knowledge between generations. Reenactment may combine several of these functions. In its most familiar forms, historical reenactment today involves a variety of groups ranging from enthusiastic amateurs to state-funded performers and professional scholars. The purposes of reenactment can also range from the deeply personal to the educational to the aggressively political. At the amateur end, across the globe, any given weekend will see groups of dedicated reenactors gathering in groups to perform renaissance dance, to recreate medieval hymnody, to reconstruct garments using original methods, to prepare food, to wear the shoes that their ancestors might have worn—both figuratively and literally. Such reenactors often share a deep commitment to historical authenticity in matters of appearance, deportment, speech, and so on. Often, they will seek to recreate specific events from the past: famous battles or other moments of communal significance. At other times, they reconstruct more generic phenomena: charivari (mock parades involving rough music), feasts, tournaments, and the like. In many cases, reenactors simulate forms of bodily experience from the past through acts of self-discipline and self-fashioning: dietary privation and bodily restraint, such as corsetry, are widely practiced, as is the alteration of hair and sometimes even bodily marking and piercing among more extreme acolytes (suffering). In some cases, reenactors role-play specific characters from the past, researching their lives, reading their words, and seeking to inhabit their mental space as far as possible. The internal culture of reenactment communities values deep historical knowledge in matters of daily life and material culture, technical skills that facilitate creative reconstruction such as needlework or swordsmanship, and a heroic commitment to the physical hardship associated with “authentic” recreation (expertise and amateurism) (Gapps, 2009). In this sense, the practices of reenactment combine the intellectual with the somatic and the kinetic. Time in the library (or, increasingly, on the internet) supplements processes of physical discipline and acts of endurance. Many reenactors maintain, moreover, that the somatic aspects of reenactment—the act of creating and wearing period clothes, for example, or of learning to sail a tall ship—facilitate insights into the past unavailable in other ways. While many academic historians view such claims with skepticism, recent scholarship illustrates some openness to ideas of this kind ( Johnson, 2015b). For educational purposes, reenactment is sometimes used to “bring history to life”—either as visual spectacle for an audience or as emotional experience for participants. In simple forms it serves in classrooms, from primary school upwards, as a device for engaging students, inviting them to make an imaginative leap that, its advocates hope, will lay foundations for historical empathy and understanding. For similar reasons, it has become a popular device within historical film and documentary. In this context, reenactment can range from the traditional device of using paid actors to simulate events and recite speeches to provide relief from the monotony of talking heads, to a more systematic attempt to recreate the supposed “experience” of the past for participants under observation (living history). A range of documentaries have sought to engage audiences by subjecting modern volunteers to the rigors of life in past ages. A pioneering version of such programs was the series Living in the Past (1978), which invited a group of participants to experience life in the iron age for the delectation of viewers. Such programs proliferated in the new millennium, particularly in the Anglophone world and Germany, where they have included such projects as retracing James Cook’s first Pacific voyage (The Ship, 2002), experiencing trench warfare on the Western Front (The Trench, 2002), life in a Canadian gold rush (Klondike: The Quest for Gold, 2003), exploring the social mores of Jane Austen’s England (Regency House Party, 2004), or, more recently, subjecting participants to the trials and tribulations of life in an early Victorian tenement (Victorian Slum House, 2016). The success of the genre has 188

Practices of reenactment

seen it gain its own label, “historical reality television,” reflecting a habitual fusion of historical data, observational film, and the voyeurism of contemporary “reality” programing (Figure 39.1). Within historical filmmaking, reenactment often serves two purposes: it is used as a pedagogical tool, but producers often claim that it can also serve as an investigative method in its own right. There can be no doubt that visiting sites of memory, or even simulating the bodily experience of a past era, can only take us so far in recapturing its mental world (memory and commemoration). Despite these obvious caveats, practices related to reenactment have played a significant role in recent enquiries into the past. In particular, the reconstruction and use of period technology and material culture has contributed to recent historiography of science and technology, arts and crafts, engineering, and so on. Often this has taken the form of “experiments”—attempts to determine what can be achieved with certain technology, to reconstruct manufacturing processes or examine the long-term consequences of agricultural practices on soil quality, for example. The subfield of experimental archaeology is devoted to research of this kind, its practitioners attempting to reconstruct past practices for everything from stone tool construction to ceramics, building, and burial. One early and controversial example of such experiments was the Kon Tiki expedition of Thor Heyerdahl (1947), in which the Norwegian adventurer and scholar attempted to prove the viability of human settlement of the deep Pacific from the Americas by sailing a balsa wood raft eastward from Peru. Despite the success of the expedition in demonstrating the technological and geographical feasibility of such settlement, the majority of scholars today reject Heyerdahl’s hypothesis of American origins for the

Figure 39.1 The author at work: voyaging to observe the Transit of Venus at Lord Howe Island in 2012, on board the replica of HMB Endeavour.This voyage was a reenactment of Captain James Cook’s First Voyage, mounted by the Australian National Maritime Museum. Source: Australian National Maritime Museum collection.

189

Alexander Cook

Polynesians, citing linguistic, archaeological, and anthropological evidence for settlement from Asia. Heyerdahl’s experiment illustrates one broader limitation of experimental archaeology— demonstrating that something can be done is not proof that it was done. Nonetheless, experimental archaeology is now widely considered a legitimate subfield of research that can shed useful light on specific issues (Outram, 2008). Reenactment is a flexible concept that has been applied to an enormous range of human activities ranging from solemn religious ritual, to scholarly technique, to casual pastime. In this sense, reenactment is a term that can be, and has been, deployed within a range of different idioms to describe very different practices. Despite the professional skepticism about reenactment felt by many historians, the influential 20th-century philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood argued that reenactment lies, or should lie, at the heart of all historical thinking and research. In his eyes, historians’ ultimate goal is to “re-enact” the thought of past actors in their own minds and thus to create inter-temporal understanding (Collingwood, 1994 [1946], pp. 39, 444−451). For Collingwood, reenactment was not the physical recreation of a scene, or the public performance of an event, but a kind of mental practice, based on the philological reconstruction of the original meaning of texts and the contexts in which they were created. It was an act of imaginative engagement informed by rigorous scholarly protocols. Other disciplines use the concept of reenactment in quite different ways. In psychoanalysis, for example, the concept of reenactment has long been tied to the pathologies of human development. From Sigmund Freud’s early comments on “repetition compulsion,” psychoanalysts have seen the patterns of repetition in individual lives, and sometimes in societies as a whole, in terms of an impulse to return to formative experiences (Freud, 2003 [1920]). Increasingly, that phenomenon has been conceptualized in terms of the link between reenactment and trauma. These two examples alone highlight some fundamental contrasts between different conceptions of reenactment. For Collingwood, reenactment was a conscious, purposive, and investigative activity linked to the human desire for knowledge. For Freud and many of his followers, reenactment is a compulsive, largely unconscious, behavior that reflects psychological distress—it is a symptom of unresolved stress. In some ways, these uses of the term reenactment take us a long way from its common association with the performative recreation of aspects of the past. In others, however, they serve to highlight issues that remain pertinent to scholars who seek to understand the social significance that reenactment can hold in many of its forms. Certainly, many practices of reenactment today contain some investigative component, where participants seek to learn something about the past through acts of creative reconstruction. Some reenactments also seek to work through traumatic aspects of the past, performing a therapeutic role for communities trying to live with difficult histories (production of historical meaning). In both endeavors, success is often a subject of ongoing dispute. Thus, historical reenactments, like many practices that seek to bring the past into imaginative dialogue with the present, remain contested ground both between communities and within them.

Further reading Agnew,V., and Lamb, J. (eds.), 2009; Agnew,V., 2007; Cook, A., 2004; McCalman, I., and Pickering, P. (eds.), 2010; Outram, A., 2008.

190

40 PRODUCTION OF HISTORICAL MEANING Scott Magelssen

To use the term production of historical meaning is to recognize that the representation of an environment or historical event is not so much a matter of getting it right insofar as the criteria for “right” is determined by 19th-century Hegelian or positivist notions of scientifically evidenced truth (authenticity). Rather, as more recent discourses remind us, the meaning of an event is flexible and informed by any number of factors, including the interpreter, group, or institution’s ideology, values, subject position, and indeed historiographic understanding. In other words, while historical reenactors and heritage sites were concerned mostly with accuracy in their performances and exhibits even as recently as half a century ago—at least outwardly—today’s goals for producing meaning are just as likely to include emotional impact, inclusivity, and an eye toward social justice. This is not to say, however, that earlier efforts in historical reenactment were not undoubtedly productions of historical meaning: 18th- and 19th-century pageants and mock battles were intended to shore up nationalistic pride or re-narrate a culture’s or society’s past in order to affirm the regime at hand. This was the case with French Revolutionary spectacles, Spanish colonizers’ stagings of the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula with and for Indigenous peoples of the “New World,” and Buffalo Bill’s wild west shows (memory and commemoration). Mid20th-century programming by the US National Parks Service affirmed the politics of America’s founding fathers and offered a nostalgic balm for citizens suffering alienation from the growing technological innovations of the present; Alvin Toffler diagnosed this as “Future Shock” (Toffler, 1970; nostalgia). In each of these cases, the intentions have certainly been aimed at reifying a past which those involved were meant to feel good about. Nor should we presume that earlier programmers and historical societies were unaware that their production choices were informed by subjectivity and artistic license. Freeman Tilden’s list of principles for historical reenactment (1977) included among its recommendations that National Parks Service reenactors gear their performances to resonate with visitors’ values and experiences, and that reenactments ought to be understood as interpretation and provocation rather than merely neutral windows into a past environment. Yet for much of the 20th century, reenactments by museums and heritage sites and hobbyist groups tended to frame their goal for historical interpretation as complete historical accuracy, and to emphasize that success would come with sustained historical rigor, attention to archival and archaeological evidence, scientific method, and an attention to emerging historical 191

Scott Magelssen

information as it became available (corroboration). For champions of American living history museums, this would often include first-person character interpretation as an ideal mode of representation (Anderson, 1984; Snow, 1993). J. D. Rockefeller Jr.’s mantra during the restoration of Williamsburg, Virginia, as a tourist attraction in the 1930s was that “no scholar must ever be able to come to us and tell us we made a mistake” (Handler and Gable, 1997, p. 34). And members of reenactment groups devoted to “impressions” of military campaigns and battles or of fur trading expeditions have perennially policed each other’s practices to guarantee fidelity in detail, from the stitch or button on a uniform to the gender or race of the performer (Thompson, 2004; Tyson, 2011). The second half of the 20th-century brought significant challenges to the assumption that archivally corroborated historical accuracy was only a matter of time and labor. These challenges were leveled, on the one hand, by social historians. This new generation of left-leaning scholars, who cut their teeth on the Civil Rights debates of the 1960s and understood that the historical operation was always about class, insisted that the majority of past lives, especially those of women, children, minorities, and the poor, could never be remembered properly if reenactments relied solely on written documents, since such documents tended, with few exceptions, to be about wealthy white men (see Handler and Gable, 1997; Wallace, 1996). On the other hand, the challenges came from discursive shifts in historiographical theory coming out of continental Europe led by thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Michel de Certeau maintained, for example, that historical meaning is a fictive product of a historian’s selection of remembered events and the imprimatur of the institution or state which that historian serves (1988). Roland Barthes identified a tendency for historians to beguile their readers with a “reality effect” that substituted detail surmised or conjectured out of presumed common sense rather than documented evidence (1986). And, on the extreme end, Jean Baudrillard’s work suggested that any attempt at historical reconstruction would result in a simulacrum that simply obviated and substituted for the real (1994). For the most part, the particulars of these debates were limited to back-and-forth discussion in scholarship, and had difficulty being put into practice in actual historical reenactment. Richard Handler and Eric Gable found that even when Colonial Williamsburg programmers in the 1980s were filled with a zeal for social history, their ideals dissipated when their new protocols for interpretation were bucked by more conservative costumed hosts on the “front lines” in the Historic Area (1997). It may be the case that many living history museums adjusted their mission to represent historically underrepresented groups such as People of Color, women, and those otherwise politically and economically disenfranchised. Examples include Native American programming at Plimoth Plantation and African American programming at Williamsburg. These efforts, though, have often faced shortages of staff and resources and have struggled to fit organically into the historiographical templates of the rest of the institution, which still largely hinge on reproducing meaning in-line with traditional, evidence-based pictures of the past featuring high-profile white protagonists (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, The Pilgrims, and so forth) (Peers, 2007; Lawson, 1995; Magelssen, 2007; indigeneity; living history) By the same token, hobbyist reenactment groups came under scrutiny in popular and legal arenas because critics felt their outward insistence on rigor and fidelity masked a more insidious production of meaning that served at best as a kind of in-group gatekeeping and, more soberingly, as a means for sustaining a smoldering, racially motivated counterculture (battle). While there are hundreds of documented instances of women who disguised themselves as men to fight in the American Civil War, for instance, reenactment groups have often frowned upon anyone other than men participating in battle reenactments, and one instance of a woman

192

Production of historical meaning

c­laiming gender discrimination on the part of the National Parks Service at the Antietam National Battlefield made it to Federal Court, where the judge found the barring of participants on the basis of gender unconstitutional (Young 1996; gender). Journalist Tony Horwitz spent a year embedded with Confederate reenactors in the American South to find rather immediately that for a large percentage of these hobbyists, reenacting a battle is more about white pride and bearing witness to the “unfinished war” of continued “northern aggression” against good white southerners than it is about historical accuracy (1999). In cases like this, reenactors have often been able to shrug off more complicated considerations of the production of historical meaning by hewing to a rubric of historical fidelity, i.e., of barring all obstacles to participants’ right to a so-called period rush, even when evidence is readily available to consider alternative historical meanings. Much work has been done in recent years to trouble and nuance the idea of producing historical meaning as a new generation of scholars has addressed the question equipped with emerging discourses in, for instance, performance for social change, affect studies, and cognitive neuroscience. Anthony Jackson and Jenny Kidd find that museum and heritage site programmers are “more reflexive and less defensive” about the argument that heritage performance can be both educational and authentic for visitors regardless of the criterion for accuracy (2011; authenticity). This more liberating approach allows programming to be more creative in paying due diligence to stories of the underrepresented. Tourism and performance scholars like Laurajane Smith and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett are comfortable acknowledging that heritage is produced in the moment and not an objectively stable quality to be achieved with the right amount of science. As such, they find that the concept can be usefully leveraged to bear witness to past lives, traumas, and experiences (Smith, 2011; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998; trauma; experience). Drawing on theories of cognition by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (2002), Catherine Hughes argues that meaning in historical reenactment or demonstration is always a coproduction—a “conceptual blend”—between the choices of the reenactor and the cognitive concepts and categories already emergent in the visitor (2011; emotion). At the same time, new paradigms in museum education have privileged experiential and participatory learning in reenactment programming as both pedagogically promising and as a way to compete in the age of user-generated content and individually curated entertainment platforms. While reenactment as hobbyism has ostensibly always been about producing individual meaning within a larger special-interest community (Erisman, 1998), curators and programmers are adjusting to the advent of Museums 2.0 by pivoting from historical meaning grounded in fidelity and accuracy to meaning produced by the visitor’s affective or emotional connection between the past and her or his own life (Wood and Latham, 2013). Participatory programming at museums and heritage sites has expanded in the last decade to not only immerse visitors in a historical reenactment, but to give them roles and the perception of free choice that will help determine the outcome of the story, whether these roles be fugitive slaves at Conner Prairie Interactive History Park in Indiana, or undocumented migrants trying to cross the US border at Parque Eco Alberto in central Mexico (Magelssen, 2014; narrative; suffering). Finally, performance artists and groups not affiliated with educational institutions or hobbyist societies have embraced the conventions of historical reenactment to critique past productions of historical meaning and to create new meaning intended to foment present-day awareness of social and political issues or even to invoke a desired futurity for the participants. Chicago’s Pocket Guide to Hell organizes participatory spectacles that both reenact notorious events in Chicago’s history (the Lager Beer Riot of 1855, the Haymarket Affair of 1886) and celebrate the continuing efforts of the 99 percent (Figure 40.1). Allison Smith’s 2005 reenactment ­installation

193

Scott Magelssen

Figure 40.1 Participants in The 1855 Lager Beer Riot Dodgeball Reenactment and Beer Tasting, Pocket Guide to Hell. 25 April 2015, Benton House, Chicago. Source: Roslyn Cohen.

The Muster amassed queer-identified artists and intellectuals and their allies to create a pink and campy parody of a Confederate military encampment. Both of these examples imbue their representational practices with a winking camp sensibility, which Rebecca Schneider describes as “that which is gotten slightly wrong in the effort to get something right” (2012, p. 112). That is, each recognizes the familiar tropes of historical reenactments if only to flip them upside down in a carnivalesque commitment to the production of meaning in the present.

Further reading Barthes, R., 1996; de Certeau, M., 1998; Handler R., and Gable, E., 1997; Horwitz, T., 1999; Hughes, C., 2011; Jackson, A., and Kidd, J., 2011; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B., 1998; Magelssen, S., 2014; Magelssen, S., 2007; Peers, L., 2007; Schneider, R., 2011; Smith, L., 2011; Wood, E., and Latham, K., 2013.

194

41 REALISM Jonathan Lamb

In the entry for Realism in his seminal Keywords, Raymond Williams points to the complex history of the word and its associates, noting that originally realism was a medieval school of thought opposed to nominalism, and more akin to what today we would call idealism. “The old doctrine of Realism was an assertion of the absolute and objective existence of … universal Forms or Ideas [that] were held … to exist independently of the objects in which they were perceived” (2015 [1976], p. 198). It derived from Plato’s argument that intelligible ideas coincided with the essential properties of things, a pure manifestation of the truth inaccessible to the five senses. Such ideas we cannot discover by empirical means, rather through a recollection of their innate prints in the mind, brought into focus by rigorous meditation. Although it is certainly true that in its scholastic guise the doctrine of forms “may be said to have faded” (ibid.), it is equally true that after its Cartesian renovation as the cogito, it has enjoyed a buoyant afterlife. What we know today as cognitive science, “an ontology that divorces the activity of the mind from the body in the world” (Ingold, 2011 [2000], p. 165), shares Descartes’s dualist proposition that our most important ideas are vouchsafed to the mind no thanks to impressions of the material world (evidence). It is a supreme irony, then, that the philosophical basis of historical reenactment should rely on precisely that kind of dualist ontology. When philosopher of history and early theorist of reenactment R. G. Collingwood claimed to become Thomas à Beckett by inhabiting the thoughts of the 12th-century archbishop, he defended such a claim from absurdity by arguing for a kind of presence and immediacy superior to that of an event or situation; one that is achieved solely by an effort of mental reflection. He followed that proposition with this corollary: “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 re-enacted in its immediacy” (Collingwood, 1994, p. 297). That is to say it is only by means of ideas without any sensible trace that reenactment can be said to occur, and it will have no bearing at all upon anything that was heard, seen, smelt, tasted, or touched in any actual physical situation, whether historical or present. Nothing could be more remote from what most present-day reenactors of history regard as their task and their reward. Their aim is “Being There” (Horwitz, 1999, p. 228), and the road toward it is paved with evidence of the real and illuminated by the sensations and passions aroused while traversing it. On arrival the subject experiences, owing to the privations and 195

Jonathan Lamb

authenticities of the trip, a kind of afflatus variously named by obsessive Confederate reenactors as “wargasm,” “peaking,” “Nirvana,” or “Goose-bump City” (Horwitz, 1999, pp. 210, 218, 379, 213). Genuine memorabilia contribute to this transfiguration by exercising every sense organ: marching in stinking old socks and ancient leaking boots, or with no socks or boots at all; starving until the reenactor fits an original Confederate States Army butternut uniform whose brass buttons are brought to the right patina by being soaked in urine; food is bad bacon; sleep is enjoyed under a single blanket spooning with five other bodies, all sodden and cold. When writer Tony Horwitz points out a handsome figure masquerading as a Confederate officer, his mentor Robert Lee Hodge acidly observes, “A real Confederate would eventually have cut that hair to keep the lice under control. And what’s with the hat? It’s all wrong—the Boer War maybe, not this one” (1999, p. 141). Hodge’s ancestor is Laurence Sterne’s Uncle Toby, who begins his career of reenactment by reproducing the siege-works at the battle of Namur, where he was badly injured during the War of the Grand Alliance. As his mock sieges become more elaborate, he graduates to the next major war in Flanders, The War of the Spanish Succession, and to a whole series of sieges at which he was never present. As the distance grows between Toby’s own experience of war and each successive siege represented on his bowling green, so does his attention to the realism of each scene. What started as a diagram drawn in the earth and supplemented by imagination, has flourished into miniature earthworks faced with sods surrounding a model town, complete with churches and bridges, against which toy cannons play, charged with tobacco and emitting smoke. Toby translates the description in the Military Gazette into the action on his bowling green, and when a breach is made and the British standard planted on the enemy ramparts, he feels a rapture quite as exquisite as any of Hodge’s wargasms: “Heaven! Earth! Sea! … ye never compounded so intoxicating a draught … Heaven! Earth! Sea!—all was lifted up” (Sterne, 1940, p. 299). It is worth observing that those purely ideational techniques of recovering the true trajectory of history favored by Collingwood are set aside by Toby as irrelevant to the plan of “being there.” That is to say, only accompaniments that stimulate immediate impressions—tobacco smoke, smelly socks—are allowed entry, while symbols of invisible curves are set aside (Toby has to jettison the calculus of pyroballogy just as Hodges ignores the history told by infra-red aerial photographs). In praise of this kind of formal realism of invisible truth, Horwitz’s expert informant says, “Traditional historians tend to ignore the best primary source out there—the ground … If you read it right, you realize a lot of the written history is simply wrong” (1999, p. 176). Under the pressure of this kind of evidence, Horwitz begins to wonder “if everything I thought I knew about Shiloh—and about many other battles—was closer to fiction than to fact” (ibid.). This is a fair anxiety to air, but not one that troubles Toby or Hodge. Hodge’s critics accuse him of elitism, but it seems more accurate to call him and Toby solipsists, since the rapture they seek is personal and to a great degree private, no matter how they justify it. They are not being authentic for the sake of spectators (Toby does not even know he has any), but for themselves (authenticity). Certainly, they recruit disciples, but it is for the purpose of bearing of witness to the transformation of representation into what Lord Kames called “ideal presence” (2005 [1762]). It concerns only those performing the rite, not those observing it. This is where the challenge of realism in reenactment becomes formidable. In one respect, Collingwood is right when he says that presence and immediacy are not reenactable because the most a representation can expect to achieve is to appear as like its prototype as possible (mimesis). There has to be some acknowledgment of the fictive limits of the reenactment enterprise, otherwise its telos might be celebrated with real bullets and an unlovely death. In her essay on fictionality (2006), Catherine Gallagher distinguishes between two forms of realist representation: one she calls realist fiction, the other realist fiction. The first uses fiction to 196

Realism

mount hypotheses of what is most likely to happen in certain situations, given the propensities of the characters involved in it and the challenges they face. Techniques of verisimilitude are brandished by the narrator, not disguised. Realist fiction, on the other hand, is concerned to reinforce what Samuel Richardson called the “historical faith” (1964, p. 85) of the reader by means of techniques designed to breach the wall dividing the author from the reader and true history from invention, such as symptoms of spontaneity that pierce the surface of print— uneven type, blotted or missing pages, writing to the moment, and all the other intimacies allowed between readers of epistolary novels and their alleged correspondents. You, the reader, are actually handling the disordered fragments Clarissa Harlowe scribbled on a piece of paper after being raped. A notable beneficiary of Sterne’s experiments in the realism of reenactment is the contemporary writer J. M. Coetzee. In “Lesson 1: Realism,” the first chapter of his novel Elizabeth Costello, his invented alter ego announces her interest in what Coetzee calls the realism of embodiment, “the idea that ideas have no autonomous existence, and can exist only in things” (2003, p. 9). Costello declares, “Realism has never been comfortable with ideas … So when it needs to debate ideas … realism is driven to invent situations … in which characters give voice to contending ideas and thereby in a certain sense embody them” (ibid.). Direct embodiment is evidently impossible, so what is needed is some kind of sympathetic bridge between an idea derived from real experience in the past and a living moment in the present. But when Coetzee’s character confronts the implications of Thomas Nagel’s famous philosophical query, “What is it like to be a bat?” by imagining what it might be like to be a corpse, she finds them less than consoling: What is it, in Nagel’s terms, that I know? Do I know what it is like for me to be a corpse or do I know what it is like for a corpse to be a corpse? The distinction seems to me trivial. What I know is what a corpse cannot know; that it is extinct, that it knows nothing and will never know anything any more. For an instant, before my whole structure of knowledge collapses in panic, I am alive inside that contradiction, dead and alive at the same time. (Coetzee, 2003, p. 77) The distinction between Costello as corpse and corpse as corpse is not trivial because it points to what Costello is actually doing, which is not simply imagining herself dead, but also impersonating a corpse that she calls her self. This is her version of the reenactor’s Being There. The co-presence of the two elements that constitute the person of the corpse, the object represented and the power of representing it as something like what it is: this is what allows her to be dead and alive—or animal and human, or past and present—at the same time. She shows how far Hodge’s mimicry of Matthew Brady’s photographs of Civil War corpses stands from the imaginative agility this kind of realist reenactment requires. However, the price paid for Costello’s simultaneous apprehension of two extremely different states of being is a moment of severe shock. The measure of successful realism in the reenactment of history, then, is not mere situational exactitude, sentience, or thought, but what happens—that is to say, what actually occurs— when history and fiction become a volatile and unpredictable emulsion.

Further reading Collingwood, R. G., 1994; Gallagher, C., 2006; Ingold, T., 2011 [2000]; McKeon, M., 1987; Watt, I., 1957; Williams, R., 2015 [1976].

197

42 REPRESENTATION Inke Arns

Representation (from Latin repraesentatio, repraesentare, “to bring to mind by description,” also “to symbolize, to be the embodiment of ”) is a philosophical term for the use of signs that stand in for and take the place of something else (Mitchell, 1995). It can also be thought of as the production of meaning through language, for, as Hall (1997a) points out: we give things meaning by how we represent them—the words we use about them, the stories we tell about them, the images of them we produce, the emotions we associate with them, the ways we classify and conceptualize them, the values we place on them. (p. 3) It is through representation that people organize reality by naming its elements. These signs are arranged to form semantic constructions and express relations (Mitchell, 1995). Representation is thus an essential feature of linguistic processes, the semiotic dimensions of which were explored and systematized by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), the founder of modern semiotics, and by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), the founder of structuralism. As a mediation process that functions through referrals and “proxies,” representation is an integral part of language, as well as sign systems in art and music. In philosophy, it describes a controversial epistemological problem: Robert Cummins (1989) distinguishes two main problems in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. One is the problem of determining which states or objects are used by minds or cognitive systems to represent. The other is the problem of defining the relation between representations and what they represent. Representation concerns a wide range of subjects: since antiquity, representation has been a fundamental concept within aesthetics, semiotics, and, for about 300 years, since the publication of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), also within politics and political science. As Mitchell points out (1995), the common structure of semiotic and political representation is a triangular one: representation is a representation of something through something for something (or somebody). While Aristotle deemed mimesis natural to man, and therefore considered representation necessary for people’s being in the world, Plato, in contrast, looked upon representation with more caution. He believed that representation, like contemporary media, intervenes between the viewer and the real, creating illusions that lead the viewer away from “real things” (Hall, 1997). In the field of politics and aesthetics, ­representation is, then, deeply ambivalent: on the one 198

Representation

hand, it is with the help of representation that people express their will, while on the other, representation separates them from this will. In representative democracy, for example, elected persons generally “speak for (‘on behalf of ’ or ‘in the name of ’) those who elected them” and “continually represent (make present) the views of those who elected them” (Williams, 2014, p. 268). However, in politics as well as in aesthetics, each representation represents a loss, a gap between intention and realization and between original and copy. Drawing on Mitchell’s observation that “representation (in memory, in verbal descriptions, in images) not only ‘mediates’ our knowledge (of slavery and of many other things), but obstructs, fragments, and negates that knowledge” (1994, p. 188), many contemporary artistic reenactment projects take a critical stance toward representation. Such artistic reenactment is not only critical of representation; it intends to question and destabilize images through immersion, immediacy, bodily experience, and empathy. However, while artistic reenactments adopt a broadly constructionist approach to representation and meaning, other historical simulations, like battle reenactments, work very differently. As forms of popular culture, they seem to accept history as a given. They are not interested in questioning representation per se, but rather, they have a mimetic understanding of it. What is more, unlike artistic reenactments, battle reenactments do not typically interrogate the relevance of the past for the present. Contemporary art has seen a burgeoning of artistic reenactments that restage historical situations and events. One reason for this uncanny desire for performative repetition seems to reside in what Benzaquen-Gautier refers to as “(t)oday’s ubiquity of media images and their triumph over direct observation in our experience of the world” (this volume, art). Obviously, all history comes to us as a form of representation and is always represented via narrative. Thus, it would be naive to ask what really happened outside of the history represented and, in contradistinction to more conventional forms of reenactment, to look for the “authenticity” beyond the images.That is not what artistic reenactments are about. However, artists working with reenactment consider certain past events too important to let them remain abstract knowledge—what is generally thought of as history. Benzaquen-Gautier points out that the historical events reenacted in art are often “events of the 20th century, considered in their traumatic or political dimension and seen as of relevance today” (art). She adds that in artistic reenactments, artists intend to break down representation by “exposing the constructedness of mediation” and by replacing it with immediacy, thereby proposing “an affective relation to history through embodiment and the erasure of any safe distance between abstract knowledge and personal experience of the past.” British artist Rod Dickinson’s Milgram Reenactment (2002) is a reenactment of one of the 20th century’s most controversial experiments in social psychology. In 1961, Stanley Milgram, a 27-year-old assistant professor at Yale University, conducted the so-called Milgram Experiment, which aimed to analyze the crimes of National Socialism from a social-psychological perspective. The experiment tested the obedience of individuals toward people in authority and also the willingness of ordinary people to follow orders, even when the orders contradicted their consciences. The Milgram Reenactment (2002) is a simulation of parts of the original experiment. In detailed reconstructions of the original rooms, actors followed the experimental protocols as though they were performing a stage play. The audience watched the four-hour performance through one-way glass windows, which were set into the walls. Although this was just a dramatic performance with a predetermined course and results that were known to most audience members, the effect was nevertheless special. The spectators’ position as observers generated an experience that greatly differed from that of looking at photographs or reading the experimental write-up. By becoming witnesses to an event—an event usually accessible only in a form communicated by media, but whose simulation now unfolded in real time—observers were confronted with a necessity to act (or act differently), they were 199

Inke Arns

prompted to question themselves. Dickinson thus added an ethical dimension to the event. As Gaskin asks (2003): How far would I have gone, how many shocks would I have administered? You then question the degree to which you resist authority in your daily life. Should you feel reassured that, in the original experiment, 60% of the people were prepared to kill their subject if instructed to do so? (…) are you sure you would resist authority? (p. 13) In Dickinson’s reenactment of the Milgram experiment, the paradox of reenactment becomes clear: the critique (and erasure) of representation and the simultaneous creation of distance— often co-existent in one and the same artwork—are key mechanisms in the contemporary practice of artistic reenactments. Initially it is about the elimination of safe distance.Viewers or readers become immediate witnesses of a (repeated historical) event, which unfolds before their eyes, or they become participants in an action, in which they actively take part. Reenactments eliminate the distance, construed as safe, between the historical event represented by the media and the present, between performers and audience. The reenactment transforms representation into embodiment, and distanced, indirect involvement into— sometimes unpleasant—direct involvement. This process renders the passive reader or observer an active witness or participant. The witnesses or participants replace their existing collective knowledge of the past with direct and often also a physical experience of “history.” Artworks that utilize strategies of reenactments attempt to (re-)create a connection with history, which is increasingly based on media images. The short-circuiting of the present with the past makes it possible to experience the past in the present—actually, an impossible view of history. This is an attempt to feel sympathy for the subjects of bygone events by imagining the self in their position. By eliminating the safe distance between abstract knowledge and personal experience, between then and now, between the others and oneself, historical as well as artistic reenactments make personal experience of abstract history possible. A good example of this is Jeremy Deller’s recent project We’re Here Because We’re Here (2016), which brings soldiers who died in World War I “back to life.” This project coincided with the centennial of one of the deadliest battles of World War I, the Battle of the Somme (1916), in which 1,000,000 men were wounded or killed. Deller dispatched 1,600 young men dressed up as British World War I soldiers to 17 places around the UK. As a “decentralized memorial” (Deller, 2016), the soldiers moved around the cities, walked, rested, took the subway, waited at train stations, entered Ikea or Tesco—and visited places that did not exist in 1916. Deller did this, he said, in order to create a maximum “visual incongruity” or a “visual shock.” The radical transposition of the soldiers into contemporary life makes this project very different from typical historical reenactments, battle restagings, or living history.The soldiers also did not speak, but handed out cards with their name and rank, age, and place and date of death (“Died at the Somme on 1st July, 1916. Aged 28 years”). The soldiers’ “stepping out of the frame” and the consecutive personal encounter with the “audience” is reminiscent of what Bertolt Brecht called the Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect). Artistic reenactments, therefore, do not stop at the elimination of distance (i.e., the critique of representation) or at the partial or total identification with historical subjects (like many popcultural reenactments). The second, not less important step is the active creation of distance. In reenactments one finds, as Steve Rushton puts it, a complex and in-depth reflection of the mediation of memory—which can be even described as the core subject of reenactment as an art form.This tendency asks how memory 200

Representation

is an entity which is continuously being restructured—not only by filmmakers and reenactors but also by us personally, as mediating and mediated subjects. (2005, p. 10) (memory and commemoration; mediality) In this sense, Rod Dickinson wrote about the role of reenactment in his works: I have very consciously focused on events that were heavily mediated in their original form. My hope with these pieces is that the audience’s direct experience of the live performance is constantly undercut by their knowledge of the layers of mediation that are at play in both the original historical event and my double of it. I hope with pieces such as these that rather than making “history” “real” (often the declared aim of reenactments found in other cultural spaces, such as TV or hobbyist recreations), history is actually experienced by the audience as deferred and displaced, but through the apparently immediate and direct lens of live performance. (2005, n.p.) It is in this sense that Dickinson writes about The Eternal Frame (1975), which is for him a key work in the context of reenactments: From its beginning The Eternal Frame situates JFK’s death as a real death and as an image death, critiquing the powerful hold that the images as history have on our memory and emotions. (…) Reenactment seems, as a form of representation, strangely well equipped to address moments of collective trauma and anxiety. Almost as if, taking a Debordian turn, that the reenactment operates as the uncanny of the spectacle. A live image, in real space and real time, but simultaneously displaced. (2005, n.p.) Representation and reenactment are not necessarily opposites—Dickinson even calls reenactment “a form of representation”—but their relationship is a complex one. One could say that (historical as well as artistic) reenactment generally is critical of representation, and, through embodiment, seeks to stimulate and activate the imagination. Battle reenactments, however, allow the participants to imagine themselves in a different role unconnected to their own situations or the present. Artistic reenactments, in contrast, focus on those historical events that are seen as of relevance today. They transform abstract knowledge (history) into a personal experience of the past precisely because the events that get reenacted are considered too important (traumatic, overtly political) to be tamed through tacit inscription in the history books. At the same time, artistic reenactments address the mediation of collective memory—by means of an immediate image which is at the same time experienced as deferred and displaced.

Further reading Culler, J., 2000; Eagleton, T., 1999; Eco, U., 1984; Hall, S. (ed.), 1997a; Mitchell, W. J. T., 1994; Mitchell, W. J. T., 1995; Saussure, F. de, 1983 [1916].

201

43 RITUAL Anja Dreschke

The relationship between reenactment and ritual is often associated with the restagings and reappropriations of narratives from a mythological past and is common in many religious ceremonies. For example, the Eucharist, celebrated as part of the Christian liturgy, is generally thought of as a symbolic reenactment of the Last Supper (practices of reenactment). In the past, rituals were often defined as stereotyped, formalized, repetitive actions that served the primary purpose of communicating with spiritual or otherworldly entities. This limited perspective was called into question in the late 19th century, when new disciplines like anthropology, sociology, and psychology broadened the meaning of the concept of ritual from the sphere of religion to symbolic actions in general. The new approach defined rituals by their function, whether it be to establish social solidarity, to cope with individual or collective crises, to bring success on the hunt, or to structure the life cycle or the seasonal cycle. Rituals were seen as marking temporal breaks between interlinked actions, synchronizing the achievements of a community, and reinforcing beliefs in magical powers. Today, the field of ritual studies also includes approaches from media and communication studies, performance studies, and theater, literary, and art theory. It deals with a broad variety of different performances, ranging from everyday action (Goffman, 1959), play (Bateson, 1972), and theater (Schechner, 1985) to social drama (Turner, 1982) and possession rites (Kramer, 1987). The term ritual thus continues to defy a single definition. Instead, the field of ritual studies focuses on investigations of specific ritual practices in their local contexts and rites in different areas of social life (e.g., Geertz, 1973; Tambiah 1979; Douglas, 1966). Most scholars now treat rituals as highly creative and productive social interactions that reinforce the significance of meaning-laden objects and practices within specific social, political, and religious contexts. The field of ritual studies distinguishes between reenactment as an analytical concept or scholarly method, and historical reenactment as a social phenomenon. The latter has become a popular leisure activity around the globe and takes a range of different forms and sometimes involves transnational social networks. Many hobbyists who reenact past events show a particular interest in the religious life of those whose lives they imitate, most readily observable among so-called Indian hobbyists, who emulate the historical cultures of Native Americans (Kalshoven, 2012; Penny, 2014). This appropriation of the spiritual practices of spatially, temporally, or culturally remote groups raises fundamental questions about how, if at all, the boundaries between

202

Ritual

reenactment and ritual can be drawn, and about how conflicting claims concerning legitimacy, authenticity, and the production of meaning ought to be addressed. Promising approaches to these issues have been developed by theater scholar Richard Schechner and by anthropologist Victor Turner. Turner (1982) organized so-called “playshops,” in which students explored the use of reenactment as a method to better understand the ethnographic literature on rituals. Schechner drew on his work as a director of experimental theater in order to stress the common features of ritual, play, theater, and everyday actions. His concept of “restored behavior” addresses the ways in which collective and individual memory and identity are constituted through repetitive actions (Schechner, 1985). Though Schechner does not use the term reenactment, his concept of restored behavior suggests that performances are always based on the (re)enactment of what he calls coded actions. He states that the process of rearranging, recontextualizing, and reassembling restored behavior underlies all forms of performance that include staging, scripts, improvisation, rehearsals, and training. Schechner’s notion of performance as a continuum, with theater at one extreme, and everyday action at the other, was inspired by Turner’s concept of “social drama.” For his concept, Turner drew on the tripartite structure that Arnold van Gennep (1909) identified in certain rites of passage. Such initiation rituals frame the transition of an individual from one social status to another, and can be divided into a phase of separation from a social role or order, a liminal (Latin limen, English threshold) phase of disorientation and uncertainty, and a phase of reintegration into an established order. Turner was particularly interested in the liminal phase, which he describes as a state of in-betweenness, during which social structures and differences dissolve, leading to the experience of communitas as a condition of indeterminacy and potentiality (Turner, 1969). A prime example of such liminal states are carnival festivals, where everyday conventions, behavioral patterns, and social hierarchies are temporarily inverted or thrown out. A parallel can be found in historical reenactments, in which practitioners seek to experience a social world different from their everyday reality, dressing up in costume to take on the role of a historical character. For Turner, this exceptional state constitutes an anti-structure that functions as an antidote to the existing social order, which in turn helps to reaffirm the established structure of a society. At the same time, it has the potential to spark individual and collective transformation. In other words, rituals can engender social or political changes that lead to the creation of new customs or institutions. This dialectic of structure and anti-structure corresponds to the dual nature of reenactment, which is characterized by both renewal and an affirmation of what already is. Turner distinguishes between the liminal, which designates ritualistic practices that are obligatory for all members in small-scale societies, and the “liminoid,” which applies to the “leisure genres of art, sport, pastimes, games, etc. […] practiced by and for particular groups, categories, segments, and sectors” (Turner, 1982, p. 86) in complex societies. The main difference is that liminoid phenomena are not obligatory but a matter of choice, a criterion that also holds true for participation in historical reenactments. Yet the fact that these activities are voluntary does not mean that they are arbitrary forms of amusement, as some critics assume. Like other liminoid phenomena, historical reenactments are embedded in the social life of the participants and can be studied—like rituals—as practices of community building that help produce collective identity and meaning. The type of meaning varies from case to case: historical meaning is produced when a battle is reenacted in a living history museum, while spiritual meaning can be produced through religious reenactments like the Eucharist. Nevertheless, it may not always be possible to subsume a performance under a single heading. Depending on how it is framed (Goffman, 1974), one and the same performance can be interpreted as historical reenactment or

203

Anja Dreschke

as religious ritual. For example, among the Cologne Tribes, who reenact the historic life worlds of Huns and Mongolians, it is common to celebrate wedding ceremonies or other life cycle rituals that have both a collective and an individual significance: on a collective level, they aim to accurately represent the historical Hunnic or Mongolian culture for a wider public, while on an individual level, they serve as effective marriage rituals for the bride and groom and other members of the group (Dreschke, 2016). The line between historical reenactment and religious ceremony becomes even more blurred in the appropriation of trance or possession rituals. Such rituals can be considered reenactments in the sense that they are mainly based on mimicking otherworldly beings (Taussig, 1993), a relationship that can fruitfully be investigated by comparing practices of embodiment and practices of imagination (Kramer, 2005) in (possession) rituals and in historical reenactment (Dreschke, forthcoming). Particularly complicated is the question of how to treat the adaptation of indigenous ritual practices by non-indigenous people in historical reenactments. The rise of esoteric religious movements like (neo)shamanism (Lindquist, 1997), (neo)paganism, or Wicca (Luhrmann, 1989; Greenwood, 2000) in the second half of the 20th century is indicative of the increased popularity of alternative spirituality. At the same time, major religions seem to have lost some of their impact, at least in the West (Hanegraf, 2013). One explanation for this trend may be feelings of alienation from established forms of religious practice that are perceived as ossified versions of formerly vivid or “real” rituals, thus motivating people to seek out new expressions of individual or collective spirituality (Caduff and Pfaff-Czarnecka, 1999). The members of the Cologne Tribes, for instance, emphasize that they experience the spiritual practices they adapt in their reenactments as more authentic and meaningful than the Catholic rituals they were socialized into, while for most outsiders, their performances appear to be a random amalgamation of elements from different cultural and religious traditions, namely Siberian and Mongolian shamanism.These contradictory positions are mirrored in current debates about cultural heritage rights: non-native practitioners who adapt indigenous religious beliefs are accused by both political activists and academics of inauthentically or illegitimately appropriating the rituals and thus of harboring neo-colonial attitudes (Welch, 2007). To counteract such criticism, “plastic shamans,” as their detractors call them, employ different strategies to legitimize their reenactments. The Cologne Tribes claim that shamanism should be viewed as a universal primary religion that underlies all other religious beliefs (for a comprehensive discussion on the construction of shamanism in the Western imagination, see Znamenski, 2007). In doing so, they seek to justify and make plausible their reenactments. From the point of view of the practitioners, the adaptation of what appears to be foreign to outsiders is conceptualized as a revitalization of the beliefs of one’s own alleged ancestors (on similar strategies of legitimization, see Laack, 2011). From the perspective of contemporary ritual studies, the adaptation of ritual practices from a foreign culture or another period of time is conceived as a ritual transfer that can be mediated through oral tradition, texts, sound recordings, or (moving) images.Various aspects of such transfers can be studied, including their geography/space, ecological environment, culture, religion, politics, economy, or society (Langer and Snoek, 2013). Assuming that in a globalized world, rituals are not just tied to local traditions but migrate through transcultural and transnational networks, ritual practices are embedded in complex processes of revitalization, reframing, and reinterpretation, thus serving as an almost inexhaustible reservoir for inventing new “traditions” (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983). Historical reenactments thus might be considered as ritualistic practices of a (rather) new global trend. They can be interpreted as practices that contribute to the ­production of ­historical meaning. They take the form of religious rituals, tourist spectacles, displays of nationalism,

204

Ritual

p­ oliticized reanimations of folklore, artful instances of choreography, and bodily techniques of trance and possession.Viewing reenactments as rituals opens space for better understanding the politics of inventing traditions and folklore, of making practices authentic, of their commodification, and of the globalization of ritualistic practices and their medialization.

Further reading Handelman, D., and Lindquist, G. (eds.), 2005; Humphrey, C., and Laidlaw, J., 1994; Koepping, K. P. (ed.), 1997; Lambek, M., 2016.

205

44 ROLE-PLAY Stephen Gapps

Role-play is broadly defined either as unconsciously altering behavior to fulfill a social role, or as consciously assuming an imagined or real character in a performance, game, or educational setting. This latter sense of the term has informed the conceptualization and practices of historical reenactment, and it underpins the related, massive global popularity of computer-based role-playing games in recent years. The growth of role-play techniques and the beginning of reflective and critical analysis of role-play can be traced to the development of improvisational theater in the UK and US in the 1960s, in particular, when improvised dialogue and stock characters and scenes replaced the scripts of traditional theater. Neither participants nor audience could know the direction or outcome of any given performance. Audience-performer boundaries were blurred in what proponents argued was a democratization of traditional theater. At the same time, in the field of psychology, role-play developed as a cathartic therapeutic technique (trauma). From the 1970s, history educators claimed that using role-play by trained staff at heritage sites and museums could foster a meaningful and democratic engagement with history through interactive immersion. In a burst of enthusiasm for so-called living history, participants often inhabited the first-person, acting as if from the past, but speaking only in the present tense. This form of role-play certainly occupied a formative place in the growth of history tourism and outdoor museums, but it has proved difficult to sustain and is now only rarely part of the repertoire in historical reenactments and heritage sites. First-person roleplay has, however, found more fertile ground in the related sub-cultures of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), cosplay (costumed play), and live action role-play (LARP). While these groups do not claim to perform reenactments, they often recreate historical events, scenarios, or eras that reference the past. Public historians have keenly observed the strengths and weaknesses of role-play methods employed at living history museums and history tourism sites such as Plimoth Plantation in the US. Audiences either refused to engage with role-play or disrupted it, often delighting in breaking the conceit of a performance of the past that employed obvious anachronisms. Since the initial enthusiasm of the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in the US, first-person interpretation by costumed actors role-playing historical characters declined under criticism from academics as well as from performers and their audiences (Anderson, 1984; Carson 1998; Creviston Lee, 2013; Roth, 1998; Snow, 1993; Gapps, 2002; MacCannell, 1973; Magelssen, 2004). 206

Role-play

So-called second-person interpretation techniques, which do not require such active audience participation in the role-playing game, have been more successful in living history museums and heritage sites. In hands-on living history displays, social history educational methods emphasize the daily tasks of working peoples’ lives. Proponents argued that witnessing a blacksmith operating a forge, for example, allowed everyone to understand the tools, the medium, and the person using them. This method also became the dominant form of interpretation that involved some level of role-play in Europe and Australia, where first-person role-play in history tourism had never been as well received as in the US (Magelssen, 2006; Gapps, 2002; 2018) (Figure 44.1). Beyond living history museums, role-play formed the basis of several related sub-cultures that also developed from the late 1960s and early 1970s, initially in the US, then quickly taken up by other Western countries, particularly Australia. Some of them, such as role-playing in Scandinavian countries, were influenced by local theatrical traditions, but the basis of much role-playing technique in the 1970s originated in wargames and coincided with the explosion of interest in medieval-inspired fantasy literature such as Lord of the Rings (gaming). During the early 1970s, wargamers moved from table-top games with figures and counters into a more cognitive and collaborative experience, in which a game master would describe a fictional world and participants could suggest their characters’ responses to given situations. Depending on the game master’s assent, the story would evolve in unforeseen directions, propelled by participants’ imaginations. Role-playing games combined wargaming rules systems with improvisational theater to create an immersive, collaborative form of game-play that added a level of individual agency. Until the advent of computer-based role-playing games, miniature

Figure 44.1 Actors at the Tower of London role-playing Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Source: Stephen Gapps.

207

Stephen Gapps

wargame figures were used in moments of game-play that required more technical adjudication, with rules and dice-rolling rather than interactive story building. Various games were spawned in informal gaming networks, but in 1974, Dungeons and Dragons—regarded as the “first modern role-playing game”—became commercially available. There followed a boom in “RPGs,” as they became known, particularly among science fiction and fantasy literature fans. Many of the sets or worlds, stories, and game-mechanisms formed the basis of computer games from the 1980s onwards (Hendricks et al., 2006; Tresca, 2010). While role-playing games were booming, other variants of role-play took shape. The SCA began in California in 1966 among a small group of people who articulated their medievalthemed gatherings as a “protest against the 20th century.” Initially focusing on costume and tournament combat from medieval history, the SCA chose to “selectively recreate” the past, only “choosing elements of the culture that interest and attract” members. In joining the SCA, “everyone is presumed to be minor nobility” from pre-17th-century Europe (SCA, 1996). SCA members adopt a medieval name and title and develop a suitable persona or character to go with them. While some characters may be highly fictional, many are based on historical figures or generic roles.The role-playing of these characters is featured at specific events, such as recreated medieval tournaments. The SCA eschewed the more stringent rules around historical accuracy that amateur reenactment groups imposed, and this attracted the growing numbers of people interested in performed medieval fantasy fiction. Membership expanded rapidly during the 1970s and remains strong, with tens of thousands in the self-styled kingdoms and principalities of the SCA worldwide. A series of related movements that engaged with role-play techniques emerged in the 1980s. The most prominent were cosplay and LARP. Cosplay originated in US science fiction fan conferences as early as the late 1930s, when attendees began to turn up dressed in costumes of their favorite sci-fi book, movie, or cartoon character. The practice boomed in the 1980s, and cosplay acquired a decidedly more global appeal, highly popular in Japan in particular. Cosplay is often styled as a form of performance art and, while it has similarities with historical reenactment practices in the attention paid to costume details, role-play is not as important as costuming (Go, 2015). LARP emerged as a distinctly postmodern phenomenon in the 1980s. Techniques of historical reenactment’s mock combat were added to table-top or computer-based role-playing games, and participants costumed themselves as their game characters in order to play out game scenarios in “live action.” Despite its connections with theater, living history, and education, analysis of LARP has mostly been in the field of game studies. Yet while there are similarities to game-play and the creation of alternative worlds, live and digital role-playing are in many ways quite distinct. Unlike digital games, live role-play is rarely commoditized and, while open to ethnographic analysis, its ephemeral nature evades documentation. Efforts to describe the internal game dynamics, player experiences, and motivations—a subcultural understanding of LARP—have proved unsuccessful (Montola and Stenros, 2010; Stenros and Montola, 2011, pp. 6–10). So-called Nordic LARP diverged significantly from the US and elsewhere. Often called “Nordic Art Larp,” “participatory” or “new theatre,” the game-play often explores particular emotions or concepts through fantasy worlds, thus finding broad acceptance as “social value” or therapeutic escapism (Bressanin, 2012). Nordic LARP’s growing body of largely participant-driven literature also distinguishes it from other LARP communities, since it draws on academic work with strong connections to theater studies, gaming, and history education. As online gaming cultures became pervasive during the last two decades, interest in the educational value of live role-play techniques to “increase engagement and motivation” in students grew, 208

Role-play

and ­educational role-playing or “edu-larp” emerged in classrooms across Scandinavia (Bowman 2016). LARP’s fantasy-fiction genre origins remain strong, yet in no way do they characterize the entire sub-culture. By the 1990s, Larpers in Europe and the US were claiming urban wastelands as evocative sites for post-apocalyptic-themed games and LARP worlds were taken from “forests and castles” to “industrial halls and city streets” (Montola, 2007, p. 267) (dark tourism). Whether “live” role-play first emerged in response to online and digital gaming remains unclear. LARP has much in common with the structures of digital gaming worlds and their communities, and often combines live and online digital gaming. Yet an important thread for many is the informal theater of role-playing—acting without being on stage—which has led to the term “Theatre-Style Larp” (Harrison 2009; Young 2003). Real, normative, and hegemonic spaces are often transformed in role-play games (performance and performativity). Role-play has thus been considered in terms of Foucault’s concept of a heterotopia, where the collective game experience becomes a liminal “other” space that can be imbued with a new political function. Recently, there have been suggestions that LARP, together with communities of HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) and other groups at Renaissance Fairs in the US, have become sanctuaries for far-right politics. This sparked internal, real-world political debate in groups ostensibly avoiding such issues (Weil, 2018). Despite critiques of heterotopias as apolitical, education theory in particular has revisited the concepts, seeing them as social spaces of deviation that expose the limits of real spaces and question their normative functions, rather than being merely a form of escapism (Foucault, 1966; Charteris, Jones, Nye, and Reyes, 2017). From their origins as a sub-culture in the 1970s, role-playing games have had a surprisingly strong and ongoing resonance in popular culture across the globe. They exhibit intersections of fantasy, history, and real-world social behaviors and political motivations, particularly in terms of the construction and political contestation of heterotopias (Hendricks et al., 2006, pp. 1–18; Hutchings and Giardino, 2016).

Further reading Gapps, S., 2018; Hendricks, S. Q.,Williams, J. P., and Winkler,W. K. (eds.), 2006; Hutchings,T., and Giardino, J., 2016; Magelssen, S., 2006; Montola, M., and Stenros, J. (eds.), 2010.

209

45 SUBLIME Jonathan Lamb

The work of art no longer wants to mean something; rather, it wants to be something. (Blumenberg, 2000, p. 46) It is evident that the “affective turn” in reenactment distinguishes an overflow of sensations and emotions that is symptomatic of a very powerful identification with an historical event, or a character within it. Under that pressure of feeling, it is no longer possible for the reenactor to consider him- or herself critically in relation to the action being performed since the performance and the action are to all intents and purposes the same. At such moments of intensity, reenactment introduces into what otherwise might have been simply a device of representation a pressure of aesthetic excitement known as the sublime. The sublime is the only ancient treatment of literary imitation, or mimesis, that goes beyond the bounds of formal requirements of probability, meter, decorum, genre, diction, tropes, and so on, in order to demonstrate how passion is transfused from the original to the copy so that the whole being of the imitator, not to mention the imitation itself, is caught up in what is imitated. This is no less true of the original itself, whether it is an event, phenomenon, or text, since its authority is about to be shared with its representation, its conception with its effect, its past manifestation with its present instance. The sublime perpetually eliminates the difference between the thing itself and its image—a feat that many might claim as the sine qua non of a successful reenactment, whether it is called the sublime, “period rush,” “Nirvana,” or “Goose Bump City” (Horwitz, 1999, p. 379, p. 213). At first sight, Longinus’s On the Sublime makes a modest claim as a “rhetoric” or “techne,” a recipe book of poetic and oratorical devices that was the specialty of the Sophists. When Plato complains of knowledge and persuasion being put up for sale by scholars who see nothing wrong with turning truth, beauty, and passion into commodities, the Sophists are whom he had in mind. Longinus presents himself during the Second Sophistic (circa 200 ce) as one of them, introducing his treatise as a set of “plain Directions … how and by what Method” the sublime may be attained (Longinus, 1739, p. 2). Where his method differs from others is that it aims not simply to define sublimity but to produce it. His idea of sublime performance is to transform precept into action and description into an event. So the praise accorded to Longinus down the ages is always in the same vein: he is sublime on the sublime or, as Alexander Pope puts it, “he is himself the great sublime he draws” (Pope, 1711, p. 39).

210

Sublime

The only ancient critic to accord the Pentateuch the status of great literature, Longinus includes Moses’s account of the creation of light, “And God said—What?—Let there be Light, and there was Light” (Longinus, 1739, pp. 23–24). Look how exactly he invites us to observe how this remarkable feat of coincident utterance and event (“and there was light” not “and then there was light”) comes down to us in a quotation which is then re-quoted in order to demonstrate that the magnificence of divine illocution is not weakened by repetition. This is reenactment of the first water.To do what one is talking about belongs to a unique line of rhetoric that finds mere representation as unexciting as Plato says it is in the Republic (mimesis). But it comes at some cost. Longinus puts it like this: The Sublime, endued with Strength irresistible, strikes home, and triumphs over every Hearer … [its] Force we cannot possibly withstand [for it] immediately sinks deep, and makes such Impressions on the Mind as cannot be easily worn out or effaced. (Longinus, 1739, pp. 3, 15) It is like a battle where the first onset favors the agency of the sublime while the audience lies bruised and supine. However, in the second phase, a transfusion of energy takes place, “For the Mind is … so sensibly affected with its lively Strokes, that it swells in Transport and an inward Pride, as if what was only heard had been the Product of its own Invention” (Longinus, 1739, p. 14). This reaction Edmund Burke called delight, as opposed to pleasure. Pleasure is a pure emotion, but delight is terror blended with rebounded power. For those reenactors whose enthusiasm is not bounded by meticulous attention to the paraphernalia of the performance of a historical event, the pains of an exact imitation—marching in bare feet, trying to sleep in icy weather under a single blanket, finding en route the only food that will be consumed—are the overture to the overpowering sense of inhabiting, not just representing, a historical moment. Longinus’s attitude to figurative language runs closely parallel with the scene of overthrow and recovery that marks the first encounter with the sublime. He gives an example from Demosthenes’s speech “On the Crown,” where the orator is describing an unwarranted attack upon an innocent man: There are several Turns in the Gesture, in the Look, in the Voice of the Man who does violence to another, which it is impossible for the Party that suffers such Violence to express … in the Gesture, in the Look, in the Voice—when like a Ruffian when like an Enemy, when with his Fist, when on the Face. (Longinus, 1739, p. 55) Rather than simply state that the violence he mentions included striking the victim on the face, Demosthenes reenacts both the disorder of the attack as the aggressor, who has no definite purpose except to insult and wound, and also as the waylaid individual suffering the welter of gestures, shouts, and blows. In conveying this, Demosthenes himself is caught up in violence without a reason, and as it were, spontaneously resorts to the figure of asyndeton (syntactical disorder) that does to his words what the aggressor’s assault is doing to someone’s presence of mind and face.The only appropriate responses are gestural: motions of the arms, repetitions, and fragments broken off from any intelligible sequence (gesture). The figures of the sublime are all like this: the aposiopesis or interruption that breaks off in the middle; the litotes or double negative that can only affirm something by denying its opposite; the apostrophe or address to a conjured other party that turns a description into a confrontation or appeal; the ellipse which

211

Jonathan Lamb

dissolves words into expressive silence. Is there not an echo of this in the puns and neologisms of the devoted reenactor: “wargasm” going hand in hand with a terrifying familiarity with the dead (Horwitz, 1999, p. 210)? Immanuel Kant, who like Burke had read the early sections of On the Sublime with great care, wrote a book in imitation of the Philosophical Enquiry called Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, in which he attempts distinctions between the terrifying, noble, and splendid sublimes, using the same ad hominem empirical style as Burke: “This is what we all feel at one time or another” (1764, p. x). In his third Critique, the Critique of Judgment, he renounced this “empirical anthropology” as unsuitable for the sublime (1952, p. 132). He now understood the sublime as the aesthetic of iconoclasm: not the creation of light but the prohibition against images was his prime instance of it from the scriptures. He understood the correspondence between the dynamic (or Longinian) sublime and the mathematical sublime as arising from an embarrassment of the imagination: it cannot frame phenomena that have no limit, and it cannot count a number that is infinite. In short, the sublime attributes of God cannot be represented by an image or a sum. How then might Kant account for the rebound of energy that Longinus had called “inward pride” and Burke “delight,” the surge of self-love that saves the overwhelmed imagination from total prostration and makes the delivery of a quotation sound (and feel) like an illocutionary command? Kant explained it as a force that leaves the imagination wounded, unable to act, with no choice but to relinquish responsibility for representing such a disabling experience to the reason. Reason of course makes no attempt to frame or measure it; translating it instead into an abstraction, and so controlling it as a symbol, rather as mathematicians control the enigma of infinity with the sign of the lemniscate, or as geometricians control parabolas with the sign of pi.This affords the human mind a sense of transcendental greatness he calls Ergiessung. The relevance of Kant’s intervention to the project of historical reenactment turns on the question of imagination, whether images can act by their own force as images without paralyzing the sensibility of the reenactor, or whether the shock of coming so close to the presence of a historical event induces the mind to find some substitute for empirical perception.There is no doubt that R.G. Collingwood took Kant’s route out of this difficulty. But if we take a popular example of a reenactment, namely the haka or challenge that begins each match of the New Zealand All Blacks, it is a short reenactment of the defiance hurled at enemies by Maori ariki (chiefs) before fighting them. The most popular belongs to the cornered Te Rauparaha, chief of the Ngati Toa, who emerged from his trench wiping the filth from his arms and thighs, his eyes bulging and his tongue extended, shouting, “Ka mate, ka mate, ka ora, ka ora.” “Is it to be death or life?” It is a question overwhelmed by the urgency with which it is put; and it is a quotation that grows consubstantial with its source.

Further reading Blumenberg, H., 2000; Collingwood, R. G., 1994; Fanning, C., 2005; Ianetta, M., 2005; Kant, I., 1952; Lamb, J., 2005; Longinus, 1739; Mats, M., 2000; O’Gorman, N., 2004.

212

46 SUFFERING Vanessa Agnew

The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition for all truth. (Adorno, 1973, pp. 17–18) It is from the second book of Virgil’s Aeneid (ca. 19–29 bce) and Quintus’s Posthomerica (4th century) that we acquire an account of human suffering inflicted by the gods. In contrast to Christian conceptions of suffering which afford it ontological and eschatological significance (Barber, 2017, p. 132), in classical antiquity, suffering is unrelieved by the possibility of divine grace. Punished by Athena, or perhaps Apollo, the Trojan priest Laocoön is first blinded, then ensnared along with his two sons by sea serpents. Represented in the famous statue by Hagesandros, Athenedoros, and Polydoros, the family’s contorted limbs and tortured faces strain in perpetual agony as they stamp and thrust against serpents that constrict their limbs and champ at their bodies (Figure 46.1). The reasons for Laocoön’s punishment remain obscure. He tried to expose the Greeks’ treachery; he desecrated holy ground by having sex there—the reasons are not really important. But like Cassandra, here was a man who could see what others could not and who would put his suppositions to the test. “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,” he instructed his countrymen, “Beware of the Greeks, even when they bear gifts,” and enjoined them to reject the offering (Virgil, Aeneid, II, 49). To no avail: the Trojans could not read Laocoön’s suffering any more than they could read the ruse-horse. The city would be overrun by Greek soldiers concealed in the wooden horse, the war would end in Trojan defeat, and Laocoön and his children suffer an agonizing death: lle simul manibus tendit divellere nodos perfusus sanie vittas atroque veneno, clamores simul horrendos ad sidera tollit: qualis mugitus, fugit cum saucius aram taurus et incertam excussit cervice securim. With both his hands he labors at the knots; His holy fillets the blue venom blots; His roaring fills the flitting air around. Thus, when an ox receives a glancing wound, 213

Vanessa Agnew

He breaks his bands, the fatal altar flies, And with loud bellowings breaks the yielding skies. (Virgil, trans. Dryden [1697], 110) As a central model in the Western iconography of suffering, the effect of the Laocoön group relies on an empathetic relation with the sufferer. We are moved by Laocoön’s furrowed brow and contorted expression: like him, we feel ignored by our fellows, unjustly punished, restrained by the deadly snakes, doomed. Reenactment operates similarly in this regard. Through restaging, the individual’s suffering assumes a metonymic relationship to suffering in the past. The reenactor’s suffering also functions as a structuring device for the narrative itself—battle reenactors starve themselves to look and feel the part of soldier, crouch cold and wet in fake trenches, and are discombobulated by the fog of simulated war. The more acute the pain, the more authentic a correlative of historical experience the reenactment appears to be.Yet, the use of suffering as a narrative structuring device is also driven by the genre’s formal constraints—its emphasis on individual plight and difficulty in encapsulating complex historical processes. In consequence, reenactment narratives often depart from the historical events they mean to represent. The discovery of Australia’s eastern seaboard by Captain Cook is told, for example, via the feel of hempen rigging in the hand, the dizzying height of the foremast, the pitching deck, the improbable climb over the lip of the fighting top (Agnew, 2010). Such a tale of sailorly derring-do would never have been worthy of telling in the 18th century like it is in the 21st. But pain, fear, loneliness, bewilderment—these

Figure 46.1 Hagesandros, Athenedoros, and Polydoros, Laocoön and his sons, marble copy of a Hellenistic original ca. 200 bc. Found at Baths of Trajan, 1506. Source:Vatican Museums CC BY-SA 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0.

214

Suffering

are the manifestations of suffering that give reenactment its meat and bones and make it seem a true account of the past. In a reversal of Adorno’s coupling comes the assertion that truth-telling is anterior to the expression of suffering. Philosopher Gary A. Mullen argues in this regard that truth is “a language in which our suffering can be expressed and given a central role in the determination of political practice” (2016, p. 102). In fact, what Adorno draws attention to—misleading in the standard English translation—is the need for suffering to be articulated, or to be allowed to be articulated: “Das Bedürfnis, Leiden beredet werden zu lassen, ist Bedingung aller Wahrheit” (1966, n.p.). In Adorno’s passive construction, there is no agent to permit or prohibit, express or witness the articulation of suffering. Adorno suggests, rather, that suffering has to be given the opportunity to find voice. The important pendant to this is that without the possibility of articulating suffering, truth and justice cannot exist. New developments in reenactment like high-resolution multidimensional scanning, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and forensic architecture offer—or claim to offer—a technologized means of establishing the truth about the past and of uncovering and modeling the material conditions of suffering. In some respects, this technology is similar to the longstanding use of crime scene reconstruction in court cases (evidence). In other regards, the technology offers novel possibilities for investigating, representing, and “experiencing” the past through high-caliber simulations of built environments, the reconstruction of events through a range of evidentiary sources, and the possibility of virtually occupying different subject positions from multiple points of view. The technology promises to transform judicial systems because of its capacity to make crime scenes accessible to investigators and courts long after crimes have been perpetrated (Breker, quoted in Cieslak, 2016). Digital environments are also transforming historical representation. Historian David Staley goes so far as to predict that such tools will supersede traditional narrative accounts of the past for the very reason that prose “linearizes concepts and ideas that are not inherently linear” (2014). Nazi VR (dir. David Freid, 2017, 17 min.), a documentary short detailing the prosecution of a Nazi criminal, marks such a milestone in the use of digital technology to reconstruct and restage the past. Given the dearth of material evidence and surviving witnesses and the advanced age of the alleged perpetrators, the 2016 trial of Reinhold Hanning was a last-ditch effort to bring a perpetrator of the Holocaust to justice (Freid, 2019). Changes to German law and a precedent-setting case in 2011 allowed federal prosecutors to charge low-level functionaries with having abetted rather than directly committed crimes during World War II. Central to securing Hanning’s conviction were the use of digital media and VR reconstruction. The former SS guard at Auschwitz-Birkenau was ultimately found guilty of being an accessory to the murder of 170,000 people and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. Since the case was still on appeal when he died a year later, the conviction did not stand under German law (Smale, 2017). Claiming to have witnessed neither the selections nor gassing of victims at Auschwitz, Hanning’s defense rested on the assertion that he had worked at the concentration camp but possessed no knowledge of the crimes committed there. To make their case, prosecutors needed to establish precisely what the defendant had seen. Evidence was compiled from laser scans, aerial photographs, witness testimony, and historical blueprints which were used to digitally recreate destroyed buildings. Equipped with this VR model, the court was able to virtually inhabit the simulated genocide site, examine it from every angle, and draw on this reenactive experience to establish the defendant’s guilt (Figure 46.2). The Office for Photo Technology and 3D Crime Scene Mapping (Zentrale Fototechnik und 3D-Tatortvermessung) was commissioned by Bavarian public prosecutors to produce the 3D model of the concentration camp, and laser scanning conducted on site over a period of 215

Vanessa Agnew

Figure 46.2  A screenshot from the documentary short Nazi VR (2017) shows a mashup image of the defendant being tried as an accessory to mass murder. In the background, a low-tech courtroom sketch shows the public wearing VR headsets. These enable viewers to inhabit a 3D reconstruction and see “exactly” what the defendant saw at Auschwitz 70 years earlier. Yet, like the statue of Justitia wearing a blindfold, it is unclear whether justice is hereby made more or less partial. Source: Nazi VR (dir. David Freid).

several days in 2015. Since most of the buildings had been leveled at the end of the war, the infrastructure had to be digitally reconstructed from historical photographs, maps, and surveyors’ records. Using technology increasingly used in the investigation of violent crime scenes, a scanner, revolving around its horizontal axis and 310o in a vertical plane, recorded some 30 million data points per scan. According to digital imaging expert, Ralf Breker, with this kind of technology, “Details can be discerned. The tiniest trace of blood.” “We can draw virtual ellipses around the blood splatters and an algorithm calculates the ballistic trajectory of the blood drops.” Witness statements can then be compared with the scans. This visual record gives ballistics experts and physicists the possibility even long after the fact of “walking around in crime scenes and working there” (Nazi VR, 2017). According to Breker, this recording and reconstructive work resulted in an Auschwitz model of unprecedented exactitude: “It is much, much more precise than Google Earth … The advantage the model offers is that [it gives] a better overview of the camp and can recreate the perspective of a suspect, for example, in a watchtower” (quoted in Cole, 2016). Looking through his headset at the concentration camp, Breker claimed to see “exactly what a security guard saw from this perspective,” making VR a tool that “objectively” established what was visible to the defendant at the time (Nazi VR, 2017). Three-dimensional modeling that draws on laser scans, photogrammetric technology, digital mapping, and image editing software renders the scene “precisely measurable and interpretable” and allows “inferences about the nature of external acts of violence” to be made. The central perspective is replaced by infinite possible perspectives (Bayrisches Landeskriminalamt Zentrale Fototechnik und 3D-Tatortvermessung, 2019). Since Jeremy Bentham’s innovation in the 18th century, the panopticon has been thought of as the ne plus ultra of information gathering.To see things with a totalizing view is, apparently, to see them with ultimate clarity. Prisons built on a circular model, surveillance towers, and CCTV 216

Suffering

allow the perpetual visibility of the subject under a regime of asymmetric power relations and monitoring.Yet, critics have long drawn attention to problems associated with the dominance of the specular. Others draw attention to problems associated with visualizing big data, particularly within a judicial context. Legal scholars Mark Lemley and Eugene Volokh argue, for example, that legal doctrine is based on conventional distinctions between reality and communication, perception and experience, physical presence and remoteness, conduct and speech, and physical and psychological harm—distinctions that VR undermines (2018). Falling into uncharted territory are thus the influence of VR on the viewer’s thoughts and emotions, proprietorship of VR experiences, blurring of the real and perceptually real, and the capacity of VR to generate memories (Nori, 2018). As virtual reenactments of the 1974 Milgram experiment have convincingly shown,VR disrupts our ideas about the real, as well as our affective responses to the simulation. In a new permutation of performance artist Rod Dickinson’s Milgrim Reenactment (2002), inflicting virtual pain on an avatar elicited subjective, behavioral, and physiological responses among the experimental subjects (Slater et al., 2006).The authors of the study concluded that the “objective ‘reality’ of [the avatar’s] pain” was of “secondary importance” to these responses (Cheetham et al., 2009). Whereas Dickinson’s artistic reenactment highlighted problems of agency and historical distance (representation), the virtual Milgrim reenactment raised questions about the nature of empathy in relation to the social dilemma posed by obedience to authority. The study’s findings were inconclusive as to whether test subjects sought to avoid inflicting virtual pain because they shared the affective state of the avatar (they experienced empathy) or because of their own aversive state of personal distress (Cheetham et al., 2009). Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s reading of the Laocoön group in Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1987 [1766]) makes a case for the different aesthetic possibilities of various media. Over and against Horace’s assertion in Ars Poetica that the expressive possibilities of one medium are just like those of another (ut pictura poesis), Lessing insists that sculpture is poetry’s inferior. The statue fixes a moment in time, whereas poetry trades in time. It narrates and contextualizes. The Laocoön of Hagesandros, Athenedoros, and Polydoros has a mouth that emits only a fearful, half-suppressed sigh, not rage and not an agonized scream, the natural expression of physical pain (pp. 9, 12).Virgil’s literary character, in contrast, bellows in agony. We do not judge Laocoön for this unrestrained expression of pain, which in another context might be regarded as unseemly. From our reading, we already know Laocoön as a patriot and caring father (pp. 7, 27). He has a history and a life, and it is to this life that Lessing would have Laocoön restored. We can extend Lessing’s and Adorno’s insights to question the expressive possibilities of digital media and the relation of suffering to the pursuit of truth and justice. Employed in the courtroom,VR reconstruction based on high-resolution scanning has made it possible to bring historical cases to trial and achieve judicial convictions where incriminating evidence would have been otherwise insufficient.Yet the new technology posits truth as the inevitable outcome of massive data capture and 3D reconstruction, even when this digital data capture relies on 3D modeling in the first place (what Fabrizio Gallanti in forensic architecture calls “reverse architecture”). Asserting the primacy and comprehensiveness of the visible also begs the question as to what cannot be seen, and also not heard, felt, tasted, and smelled. The victim’s suffering, for one, seems incidental to an enterprise that asserts an isomorphism between big data, digital reconstruction, reenactment, interpretation, and total knowledge. Perhaps we would do well to recall that suffering is not merely the business of the individual and his or her personal experience: it weighs upon the subject but not on the subject only. According to Adorno, wrangling with suffering is a precondition for truth-telling and for the exercise of justice—not the other way around. Over and against the assumption that suffering stands opposed to objective 217

Vanessa Agnew

knowledge comes an invitation to consider another possibility. Adorno leads us away from a dependence on big data, the infinite proliferation of viewpoints, and virtual experience. “Leiden ist Objektivität, die auf dem Subjekt lastet; was es als sein Subjektivstes erfährt, sein Ausdruck, ist objektiv vermittelt”: Suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject; what he or she experiences as the most subjective aspect of themselves is, when expressed, itself conveyed objectively (Adorno, 1966, n.p.).

Further reading Allard, A. J., and Martin, M. R., ed., 2016; Milgram, S., 1974; Motrescu-Mayes, A., and Aasman, S., 2019; Presner, T., 2004; Raneri, D., 2018.

218

47 TRAUMA Nena Močnik

In July 2016, in an abandoned factory occupied by a Dutch battalion during the genocide in the former Yugoslavia, spectators, including locals from Srebrenica and surrounding villages, came to see the performance Srebrena krv (Silver Blood). The performance followed the story of two brothers and their happy childhoods, the loss of their futures and hope in humanity, the responsibility of the international community, and the lasting consequences of mass atrocities. The atmosphere became stifling in the otherwise spacious hall as the performance reenacted the traumatic events of 1995. Some older audience members left; some watched the performance in complete silence, captivated by the images on stage; others covered their eyes and repeatedly sighed and breathed heavily. All were deeply affected in one way or another. Whether in the form of performances, films, or informal educational tools such as video games (contemporary art; gaming), reenactment has become one of the most ubiquitous ways of teaching about traumatic historical events. Reenactments enhance not only cognitive explanations of what and how events happened—they also help capture the emotional and somatic understanding of why those events happened. Reenactment has the capacity to translate the intimate, individual experiences of those who have experienced traumatic events and suffer from post-traumatic syndromes into the material and emotional lives of random spectators who have yet to understand and develop compassionate relationships with survivors. Some scholars (Shick, 2011; van der Kolk, 2015) agree that historical reenactment, through collective memory, offers a platform for survivors to confront and relieve the pain that resides in their bodies (body and embodiment). Reenactment creates a form of catharsis in which past atrocities are given narrative closure. It can comfort survivors by allowing their testimonies to be heard and their experiences to be acted out (memory and commemoration). As a vehicle for communicating traumatic pasts across time and space, reenactment confronts and informs audiences, showing how history and memory overlap to serve the present socio-political dynamics of communities. Writing histories about natural disasters, collective violence, and mass atrocities usually starts with collecting survivors’ testimonies that are necessarily imperfect, sometimes politically inflected and generally lacking consensus. When traumatic events from the past are unresolved, reenactment bears political connotations that are often expressed as frustration over the slowness of change (Owen and Ehrenhaus, 2014). At the same time, reenactment can help clarify past events or construct explanations that respond to the current political and ideological needs of those holding the power of cultural 219

Nena Močnik

memory (production of historical meaning). Opening the wounds of a community’s trauma and acting it out together with or on behalf of the community has the potential to mobilize the audience, educate, and engage them in healing and in constructing a hopeful future. Survivors and victims are easily brought to action, either in the form of offering their testimonies, or in the form of watching as an audience and working as reenactors, especially in cases when justice has not been achieved and reparatory demands have gone unanswered. However, as they are often accorded moral authority, reenactments are often informed by highly personal perspectives that dispense with objective research. Survivors are given the right to evaluate and judge the correctness and appropriation of the events, experiences, and emotions being reenacted. In societies that are still fragile and conflicted, the reenactment script shaped by survivors— those who own the trauma and are thus perceived as the ultimate authorities in creating the (post)trauma narratives—can provoke destructive emotions and negative (re)actions. If survivors’ memories serve as the only reference point and form of historical evidence for incorporating traumatic experiences into historical reenactment, it can be difficult to provide just and impartial narratives. What a survivor remembers can depend on their current mental, emotional, and corporeal state. Real events from the past are recalled through a process of memorizing, organizing, and reconstructing a memory in relation to the present context. Furthermore, accessing coherent and reliable memories of the traumatic event can itself be challenging, because traumatic events often give rise to suppressed, fragmentary forms of memory that resist simple recounting. Many individuals exposed to trauma report that their speech shuts down when trying to describe what has happened to them. Their response to trauma makes it extremely difficult for them to linguistically organize and frame the experience in a suitable narrative structure. Memories of traumatic events are stored in the body and mind in fragmented form, with only certain (graphic) images recurring regularly (Herman, 1992). Survivors of such events often report that after a time they can no longer clearly distinguish between their own memories and those reenacted in popular culture (Sturken, 1997). However, even though a traumatic memory may lose its clarity, become distorted or altered, and/or be manipulated over time, at some point, it becomes fixed. After this point, that particular recollection of the event remains unchanged and unquestioned (van der Kolk and van der Hart, 1991). For the survivors, this point represents a moment in time in which the traumatic experience from the past has been “worked through” (Adorno, 2005): the event has been mastered to the extent that it can be set aside, allowing the survivors to move on with their lives. For the audience, this is the point when collective memory enters the historical accounts and receives recognition in public narratives and ideological discourses. Trauma scholars (Levine, 1992; Rotschild, 2000) have long engaged with the ways in which bodies can communicate and reveal traumatic stories that are otherwise suppressed and difficult to access through language only. Recorded in genetic memory, trauma is thought to be “locked in the body” and hence expressed through emotional responses and bodily sensations (emotion), rather than in cognitively organized narratives. If reenactors are not themselves survivors, performing traumatic pasts also means learning about and understanding the sensual, emotional, and physical dimensions of a survivor’s testimony.Therefore, the body may be thought of as providing a form of physical evidence of the event that can be translated into a sensory experience of cognitive understanding and emphatic interaction. During her workshop Achieving Truth: Creating the Physicality of War on Stage (University of Ottawa, March 16, 2018), Aimée Mica Ntuli shared her experiences as a co-writer and actress in the piece Cheers to Sarajevo (2017) (Figure 47.1). She discussed the preparations actors took to stage a semi-documentary portrayal of the siege of Sarajevo and the fate of a group of friends

220

Trauma

Figure 47.1  Cheers to Sarajevo, 2017. Directed by Andrew Roux, written by Aimée Mica Ntuli and Lidija Marelic, produced by Aimeé Mica Ntuli. From left to right: Alistair Moulton Black, Rory Acton Burnell, Lamar Bonhomme. Front: Aimeé Mica Ntuli. Source: Aimeé Mica Ntuli.

from different ethnic backgrounds. She led participants of the workshop, drama students, and other interested individuals through performing-arts exercises, framing them as a way of recreating the physicality and emotions experienced by individuals during the war. At one point, participants were brought into a simulation of a detention camp and subjected to a reenactment of a disturbing interrogation by a camp guard. Everyone was ordered to stand facing the wall with their arms raised above their heads while an actor portraying a camp guard walked behind them with heavy steps and randomly inspected their bodies. Following this experience, participants were ordered to form a new line and the same actor approached each of them closely, continuing to ask participants upsetting questions. The reactions of the participants varied widely across the emotional spectrum, including hysterical laughter, babbling, resisting the guard, and leaving the stage to observe. In this sense, workshop participants were invited to move from the passive witnessing of cognitive observation to active reenactment through the use of sensory, embodied practices. Improvising the detention scene and role-playing did not prompt participants to think about what they would do in a similar situation so much as it invited them to feel and observe their own intrinsic emotional and bodily responses to the reenacted scenes. The example demonstrates how reenacting a traumatic past experience can serve to position the memory and understanding of trauma outside the common medical definition of the term, which tends to overlook the bodily dimension of memory. Through reenactment, participants can immerse themselves in experiential learning processes that involve cognitive and sensory understandings of an event from another time and place. This could be as simple as reproducing dialogues and conversation or wearing period clothes, and as engaged as performing characters at a real historical site. Either way, reenacting can serve as a way of understanding history through direct experience. However, as much as such role-playing can offer people a profound understanding of complex human behaviors and dynamics, it also might increase the risk of post-traumatic

221

Nena Močnik

stress disorder among survivors or the transgenerational transmission of trauma in the affected communities. The effects of past events are cumulative and persist in different ways in the behaviors, attitudes, and social dynamics of succeeding generations long after the events have occurred. In order to fill in gaps in memory and create coherent narratives, reenactments combine what is “real” with fantasy and the capability of reenactors to empathize and identify with events. In this sense, reenactment has the potential to help reconnect disempowered victims and survivors with their descendants to help them make sense of the events. It can help them not only restore, but also “re-story” their lives (Yoder, 2005). After a period of mourning, reenactment can encourage work toward reconciliation and a path to breaking the cycle of violence (Schwarz, 2007). As opposed to written historiography and memorials, which tend to freeze the past and represent the events as fixed moments in time, trauma reenactment displays suffering in a controlled environment with the deliberate aim of learning about fragile social realities and vulnerabilities. In this sense, survivors in the audience or those who perform in reenactments engage in the Freudian act of “repetition-compulsion” (Freud, 2010): an act that recapitulates earlier trauma and in so doing enables survivors to relive the traumatic events in order to remember, digest, integrate, accept, and recover from the traumatic experience. Mark Auslander (2014) has observed several performances by multiracial amateur groups in the US that stage slave auctions and journeys of enslaved Africans crossing the Middle Passage, paying special attention to how these reenactments might provide new opportunities for interracial dialogue. He notes that white participants are drawn to such events to express the need for (historical) justice, solidarity, and, most of all, reconciliation, while African-American participants expect to witness and be able to share their personal and collective histories of pain. Such acts of reciprocity between perpetrators and victims often emerge in response to the inadequacy of traditional commemorative practices, which tend to be one-sided and ignore history’s continuing effects in the present. Active engagement in reenactment can be educational. However, it demands that participants overcome the “egoism of victimization” (Mack, 1983), which means that they have to shift their focus away from their own pain in order to see the pain that “their” group has caused others. Through the acknowledgment that occurs through telling and listening to traumatic stories, reenactment can break the cycle of trauma and counteract victims’ isolation and silence. By careful and informed guidance, reenactment can transform unspeakable acts in ways that do not deepen the trauma, but instead rehearse a future of post-traumatic growth and reconciliation with the active participation of community members. But while reenacting traumatic events can support the healing of psychological and sociopolitical ruptures in historically damaged and divided communities, the repetitive nature of reenactment can also prevent effective closure and instead perpetuate further violence. On Columbus Day in 1992, the US Congress organized a Quincentennial Jubilee, which was to include a reenactment of the “discovery of America.” The state’s insistence on celebrating the conquest despite loud calls for an acknowledgment of the genocide perpetrated on indigenous peoples gave rise to a “Resistance 500” task force, which ultimately succeeded in having the controversial event canceled. Ever since, celebrations of Columbus’s expedition have been criticized as historical misrepresentations and denials of the crimes committed against indigenous people in both Americas (Hochbruck, 1993). The attempt to reenact the complexity of collective violence, its consequences, and the individual accounts of survivors and perpetrators can also run the risk of over-simplifying the events or creating positive/negative binaries where audiences empathize only with some individuals or social groups while demonizing the “Other.” For instance, in his writings on the annual reenactments of remembered histories in Japan,Tatsushi Arai (2015, p. 23) makes the point that the Japanese public and policymakers must 222

Trauma

acknowledge the Korean, Chinese, and other Asian nations’ lived and remembered histories of Japanese colonial rule. He argues that only by acknowledging diverse yet contested narratives might reconciliation be achieved. Ignoring the memories of a traumatized community can lead to a failure to address the need for restorative justice. In this sense, historical trauma in new, disguised forms becomes a real-life reenactment, namely not as a staged, mediated, and intentionally prepared performance for the audience, but rather an intrinsic and subconscious response to triggers. As opposed to other cases in this text, victims in this context are real and living people in this very moment, not reenacting victims who are not present yet or passed away a long time ago. The sense of being mistreated is transferred through generations and the continuity of the catastrophe becomes repeated on an institutional level; a deliberately chosen traumatic event can become an integral part of a group’s identity, helping them to regain power and a sense of control over the past and present (Herman, 1992;Volkan, 2004). Howard Stein (2014) takes as an example non-Israeli Jews’ relationship to contemporary violence between Jews and Palestinians in Israel. He argues that the current violence might, to some certain extent, be a reenactment of historical traumas on both sides, and both on the interpersonal and social levels.The “Holocaust industry,” he writes, is based on continuous and ritualized repetitions of specific and chosen memories that have successfully been transferred through generations. These repetitions have created a vicious cycle of perpetuating the fear of a never-ending threat to the present and future. Because this narrative is deeply embedded in Jewish cultural memory, the reenactment of trauma is usually unconscious and has hence become one of the major sources of present-day violence. When the motivation for reenacting historical trauma lies in individuals who are held hostage to the legacies of traumas rooted in past injustice, both reenactors and witnesses end up witnessing just another repetition of the eternal pain instead of participating in healing and restorative justice. Therefore, reenactors of historical trauma must be cautious about how to ensure that active remembrance operates as a form of resistance against political denial and systematic forgetting (indigeneity). By acknowledging those who have been hurt, reenactment often emphasizes accountability and nurtures the process of forgiveness, which can become a legitimate form of restorative justice. Theater in post-genocide Rwanda has become one of the most influential spaces for perpetrators and survivors to meet and forge new relationships. Ananda Breed (2008, p. 46) describes the powerful role of “reconciliation plays” in this context. One performance, Duharanire Kunga Izatanye (Let’s Try Our Best to Unite Those Who Are Divided), stages a marriage between a Hutu and a Tutsi; during the reconciliation scenes between opposing families, the audience responds with cheers, cries of approval, and humor. Ideally, reenactments utilize representations that deal with the past in ways that allow divided societies to move into the future. Witnessing the reenactment of traumatic events might, in the best-case scenario, foster sufficient moral courage among people to transform trauma and break the cycle of hostile emotions like rage, anger, fear, and frustration. Working through these emotions is fundamental for any recovery and for ushering in processes of reparation and reconciliation.

Further reading Levine, P., 1992; Rothschild, B., 2000; Shick, K., 2011; van der Kolk, B. A., 2015.

223

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aarseth, E. (2004) “Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation”, in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (eds. N. Wardrip-Fruin, P. Harrigan, and M. Crumpton), Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press, pp. 45–55. Abbott, A. (2007) “Story, Plot, and Narration”, in: Cambridge Companion to Narrative (ed. D. Herman), Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University Press, pp. 39–51. Addison, J. and Steele, R. (1907 [1711–12]) The Spectator (ed. G. G. Smith), 8 vols. bound as 4, London, J. M. Dent & Co. Adorno, T. W. (2005 [1963/1969]) Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (trans. H. W. Pickford), New York, Columbia University Press. Adorno, T. W. (1966) Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp [Online]. Available at https​://ar​ chive​.org/​strea​m/The​odorA​dorno​-Nega​tiveD​ialek​tik/A​dorno​Theod​orW.-​Negat​iveDi​alekt​ik_dj​ vu.tx​t (Accessed 10 April 2019). Adorno, T. W. (1973) Negative Dialectics (trans. E. B. Ashton), London, Routledge. Agnew,V. (2004) “What is Reenactment?” Criticism, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 327–339. Agnew,V. (2007) “History’s Affective Turn: Historical Re-enactment and its Work in the Present”, Rethinking History:The Journal of Theory and Practice [special issue], vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 299–312. Agnew, V. (2009) “Genealogies of Space in Colonial and Postcolonial Reenactment”, in Settler and Creole Reenactment (eds.V. Agnew and J. Lamb), Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 294–318. Agnew,V. (2010) “History’s Pure Serene: On Reenacting Cook’s First Voyage, September 2001”, in Staging the Past: Themed Environments in Transcultural Perspectives (eds. J. Schlehe, M. Uike-Bormann, C. Oesterle and W. Hochbruck), Bielefeld, Transcript, pp. 205–218. Agnew, V. (2018) “Reenacting the Stone Age: Journeying Back in Time Through the Uckermark and Western Pomerania”, in A Companion to Public History (ed. D. M. Dean), Hoboken, New Jersey, John Wiley and Sons, pp. 365–375. Agnew,V. (2019) “Songs of Flight: War and Genocide Reenactment on the Refugee Route”, in Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma (eds. A. Fauser and M. A. Figueroa), Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, pp. 170–199. Agnew,V. (2020) “Refugee Routes: Connecting the Displaced and the Emplaced”, in Refugee Routes (eds. V. Agnew, K. Konuk and J. O. Newman), Bielefeld, Transcript. Agnew,V. and Lamb, J. (eds.) (2004) Criticism [Special Issue: Extreme and Sentimental History], vol. 46, no. 3. Agnew,V. and Lamb, J. (eds.) (2009) Settler and Creole Reenactment, Basingstoke, Palgrave-Macmillan. Ahmed, S. (2004) “Collective Feelings: Or, the Impression Left by Others”, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 25–42. Ahmed, S. (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Durham, Duke University Press. Ahrens, C. (1990) Wiederaufgebaute Vorzeit. Archäologische Freilichtmuseen in Europa, Neumünster, Wachholtz. Allen, J. (2005) “Einmal ist Keinmal: Observations on Reenactment”, in RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-porting (eds. A. Caronia, J. Janša and D. Quaranta), Brescia, Link Editions (this edition 2009), pp. 17–26.

225

Bibliography Allison, D. B. (2016) Living History: Effective Costumed Interpretation and Enactment at Museums and Historic Sites, Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield. Amster, M. H. (2008) “A Pilgrimage to the Past: Civil War Reenactors in Gettysburg”, in Reflecting on America: Anthropological Views of U.S. Culture (eds. Boston, Pearson/Allen and Bacon), New York, Routledge, pp. 15–27. Anchor, R. (1978) “History and Play: Johan Huizinga and His Critics”, History and Theory, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 63–93. Anderson, G. (1976) Victorian Clerks, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Anderson, J. (1982) “Living History: Simulating Everyday Life in Living Museums”, American Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 290–306. Anderson, J. (1984) Time Machines.The World of Living History, Nashville,The American Association for State and Local History. Anderson, J. (ed.) (1991) A Living History Reader: Museums, Nashville, American Association for State and Local History. Anderson, B. (1992) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London and New York,Verso. Andraschko, F. M. and Schmidt, M. (1991) “Experimentelle Archäologie: Masche oder Methode? Anmerkungen zur Geschichte und Methodik einer ‘neuen’ Forschungsrichtung”, Experimentelle Archäologie, Bilanz 1991, pp. 69–82. Ankersmit, F. R. (2000) “The Linguistic Turn, Literary Theory and Historical Theory”, Historia, vol. 45, no 2, pp. 271–310. Ankersmit, F. R. (2005) Sublime Historical Experience, Stanford, Stanford University Press. Apel, D. (2012) War Culture and the Contest of Images, New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press. Appadurai, A. (1988) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Apperley,T. (2010) Gaming Rhythm: Rhythms. Play and Counterplay from the Situated to the Global, Amsterdam, Institute of Network Cultures. Arai, T. (2015) “Meeting Reconciliation Challenges in China-Japan-Korea Relations: Japanese Policy Options and Civil Society Initiatives”, in Contested Memories and Reconciliation Challenges Japan and the Asia-Pacific on the 70th Anniversary of the End of World War II (eds. T. Arai, S. Goto and Z. Wang), Washington, Wilson Centre, pp. 20–36. Arendt, H. (2005) “The Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report from Germany”, in Essays in Understanding 1930– 1954 (Intro. J. Kohn), New York, Schocken, pp. 248–269. Arenson, K. J. and Bagaric, M. (2005) Rules of Evidence in Australia: Text and Cases, Chatswood, New South Wales, Butterworths. Arns, I. (2007) “History Will Repeat Itself: Strategies of Reenactment in Contemporary (Media) Art and Performance”, in History Will Repeat Itself: Strategies of Reenactment in Contemporary (Media) Art and Performance (eds. I. Arns and G. Horn), Frankfurt am Main, Revolver, pp. 1–9 [Online]. Available at www.e​n.ink​earns​.de/f​i les/​2011/​05/HW​RI-Ar​ns-Ka​t-200​7-eng​l.pdf​ (Accessed 3 July 2018). Arns, I. (2017) “Battlefield History. Artistic Reenactments as Participatory Deconstructions of History”, in Nikolai Evreinov: The Storming of the Winter Palace (eds. I. Arns, I. Chubarov and S. Sasse), Zurich, diaphanes, pp. 281–289. Arns, I. and Horn, G. (2007) History Will Repeat Itself. Strategien des Reenactment in der zeitgenössischen (Medien-)Kunst und Performance, Frankfurt am Main, Revolver. Arns, I., Chubarov, I. and Sasse, S. (eds.) (2017) Nikolai Evreinov: The Storming of the Winter Palace, Zurich, diaphanes. Aronson-Lehavi, S. (2012) “Transformations of Religious Performativity: Sacrificial Figures in Modern Experimental Theatre”, Performance and Spirituality, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 57–70. Ascher, R. (1961) “Experimental Archaeology”, American Anthropologist, vol. 63, no. 4, pp. 793–816. Ashby, L. (2006) With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture Since 1830, Lexington, Kentucky University Press. Ashton, P. (2010) “Introduction: Going Public”, Public History Review, vol. 17, pp. 1–15. Ashton, P. and Kean H. (eds.) (2012 [2008]) Public History and Heritage Today. People and their Pasts, Basingstoke, Palgrave Mac-Millan. Assmann, A. (2006) Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik, Munich, C.H. Beck. Assmann, J. (1992) Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen, Munich, C. H. Beck.

226

Bibliography Auerbach, E. (2003) Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press. Auget, R. (2012) Cruelty and Civilization:The Roman Games, London and New York, Routledge. Auslander, P. (1999) Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, London and New York, Routledge. Auslander, M. J. (2010) “‘Holding on to Those Who Can’t Be Held’: Reenacting a Lynching at Moore’s Ford Georgia”, Southern Spaces, November [Online]. Available at https​://so​uther​nspac​es.or​g/201​0/hol​ ding-​those​-who-​cant-​be-he​ld-re​enact​ing-l​ynchi​ng-mo​ores-​ford-​georg​ia (Accessed 4 April 2019). Auslander, M. J. (2013) “Touching the Past: Materializing Time in Traumatic ‘Living History’ Reenactments”, Signs and Society, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 161–183. Auslander, M. J. (2014) “Give Me Back My Children!’ Traumatic Reenactment and Tenuous Democratic Public Spheres”, North American Dialogue, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 1–12. Austen, J. (1817) Northanger Abbey (ed. M. Butler), London, Penguin (this edition 1995). Austin, J. L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press. Averbuch, I. (2012) “Discourses of the Reappearing:The Reenactment of the ‘Cloth-Bridge Consecration Rite’ at Mt. Tateyama”, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 1–54. Bal, M. (2009) Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Toronto, University of  Toronto Press. Balke, F. and Engelmeier, H. (2016) Mimesis und Figura: Mit einer Neuausgabe des “Figura”-Aufsatzes von Erich Auerbach, Paderborn, Wilhelm Fink. Barber, D. C. (2017) “Theodor Adorno (1903–1969)”, in Religion and European Philosophy: Key Thinkers from Kant to Žižek (eds. P. Goodchild and H. Phelps), London, Routledge, pp. 127–140. Barthes, R. (1986) “The Reality Effect”, in The Rustle of Language (trans. R. Howard), New York, Hill and Wang, pp. 141–158. Barthes, R. (2006) “The Reality Effect”, in The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900–2000 (ed. D. J. Hale), Malden, Massachusetts, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, pp. 229–234. Bartie, A., Fleming, L., Freeman, M., Hulme, T., Readman, P. and Tupman, C. (2017) “‘And Those Who Live, How Shall I Tell Their Fame?’ Historical Pageants, Collective Remembrance and the First World War, 1919–39”, Historical Research, vol. 90, no. 249, pp. 636–661 [Online]. Available at https://doi. org/10.1111/1468-2281.12189 (Accessed 18 August 2018). Bartie, A., Fleming, L., Freeman, M., Hulme, T., Hutton, A. and Readman, P. (n.d.) “Old Moreton 1589– 1914”, The Redress of the Past [Online]. Available at http:​//www​.hist​orica​lpage​ants.​ac.uk​/page​ants/​ 1301/​(Accessed 15 July 2018). Bashford, A. and Chaplin, J. (2016) The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press. Bateson, G. (2000 [1972]) “A Theory of Play and Fantasy”, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, pp. 177–193. Bathory, R. (2018) Dark Tourism, Darlington, Carpet Bombing Culture. Baudrillard, J. (1994) “The Precession of Simulacra”, in Simulation and Simulacra (trans. S. F. Glaser), Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press. Bäuml, F. H. (1998) “Mimesis as Model: Medieval Media-Change and Canonical Reality”, in Mimesis: Studien zur literarischen Repräsentation / Studies on Literary Presentation (ed. B. F. Scholz), Tübingen, Francke Verlag, pp. 77–86. Beecher, W. C. and Scoville, S. Jr. (2006) [1888] A Biography of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, New York, Cosimo. Belting, H. (1997 [1990]) Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Bendix, R. (1997) In Search of Authenticity:The Formation of Folklore Studies, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press. Benjamin, W. (1968) Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, New York, Schocken Books. Benjamin, W. (2008 [1936]) The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, London, Penguin. Bennett, T. (1995) The Birth of the Museum: History,Theory, Politics, London, Routledge. Bent, M. (2017) “Lost Sounds and Retrievable Sense”, Historical Performance: Theory, Practice and Interdisciplinarity Conference [abstract], Indiana University, Bloomington, 19–21 May [Online]. Available at http:​//mus​ic.in​diana​.edu/​depar​tment​s/aca​demic​/earl​y-mus​ic/20​17_HP​I_Con​f_Pro​g.pdf​ (Accessed 6 March 2018). Benveniste, É. (2016 [1969]) Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Berkeley, G. (1709) Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision, Dublin, Printed by Aaron Rhames, for Jeremy Pepyat.

227

Bibliography Bérube, M. (2005) “Experience”, in New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (eds. T. Bennett, L. Grossberg and M. Morris), Malden, MA, Blackwell, pp. 122–123. Bhabha, H. K. (1984) “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”, October, vol. 28, pp. 125–133. Bhabha, H. K. (1994) The Location of Culture, London, Routledge. Bianchi, R. R. (2004) Guests of God: Pilgrimage and Politics in the Islamic World, New York, Oxford University Press. Bielo, J. (2016) “Replication as Religious Practice, Temporality as Religious Problem”, History and Anthropology, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 131–148. Bikerman, E. (1947 [1935]) The Maccabees. An Account of their History from the Beginnings to the Fall of the House of the Hasmoneans, New York, Schocken. Blackson, R. (2007) “Once More … with Feeling: Reenactment in Contemporary Art and Culture”, Art Journal, vol. 66, no. 1, pp. 28–40. Blanton, D. and Cook, L. M. (2002) They Fought like Demons:Women Soldiers in the American Civil War, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press. Blight, D.W. (2001) Race and Reunion.The Civil War in American Memory, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press. Blumberg, I. (2007) Houses of Study:A Jewish Woman among Books, Lincoln, Nebraska, University of Nebraska Press. Blumenberg, H. (2000) “‘Imitation of Nature’: Toward a Prehistory of the Idea of the Idea of Creative Being”, Qui Parle, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 17–54. Bonnett, A. (2016) The Geography of Nostalgia: Global and Local Perspectives on Modernity and Loss, London, Routledge. Borggreen, G. and Gade, R. (eds.) (2013) Performance Archives/Archives of Performance, Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum Press. Boswell, J. (2014) [1768] “The Execution of Gibson and Payne”, The Public Advertiser, 26 April, in Facts and Inventions: Selections from the Journalism of James (ed. P. Tankard), Boswell, New Haven, Yale University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of A Theory of Practice (trans. Richard Nice), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Bowan, K. (2010) “R.G. Collingwood, Historical Reenactment and the Early Musical Revival”, in Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn (eds. I. McCalman and P. Pickering), Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Bowman, S. L. (2016) “Role-Playing and Simulation in Education”, International Journal of Role-Playing [special issue], Issue 7 [Online]. Available at http://ijrp.subcultures.nl/ (Accessed 15 August 2018). Boyarin, D. (1999) Dying for God. Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism, Stanford, Stanford University Press. Boyd, M. C. (2007) “Performance Simulacra: Reenactment as (Re)authoring”, Theory Now, 31 May [Online]. Available at http:​//www​.theo​rynow​.blog​spot.​com/2​007/0​5/per​forma​nce-s​imula​cra-r​eenac​ tment​-as.h​tml (Accessed 18 July 2018). Boym, S. (2001) The Future of Nostalgia, New York, Basic Books. Brædder A. (2016) Kroppen – et medium til fortid. Fortid som nærværende i 2. verdenskrigs-reenactment og levendegørelse på frilandsmuseer, unpublished PhD dissertation, Aarhus University. Brædder, A., Esmark, E., Kruse,T., Nielsen, C.T. and Warring, A. (2017) “Doing Pasts: Authenticity from the Reenactors’ Perspective”, Rethinking History, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 171–192. Brauer, J. and Lücke, M. (2013) “Emotionen, Geschichte und historisches Lernen. Einführende Überlegungen”, in Emotionen, Geschichte und historisches Lernen. Geschichtsdidaktische und geschichtskulturelle Perspektiven (eds. J. Brauer and M. Lücke), Göttingen,V&R unipress, pp. 11–26. Brecht, B. (1979) Poems: 1913–1956, London, Routledge. Breed, A. (2008) “Performing the Nation: Theatre in Post-Genocide Rwanda”, TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 32–50. Bressanin, A. (2012) “Fantasy Dressing up for Live-Action Roleplay Games”, BBC News Online, 3 May 2012 [Online]. Available at https​://ww​w.bbc​.com/​news/​av/ma​gazin​e-179​14502​/fant​asy-d​ressi​ng-up​ -for-​live-​actio​n-rol​eplay​-game​s (Accessed 2 September 2018). Brewer, J. (2010) “Reenactment and Neo-Realism”, in Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn (eds. I. McCalman and P. Pickering), Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 79–89. Bruner, E. (1994) “Abraham Lincoln as Authentic Reproduction: A Critique of Postmodernism” American Anthropologist, vol. 96, no. 2, pp. 397–415.

228

Bibliography Bruzzi, S. (2006) New Documentary, revised edition, London, Routledge. Bryan, J. (2016), “Harnessing the Power of Simulated and Illustrative Evidence Without an Expert”, McCathern, 29 August [Online]. Available at http:​//mcc​ather​nlaw.​com/h​arnes​sing-​the-p​ower-​of-si​ mulat​ed-an​d-ill​ustra​tive-​evide​nce-w​ithou​t-an-​exper​t/ (Accessed 15 August 2018). Brygzel, A. (2018) “Artistic Reenactments in East European Performance Art, 1960-Present” Art Margins, 26 January [Online]. Available at http:​//www​.artm​argin​s.com​/inde​x.php​/feat​ured-​artic​les-s​p-829​ 27383​1/812​-arti​stic-​reena​ctmen​ts-in​-east​-euro​pe-in​trodu​ction​ (Accessed 18 July 2018). Bull, R. (1774) Extra-illustrated Biographical History of England, from Egbert the Great to the Revolution, London, Huntington Library. Burke, E. (1958) A Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (J. T. Boulton), Oxford, Basil Blackwell (this edition 1987). Burstyn, S. (1997) “In Quest of the Period Ear”, Early Music, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 692–697, 699–701. Burton, J. (2006) “Repeat Performance”, Artforum International, 44–45, pp. 55–56. Buruma, I. (2015) “The Violent Mysteries of Indonesia”, New York Review of Books [Online], vol. 62, no. 16. Available at https​://ww​w.nyb​ooks.​com/a​rticl​es/20​15/10​/22/v​iolen​t-mys​terie​s-ind​onesi​a/ (Accessed 17 August 2018). Butler, J. (1988) “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory”, Theatre Journal, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 519–531. Butler, J. (1999 [1990]) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York, Routledge. Butler, J. (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York, Routledge. Butt, J. (2002) Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Caduff, C. and Pfaff-Czarnecka, J. (eds.) (1999) Rituale Heute, Berlin, Reimer. Caillois, R. (2001) Man, Play and Games, Champagne, Illinois, University of Illinois Press. Callahan, E. (1999) “What is Experimental Archaeology?”, Primitive Newsletter, vol. 1, pp. 3–5. Candlin, F. and Raiford, G. (2009) The Object Reader, New York, Routledge. Carlson, M. (1996) Performance: A Critical Introduction, London and New York, Routledge. Caronia, A. (2009) “Never Twice in the Same River: Representation, History, and Language in Contemporary Reenactment”, in (eds. A. Caronia, J. Janša and D. Quaranta) RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-porting, Brescia, Link Editions, pp. 5–16. Carson, C. (1998) “Colonial Williamsburg and the Practice of Interpretive Planning”, The Public Historian, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 11–52. Carstensen, J., Meiners, U. and Mohrmann, R. E. (eds.) (2008) Living History im Museum. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer Populären Vermittlungsform, Münster, Waxmann Verlag. Casey, M. (2012) Telling Stories: Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander Performance, Melbourne, Australian Scholarly Publishing. Cassin, B. (2016) Nostalgia:When Are We Ever at Home? (trans. P.-A. Brault), New York, Fordham University Press. Certeau De, M. (1984 [1980]) The Practice of Everyday Life (trans. S. Rendall), Berkeley, University of California Press. Certeau De, M. (1988) The Writing of History (trans. T. Conley), New York, Columbia University Press. Cesare,T. N. and Joy, J. (2006) “Performa/(Re)performa”, TDR:The Drama Review, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 170–177. Chambers, E. (1728) Cyclopaedia: or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, London, James and John Knapton, et al. Chapman, A. (2016) Digital Games as History: How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice, New York, Routledge. Chapman, A., Foka, A. and Westin, J. (2017) “Introduction: What Is Historical Game Studies?” Rethinking History, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 358–371. Charleton, W. (1670) Natural History of the Passions, London, James Magnes. Charteris, J., Jones, M., Nye, A. and Reyes,V. (2017) “A Heterotopology of the Academy: Mapping Alterior Assemblages as Possibilised Heterotopias”, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, vol. 30, no. 4, pp. 340–353. Cheetham, M., Pedroni, A. F., Antley, A., Slater, M. and Jäncke, L. (2009) “Virtual Milgram: Empathic Concern or Personal Distress? Evidence from Functional MRI and Dispositional Measures”, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, October 20 [Online]. Available at https​://do​i.org​/10.3​389/n​euro.​09.02​9.200​9 (Accessed 17 April 2019). Cheng, N. (2018) “‘Flesh and Blood Archives’: Embodying the Oral History”, Oral History Review, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 127–142.

229

Bibliography Chisum,W. (2000) “Evidence Dynamics: Locard’s Exchange Principle and Crime Reconstruction”, Journal of Behavioural Profiling, vol. 1, no. 1 [Online]. Available at http:​//www​.prof​i ling​.org/​journ​al/vo​l1_no​1/ jbp​_ed_j​anuar​y2000​_1-1.​html (Accessed 1 June 2019) Chisum, W. and Turvey, B. (2011) Crime Reconstruction, Amsterdam, Elsevier. Cieslak, M. (2016) “Virtual Reality to Aid Auschwitz War Trial of Concentration Camp Guards”, BBC News, 20 November [Online]. Available at https​://ww​w.bbc​.com/​news/​techn​ology​-3802​6007 (Accessed 16 April 2019). Clark, K. (1996) Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution, Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press. Cock, R. (2003) “Evidentiary Rules and Aids in the Presentation of Evidence”, (Paper presented to the Criminal Trial Reform Conference, 24–25 March 2000, Melbourne. Coetzee, J. M. (2003) Elizabeth Costello, London, Penguin. Cohen, E. and Cohen, S. A. (2012) “Authentication: Hot and Cool”, Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 1295–1314. Cole, D. (2016) “Virtual Reality Helps Net Last Auschwitz Criminals”, The Times of Israel, 2 October [Online]. Available at https​://ww​w.tim​esofi​srael​.com/​virtu​al-re​ality​-help​s-net​-last​-ausc​hwitz​-crim​ inals​/ (Accessed 16 April 2019). Coleman, K. M. (1993) “Launching into History: Aquatic Displays in the Early Empire”, Journal of Roman Studies, vol. 83, pp. 48–74. Coleman, S. and Elsner, J. (1995) Pilgrimage: Past and Present in the World Religions, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press. Coleridge, S.T. (1930) Shakespearian Criticism (ed.T. M. Raysor), 2 vols., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Coles, J. M. (1973) Archaeology by Experiment, London, Routledge. Coles, J. M. (1979 [1973]) Erlebte Steinzeit: Experimentelle Archäologie (trans. T. A. Knust and J. Knust), Munich, Bertelsmann. Collingwood, R. G. (1989 [1939]) An Autobiography, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Collingwood, R. G. (1993) The Idea of History: Revised Edition with Lectures 1926–1928, Oxford, Clarendon Press. Collingwood, R. G. (2005/1994 [1946]) The Idea of History (ed. W. J. van der Dussen), Oxford, Oxford University Press. Collingwood, R. G. (1999) The Principles of History: And Other Writings in Philosophical History (eds. W. H. Dray and W. J. van der Dussen), Oxford, Oxford University Press. Collins-Kreiner, N. (2010) “Researching Pilgrimage: Continuity and Transformations”, Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 440–456. 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, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 487–496. Cook, M. and van Riemsdijk, M. (2014) “Agents of memorialization: Gunter Demnig’s Stolpersteine and the individual (re-)creation of a Holocaust landscape in Berlin”, Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 43, pp. 138–147. Cottle, S. (2012) “Mediatized Disasters in the Global Age: On the Ritualization of Catastrophe”, in The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology, Oxford, Oxford University Press [Online]. Available at http:​ //www​.oxfo​rdhan​dbook​s.com​/view​/10.1​093/o​xford​hb/97​80195​37776​7.001​.0001​/oxfo​rdhb-​97801​ 95377​767-e​-10 (Accessed 3 April 2019). Coulthard, G. (2014) Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press. Crabtree, G. (2013) “Modding as Digital Reenactment: A Case Study of the Battlefield Series”, in Playing with the Past. Digital Games and the Simulation of History (eds. A. B. R. Elliott and M. W. Kapell), New York, Bloomsbury, pp. 199–212. Crenshaw, K. (1991) “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color”, Stanford Law Review, vol. 43, pp. 1241–1299. Crogan, P. (2011) Gameplay Mode.War, Simulation, and Technoculture, Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press. Crowell, S. (1999) “Spectral History: Narrative, Nostalgia, and the Time of the I”, Research in Phenomenology, vol. 29, pp. 83–104. Csapo, E. and Miller, M. (eds.) (2007) The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond: From Ritual to Drama, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

230

Bibliography Culler, J. (2000) Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Cummins, R. (1989) Meaning and Mental Representation, Cambridge and London, The MIT Press. Cunningham, P. (ed.) (2008) “Experiencing Archaeology by Experiment”, Proceedings of the Experimental Archaeology Conference, Oxford. Curtis, R. (2008) “Immersion und Einfühlung: Zwischen Repräsentationalität und Materialität bewegter Bilder”, montage AV, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 89–108. Cushman, S. (1999) Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle, Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia. Daugbjerg, M. (2014) “Patchworking the Past: Materiality, Touch and the Assembling of ‘Experience’ in American Civil War Re-enactment”, International Journal of Heritage Studies, vol. 20, nos.7–8, pp.724–741. Daugbjerg, M. (2016) “‘As Real as It Gets’: Vicarious Experience and the Power of Things in Historical Re-Enactment”, in Doing History: Performative Praktiken in der Geschichtskultur (eds. S. Willner, G. Koch and S. Samida), Münster, Waxmann, pp. 151–171. 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 (eds. B. Petersson and C. Holtorf), Oxford, Archaeopress, pp. 159–176. De Beauvoir, S. (1988 [1953]) The Second Sex, London, Picador. De Groot, J. (2009) Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture, London, Routledge. De Groot, J. (2011) “Affect and Empathy: Re-enactment and Performance as/in History”, Rethinking History, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 587–599. De Laet, T. (2010) “Wühlen in Archiven. Wie sich durch Strategien des Reenactments die Grenzen des Repertoires erweitern lassen”, tanz, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 54–59. Debord, G. (1967) La société du spectacle, Paris, Buchet/Chastel. Dehghani, S. (2011) Martyrium und Messianismus. Die Geburtsstunde des Bahá`ítums,Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz Verlag. Deller, J. (2000) in Dave Beech, “The Uses of Authority,” Untitled, vol. 25, p. 10. Deloria, P. J. (1999) Playing Indian, New Haven,Yale University Press. Dening, G. (1992) Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Dening, G. (2002) “Performing on the Beaches of the Mind: An Essay”, History and Theory, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 1–24. Dening, G. (2004) “Deep Time, Deep Spaces: Civilising the Sea”, in Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (eds. B. Klein and G. Mackenthun), London, Routledge, pp. 13–35. Denzin, N. K. (2016) Indians on Display: Global Commodification of Native America in Performance, London, Routledge. Derrida, J. (1977) “Signature Event Context”, in Limited Inc.(ed. Derrida J.), Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press. Derrida, J. (1996 [1995]) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (trans. E. Prenowitz), Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Descartes, R. (1901 [1641]) The Method, Meditations and Philosophy of Descartes (trans. J. Veitch), Red Oak, TX, Aladdin Book Company. DeSilvey, C. (2007) “Art and Archive: Memory-work on a Montana Homestead”, Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 33, pp. 878–900. Diamond, E. (1996) Performance and Cultural Politics, New York, Routledge. Dickens, C. (2002) Great Expectations, (eds. C. Mitchell and D. Trotter), London, Penguin. Dickinson, R. (2005) contribution to the Crumb mailing list, 8 December 2005 (archived I. Arns). Dolata, D. (2004) “Book Reviews: Works, Performance, Creativity: ‘History, Imagination and the Performance of Music,’ by Peter Walls”, Notes, vol. 61, no. 2, pp. 451–54. Donington, R. (1963) The Interpretation of Early Music, London, Faber and Faber. Douglas, M. (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo, London, Routledge. Dray, W. H. (1995) History as Re-Enactment: R.G. Collingwood’s Idea of History, Oxford, Clarendon Press. Dreschke, A. (2016) “Etwas Altes, etwas Neues, etwas Geliehenes: Zum Erfinden von Ritualen im historischen Reenactment”, in Doing History. Performative Praktiken in der Geschichtskultur (eds. S.Willner, G. Koch and S.Samida), Göttingen, Waxmann, pp. 173–192. Dreschke, A. (forthcoming) Kölner Stämme: Medienethnografie einer mimetischen Kultur.

231

Bibliography Dreyfus, H. (1996) “The Current Relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Embodiment”, The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy, vol. 4 [Online]. Available at http:​//eja​p.lou​isian​a.edu​/EJAP/1996. spri​ng/dr​eyfus​.1996​.spri​ng.ht​ml (Accessed 1 February 2018). Dubisch, J. (1995) In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press. Ducarel, A. C. (1762) Anglo-Norman Antiquities Considered in a Tour Through Part of Normandy, Held at: Los Angeles, UCLA Library, PR4092.A1 D85. Dulak, M. (1995) “Early Music Circles Its Wagons Again,” The New York Times, 11 June, p. 40. van Dülmen, R. (1991 [1987]) Theatre of Horror: Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Germany, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Basil Blackwell. Durant, D. N. (2011) The Smythson Circle, London and Chicago, Peter Owen. Dwyer, M. (2015) Back to the Fifties: Nostalgia, Hollywood Film, and Popular Music of the Seventies and Eighties, New York, Oxford University Press. Eade, J. and Katić, M. (eds.) (2018) Military Pilgrimage and Battlefield Tourism: Commemorating the Dead, London, Routledge. Eade, J. and Sallnow, M. J. (eds.) (1991) Contesting the Sacred:The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage, London, Routledge. Eagleton, T. (1999) Literary Theory: An Introduction, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers. Eco, U. (1984) Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press. Edelman, L. (2004) No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Durham, NC, Duke University Press. Edidin,A. (1998) “Playing Bach His Way: Historical Authenticity, Personal Authenticity, and the Performance of Classical Music”, Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 79–91. Edmonds, P. (2016) Settler Colonialism and (Re)conciliation: Frontier Violence, Affective Performances, and Imaginative Refoundings, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Edmonds, P. (2017) “Heart, Power, Treaty, Truth: Affective, Political Performances in (post) Reconciliation Australia”, The Trevor Reese Memorial Lecture 2017. Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King’s College London [Online]. Available at https​://ww​w.kcl​.ac.u​k/art​shums​/ahri​/cent​res/m​enzie​s/Pub​ licat​ions/​trlec​t.asp​x (Accessed 15 August 2018). Eggert, M. K. H. and Samida, S. (2009) Ur- und Frühgeschichtliche Archäologie, Tübingen, Francke. Ehrmann, J., Lewis, C. and Lewis, P. (1968) “Homo Ludens Revisited”, Yale French Studies, vol. 41, pp. 31–57. Eliade, M. (1987) The Sacred and The Profane:The Nature of Religion, New York, Harcourt Brace. Erisman, W. E. (1998) Forward into the Past: The Poetics and Politics of Community in Two Historical Re-creation Groups, PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin. Erll, A. (2008) Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, Berlin, de Gruyter. Erll, A. (2017) Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen: Eine Einführung, Stuttgart, J.B. Metzler. Eskelinen, M. (2004) “Towards Computer Game Studies”, in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (eds. N.Wardrip-Fruin, P. Harrigan, and M. Crumpton), Cambridge, Massachusetts,The MIT Press, pp. 36–44. Esmark K. and Nielsen C. T. (2015) “Autenticitet i praksis – fortidsbrug i feltet for middelalderreenactment”, in Fortider tur/retur. Reenactment og historiebrug (eds. A. Warring and T. Kruse), Frederiksberg, Samfundslitteratur, pp. 15–42. Esposito, J. L. (ed.) (2004) The Islamic World: Past and Present, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Evreinov, N. (1920) “Teatroterapiya” (“Театротерапия”), Zhizn iskusstva (Жизнь искусства), 9–10 October, no. 578–579. EXAR: European Association for the advancement of Archaeology by experiment e. V. Experimentelle Archäologie in Europa, Jahrbuch (seit 1990) [Online]. Available at http://www.exar.org/publications (Accessed 25 June 2018). Fairclough, G., Harrison, R., Jameson, J. H., Jr. and Schofield, J. (eds.) (2008) The Heritage Reader, London, Routledge. Fanning, C. (2005) “The Scriblerian Sublime”, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 647–67. Fansa, M. (1990) Experimentelle Archäologie in Deutschland. Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Nordwestdeutschland, Beiheft 4, Oldenburg, Isensee. Farmer J. O. (2005) “Playing Rebels: Reenactment as Nostalgia and Defense of the Confederacy in the Battle of Aiken”, Southern Cultures, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 46–73.

232

Bibliography Fauconnier, G. and Turner, M. (2002) The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities, New York, Basic Books. Fedele, A. (2013) Looking for Mary Magdalene: Alternative Pilgrimage and Ritual Creativity at Catholic Shrines in France, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Feldman, J. (2016) A Jewish Guide in the Holy Land: How Christian Pilgrims Made Me Israeli, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Fillitz, T. and Saris, A. J. (2013) Debating Authenticity: Concepts of Modernity in Anthropological Perspective, New York, Berghahn Books. Fink, E. (1968) “The Oasis of Happiness: Toward an Ontology of Play”, Yale French Studies, vol. 41, pp. 19–30. Firaxis Games (2016) Sid Meier’s Civilization VI [Online]. Available at https​://st​ore.s​teamp​owere​d.com​/ app/​28907​0/Sid​_Meie​rs_Ci​viliz​ation​_VI/ (Accessed 30 October 2018). Fitzgerald, P. (2014 [1982]) At Freddie’s, Boston and New York, Mariner Books. Flanagan, M. (2009) Critical Play: Radical Game Design, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press. Flores, J. R. and Paardekooper, R. (2014) Experiments Past: Histories of Experimental Archaeology, Leiden, Sidestone Press. Forensic Architecture (ed.) (2014) Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, Berlin and London, Sternberg Press and Forensic Architecture. Forster, E. M. (1962) Aspects of the Novel, London, Penguin Pelican. Foucault, M. (1977) “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (ed. D. F. Bouchard), Ithaca, Cornell University Press, pp. 139–164. Foucault, M. (1988 [1984]) The Care of the Self, New York, Random House. Foucault, M. (1999 [1983]) Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia, Berkeley, University of California Press. Foucault, M. (2002 [1966]) The Order of Things, London, Routledge. Franko, M. (1989) “Repeatability, Reconstruction and Beyond”, Theatre Journal, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 56–71. Franko, M. (ed.) (2017) The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenaactment [online]. Available at 10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780199314201.013.1 (Accessed 1 October 2018). Franko, M. (ed.) (2018) The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Frasca, G. (2003) “Simulation Versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology”, in The Video Game Theory Reader (eds. M. J. P. Wolf and B. Perron), London, Routledge, pp. 221–235. Freeman, E. (2010) Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Durham, Duke University Press. Freid, D. (2019) Nazi VR [Online]. Available at https://davidfreid.com/portfolio/nazi-vr (Accessed 17 April 2019). Freud, S. (1914) “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis II)”, in The Complete Works Volume 12 (ed. J. Strachey), London,Vintage Books (this edition 2001). Freud, S. (2003 [1920]) Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings, London, Penguin Books (this edition 2003). Frevert, U. (2016) “The History of Emotion”, in Handbook of Emotions (eds. L. Feldman Barrett, M. Lewis and J. M. Haviland-Jones), New York, Guilford Press, pp. 49–65. Frey, N. (1998) Pilgrim Stories: On and Off the Road to Santiago, Berkeley, University of California Press. Frissen,V., Lammes, S., De Lange, M., et al. (2015) “Homo Ludens 2.0: Play, Media, and Identity”, in Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures (eds. V. Frissen, S. Lammes, De Lange, M., et al.), Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, pp. 9–50. Frow, J. (1991) “Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia”, October, vol. 57, pp. 123–151. Funkenstein, A. (1993) Perceptions of Jewish History, Berkeley, University of California Press. Gadamer, H.-G. (1986) The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Gadamer, H.-G. (2013) Truth and Method, London, Bloomsbury Academic. Gaines, J. M. (1999) “Introduction: ‘The Real Returns’”, in Collecting Visible Evidence (eds. J. M. Gaines and M. Renov), London and Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1–18. Gallagher, C. (2006) “The Rise of Fictionality”, in The Novel (ed. F. Moretti), 2 vols., Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, pp. 336–363. Gallagher, C. and Greenblatt, S. (2000) Practicing New Historicism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Galloway, A. R. (2006) Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, Minneapolis, Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press.

233

Bibliography Gallup, A. (1999) “The State of Living History Interpretation in the Former North American Colonies of Great Britain”, Journal of the Institute of Historical Interpretation, vol. 1, pp. 7–10. Games for Change (2018) What We Do [Online]. Available at: http:​//www​.game​sforc​hange​.org/​what-​ we-do​/ (Accessed 6 November 2018). Gapps, S. (2002) Performing the Past: A Cultural History of Historical Reenactments, PhD Thesis, University of Technology, Sydney [Online]. Available at https​://op​us.li​b.uts​.edu.​au/bi​tstre​am/10​453/2​0121/​2/02w​ hole.​pdf (Accessed 15 August 2018). Gapps, S. (2009) “Mobile Monuments: A View of Historical Reenactment and Authenticity from Inside the Costume Cupboard of History”, Rethinking History, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 395–409. Gapps, S. (2010) “On Being a Mobile Monument: Historical Reenactments and Commemorations”, in Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn (eds. I. McCalman and P. Pickering), Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 50–62. Gapps, S. (2018) “Museums of the Living Dead: Performance, Body and Memory at Living History Museums”, Journal of Curatorial Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 248–270. Gaskin,V. (2003) “Subjects in Search of an Author”, in The Milgram Reenactment. Essays on Rod Dickinson’s Re-enactment of Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority Experiment (ed. S. Rushton), Frankfurt am Main, Revolver, pp. 6–16. Geertz, C. (1973) “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight”, in The Interpretation of Cultures (ed. C. Geertz), New York, Basic Books, pp. 412–453. Geimer, P. (2015) “Die Farben der Geschichte und die ‘Wahrheit des Schwarz-Weiß’”, in Schwarz/Weiß als Evidenz: ‘With Black and White You Can Keep More of a Distance’ (eds. M. Wagner and H. Lethen), Frankfurt am Main, Campus, pp. 246–251. von Geldern, J. (1998) “Putting the Masses in Mass Culture: Bolshevik Festivals, 1918–1920”, Popular Culture, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 133–44. von Gennep, A. (1909) Les rites de passage, Paris, E. Nourry. Ghys, T. (2012) “Technology Trees: Freedom and Determinism in Historical Strategy Games”, Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research, vol. 12, no. 1 [Online]. Available at: http:​// gam​estud​ies.o​rg/12​01/ar​ticle​s/tuu​r_ghy​s (Accessed 30 October 2018). Gianacchi, G. and Westerman, J. (eds.) (2018) Histories of Performance Documentation: Museum, Artistic, and Scholarly Practices, New York, Routledge. Gilbert, H. (2013) “Indigeneity and Performance”, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 173–180. Gilbert, L. (2017) “‘The Past is Your Playground’: The Challenges and Possibilities of Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate for Social Education”, Theory & Research in Social Education, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 145–155. Gilligan, M. (2007) “The Beggar’s Pantomime: on Performance and Its Appropriations”, Artforum International, vol. 45, no. 10, pp. 426–433. Girard, R. (1986 [1982]) The Scapegoat, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press. Glassberg, D. (1990) American Historical Pageantry, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina. Go,Y. (2015) “An Overview of Cosplay: Exploring the Subculture”, The Artifice [Online]. Available at https​ ://th​e-art​ifice​.com/​cospl​ay-ov​ervie​w/ (Accessed 3 September 2018). Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Garden City, New York, Doubleday. Goffman, E. (1974) Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press. Golin, S. (2005) “The IWW and Bohemians: The Case of the Paterson Pageant”, Working USA, vol. 8, no. 5, pp. 565–572. Gonen, R. (2003) Contested Holiness: Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Perspectives on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Jersey City, New Jersey, KTAV Publishing House. Goodman, K. (2010) “‛Uncertain Disease’: Nostalgia, Pathologies of Motion, Practices of Reading”, Studies in Romanticism, vol. 49, no. 2, pp. 197–227. Goodman, N. (1988) Ways of Worldmaking, Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing. Greenia, G. (2014) “Pilgrimage and the American Myth”, in Redefining Pilgrimage: New Perspectives on Historical and Contemporary (ed. A. M. Pazos), Farnham, UK, and Burlington,Vermont, Ashgate, pp. 47–70. Greenwood, S. (2000) Magic,Witchcraft and the Otherworld: An Anthropology, Oxford, Berg. Griffiths,A. (2003) “‘Shivers DownYour Spine’: Panoramas and the Origins of the Cinematic Reenactment”, Screen, vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 1–37. Groome, D. (1999) An Introduction to Cognitive Psychology: Processes and Disorders, New York, Routledge. Guest, A. H. (2008) Your Move: A New Approach to the Study of Movement and Dance, 2nd edition, New York, Routledge.

234

Bibliography Gumbrecht, H. U. (2004) Production of Presence:What Meaning Cannot Convey, Stanford, Stanford University Press. Hacking, I. (2002) Historical Ontology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press. Hahn, H.-P. (ed.) (2015) Vom Eigensinn der Dinge: Für eine neue Perspektive auf die Welt des Materiellen, Berlin, Neofelis. Haines, E. (2019) “Visions from Behind a Desk? Archival Performance and the Re-enactment of Colonial Bureaucracy”, Area, vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 25–34. Halberstam, J. (2005) In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York, New York University Press. Halbwachs, M. (1992 [1925]) On Collective Memory, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Hall, G. (2016) “Selective Authenticity: Civil War Reenactors and Credible Reenactments”, Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 29, no. 3, pp. 413–435. Hall, S. (1997a) “Introduction”, in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (ed. S. Hall), London, Open University Press, pp. 1–12. Hall, S. (ed.) (1997b) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, London, Open University Press. Hammer, D. (2010) “Roman Spectacle Entertainments and the Technology of Reality”, Arethusa, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 63–86. Handelman, D. and Lindquist, G. (eds.) (2005) Ritual in Its Own Right: Exploring Dynamics of Transformation, New York, Berghahn Books. Handler, R. (1986) “Authenticity”, Anthropology Today, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 2–4. Handler, R. (1987) “Overpowered by Realism: Living History and the Simulation of the Past”, Journal of American Folklore, vol. 100, pp. 337–341. Handler, R. and Gable, E. (1997) The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg, Durham, Duke University Press. Handler, R. and Saxton, W. (1988) “Reflexivity, Narrative, and the Quest for Authenticity in ‘Living History’”, Cultural Anthropology, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 242–260. Hanegraaff, W. (2013) Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed, London, Bloomsbury. Hansen, H. O. (2014) “Experience and Experiment”, in Experiments Past: Histories of Experimental Archaeology (eds. J. R. Flores and R. Paardekooper), Leiden, Sidestone Press, pp. 167–181. Haraway, D. (2015) “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin”, Environmental Humanities, vol. 6, pp. 159–165. von Harnack, A. (1981 [1905]) Militia Christi. The Christian Religion and the Military in the First Three Centuries, Philadelphia, Fortress Press. Harris, A., Holman Jones, S., Faulkner, S. and Brook, E. (2017) Queering Families, Schooling Publics: Keywords, New York, Routledge. Harrison, R. (2013) Heritage: Critical Approaches, London, Routledge. Hart, L. (2007) “Authentic Recreation: Living History and Leisure”, Museum and Society, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 103–124. Harvey, D. C. (2001) “Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents: Temporality, Meaning and the Scope of Heritage Studies”, International Journal of Heritage Studies, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 319–338. Haynes, B. (2007) The End of Early Music: A Period Performer’s History of Music for the Twenty-First Century, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Heinen, S., Sommer, R. (eds.) (2009) Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Hell, J. (2008) “Ruins Travel: Orphic Journeys through 1940s Germany”, in Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey (ed. J. Zilcosky), Toronto, University of Toronto Press, pp. 123–160. Heller, C. and Pezzani, L. (2018) Forensic Oceanography Mare Clausum. Italy and the EU’s Undeclared Operation to Stem Migration across the Mediterranean [Online]. Available at http:​//www​.fore​nsic-​archi​tectu​re.or​g/ wp-​conte​nt/up​loads​/2018​/05/2​018-0​5-07-​FO-Ma​re-Cl​ausum​-full​-EN.p​df (Accessed 01 April 2019). Hendricks, S. Q., Williams, J. P. and Winkler, W. K. (eds.) (2006) Gaming as Culture: Essays on Reality, Identity and Experience in Fantasy Games, Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland. Hennes, D. B. (1993) “Manufacturing Evidence for Trial:The Prejudicial Implications of Videotaped Crime Scene Re-enactments”, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, vol. 142, pp. 2125–2181. van Henten, J.W. and Avemarie, F. (2002) Martyrdom and Noble Death. Selected Texts from Graeco-Roman, Jewish and Christian Antiquity, London and New York, Routledge. Herd, D. and Pincus, A. (eds.) (2016) Refugee Tales, Manchester, Comma Press. Herman, D. et al. (eds.) (2005) Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London and New York, Routledge.

235

Bibliography Herman, D. (ed.) (2007) The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press. Herman, J. L. (1992) Trauma and Recovery, New York, Basic Books. Hicks, D. and Beaudry M. C. (eds.) (2010) The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Hinz, M. (2011) “Reenactment”, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung [Online]. Available at http:​//www​ .bpb.​de/ge​sells​chaft​/kult​ur/ku​lture​lle-b​ildun​g/602​59/re​enact​ment?​p=all​ (Accessed 4 December 2017). Hirsch, M. (2012) The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, New York, Columbia University Press. Hobbes, T. (1996/2011 [1651]) Leviathan (ed. R. Tuck), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, E. J. and Ranger,T. O. (eds.) (1983) The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Hochbruck, W. (1993) “500 Jahre Amerika: Reden und Proklamationen zum Columbus Day”, in Die Rhetorik amerikanischer Präsidenten seit F.D. Roosevelt (ed. P. Goetsch), Tübingen, Narr, pp. 353–362. Hochbruck, W. (2009) “Belebte Geschichte: Delimitationen der Anschaulichkeit im Geschichtstheater”, in History Goes Pop: Zur Repräsentation von Geschichte in populären Medien und Genres (eds. B. Korte and S. Paletschek), Berlin, De Gruyter, pp. 215–230. Hofer, J. (1688) Dissertatio Medica de Nostalgia, oder Heimwehe, University of  Basel, Typis Iacobi Bertschii. Hoffman, A. G. (2009) “Archival Bodies”, American Imago, vol. 66, no. 1, pp. 5–40. Hoffmann, A. and Cole, P. (2016) Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, New York, Schocken Books. Hohenhaus, P. (2013) “Commemorating and Commodifying the Rwandan Genocide: Memorial Sites in a Politically Difficult Context”, in Dark Tourism and Place Identity: Managing and Interpreting Dark Places (eds. L. White and E. Frew), London, Routledge, pp. 142–155. Hohenhaus, P. (2019) Dark Tourism [Online]. Available at http://www.dark-tourism.com (Accessed 5 April 2019). Hoiberg, D. and Ramchandani, I. (eds.) (2000) Students’ Britannica India, New Delhi, Encyclopædia Britannica. Hoika, J. (1999) “Archäologie, Vorgeschichte, Urgeschichte, Frühgeschichte, Geschichte”, Archäologische Informationen, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 51–86. Holtorf, C. (2010) “On the Possibility of Time Travel”, Lund Archaeological Review, vols. 15/16, pp. 31–41. Holtorf, C. (2013) “On Pastness: A Reconsideration of Materiality in Archaeological Object Authenticity”, Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 86, no. 2, pp. 427–444. Homer (1956), The Odyssey (trans. G. Chapman), Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press. Horn, G. and Arns, I. (2007) History Will Repeat Itself: Strategies of Re-Enactment in Contemporary Art, Frankfurt am Main, Revolver. Hörning, K. H. (2015) “Was fremde Dinge tun: Sozialtheoretische Herausforderung”, in Vom Eigensinn der Dinge: Für eine neue Perspektive auf die Welt des Materiellen (ed. H.-P. Hahn), Berlin, Neofelis, pp. 163–176. Horsch, S. and Treml, M. (eds.) (2011) Grenzgänger der Religionskulturen. Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zu Gegenwart und Geschichte der Märtyrer, Munich, Fink. Horwitz,T. (1999 [1998]) Confederates in the Attic. Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, New York, Vintage. Hosseini Hamedani, S. M. H. (1983) Anwār e Derakhshan, vol. 18, Tehran, Ketabforushi-e Lotfi. Hughes, C. (2011) “Mirror Neurons and Simulation: The Role of the Spectator in Museum Theatre”, in Performing Heritage: Research, Practice and Innovation in Museum Theatre and Live Interpretation (eds. A. Jackson and J. Kidd), Manchester, Manchester University Press. Hughes-Warrington, M. (2003) How Good an Historian Shall I Be? Exeter, Imprint Academic. Hühn, P., Pier, J., Schmid, W. and Schönert, J. (eds.) (2009) Handbook of Narratology, Berlin and New York, De Gruyter. Huizinga, J. (1949) Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. Humphrey, C. and Laidlaw, J. (1994) The Archetypical Actions of Ritual: A Theory of Ritual Illustrated by the Jain Rite of Worship, Oxford, Clarendon Press. Hunt, S. J. (2004) “Acting the Part: ‘Living History’ as a Serious Leisure Pursuit”, Leisure Studies, vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 387–403. Hurley, E. (ed.) (2014) Theatres of Affect: New Essays on Canadian Theatre, vol. 4, Playwrights Canada Press. Hurley, E. and Warner, S. (2012) “Affect/Performance/Politics”, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 99–107.

236

Bibliography Hutcheon, L. and Valdés, M. (1991) “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern: A Dialogue”, Poligrafias. Revista de Literatura Comparada, vol. 3, pp. 18–41. Hutchings, T. and Giardino, J. (2016) “Foucault’s Heterotopias as Play Spaces”, International Journal of RolePlaying, vol. 7, pp. 10–14 [Online]. Available at http://ijrp.subcultures.nl/ (Accessed 25 June 2018). Huyssen, A. (2003) Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Stanford, Stanford University Press. Hyde, K. F. and Harman, S. (2011) “Motives for a Secular Pilgrimage to the Gallipoli Battlefields”, Tourism Management, vol. 32, no. 6, pp. 1343–1351. Ianetta, M. (2005) “‘To Elevate I Must First Soften’: Rhetoric, Aesthetic, and the Sublime Traditions”, College English, vol. 67, no. 4, pp. 400–420. Ibn Ishaq, M. (1955) Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah – The Life of Muhammad (trans. A. Guillaume), Oxford, Oxford University Press. Iles, J. (2006) “Recalling the Ghosts of War: Performing Tourism on the Battlefields of the Western Front”, Text and Performance Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 162–180. Ingold, T. (2011 [2000]) The Perception of the Environment, London, Routledge. Jackson, A. and Kidd, J. (2011) Performing Heritage: Research, Practice and Innovation in Museum Theatre and Live Interpretation, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press. Jenkins, H. (2004) “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”, in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (eds. N.Wardrip-Fruin, P. Harrigan and M. Crumpton), Cambridge, Massachusetts,The MIT Press, pp. 118–130. Jensen, B. E. (1995) “Folk og fag”, Den Jyske Historiker [special issue], pp. 7–18. Jensen, B. E. (2000) “Historie som erindring – på sporet af menigmands historiebrug”, in At bruge historie i en sen-/postmoderne tid (ed. B. E. Jensen), Frederiksberg, Samfundslitteratur, pp. 197–226. Johnson, M. (2011) “Reconciliation, Indigeneity and Postcolonial Nationhood in Settler States”, Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 187–201. Johnson, K. (2014) “Performing Pasts for Present Purposes: Reenactment as Embodied, Performed History”, in History, Memory, Performance (eds. D. Dean,Y. Meerzon and K. Prince), Hampshire and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 36–52. Johnson, K. (2015) “Rethinking (Re)doing: Historical Re-enactment and/as Historiography”, Rethinking History, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 193–206. Johnson, K. (2016) Re-enactment’s (Em)bodying of History, PhD Dissertation, University of Sydney. Jones, A. (2011) “The Artist Is Present: Artistic Reenactments and the Impossibility of Presence”, TDR:The Drama Review, vol. 55, no. 1, pp. 16–45. Jones, G. (2014). “‘Little Families’: The Social Fabric of Civil War Reenacting”, in Staging the Past: Themed Environments in Transcultural Perspective (eds. J. Schlehe, M. Uike-Bormann, C. Oesterle and W. Hochbruck), Bielefeld, Transcript, pp. 219–234. Jones, A. and Healthfield, A. (eds.) (2012) Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, Chicago, Intellect. Jordan, B. M. (2011) “‘We Stand on the Same Battlefield’: The Gettysburg Centenary and the Shadow of Race”, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. CXXXV, no. 4, pp. 481–511. Juslin, P. N. and Sloboda, J. (eds.) (2011) Handbook of Music and Emotion:Theory. Research, Applications, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Juul, J. (2001) “Games Studies 0101: Games Telling Stories?” Game Studies, vol. 1, no. 1 [Online]. Available at http:​//www​.game​studi​es.or​g/010​1/juu​l-gts​/ (Accessed 20 March 2018). Kaeser, M. A. (2008) Visions d’une civilisation engloutie: La représentation des villages lacustres, de 1854 à nos jours / Ansichten einer versunkenen Welt: Die Darstellung der Pfahlbaudörfer seit 1854, Hauterive, Laténium. Kahana, J. (2009) “Introduction: What Now? Presenting Reenactment”, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, vol. 50, no. 1 and 2, Spring and Fall, pp. 46–60. Kahn,V. (2004) Wayward Contracts, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press. Kalshoven, P. T. (2010) “Things in the Making”, Etnofoor, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 59–74. Kalshoven, P. T. (2012) Crafting “the Indian”: Knowledge, Desire, and Play in Indianist Reenactment, New York, Berghahn Books. 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, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 561–578. Kames, H. H. (2005 [1762]) Elements of Criticism (ed. P. Jones), 2 vols., Indianapolis, Liberty Fund.

237

Bibliography Kandler, M. (2000) “Guido List, Adolf Hitler und Carnuntum”, Altmodische Archäologie, Festschrift für Friedrich Brein, Forum Archaeologiae, vol. 14, no. III, pp. 103–111. Kansteiner, W. (2002) “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies”, History and Theory, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 179–197. Kant, I. (1952) The Critique of Judgment (trans. J. C. Meredith), Oxford, The Clarendon Press. Kant, I. (1991) “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History” (trans. H. B. Nisbet), in Kant: Political Writings (ed. H. Reiss), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Kantorowicz, E. (1965 [1961]) “Gods in Uniform”, in Selected Studies (ed. E. Kantorowicz), Locust Valley, NY, Augustin, pp. 7–24. Kean, H. and Martin, P. (eds.) (2013) The Public History Reader, London, Routledge. Kelly,V. (2009) “Ghosts of the Past: Breaker Morant and Re-enactment”, History Australia, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 08.1–08.14. Kelterborn, P. (1991) “Die wissenschaftlichen Experimente in der experimentellen Archäologie”, Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte, vol. 1, pp. 21–24. Kelterborn, P. (1994) “Was ist ein wissenschaftliches Experiment?”, Anzeiger der Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Experimentelle Archäologie der Schweiz AEAS, vol. 1, pp. 7–9. Kendal, N. (1934 [1906]) Criminal Investigations: A Practical Textbook for Magistrates, Police Officers and Lawyers, London, Sweet and Maxwell. Kennedy, R. (2005) “Self-Mutilation is the Sincerest form of Flattery”, The New York Times, 6 November. [Online] Available at http:​//www​.nyti​mes.c​om/20​05/11​/06/a​rts/d​esign​/06ke​nn.ht​ml (Accessed 15 August 2019). Kenyon, N. (ed.) (1988) Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Keogh, B. (2018) A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press. Kerman, J., Dreyfus, L., Kosman, J., Rockwell, J., Taruskin, R. and McGegan, N. (1992) “The Early Music Debate: Ancient, Moderns, Postmoderns”, Journal of Musicology, vol. 10, pp. 113–130. Kerr, A. (2006) The Business and Culture of Digital Games: Gamework/Gameplay, London, SAGE. Kerr, A. (2017) Global Games: Production, Circulation and Policy in the Networked Era, New York, Routledge. Kindt, T. and Müller, H. (eds.) (2003) What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, Berlin and New York, De Gruyter. King, G. R. D. (2004) “Muqarnas: The Paintings of the Pre-Islamic Kaʿba”, in Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World, vol. 21, pp. 219–229. Kirby, M. (1984) “Reconstruction: An Introduction”, The Drama Review:TDR, vol. 28, no. 3, p. 2. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (1990) “Objects of Ethnography”, in Exhibiting Cultures (eds. I. Karp and S. D. Lavine), Washington, DC, Smithsonian Press, pp. 386–443. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (1998) Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage, Berkeley, University of California Press. Kittler, F. (1999 [1986]) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (trans. G. Winthrop-Young and M. Wutz), Stanford, Stanford University Press. Kivy, P. (1995) Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance, Ithaca, Cornell University Press. Knighton, T. (1996) “Editorial”, Early Music, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 548–549. Kobialka, D. (2013) “The Mask(s) and Transformers of Historical Re-Enactment: Material Culture and Contemporary Vikings”, Current Swedish Archaeology, vol. 21, pp. 141–161. Koch, G. (2003) “Nachstellungen – Film und historischer Moment”, in Die Gegenwart der Vergangenheit. Dokumentarfilm, Fernsehen und Geschichte (eds. E. Hohenberger and J. Keilbach), Berlin, Vorwerk 8, pp. 216–229. Kocurek, C. A. (2015) Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Koch, G. (2010) Mimesis und ihre Künste, Paderborn, Wilhelm Fink. Koepping, K. P. (ed.) (1997) The Games of Gods and Man: Essays on Play and Performance, Hamburg, Lit. van der Kolk, B. A. (2015) The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, New York, Penguin Books. van der Kolk, B. A. and van der Hart, O. (1991) “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma”, American Imago, vol. 48, pp. 425–454. Konuk, K. (2004) “Ethnomasquerade in Ottoman-European Encounters: Reenacting Lady Mary Wortley Montagu”, Criticism, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 393–414. Konuk, K. (2010) East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey, Stanford, Stanford University Press. Konuk, K. (2011) “Istanbul on Fire: End-of-Empire Melancholy in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul”, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture,Theory, vol. 86, no. 4, pp. 249–261.

238

Bibliography Kopytoff, I. (1986) “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process”, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (ed. Arjun Appadurai), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 64–91. Kors, M. J. L., Ferri, G., van der Spek, E. D., et al. (2016) “A Breathtaking Journey: On the Design of an Empathy-Arousing Mixed-Reality Game”, in Proceedings of the 2016 Annual Symposium on ComputerHuman Interaction in Play - CHI PLAY ’16 (ed. A. Cox), New York, ACM Press, pp. 91–104. Koselleck, R. (1989) Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp. Kracauer, S. (1969) History – The Last Things Before The Last, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Kramer, F. (1993 [1987]) The Red Fez: Art and Spirit Possession in Africa, London,Verso Books. Kramer, F. (2005) Schriften zur Ethnologie, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp. Kramnick, J. (2015) “An Aesthetics and Ecology of Presence”, European Romantic Review, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 315–327. Krasner, D. (2002) A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre Drama and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance: 1910–1927, New York, Palgrave Macmillan. Kruschkova, K. (2010) “Tanzgeschichte(n): wieder und wider. Re-enactment, Referenz, reverence”, in Original und Revival. Geschichts-Schreibung im Tanz (eds. C. Thurner and J. Wehren), Zurich, Chronos, pp. 39–46. Kurtz, G. (2014) Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film, New York, FSG. Laack, I. (2011) “Rekusivität, Invention und Ritualdesign in den Sacred Dramas der Goddess of People of Avaln (England)”, Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft, vol. 19, nos. 1–2, pp. 212–242. Lamb, J. (2009), “Introduction”, in Settler and Creole Reenactment (eds. V. Agnew and J. Lamb), London, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–17. Lamb, J. (2011) The Things Things Say, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press. Lamb, J. (2012) “The Sublime”, in, The Cambridge History of Criticism: The Eighteenth Century (eds. H. B. Nisbet and C. Rawson), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Lamb, J. (2016) Scurvy:The Disease of Discovery, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press. Lambek, M. (2016) A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion, Oxford, Blackwell. Lammers-Keijsers,Y. (2005) “Scientific Experiments: A Possibility? Presenting A General Cyclical Script for Experiments in Archaeology”, Eurea, vol. 2, pp. 18–24. Landsberg, A. (2004) Prosthetic Memory:The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, New York, Columbia University Press. Langer, R. and Snoek, J. A. M. (2013) “Ritualtransfer”, in Ritual und Ritualdynamik (eds. C. Brosius, A. Michaels and P. Schrode), Göttingen,Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, pp. 188–196. Lash, S. (2006) “Experience”, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 23, nos. 2–3, pp. 335–341. Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern (trans. C. Porter), Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1996) “On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications”, Soziale Welt, vol. 47, no. 4, pp. 369–381. Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, New York, Oxford University Press. Lawrance, B., Osborn, E. and Roberts, R. (2006) Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press. Lawson, A. L. (1995) “The Other Half”: Making African-American History at Colonial Williamsburg, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Virginia. Lawson, C. (1999) The Historical Performance of Music: An Introduction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Lee Hadden, R. (ed.) (1999) Reliving the Civil War: A Reenactor’s Handbook, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, Stackpole Books. Lee, S. C. (2013) “The Dilemma of First Person Interpretation”, History: Preserved [Online]. Available at http:​//www​.hist​ory-p​reser​ved.c​om/20​13/04​/pros​-cons​-of-f​i rst-​perso​n-int​erpre​tatio​n.htm​l (Accessed 20 August 2018). Leech-Wilkinson, D., Taruskin, R., Temperley, N. and Winter, R. (1984) “The Limits of Authenticity: A Discussion”, Early Music, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 3–25. Lelo, L. and Jamal, T. (2016) “African Americans at Sites of Darkness”, Dark Tourism and Place Identity: Managing and Interpreting Dark Places (Contemporary Geographies of Leisure,Tourism and Mobility, vol. 37), London, Routledge, pp. 28–45. Lemley, M.A. and Volokh, E. (2018) “Law,Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality”, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, vol. 166, no. 5, pp. 1051–1138.

239

Bibliography Lennon, J. J. and Foley, M. (1996) “JFK and Dark Tourism: A Fascination with Assassination”, International Journal of Heritage Studies, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 198–211. Lennon, J. J. and Foley, M. (2000) Dark Tourism:The Attraction of Death and Disaster, London, Continuum. Lepecki, A. (2010) “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dance”, Dance Research Journal, vol. 42, pp. 28–48. Lessing, G. E. (1987) [1766] Laokoön, oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie, Stuttgart, Reclam. Levine, P. (1992) The Body as Healer:Transforming Trauma and Anxiety, Boulder, Colorado, Sounds True. Lewis, J. L. (2014) The Anthropology of Cultural Performance, Hampshire and New York, Palgrave Macmillan. Light, D. (2017) “Progress in Dark Tourism and Thanatourism Research: An Uneasy Relationship with Heritage Tourism”, Tourism Management, vol. 61, pp. 275–301. Linderoth, J. and Bennerstedt, U. (2007) “This is Not a Door: An Ecological Approach to Computer Games”, Situated Play, Proceedings of DiGRA 2007 Conference, Tokyo, 2007. Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) [Online]. Available at: http:​//www​.digr​a.org​/wp-c​onten​t/upl​oads/​digit​al-li​ brary​/0731​2.510​11.pd​f (Accessed 28 September 2018). Lindquist, G. (1997) Shamanic Performances on the Urban Scene: Neo-Shamanism in Contemporary Sweden, Stockholm, Socialantropologiska Institutionen. Lofgren, E.T. and Fefferman, N. H. (2007) “The Untapped Potential of Virtual Game Worlds to Shed Light on Real World Epidemics”, The Lancet Infectious Diseases, vol. 7, no. 9, pp. 625–629. Logan,W. and Reeves, K. (2009) Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with Difficult Heritage, London, Routledge. Long, M. (2011) Islamic Beliefs, Practices, and Cultures, New York, Marshall Cavendish Corporation. Longinus (1739) On the Sublime (trans. W. Smith), London, J. Watts. Lowenthal, D. (1999) The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Lowth, R. (1787) Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (trans. G. Gregory), 2 vols., London, J. Johnson. Lubar, S. and Kingery, W. D. (1993) History from Things, Washington, DC, Smithsonian Institution Press. Lucretius (1996) De rerum natura (trans. L. Hutchinson, ed. H. de Quehen), Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press. Luhrmann, T. (1989) Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press. Lunacharsky, A. (1958) “O narodnykh praznesvakh”, in Lunacharsky, A. O teatre i dramaturgii, tom 1, Russkij dorevolutsionnyj i sovetskij teatr, Moscow, pp. 190–193. Lüning, J. (1991) “Bemerkungen zur experimentellen Archäologie”, Experimentelle Archäologie, Bilanz 1991, pp. 15–18. Lütticken, S. (2005a) “An Arena in Which to Reenact”, in Life, Once More. Forms of Re-enactment in Contemporary Art (ed. S. Lütticken), Rotterdam, Witte de With, pp. 17–60. Lütticken, S. (2005b) Life Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, Witte de With. Lyotard, J.-F. (1979) La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir, Paris, Minuit. MacCannell, D. (1973) “Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings”, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 79, no. 3, pp. 589–603. Macdonald, S. (2013) Memorylands. Heritage and Identity in Europe Today, London, Routledge. Mack, J. (1983) “Nationalism and the Self ”, Psychohistory Review, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 47–69. Mack, J. (2011) “Navigation and the Arts of Performance”, in Mack, J., The Sea: A Cultural History, London, Reaktion, pp. 105–135. Magelssen, S. (2004), “Living History Museums and the Construction of the Real through Performance”, Theatre Survey, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 61–74. Magelssen, S. (2006) “Making History in the Second Person: Post-touristic Considerations for Living Historical Interpretation”, Theatre Journal, vol. 58, no. 2, pp. 291–312. Magelssen, S. (2007) Living History Museums. Undoing History through Performance, Lanham, The Scarecrow Press. Magelssen, S. (2014) Simming: Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press. Magelssen, S. and Justice-Malloy, R. (2011) Enacting History, Tuscaloosa, The University of Alabama Press. Maisuradze, G. (2007) “Der heilige Georg – ein Held christlicher politischer Ideologie”, in Märtyrer-Porträt: von Opfertod, Blutzeugen und heiligen Kriegern (ed. S. Weigel), München, Fink, pp. 95–99. Malpas, J. (2011) “Philosophy’s Nostalgia”, in (eds. H. Kenaan and I. Ferber) Philosophy’s Moods:The Affective Grounds of Thinking, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 87–101. Manzella, C. and Watkins, A. (2011) “Performance Anxiety: Performance Art in the Twenty-First-Century Catalogs and Archives”, Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, vol. 30, no.1, pp. 28–32.

240

Bibliography Margry, P. J. (2008) “Secular Pilgrimage: A Contradiction in Terms?” in Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World: New Itineraries into the Sacred (ed. P. J. Margry), Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, pp. 13–46. Martin, C. (2011) The End of ‘America’s Most Wanted’: Good News for Criminals, Bad News for the FBI, Time, 29 July. Marx, K. (2000 [1852]) “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings (ed. D. McLelland), Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 329–355. Mats, M. (2000) “On the Technique of the Sublime”, Comparative Literature, vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 1–10. Mattieu, J. R. (2002) “Introduction – Experimental Archaeology: Replicating Past Objects, Behaviours, and Processes James”, in Experimental Archaeology, Replicating Past Objects, Behaviours and Processes (ed. J. R. Mathieu), Oxford, British Archaeological Reports, pp. 1–12. May, S. (2015) Rethinking Practice as Research and the Cognitive Turn, New York, Palgrave Macmillan. McCallum, E. L. and Tuhkanen, M. (eds.) (2011) “Becoming Unbecoming: Untimely Mediations. Introduction”, in Queer Times, Queer Becomings (ed. McCallum, E. L. and Tuhkanen, M.), Albany, State University of New York Press, pp. 1–21. McCalman, I. and Pickering, P. A. (eds.) (2010a) Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. McCalman, I. and Pickering, P. A. (2010b) “From Realism to the Affective Turn: An Agenda”, in Historical Reenactment (eds. I. McCalman and P. A. Pickering), Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–17. Melvin, J. (2018) The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder, New York and London, Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002 [1945]) Phenomenology of Perception (trans. Colin Smith), London and New York, Routledge. Merrill, L. (2005) “Performing History: A Politics of Location”, in The SAGE Handbook of Performance Studies (eds. J. Hamera and D. S. Madison), Thousand Oaks, Sage, pp. 65–72. Merrington, P. (1998/1999) “Heritage, Pageantry and Archivism: Creed Systems and Tropes of Public History in Imperial South Africa, Circa 1910”, Kronos, no. 25, [Pre-millennium issue], pp. 129–151. Mikula, M. (2015) “Historical Re-enactment: Narrativity, Affect and the Sublime”, Rethinking History, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 583–601. Miles, S. (2014) “Battlefield Sites as Dark Tourism Attractions: An Analysis of Experience”, Journal of Heritage Tourism, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 134–147. Mink, L. (1970) “History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension”, New Literary History I, pp. 541–558. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1994), Picture Theory, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1995), “Representation”, in Critical Terms for Literary Study (eds. F. Lentricchia and T. McLaughlin), Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Mol, A. A. A., Ariese-Vandemeulebroucke, C. E., Boom, K. H. J., et al. (2017) “Tutorial: An Introduction to Archaeology, Heritage, and Video Games”, in The Interactive Past. Archaeology, Heritage & Video Games (eds. A. A. A. Mol, C. E. Ariese-Vandemeulebroucke, K. H. J. Boom, et al.), Leiden, Sidestone Press, pp. 7–17. Momen, M. (1985) An Introduction to Shi‘i Islam, The History and Doctrines of Twelver Shi‘ism, New Haven, Yale University Press. Mommsen, H. (1964) “Der Reichstagsbrand und seine politischen Folgen”, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (Vf  Z), vol. 12, pp. 351–413 [Online]. Available at https​://ww​w.ifz​-muen​chen.​de/he​ftarc​hiv/1​964_4. pdf (Accessed 14 September 2019). de Montaigne, M. (1711) Essays (trans. C. Cotton), 3 vols., 4th edition, London, Daniel Brown et al. Montola, M. (2007) “Urban Role-Play: The Next Generation of Role-Playing in Urban Space”, in Space Time Play. Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism:The Next Level (eds. F. von Borries, S. Walz and M. Böttger), Birkhäuser, Basel. Montola, M. and Stenros, J. (eds.) (2010) Nordic Larp, Stockholm, Fëa Livia. Morinis, A. (1992) “Introduction: The Territory of the Anthropology of Pilgrimage”, in Sacred Journeys:The Anthropology of Pilgrimage (ed. A. Morinis), Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, pp. 1–27. Morris, E. (2008) “Play it Again, Sam (Reenactments, Part One)”, New York Times Opinionator, 3 April 2008 [Online]. Available at http:​//opi​niona​tor.b​logs.​nytim​es.co​m/200​8/04/​03/pl​ay-it​-agai​n-sam​-reen​ actme​nts-p​art-o​ne/ (Accessed 3 August 2018). Muhle, M. (2013a) “History will Repeat Itself. Für eine (Medien-)Philosophie des Reenactments”, in Körper des Denkens. Neue Positionen der Medienphilosophie (eds. L. Engell, F. Hartmann and C. Voss), Munich, Fink, pp. 113–134.

241

Bibliography Muhle, M. (2013b) “Reenactments du Pouvoir: Remarques sur une Historiographie Médiale”, Rue Descartes, vol. 1, no. 77, pp. 82–93. Mullen, G. A. (2016) Adorno on Politics after Auschwitz, Lanham, Maryland, Lexington Books. Müller, S. L. and Schwarz, A. (2008) “‘A Ready-Made Set of Ancestors’”: Re-enacting a Gendered Past in the 1900 House”, in Iterationen. Geschlecht im kulturellen Gedächtnis [Iterations: Gender and Cultural Memory] (eds. A. Schwarz and S. L. Müller), Göttingen, Wallstein, pp. 89–110. Muñoz, J. E. (2009) Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York, New York University Press. Munslow, A. (2000) The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies, London, Routledge. Murray, J. H. (1999) Hamlet on the Holodeck:The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press. Murray, J. H. (2013) “The Last Word on Ludology v Narratology”, Humanistic Design for an Emerging Medium, 28 June 2013 [Online]. Available at https​://in​venti​ngthe​mediu​m.com​/2013​/06/2​8/the​-last​ -word​-on-l​udolo​gy-v-​narra​tolog​y-200​5/ (Accessed 20 March 2018). Myrone, M. and Peltz, L. (eds.) (1999) Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice 1700– 1850, Aldershot, Ashgate. Narāqī, A. (1995) [1820]) Mustanad al-Shi’a fi ahkam al-shari’a, Qom, Āl al-Bayt. Nelles, H. V. (1996) “Historical Pageantry and the ‘Fusion of the Races’ at the Tercentenary of Quebec, 1908”, Histoire Sociale: Social History, vol. 29, no. 58, pp. 391–415. Nelson, R. (ed.) (2013) Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances, Palgrave Macmillan. Nichols, B. (2008) “Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject”, Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 72–89. Nichols, B. (2016) Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary, Oakland, University of California Press. Nielsen, M. H. (1981) “Re-enactment and Reconstruction in Collingwood’s Philosophy of History”, History and Theory, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 1–31. Noë, A. (2004) Action in Perception, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press. Noland, C. (2009) Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures, Producing Cultures, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press. Nora, P. (1989) “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”, Memory and Counter-Memory, a special issue of Representations, vol. 26, pp. 7–24. Nugent, M. (2015) “‘An Echo of that other Cry’: Re-Enacting Captain Cook’s First Landing as Conciliation Event”, in Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim (eds. K. Darian-Smith and P. Edmonds), New York and Abingdon, Routledge, pp. 193–210. Nussbaum, M. (2001) Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. O’Gorman, N. (2004) “Longinus’s Sublime Rhetoric, or How Rhetoric Came into Its Own”, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 71–89. Olick, J. K. (1999) “Collective Memory: The Two Cultures”, Sociological Theory, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 333–348. Olick, J. K., Vinitzky-Seroussi, V. and Levy, D. (2011) The Collective Memory Reader, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Öncü, A. (2007) “The Politics of Istanbul’s Ottoman Heritage in the Era of Globalism: Refractions Through the Prism of a Theme Park”, in (eds. B. Drieskens, F. Mermier and H. Wimmen) Cities of the South: Poverty, Citizenship and Exclusion in the 21st Century, London and Beirut, Saqi Books, pp. 233–264. Orwell, G. (1981) 1984, Harmondsworth, Penguin Putnam. Otto, U. (2010a) “Gegen Vergegenwärtigung. Zur Geste und Genese des Reenactments”, in Verfahren der Vergegenwärtigung (ed. M. Mertens), Tübingen, Francke, pp. 95–110. Otto, U. (2010b) “Krieg von Gestern. Die Verkörperung von Geschichtsbildern im Reenactment”, in Welt – Bild – Theater. Politik des Wissens und der Bilder (ed. K. Röttger), Tübingen, Narr, pp. 77–88. Otto, U. (2011) “Die Macht der Toten als das Leben der Bilder: Praktiken des Reenactments in Kunst und Kultur”, in Schauspielen heute: Die Bildung des Menschen in den performativen Künsten (eds. J. Roselt and C. Weiler), Bielefeld, Transcript, pp. 185–201. Otto, U. and Roselt, J. (2012) Theater als Zeitmaschine. Zur performativen Praxis des Reenactments. Theater- und kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven, Bielefeld, Transcript. Outram, A. (2008) “Introduction to Experimental Archaeology”, World Archaeology, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 1–6. Owen, S. A. and Ehrenhaus, P. (2014) “The Moore’s Ford Lynching Reenactment: Affective Memory and Race Trauma”, Text and Performance Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 2–90.

242

Bibliography Pagelow, D. (2001) Forensic Architecture, An Introduction, Patterson, Cromlech Architect. Pannewick, F. (2004) Martyrdom in Literature.Visions of Death and Meaningful Suffering in Europe and the Middle East from Antiquity to Modernity, Wiesbaden, Reichert. Patchett, M. (2016) “The Taxidermist’s Apprentice: Stitching Together the Past and Present of a Craft Practice”, Cultural Geographies, vol. 23, pp. 401–419. Payne, M. T. (2016) Playing War. Military Video Games After 9/11, New York and London, New York University Press. Pearlstein, E. (in preparation) “Introduction for Section 1. Terminology and History of Change”, in Getty Readings in Conservation. Conservation and Stewardship of Indigenous Collections: Changes and Transformations (ed. E. Pearlstein), Los Angeles, Getty Conservation Institute. Pearson, M. and Shanks, M. (2001) Theatre/Archaeology, Abingdon, Routledge. Peers, L. (2007) Playing Ourselves: Interpreting Native Histories at Historic Reconstructions, Lanham, AltaMira. Peltz, L. (1999) “The Extra-Illustration of London: The Gendered Spaces and Practices of Antiquarianism in the Late Eighteenth Century”, in Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice (eds. M. Myrone and L. Peltz), Aldershot, Ashgate, pp. 1700–1850. Peltz, L. (2017) Facing the Text, San Marino, Huntington Library Press. Penny, H. G. (2014) “Not Playing Indian: Surrogate Indigeneity and the German Hobbyist Scene”, in Performing Indigeneity: Global Histories and Contemporary Experiences (eds. L. Graham and H. G. Penny), Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, pp. 169–205. Peres Da Costa, N. (2012) Off the Record: Performing Practices in Romantic Piano Playing, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Peters, K. (moderator) (2009) “History and Fiction. A Roundtable Discussion on the (Re)construction of History in Art and Film with Yael Bartana, Maryam Jafri, Romuald Karmakar and Clemens von Wedemeyer”, Texte zur Kunst, Geschichte/History, vol. 76, pp. 112–118. Peters, J. D. (2009) “Witnessing”, in Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication (eds. P. Frosh and A. Pinchevsky), Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 23–48. Phelan, P. (1993) Unmarked:The Politics of Performance, London, Routledge. Phillips, M. S. (2015) On Historical Distance, New Haven,Yale University Press. Phipps, P. (2009) “Globalization, Indigeneity and Performing Culture”, Local-Global, vol. 6, pp. 28–48. Pickering, P. (2010) “‘No Witnesses. No Leads, No Problems’:The Reenactment of Crime and Rebellion”, in Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn (eds. P. A. Pickering and I. MaCalman), Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 109–133. Pickering, P. (2016) “‘Hark ye back to the age of valour’: Re-enacting Chivalry from the Eglinton Tournament to Kill Streak”, in Chivalry and the Medieval Past (eds. K. Stevenson and B. Gribling), Martlesham, The Boydell Press, pp. 198–214. Piggott, S. (1976) Ruins in a Landscape, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press. Pil and Galia Kollektiv (2007) “Retro/Necro: From Beyond the Grave of the Politics of Reenactment”, Art Papers, vol. 31, no. 6, pp. 44–51 [Online]. Available at www.k​ollec​tiv.c​o.uk/​Art%2​0Pape​rs%20​featu​ re/re​enact​ment/​retro​-necr​o.htm​ (Accessed 17 July 2018). Pinney, C. (2005) “Things Happen: Or from Which Moment Does That Object Come?” in Materiality (ed. D. Miller), Durham, Duke University Press, pp. 256–272. Plamper, J. (2015) The History of Emotions: An Introduction, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Poignant, R. (2004) Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle, Sydney, UNSW Press. Poovey, M. (1998) A History of the Modern Fact, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Pope, A. (1711) An Essay on Criticism, London, W. Lewis. Potolsky, M. (2006) Mimesis, London and New York, Routledge. Puar, J. K. (2007) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham, Duke University Press. Quaranta, D. (2009) “RE:akt! Real Things Happen Twice”, in RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-porting (eds. A. Caronia, J. Janša and D. Quaranta), Brescia, Link Editions, pp. 43–52. Quintus, S. (2007) The Trojan War: Posthomerica (trans. A. James), Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press. Rabinowitz, P. (1993) “Wreckage upon Wreckage: History, Documentary and the Ruins of Memory”, History and Theory, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 119–137. Rajk, L. (2013) The Citizen Betrayed: Exhibition in Memory of the Hungarian Holocaust (trans. S. Humphreys and R. Kéri) [Online]. Available at http:​//mis​sings​eries​.org/​galle​ry/la​szlo-​rajk-​-the-​betra​yed.h​tml (Accessed 27 June 2018). Rancière, J. (2009) The Emancipated Spectator, London and New York,Verso. Rao,V. (2009) “Embracing Urbanism: The City as Archive”, New Literary History, vol. 40, pp. 371–383.

243

Bibliography Rasmussen, M. (2007) “Building Houses and Building Theories – Archaeological Experiments and House Reconstruction”, in Iron Age Houses in Flames:Testing House Reconstructions at Lejre. Studies in Technology and Culture 3 (ed. M. Rasmussen), Lejre, Lejre Historical-Archeological and Experimental Centre, pp. 6–15. Rau, M. (2009) Die letzten Tage der Ceasescus, Berlin,Verbrecher Verlag. Reader, I. and Walter, T. (eds.) (1993) Pilgrimage in Popular Culture, Basingstoke, Macmillan. Reisinger,Y. and Steiner, C. J. (2006) “Reconceptualizing Object Authenticity”, Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 65–86. Rejack, B. (2007) “Toward a Virtual Reenactment of History: Video Games and the Recreation of the Past”, Rethinking History, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 411–425. Reuter, C. (2004 [2002]) My Life is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press. Revill, G. and Wrigley, R. (eds.) (2000) Pathologies of Travel, Amsterdam, Rodopi. Reynolds, P. J. (1998) “Das Wesen Archäologischer Experimente”, Experimentelle Archäologie, Bilanz, pp. 7–20. Reynolds, D. P. (2018) Postcards from Auschwitz: Holocaust Tourism and the Meaning of Remembrance, New York, New York University Press. Richardson, S. (1964) Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson (ed. J. Carroll), Oxford, Clarendon Press. Richter, P. B. (1991) “Experimentelle Archäologie: Ziele, Methoden und Aussagemöglichkeiten”, Experimentelle Archäologie, Bilanz, pp. 19–49. Ricoeur, P. (1984) Time and Narrative, Chicago, Chicago University Press. Ricœur, P. (1985) Temps et Récit, vol. 3, Paris, Edition du Seuil. Ritterfeld, U., Cody, M. and Vorderer, P. (2009) Serious Games: Mechanisms and Effects, New York and London, Routledge. Rivers, W. H. R. (1923) Conflict and Dream, London, Kegan Paul. Roberts, L. (2014) “Navigating the ‘Archive City’: Digital Spatial Humanities and Archival Film Practice”, Convergence, vol. 21, pp. 100–115. Robin, C. and Voss, Ch. (2008) “Immersion”, Montage AV, vol. 17, no. 2. Roesch, R., Corrodo, R. and Dempster, R. (eds.) (2001) Psychology in the Courts: International Advances in Knowledge, London, Routledge. Rogerson, M. (2017) “Re-enacting the Past: Medieval English Biblical Plays and Some Modern Analouges”, in The Routledge Companion to Early Drama and Performance (ed. P. King), London, Routledge, pp. 296–314. Rojek, C. (1993) Ways of Escape, Basingstoke, Macmillan. Rokem, F. (2000) Performing History. Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press. Rosaldo, R. (1991) Culture & Truth:The Remaking of Social Analysis, Boston, Beacon Books. Rose, G. (2000) “Practising Photography: An Archive, a Study, Some Photographs and a Researcher”, Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 26, pp. 555–571. Rosenwein, B. (2002) “Worrying about Emotions in History”, American Historical Review, vol. 107, pp. 821–845. Roth, S. F. (1998) Past into Present: Effective Techniques for First-Person Historical Interpretation, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press. Rothschild, B. (2000) The Body Remembers, New York, W.W. Norton. Rushton, S. (2005) “Tweedledum and Tweedledee Resolved to Have a Battle (Preface One)”, in Experience, Memory, Re-enactment (eds. A. Bangma, S. Rushton and F. Wüst), Rotterdam and Frankfurt am Main, Revolver, pp. 5–12. Rydell, R. W. and Kroes, R. (2005) Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869–1922, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Sahlins, M. (1985) Islands of History, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Saito, H. (2010) “From Collective Memory to Commemoration”, in Handbook of Cultural Sociology (eds. J. R. Hall, L. Grindstaff and M.-C. Lo), London, Routledge, pp. 629–638. Salen, K. and Zimmerman, E. (2003) Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press. Salih, S. (2007) “On Judith Butler and Performativity”, in Sexualities and Communication in Everyday Life: A Reader (eds. K. Lovas and M. Jenkins), Thousand Oaks, Sage, pp. 55–67. Samida, S. (2017) “Performing the Past: Time Travels in Archaeological Open-Air Museums”, in The Archaeology of Time Travel: Experiencing the Past in the 21st Century (eds. B. Petersson and C. Holtorf), Oxford, Archaeopress, pp. 135–155.

244

Bibliography Samida, S., Eggert, M. K. H. and Hahn, H.-P. (eds.) (2014) Handbuch Materielle Kultur: Bedeutungen, Konzepte, Disziplinen, Stuttgart, Metzler. Samuel, R. (2012 [1994]) Theatres of Memory. Volume 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture, London, Verso. Sandström, E. (2005) På den tiden, i desse dagar. Föreställningar om och bruk av historia under Medeltidsveckan på Gotland och Jamtli Historieland, Östersund, Jamtli Förlag. Santone, J. (2008) “Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces: Critical Documentation for Preserving Art’s History”, Leonardo, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 147–152. Sarlin, P. (2009) “New-Left Wing Melancholy: Mark Tribe’s The Port Huron Project and the Politics of Reenactment”, Frameworks: The Journal of Cinema and Media, vol. 50, nos. 1–2, pp. 139–157. Sasse, S. (2014) “‘Die Masse als solche’: Nikolaj Evreinovs Einnahme des Winterpalais”, Volksfiguren (ed. Annuss, E.), special issue, Maske und Kothurn, vol. 2, pp. 81–94. Saupe, A., Wiedemann, F. (2015) “Narration und Narratologie. Erzähltheorien in der Geschichtswissenschaft”, Version: 1.0, in: Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, 28.01.2015 [Online]. Available at http:​//doc​upedia. de/​zg/sa​upe_w​iedem​ann_n​arrat​ion_v​1_de_​2015,​ DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14765/zzf.dok.2.580.v1 (Accessed 14 September 2019). de Saussure, F. (1983 [1916]), Course in General Linguistics (Cours de linguistique générale) (trans. R. Harris, eds. C. Bally and A. Sechehaye), La Salle, Illinois, Open Court. SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) (1996) “What is the SCA?”, Society for Creative Anachronism [Online]. Available at http://socsen.sca.org/what-is-the-sca/ (Accessed 29 August 2018). Scandura, J. (2010) “Sweat: A Memory of Waste”, M/C Journal, vol. 13, no. 4 [Online]. Available at journ​ al.me​dia-c​ultur​e.org​.au/i​ndex.​php/m​cjour​nal/a​rticl​e/vie​w/285​ (Accessed 15 July 2018). Schaeffer, D. O. (2015) Religious Affects, Durham, Duke University Press. Schechner, R. (1981) “Performers and Spectators Transported and Transformed”, The Kenyon Review, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 83–113. Schechner, R. (1985) Between Theatre and Anthropology, Philadelphia, University of Philadelphia Press. Scheer, M. (2012) “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuan Approach to Understanding Emotion”, History and Theory, vol. 51, pp. 193–220. Scheper-Hughes, N. and Lock, M. M. (1987) “The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology”, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 6–41. Schiller, F. (1967) On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, Oxford, Clarendon Press. Schindler, B. (2018) “Experimental Research in Middle Atlantic Archaeology”, in Middle Atlantic Prehistory: Foundation and Practice (eds. A. Wholey and C. L. Nash), Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 175–189. Schlunke, K. (2006) “More than Memory: Performing Place and Postcoloniality at the Myall Creek Massacre Memorial”, in Unstable Ground: Performance and the Politics of Place (ed. G. McAuley), Brussels, Peter Lang. Schmidt, M. (2014) “Experimentelle Archäologie”, in Schlüsselbegriffe der Prähistorischen Archäologie.Tübinger Archäologische Taschenbücher (eds. D. Mölders and S.Wolfram), vol. 11, Münster and New York,Waxmann, pp. 93–98. Schmidt, T. (2015) “Some People Will Do Anything to Keep Themselves from Being Moved”, Performance Research, vol. 20, no. 5, pp. 4–9. Schneider, R. (2001) “Archives: Performance Remains”, Performance Research, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 100–108. Schneider, R. (2011) Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, New York, Routledge. Schöbel, G. (2004) “Lake-dwelling Museums: Academic Research and Public Information” in Living on the Lake in Prehistoric Europe: 150 Years of Lake Dwelling Research (ed. F. Menotti), London and New York, Routledge, pp. 221–236. Schöbel, G. (2005) “On the Responsibilities of Accurately Interpreting Prehistoric Life in Full Scale”, EuroREA, vol. 1, pp. 150–160. Schöbel, G. (2011) “Entstehung und Situation der Archäologischen Freilichtmuseen in Europa - ein Überblick”, in Dachverband Archäologischer Studierendenvertretungen (DASV), Vermittlung von Vergangenheit. Gelebte Geschichte als Dialog von Wissenschaft, Darstellung und Rezeption. Tagung vom 3.-5. Juli 2009 in Bonn, Weinstadt, Greiner, pp. 21–34. Schöbel, G. (2013) “Experimentelle Archäologie und der Dialog mit dem Besucher – eine methodische Annäherung”, Experimentelle Archäologie in Europa, Bilanz, pp. 160–170. Schöbel, G. (2013) “Museums Exhibitions, Open-Air Museums, and Hands-On Archaeology” in The Oxford Handbook of Wetland Archaeology (eds. F. Menotti and A. O’Sullivan), Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 859–874.

245

Bibliography Schöbel, G. (2017) “Rezension zu Jodi Reeves Flores/Roeland Paardekooper (ed), Experiments Past. Histories of Experimental Archaeology”, Germania, vol. 94, pp. 445–451. Schöbel, G. (2019) “Experimentelle Archäologie in Europa – State of the Art”, in Experimentelle Archäologie in Europa 2019 (ed. G. Schöbel), Unteruhldingen, Pfahlbaumuseum Unteruhldingen, pp. 201–214. Schroeder, J. D. S. (2018) “What was Black Nostalgia?” American Literary History, vol. 30, no. 4, 653–676. Schulenberg, D. (2010) “The End of Early Music: A Period Performer’s History of Music for the TwentyFirst Century by Bruce Haynes”, Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 62, no. 1, pp. 169–178. Schwarz, B. (2004) “Media Times/Historical Times”, Screen, vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 93–105. Schwarz, A. (2007) “‘Not this Year!’ Reenacting Contested Pasts Aboard the Ship”, Rethinking History, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 427–446. Schwarz, A. (2010a) “Wollten Sie auch immer schon einmal pestverseuchte Kühe auf Ihre Gegner werfen? ” Eine fachwissenschaftliche Annäherung an Geschichte im Computerspiel, Berlin, LIT Verlag. Schwarz, A. (2010b) “‘…Just as It would have been in 1861’: Stuttering Colonial Beginnings in ABC’s Outback House”, in Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn (eds. I. McCalman and P. Pickering), Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 18–38. Scott, J. W. (1991) “The Evidence of Experience”, Critical Inquiry, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 773–797. Seaton, A. V. (1996) “Guided by the Dark: From Thantopsis to Thanatourism”, International Journal of Heritage Studies, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 234–244. Seaton, A.V. (2002) “Thanatourism’s Final Frontiers? Visits to Cemeteries, Churchyards and Funerary Sites as Sacred and Secular Pilgrimage”, Tourism Recreation Research, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 73–82. Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., Arndt, J. and Routledge, C. (2008) “Nostalgia: Past, Present, and Future”, Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 17, no. 5, pp. 304–307. Seiz, M. (2015) Living History. Eine museumspädagogische Methode zur Vermittlung Ur- und Frühgeschichtlicher Inhalte, Unpublished Master’s Thesis, Tübingen, Ur- und Frühgeschichte, Universität Tübingen. Sekula, A. (1986) “The Body and the Archive”, October, vol. 39, pp. 3–64. Sénécheau, M. and Samida, S. (2015) Living History als Gegenstand Historischen Lernens. Begriffe – Problemfelder – Materialien, Stuttgart, Kohlhammer. Shalson, L. (2013) “Enduring Documents: Re-Documentation in Marina Abramović’s Seven Easy Pieces”, Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 432–441. Shapin, S. and Schaffer, S. (1985) Leviathan and the Air-pump, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press. Shapin, S. and Schaffer, S. (1989) Leviathan and the Air-Pump, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press. Sharpley, R. and Stone, P. R. (eds.) (2009) The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism, Bristol, Channel View. Shaw, A. (2015) “The Tyranny of Realism: Historical Accuracy and Politics of Representation in Assassin’s Creed III. Loading…”, The Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association, vol. 9, no. 14 [Online]. Available at http:​//jou​r nals​.sfu.​ca/lo​ading​/inde​x.php​/load​ing/a​rticl​e/vie​wArti​cle/1​57 (Accessed 30 October 2018). Sheail (n.d.) “The Hertford Pageant of 1914”, The Redress of the Past [Online]. Available at http:​//www​.hist​ orica​lpage​ants.​ac.uk​/feat​ured-​pagea​nts/h​ertfo​rd-pa​geant​-1914​/ (Accessed 25 July 2018). Shelemay, K. K. (2001) “Towards an Ethnomusicology of the Early Music Movement: Thoughts on Bridging Disciplines and Musical Worlds”, Ethnomusicology, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 1–29. Sherman, B. (1997) Inside Early Music: Conversations with Performers, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Sherman, B. (2014) “Book Review: Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance, by John Butt”, The Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 59, no. 2 [Online]. Available at http:​//www​.bshe​r man.​net/P​layin​gWith​Histo​r yRev​iew.h​tm (Accessed 14 December 2017). Shick, K. (2011) “Acting Out and Working Through: Trauma and (In)security”, Review of International Studies, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 1837–1855. Sibum, O. (2009) “Historians and the Study of Material Culture”, AHR Conversation with Auslander, L., Bentley, A., Leor, H., Sibum, H. O. and Witmore, C. The American Historical Review, vol. 114, no. 5, pp. 1355–1404. Sistani, A. H. (1993) Manāsek-e hajj, Mostahabāt-e Sa’y [Online]. Available at www.sistani.org/persian/ book/51/180/ (Accessed 27 September 2018). Slater, M., Antley, A., Davison, A., et al. (2006) “A Virtual Reprise of the Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiments”, PLoS ONE, December 20; 1:e39. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0000039.

246

Bibliography Slyce, J. (2003) “Jeremy Deller: Fables of the Reconstruction”, Flash Art International, vol. 36, no. 228, pp. 74–77. Smale, A. (2017) “Reinhold Hanning, Former Auschwitz Guard Convicted a Year Ago, Dies at 95”, The New York Times, 1 June [Online]. Available at https​://ww​w.nyt​imes.​com/2​017/0​6/01/​world​/euro​pe/re​ inhol​d-han​ning-​dead-​convi​cted-​ausch​witz-​ss-gu​ard.h​tml (Accessed 17 April 2019). Smicker, J. (2010) “Future Combat, Combating Futures: Temporalities of War Video Games and the Performance of Proleptic History”, in Joystick Soldiers:The Politics of Play in Military Video Games (eds. N. Huntemann and M. T. Payne), London, Routledge, pp. 106–121. Smith, A. (1979 [1759]) The Theory of Moral Sentiments (eds. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie), Indianapolis, Liberty Press. Smith, J. (2017) Embodiment: A History, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Smith, L. (2011) “The ‘Doing’ of Heritage: Heritage as Performance”, in Performing Heritage: Research, Practice and Innovation in Museum Theatre and Live Interpretation (eds. A. Jackson and J. Kidd), Manchester, Manchester University Press, pp. 69–81. Snow, S. E. (1993) Performing the Pilgrims: A Study of Ethnohistorical Role-Playing at Plimouth Plantation, Jackson, University Press of Mississippi. Sobchack, V. (2005) “Choreography for One, Two, and Three Legs (A Phenomenological Meditation in Movements)”, Topoi, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 55–66. Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others [Online]. Available at https​://mo​nosko​p.org​/imag​es/a/​a6/So​ ntag_​Susan​_2003​_Rega​rding​_the_​Pain_​of_Ot​hers.​pdf (Accessed 8 April 2019). Sosnowska, D. (2015) “Fake It or Re-mix It: Performance Art History on the Peripheries”, Maska, vol. 30, nos. 172–174, pp. 54–67. Spatz, B. (2015) What Can a Body Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research, London and New York, Routledge. Sprague, J. (2016) Feminist Methodologies for Critical Researchers: Bridging Differences, 2nd edition, Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield. Stahl, R. (2010) Militainment, Inc. War, Media, and Popular Culture, New York, Routledge. Staley, D. J. (2014) Computers,Visualization, and History: How New Technology Will Transform Our Understanding of the Past, 2nd edition, New York, Routledge. Stark, L. (2012) “Fantasy Dressing up for Live-Action Roleplay Games”, BBC News, 3 May [Online]. Available at https​://ww​w.bbc​.co.u​k/new​s/av/​magaz​ine-1​79145​02/fa​ntasy​-dres​sing-​up-fo​r-liv​e-act​ ion-r​olepl​ay-ga​mes (Accessed 18 August 2018). Starobinski, J. (1966) “The Idea of Nostalgia” (trans. W. Kemp), Diogenes, vol. 14, no. 8, pp. 81–103. Stearns, P. N. and Stearns, C. Z. (1985) “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards”, American Historical Review, vol. 90, pp. 813–836. Steedman, C. (2001) Dust, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Stein, H. (2014) “Chosen Trauma and Widely Shared Sense of Jewish Identity and History”, The Journal of Psychohistory, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 236–257. Steinecke, A. (2007) Kulturtourismus: Marktstrukturen, Fallstudien, Perspektiven, Oldenburg, de Gruyter. Stenros, J. and Montola, M. (2011) “The Making of Nordic Larp: Documenting a Tradition of Ephemeral Co-Creative Play”, Proceedings of DIGRA 2011 Conference: Think Design Play [Online]. Available at http:​//www​.digr​a.org​/wp-c​onten​t/upl​oads/​digit​al-li​brary​/1130​1.572​24.pd​f (Accessed 20 August 2018). Sterne, L. (1940) The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (ed. J. A. Work), New York, Odyssey Press. Sterne, L. (1992) The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (ed. I. C. Ross), Oxford, Oxford University Press. Stewart, S. (1984) On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Baltimore, Maryland, Johns Hopkins University Press. Stewart, K. (1988) “Nostalgia—A Polemic”, Cultural Anthropology, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 227–241. Stone, P. R. and Sharpley, R. (2008) “Consuming Dark Tourism: A Thanatological Perspective”, Annals of Tourism Research 35, no. 2, pp. 574–595. DOI: 10.1016/j.annals.2008.02.003. Stone, P. R., Hartmann, R., Seaton, T., et al. (eds.) (2018) The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Strauss, M. D. (2002) “Pattern Categorization of Male U.S. Civil War Reenactor Images”, Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 99–109. Sturken, M. (1997) “Reenactment, Fantasy, and the Paranoia of History: Oliver Stone’s Docudramas”, History and Theory, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 64–79.

247

Bibliography Sturken, M. (2011) “Pilgrimages, Reenactment, and Souvenirs: Modes of Memory Tourism”, in Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory (eds. M.Hirsch and N. K. Miller), New York, Columbia University Press, pp. 280–294. Swadener, B. B. and Mutua, K. (2008) “Decolonising Performances: Deconstructing the Global Postcolonial”, in Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies (eds. N. K. Denzin,Y. S. Lincoln and L. Tuhiwai Smith), Thousand Oaks, Sage. Sweet, R. (2001) “Antiquaries and Antiquities in Eighteenth-Century England”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 181–206. Sweet, R. (2004) Antiquaries, London, Hambledon and London Ltd. Tambiah, S. J. (1979) A Performative Approach to Ritual, London, Oxford University Press, pp. 113–169. Tamm, M. (2013) “Beyond History and Memory: New Perspectives in Memory Studies”, History Compass, vol. 11, no. 6, pp. 458–473. Taruskin, R. (1995) Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Taussig, M. (1993) Mimesis and Alterity. A Particular History of the Senses, New York, Routledge. Taylor, A. (2013) “Reenacting the Past”, The Atlantic, 17 June [Online]. Available at https​://ww​w.the​atlan​ tic.c​om/ph​oto/2​013/0​6/ree​nacti​ng-th​e-pas​t/100​535/ (Accessed 25 June 2018). Taylor, D. (2003) The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the America, Durham, North Carolina and London, Duke University Press. Taylor, D. (2006) “Performance and/as History”, TDR:The Drama Review, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 67–86. Taylor, R. (2002) October, London, British Film Institute. Taylor, S. and Butler, J. (2009) “Interdependence”, in Examined Life: Excursions with Contemporary Thinkers (ed. A. Taylor), New York, The New Press. Tézenas, A. (2015) I Was Here: Photographs of Dark Tourism, Stockport, Dewi Lewis. The Wintershall Players, The Passion of Jesus (2018). [Online]. Available at https​://ww​w.win​tersh​all.o​rg.uk​ /pass​ion-j​esus-​londo​n (Accessed 30 March 2019). Theodossopoulos, D. (2013) “Introduction: Laying Claim to Authenticity: Five Anthropological Dilemmas”, Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 86, no. 2, pp. 337–360. Thomas, N. (1991) Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific, Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Thompson, J. (2010 [2004]) Wargames: Inside the World of 20th-Century War Reenactors, Washington DC, Smithsonian Books. Tilden, F. (1957) Interpreting Our Heritage, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, The University of North Carolina Press. Tilden, F. (1977) Interpreting Our Heritage, 3rd ed., Chapel Hill, North Carolina, University of North Carolina Press. Tilley, C., Keane, W., Küchler, S., et al. (eds.) (2006) Handbook of Material Culture, London, Sage. Toffler, A. (1970) Future Shock, New York, Random House. Tresca, M. (2010) The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games, McFarland, North Carolina. Tuhiwei Smith, L. (1999) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London, Zed Books. Tunbridge, J. E. and Ashorth, G. J. (1996) Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict, Chichester, Wiley. Türeli, A. I. (2018) Istanbul, Open City: Exhibiting Anxieties of Urban Modernity, New York, Routledge. Turkle, S. (2007) Evocative Objects:Things We Think With, Cambridge, MIT Press. Turner, R. (1988) “Bloodless Battles: The Civil War Reenacted”, The Drama Review, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 123–136. Turner,V. W. (1969) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Chicago, Aldine. Turner, V. W. (1982) From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, Baltimore, Maryland, Johns Hopkins University Press. Turner, V. W. and Turner, E. (1978) Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, New York, Columbia University Press. Tychsen, A., Hitchens, M., Brolund, T., et al. (2006) “Live Action Role-Playing Games: Control, Communication, Storytelling, and MMORPG Similarities”, Games and Culture, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 252–275. Tyson, A. M. (2011) “Men with Their Muskets and Me in My Bare Feet: Performing History and Policing Gender at Historic Fort Snelling Living History Museum”, in Enacting History (eds. S. Magelssen and R. Justice-Malloy), Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, pp. 41–65. Tyson, A. M. (2013) The Wages of History. Emotional Labor on Public History’s Front Lines, Boston, University of Massachusetts Press.

248

Bibliography Uricchio, W. (2005) “Simulation, History, and Computer Games”, in Handbook of Computer Game Studies (eds. J. Raessens and J. Goldstein), Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press, pp. 327–338. Vaihinger, H. (1925), The Philosophy of “As If” (trans. C. K. Ogden), New York, Harcourt, Brace & Company. Varga, S. and Guignon, C. (2017) “Authenticity”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [Online] (ed. E. N. Zalta). Available at https​://pl​ato.s​tanfo​rd.ed​u/arc​hives​/fall​2017/​entri​es/au​thent​icity​/ (Accessed 25 June 2018). Veit, U. (2001) “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Theorie für die Archäologie: Anmerkungen zur jüngeren deutschsprachigen Diskussion”, in Mauerschau: Festschrift für Manfred Korfmann (ed. R. Aslan), vol. 1, Remshalden-Grunbach, Greiner, pp. 37–55. Verwoert, J. (2009 [2005]) “The Crisis of Time in Times of Crisis: On the Contemporary Conditions of the Emergence of History”, in RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-porting (eds. A. Caronia, J. Janša and D. Quaranta), Brescia, Link Editions, pp. 27–31. Virgil, [1697] The Aeneid, Book II, (trans. J. Dryden), New York, Collier. [Online]. Available at https​://ol​l.lib​ ertyf​und.o​rg/ti​tles/​virgi​l-the​-aene​id-dr​yden-​trans​ (Accessed 10 April 2019). Volkan, V. (2004) Blind Trust: Large Groups and Their Leaders in Times of Crisis and Terror, Charlottesville, Virginia, Pitchstone Publishing. Vorlauf, D. (2011) “Experimentelle Archäologie. Eine Gratwanderung zwischen Wissenschaft und Kommerz (mit ausführlicher Bibliografie mit Sachregister)”, Schriftenreihe Landesmuseum Natur und Mensch, vol. 86, Oldenburg, Isensee. Voss, C. (2008) “Fiktionale Immersion”, montage AV, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 69–88. Vowinckel, A. (2009) “Past Futures: From Re-enactment to the Simulation of History in Computer Games”, Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 322–332. Wallace, M. (1996) Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory, Philadelphia, Temple University Press. Wallis, M. (2000) “Delving the Levels of Memory and Dressing up in the Past”, in British Theatre Between the Wars, 1918–1939 (eds. C. Barker and M. Gale), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 190–214. Walls, P. (2003) History, Imagination and the Performance of Music, Woodbridge, Boydell Press. Walpole, H. (1964 [1766]) “An Account of the Giants Lately Discovered”, in Byron’s Journal of his Circumnavigation, 1764–1766 (ed. R. E. Gallagher), London, Cambridge University Press, pp. 200–209. Walton, D. (2006) Character Evidence: An Abductive Theory, Dordrecht, Springer. Walvin, J. (2010) “‘What Should We Do about Slavery?’ Slavery, Abolition and Public History”, in Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn (eds. I. McCalman and P. A. Pickering), Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Walz, M. (2010) “Bildung durch Historisches Spiel? Living History zwischenVermittlung undVermarktung”, in Bildungsarbeit im Museum: Grundfragen und Perspektiven der Vermittlung von Sammlung, Forschung und Präsentation (eds. K. M. Mieth and M. Walz), Chemnitz, Sächsische Landesstelle für Museumswesen, pp. 152–161. Wang, N. (1999) “Rethinking Authenticity in Tourism Experience”, Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 349–370. Warring A. (2015) “At rejse i tid – fortidsfamilier i Sagnlandet Lejre”, in Fortider tur/retur: Reenactment og historiebrug (eds. A. Warring and T. Kruse), Frederiksberg, Samfundslitteratur, pp. 43–66. Waterson, R. (2009) “Reconciliation as Ritual: Comparative Perspectives on Innovation and Performance in Processes of Reconciliation”, Humanities Research, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 27–47. Watt, I. (1957) The Rise of the Novel, Los Angeles, University of California Press. Weeks, J. (2003) Gettysburg. Memory, Market, and an American Shrine, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press. Weigel, S. (ed.) (2007) Märtyrer-Porträts.Von Opfertod, Blutzeugen und heiligen Kriegern, München, Fink. Weil, K. (2018) “The Alt-Right is Taking Over Renaissance Fairs”, The Daily Beast, 27 July [Online]. Available at https​://ww​w.the​daily​beast​.com/​the-a​lt-ri​ght-i​s-tak​ing-o​ver-r​enais​sance​-fair​s?sou​rce=t​ witte​r&via=desktop (Accessed 14 July 2018). Weiner, J. (1991) “Archäologische Experimente in Deutschland. Von den Anfängen bis zum Jahre 1989 – Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Experimentellen Archäologie in Deutschland”, Experimentelle Archäologie Bilanz, vol. 6, pp. 50–68. Weizman, E. (2017a) Forensic Architecture:Violence at the Threshold of Detectability, New York, Zone Books. Weizman, E. (2017b) Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, London, Verso. Welch, C. (2007) “Complicating Spiritual Appropriation: North American Indian Agency in Western Alternative Spiritual Practice”, Journal of Alternative Spiritualities and New Age Studies, vol. 3, pp. 97–117.

249

Bibliography Weller, U. (2010) “Quo vadis Experimentelle Archäologie?”, Experimentelle Archäologie in Europa, vol. 9, Bilanz, pp. 9–13. Wenzel Geissler, P. and Kelly, A. (2016) “Field Station as Stage: Re-Enacting Scientific Work and Life in Amani, Tanzania”, Social Studies of Science, vol. 46, pp. 912–937. West, B. (2014) “Historical Re-enacting and Affective Authority: Performing the American Civil War”, Annals of Leisure Research, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 161–179. White, H. (1973) Metahistory:The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press. White, H. (1978) “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact”, in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (ed. H. White), Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 81–99. White, H. (1999) Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect, Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press. White, L. and Frew, E. (eds.) (2013) Dark Tourism and Place Identity: Managing and Interpreting Dark Places (Contemporary Geographies of Leisure, Tourism and Mobility, vol. 37), London, Routledge. Williams, R. (1977) “Structures of Feeling”, in Marxism and Literature, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 128–135. Williams, R. (1981 [1976]) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, London, Fontana/Croom Helm. Williams, R. (1983) “Experience”, in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, revised edition, New York, Oxford University Press, pp. 126–129. Williams, P. (2002) “Merely Players?” Musical Times, vol. 143, no. 1880, pp. 68–69. Williams, R. (2014) “Representative”, in Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, London, Fourth Estate, pp. 266–269. Williams, R. (2015 [1976]) Keywords: A Vocabulary of the Culture and Society, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Willis, T. (1683) Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes (trans. S. Pordage), London, Thomas Dring. Willner, S., Koch, G. and Samida, S. (eds.) (2016) Doing History. Performative Praktiken in der Geschichtskultur, Münster, Waxmann. Wilson, N. (2014) Making Early Music in the Modern Age: The Art of Re-enchantment, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Winston, B. (1999) “‘Honest, Straightforward Reenactment’: The Staging of Reality”, in Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context (ed. K. Bakker), Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press. Withington,W. (1920) English Pageantry:A Historical Outline, 2 vols., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Wolfe, P. (1999) Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, London, Cassell. Wood, C. (2012) “Re-Make, Re-Model”, Frieze, 31 October [Online]. Available at www.f​r ieze​.com/​artic​ le/re​-make​-re-m​odel-​0 (Accessed 18 July 2018). Wood, E. and Latham, K. F. (2013) The Objects of Experience:Transforming Visitor-Object Encounters in Museums, New York and London, Routledge. Worsley, L. (2007) Cavalier, London, Faber and Faber. Wosińska, M. (2017) “Murambi is Not Auschwitz: The Holocaust in Representations of the Rwandan Genocide”, in Replicating Atonement: Foreign Models in the Commemoration of Atrocities (ed. M. Gabowitsch), Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 187–208. Wüstenfeld, F. (1861) Chroniken der Stadt Mekka, vol. 4, Leipzig, Olms. Yerushalmi, Y. H. (1996 [1982]) Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Seattle and London, University of Washington Press. Yoder, C. (2005) Trauma Healing: When Violence Strikes and Community Security Is Threatened, Intercourse, Pennsylvania, Good Books. Yoshino, A. (2011) Pageant Fever: Local History and Consumerism in Edwardian England, Tokyo, Waseda University Press. Young, I. M. (1998) “Throwing Like a Girl” & “Throwing Like a Girl Twenty Years Later”, in Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader (ed. D. Welton), Oxford, Blackwell Publishing. Young, J. (1993) The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, New Haven,Yale University Press. Young, E. (1996) “Confederate Counterfeit: The Case of the Cross-Dressed Civil War Soldier”, in Passing and the Fictions of Identity (ed. E. K. Ginsberg), Durham, Duke University Press, pp. 181–217. Young, M. (ed.) (2003) The Book of LARP, Laurel, Maryland, Interactivities Ink. Zerubavel, E. (2003) Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

250

Bibliography Žižek, S. (1992) Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, New York, Routledge. Žižek, S. (1993) Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT. Znamenski, A. A. (2007) The Beauty of the Primitive. Shamanism in the Western Imagination, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Online Resources A Cross-disciplinary Glossary of Terms for Historical Hobbyists [Online]. Available at https://historicgames. com/glossary.html (Accessed 25 June 2018). Baroque Dresden (2019) [Online]. Available at https​://ww​w.pan​omete​r.de/​en/dr​esden​/our-​exhib​ition​s/ (Accessed 9 April 2019) Deller,  J. (2001) The Battle of Orgreave [Online]. Available at http:​//www​.jere​mydel​ler.o​rg/Th​eBatt​leOfO​ rgrea​ve/Th​eBatt​leOfO​rgrea​ve_Vi​deo.p​hp (Accessed 14 September 2019). Deller, J. (2016) We’re Here Because We’re Here [Online]. Available at https://youtu.be/uXnr3w74TJs (Accessed 14 September 2019). Dresden 1945 (2019) [Online]. Available at https​://ww​w.pan​omete​r.de/​en/dr​esden​/our-​exhib​ition​s/ (Accessed 9 April 2019). English Heritage, Knight’s Tournament at Bolsover Castle [Online]. Available at https​://ww​w.eng​lish-​herit​age. o​rg.uk​/visi​t/wha​ts-on​/bols​over-​knigh​ts-to​urnam​ent-2​5-27-​may-2​019/ (Accessed 3 February 2019). Games for Change. What We Do [Online]. Available at: http:​//www​.game​sforc​hange​.org/​what-​we-do​/ (Accessed 6 November 2018). Jahrbuch Experimentelle Archäologie in Europa [Online], Available at http://www.exar.org/publications/ (Accessed 25 March 2018). Knight’s Tournament at Bolsover Castle (2019) English Heritage [Online]. Available at https​ ://ww​ w. eng​lish-​herit​age.o​rg.uk​/visi​t/wha​ts-on​/bols​over-​knigh​ts-to​urnam​ent-2​5-27-​may-2​019/ (Accessed 3 February 2019). Literary Database by Paardekooper, R and Vorlauf, D. [Online]. Available at http://exarc.net/bibliography (Accessed 30 September 2018). Living History Guide [Online]. Available at http:​//www​.hist​oric-​uk.co​m/Liv​ingHi​story​/Trad​ersMa​rket/​ (Acessed 26 March 2018). Stolpersteine in Berlin [Online]. Available at http://www.stolpersteine-berlin.de (Accessed 4 April 2019).

Film and Video 80064 (2005) Directed by A. Żmijewski [Film]. Poland, Centre d’Art Contemporain de Bretigny. A Cock and Bull Story (2005) Directed by M. Winterbottom [Film]. UK, BBC Films. Die Kölner Stämme (2011) Directed by A. Dreschke [Film]. Germany, Realfiction. Dreams of a Life (2011) Directed by C. Morley [Film]. UK, Cannon and Morley Productions. Les Maîtres Fous (1954) Directed by Jean Rouch [Film]. France, Les Films de la Pléiade. Man on Wire (2005) Directed by James Marsh [Film]. UK, BBC. Nazi VR (2017) Directed by D. Freid, produced by Mor Albalak [Film]. US, Mel Films. Standard Operating Procedure (2008) Directed by E. Morris [Film] US, Participant Media. Stories We Tell (2012) Directed by Sarah Polley [Film]. Canada. The Act of Killing (2014) Directed by J. Oppenheimer [Film]. US, Drafthouse Films. The Arbor (2010) Directed by Clio Barnard [Film]. UK, Artangel. The Battle of Orgreave (2001) Directed by Mike Figgis [Film]. UK, Artangel. The Eternal Frame (1975) Directed by T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm [Video]. US, Long Beach Museum of Art. The Last Bolshevik (Le tombeau d’Alexandre) (2003 [1992]) Directed by Chris Marker [Film]. US, Icarus Films. The Thin Blue Line (1988) Directed by Errol Morris [Film]. US, Channel 4. The Universal Clock - The Resistance of Peter Watkins (2001) Directed by G. Bowie [Film]. Canada, National Film Board of Canada. We’re Here Because We’re Here (2016) Directed by J. Deller [Video] 29:00 min.

251

Bibliography

Television Series 1900 House (1999) Wall to Wall Media. Abenteuer 1900: Leben im Gutshaus (2004) ARD. America’s Most Wanted (1988–2012) Fox. Crimewatch UK (1984–2017) BBC. Dark Tourist (2018) Netflix. Klondike: The Quest for Gold (2003) Frantic Films Live Action Productions. Living in the Past (1978) BBC Bristol. Outback House (2005) ABC. Pride and Prejudice: Having a Ball (2013) BBC. Regency House Party (2004) Wall to Wall Media. The Colbert Report, “Truthiness”, season 1, episode 1 (2005), Comedy Central. The Jinx (2015) Directed by Andrew Jarecki. HBO. The Ship (2002) BBC. The Staircase (Soupçons) (2004) Maha Productions. The Trench (2002) BBC. Victorian Slum House (2016) Wall to Wall Media.

Exhibitions and Installations Agnew, V. and Özbek, E. (curators) Right to Arrive. Exhibition held at PROMPT Gallery, The Australian National University, 2–22 September 2018. Arns, I. and Sasse, S. (curators) The Storming of the Winter Palace: Forensics of an Image. A cooperation between HMKV, Dortmund, and Zurich University. Exhibition held at Gessnerallee, Zurich (Nordflügel), 23 September – 25 October 2017 (under the title The Storming of the Winter Palace: History as Theater). Barenblit, F. and Bois,Y. A. and Feher, M. and Foster, H. and Güiraldes, R. and Medina, C. and Weizman, E. Forensic Architecture. Hacia Una Estetica Investigativa. Exhibition held at MACBA / MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona i MUAC Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, 2017. Bayrisches Landeskriminalamt Zentrale Fototechnik und 3D-Tatortvermessung (2019), Exhibition at Frankfurter Kunstverein [Online]. Available at https​://ww​w.fkv​.de/e​n/bav​arian​-stat​e-pol​ice/ (Accessed 17 April 2019). Blackson, R. (curator) Once More with Feeling. Exhibition held at Reg Vardy Gallery, Sunderland, 1–16 December 2005. Counter Investigations: Forensic Architecture (2018). [Online]. Available at https​://ww​w.ica​.art/​exhib​ition​s/for​ ensic​-arch​itect​ure-c​ounte​r-inv​estig​ation​s. Farocki, H. (2009) Serious Games III: Immersion, 20  min. Available at https​://ww​w.mom​a.org​/coll​ectio​n/ wor​ks/14​3770.​ Gerow, J. (curator) Reenactment. Exhibition held at BRIC, Brooklyn, 18 January – 25 February 2018. Hoffman, J. (curator) A Little Bit of History Repeated. Exhibition held at KunstWerke, Berlin, 16–18 November 2001. Horn, G. and Arns, I. (curators), Fichtner, K. (co-curator) History Will Repeat Itself. Strategies of Reenactment in Contemporary (Media) Art and Performance. Exhibition by HMKV at the PHOENIX Halle Dortmund, 9 June – 23 September 2007. Lütticken, S. (curator) Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art. Exhibition held at Witte de With, Rotterdam, 27 January–27 March 2005. Nori, F. (2018) Perception is Reality. On the Construction of Reality and Virtual Worlds. Exhibition, Frankfurter Kunstverein [Online]. Available at: https​://ww​w.fkv​.de/e​n/exh​ibiti​on/pe​rcept​ion-i​s-rea​lity-​on-th​ e-con​struc​tion-​of-re​ality​-and-​virtu​al-wo​rlds/​ (Accessed 17 April 2019). Now Again the Past: Rewind, Replay, Resound. Exhibition held at Carnegie Art Center, Buffalo, New York, 11 February – 18 March 2006. Reenacting History: Collective Actions and Everyday Gestures. Exhibition held at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, 22 September 2017 – 21 January 2018. Re-. Exhibition held at Site Gallery, Sheffield, 18 March – 28 April 2007. Tarsia, A. (curator) A Short History of Performance. Exhibition held at Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 18–23 November 2003.

252

Bibliography Thompson, N. (curator) Ahistoric Occcasion: Artists Making History. Exhibition held at Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA, 27 May 2006 – 22 April 2007. Wieder und Wider: Performances Appropriated. Exhibition held at MUMOK,Vienna, 8–18 November 2006.

Games A Breathtaking Journey. Amsterdam/Delft/Eindhoven, the Netherlands: Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences/Delft University of Technology/Eindhoven University of  Technology, 2016. Anno (Multiple titles). Montreuil, France: Max Design/Related Designs/Blue Byte, Ubisoft, 1998–2019. Assassin’s Creed (Multiple titles). Montreuil, France: Ubisoft Montréal, Ubisoft, 2007–2018. Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate. Montreuil, France: Ubisoft Montréal, 2015. Battlefield (Multiple titles). Redwood City CA, United States: DICE, Electronic Arts, 2002–2018. Call of Duty (Multiple titles). Santa Monica CA, United States: Infinity Ward/Treyarch/Sledgehammer Games/Raven Software, Activision, 2003–2018. Call of Duty: WWII. Santa Monica CA, United States: Sledgehammer Games, Activision, 2017. Conflict of Nations: World War III. Malta: Dorado Games, 2018. Crusader Kings (Multiple titles). Stockholm, Sweden: Paradox Development Studio, Paradox Interactive, 2004–2012. Kuma/War. New York NY, United States: Kuma Reality Games, 2004. Making History (Multiple titles). Boston MA, United States: Factus Games, 2007–2018. Sid Meier’s Civilization (Multiple titles). San Francisco CA, United States: MicroProse/Firaxis Games, 2K Games, 1991–2016. Sniper Elite (Multiple titles). Oxford, UK: Rebellion Developments, 2006–2017. This War of Mine. Warschau, Poland: 11 Bit Studios, 2014. Total War (Multiple titles). Horsham, UK: Creative Assembly/Feral Interactive, Sega, 2000–2019. World of W   arcraft. Irvine CA, United States: Blizzard Entertainment, 2004.

253

INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures. 3D modelling 39, 215–216, 217 1900 House (television show) 64, 66 abandoned sites 13, 13 Abbey of St. Stephen (Germany) 103, 105 Abramović, Marina 113; Seven Easy Pieces exhibition (Guggenheim, 2005) 18–19, 112 Abu Daher, Mohammad Mahmoud Odeh 82 Abu Rahma, Bassem 79 access and able-bodied assumptions 31 accreditation 20, 21 Achieving Truth: Creating the Physicality of War on Stage (University of Ottawa, 2018) 220–221 acting and actors (in reenactments): in The Arbor 51; and artifacts, presentation of 132; authenticity of 55–58; hardcore 59–60, 74, 76, 121; naturalist 171; scholar-performers 106; as supporting accepted historical narratives 64–65; and witnessing the past 64; see also FARBs Addison, Joseph 40; Spectator 41 Adler, Stella 171 Adorno, Theodor W. 213, 215, 217–218 affect see emotion and affect “affordance” concept 131 African Americans 165–166, 185 age 65 agency and free choice 8, 18–19, 84, 88, 122–123 Agnew,Vanessa: on affect 109; on ahistoricity of reenactments 92; and the challenges of reenactment 112, 114; on democratization of historical knowledge 135; on genocide representation 117, 215–217; Reenactment Case Studies: Global Perspectives on Experiential History 7; on reenactments as “affective history” 53; Refugee Plaque 48; on refugee reenactments 176

Aksoy, Faruk: Fetih 1453 (Conquest 1453) 144 Aktenzeichen XY ungelöst [Case Unsolved] television show 61 Albert (Prince) 207 alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt) 200 Allen, Jennifer 112 amateurism see expertise and amateurism American Civil War reenactments: and battle reenactments 25–28; and FARBs 75, 121; politicization of 185; popularity of 45, 112, 156; reenactors in 64, 74, 76; scripted vs. improvised 181; see also specific battle reenactments American Indian Wars 26 American Revolution 25 America’s Most Wanted television show 61 anamnesis 97, 187 Anderson, Benedict 144 Anderson, Jay 170 Ankersmit, Franklin R. 142 Anno (digital game) 84 Ant Farm: The Eternal Frame 51, 201 Antiquarian Society of Zurich 67 antiquity 72–73, 100, 102–105 Arai, Tatsushi 222–223 “archeo-technicians” 70–71 architecture 102; see also Forensic Architecture Archive/Practice (Leipzig, 2009) 113 archives and archiving 11–15, 113, 192 Archive tanzen (Salzburg, 2002) 113 Arendt, Hannah 46 Ariosto, Ludovico: Orlando Furiosio 100 Aristotle 4, 142; Poetics 151 Arns, Inke 7, 16, 17, 18, 112–113, 134 art and artistic reenactments 2, 16–19, 112, 134, 181, 199; see also mediality

254

Index Asisi,Yadegar: Dresden 1945 and Baroque Dresden 46 Asparn (open-air museum, Austria) 69 Assassin’s Creed (digital game) 84, 85 Assmann, Aleida 139, 140 Assmann, Jan 139 audiences and visitors: authenticity established by 21; and emotions, experiencing 55; and firstperson interpretation 122; motivations of 123; participation of 18, 19, 153 Auerbach, Erich 142 augmented reality (AR) 10, 215 Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (Poland) 44, 215–216; Hungarian national exhibit 21–22, 22 Auslander, Mark 222 Austen, Jane: Northanger Abbey 36, 37 Austin, John Langshaw 2, 90, 169 Australia: colonial reenactments in 26; educational reenactments in 183; historical pageants in 165; second-person interpretation in 207; settlercolonial past of 65 Austria, experimental archaeology in 67 authenticity: and authentication process 21, 22; in battle reenactments 29; centrality to reenactment 1, 3, 8–9, 11, 15; definition and overview 20–24, 183–186; and discomfort 47; and DIY approach 132; and experimental archaeology 73; and hardcore reenactors 76; and Historically Informed Performance 107–109; and immersion 181; importance of 3; and living history 121; and media artistic reenactments 134; object 132, 160–161; practices of 23; and wardrobe 63–64, 74–77 Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium 107 authorship 18–20 backstage workers 55 Bacon, Francis 67; New Atlantis 43 Balzac, Honoré de 142 Barnard, Clio: The Arbor 50–52 Barthes, Roland 86, 192 Battlefield (digital game) 84, 85 Battle of Bull Run (Virginia) 73 Battle of Gettysburg (Pennsylvania) 26, 27, 45, 135 Battle of Hastings (England) 58 Battle of Somme (France) 200 Battle of Waterloo (Belgium) 28, 28 battle reenactments 25–29, 199, 201 Baudrillard, Jean 192 Bäuml, Franz 143 BBC: Pride and Prejudice: Having a Ball (documentary) 32, 32; The Ship documentary 23–24 Beauvoir, Simone de 33 Becket, Thomas 59, 176 Beckford, William 103, 104–105 Beecher, Henry Ward 45

“before-and-after images” 83 Benjamin, Walter 134; “Theses on the Philosophy of History” 147 Bent, Margaret 109 Bentham, Jeremy 216 Benzaquen-Gautier, Stéphanie 5, 199 Beorg Wic festival (Australia) 170 Bergson, Henri 138 Berkeley, George 40 Berlin-Düppel (open-air museum, Germany) 69 biblical performances 25 Bidlo, Mike 112 Big data, see also ‘Forensic architecture’ and truth claims arising from 215–217 Bin Laden, Osama 85 Bishop, Claire 155 Blackson, Robert 154–155 Blumenberg, Hans 210 bodies: as archives 12, 14–15, 30, 33, 113; in artistic reenactment 17; cultural contexts, within 30–31; and dance reenactments 113; and emotion 17, 53; histrionic control of 95; in performance 14, 30, 32–33; and trauma 220; as vehicles for historical knowledge 7 Body Heat (film) 158 Bolsover castle (Derbyshire, England) 100 Bonnett, Alisdair 159 Boswell, James 45–46 Boucher de Perthes, Jacques 68 Bourdieu, Pierre 30 Bowan, Kate 8, 60 Boyle, Robert 4, 40, 42 Boym, Svetlana 158 Brady, Matthew 197 A Breathtaking Journey 86–87, 87 Brecht, Bertolt 45, 150, 171, 200 Brechtian techniques of alienation 2 Breed, Ananda 223 Breker, Ralf 216 Brewer, John 109 British Museum (London) 68 Bruner, Edward 20, 29, 77 Bruzzi, Stella 5; New Documentary 49 Brygzel, Ami 19 Burke, Edmund 212 Buster Farm (UK) 69 Butler, Judith 90, 169, 172 Butt, John 110 Byron, John 42 Byzantine art 126 Caen (France) 102, 105 Caesar, Julius 72 Caillois, Roger 179 Calderon, Luisa 39 Callahan, Erret 71 Call of Duty (digital game) 84, 85, 86

255

Index Camino pilgrimage 176 “campaigners” and “authentic campaigners” 76 Canada, historical pageants in 165 Cannon Hall Napoleonic Reenactment Day (2009) 180 Captain Cook’s Endeavour voyage (1768) 23–24 Cassin, Barbara 159 cause and effect 41; in historical narrative 18, 136, 152, see also empiricism Cavendish, Charles and William 100 Certeau, Michel de 192; The Practice of Everyday Life 14 Cervantine fiction 36 Chambers, Ephraim: Cyclopaedia: Or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences 101 Chapman, Adam 84, 87–88 Chapman, George 95 charivari 188 Charleton, Walter 42 Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury Tales 176 Chekhov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich 171 Chernobyl 44 Chicago’s Pocket Guide to Hell 193, 194 Christian traditions 125–127, 147, 174–176, 187; see also Eucharist; Last Supper ritual Christie, Agatha 61 Christy, Henry 68 Civilization (digital game) 84, 86 class issues 65, 90 Cody, William “Buffalo Bill” 26 Coetzee, John M.: Elizabeth Costello 197 cogito 40, 195 Colbert, Stephen 23 Cold War 85 Cole, Peter: Sacred Trash:The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza 149–150 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 41 Coles, John 71 Collingwood, Robin George: on emotional reliving 55; on historian’s work 172; The Idea of History 59–61, 122, 135–136; on ideas and mental reflection 34, 195; and metalepsis 24; ontological approach of 40; Outlines of a Philosophy of History 60; Pickering on 5; on reenactment and historical thinking 190 Cologne Tribes 204 Colonial Pennsylvania Plantation (open-air museum) 73 colonial reenactments 26 Colonial Williamsburg (Virginia) 92, 120, 183, 185, 192 Columbus Day event (1992) 222 commemoration 8, 11, 138–141 commercialization 29 commodification 18, 44, 158, 205, 208 common man trope 26

communist regimes 19 communitas 174, 203 confession 23–24 Conflict of Nations: Modern War 85 conjecture 34–38 Connerton, Paul 171; How Societies Remember 140 Connor Prairie (Indiana) 122–123, 123 Constantinople, conquest of 144–146 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) 81 Cook, James 35–36, 42–43, 55, 214 copies 20–21 corroboration 2, 36, 39–43 cosplay 206, 208 cotillions 32, 32–33 “Counter Investigations: Forensic Architecture” exhibition (ICA, 2018) 83 covenant chain tradition 118 Coyer, Gabriel-François Abbé: Supplement of Anson’s Voyage 42 craft techniques 67, 70, 77, 120, 172, 183; see also experimental archaeology Crenshaw, Kimberlé 89 crime fiction 60–61 crime scene reenactments 39; suffering 215–217 Crimewatch television show 61 Criticism journal 111 crowd-witnessing 39 Crowell, Steven Galt 156 Crusader Kings (digital game) 84 Cummins, Robert 198 Cushman, Steven 28 Dante (Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri) 143 dark tourism 44–48, 86 Darwin, Erasmus 40 data-sharing platforms 39 Daugbjerg, Mads 26, 181 the dead 30, 37, 38, 45; see also dark tourism Debord, Guy: La Société du Spectacle 17–18 decolonization 116, 158 “delayed performatives” 92 Deller, Jeremy: The Battle of Orgreave 17, 50–51, 114, 134, 141, 152, 154–155, 159, 171; We’re Here Because We’re Here 200 Demnig, Gunter: Stolperstein Projekt 46–47, 48 Demosthenes: “On the Crown” speech 211 Dening, Greg 3, 7, 172 Denmark: World War II reenactments in 76, 77 Denzin, Norman K. 117 Derrida, Jacques 113, 192; Archive Fever 12 Descartes, René 4–5, 34, 40, 59, 195 DeSilvey, Caitlin 13 Diamond, Elin 90 Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations 37 Dickinson, Rod 112; Milgram Reenactment 199–200, 217

256

Index Diderot, Denis: Supplement au voyage de Bougainville 42 “difficult” or “dissonant” heritage see dark tourism digital information and technology 3–4, 14; see also games and gaming digital wargame groups 86; see also games and gaming disability 31 documentary films 12, 49–52, 77; see also individual films documentation as evidence 57 “do it yourself ” (DIY) approach 132 Dolmetsch, Arnold 107, 108 Donington, Robert 107 Doyle, Arthur Conan 61 DuBois, W. E. B.: The Star of Ethiopia 165–166, 167 Ducarel, Andrew Coltee: Anglo-Norman Antiquities Considered in a Tour Through Part of Normandy 102–105, 103 Dunbar, Andrea 51–52 Dungeons and Dragons 208 Durkheim, Émile 138 Dutch VR Days 87 Early Music journal 107 Early Music Revival 106–110 Eastern Europe, artistic reenactments in 19 ecological psychology 87 Edmonds, Penny 5 Ehrmann, Jacques 179 Eisenstein, Sergei: October (film) 26 Elizabeth I (Queen) 165 “embodied documentation” (or “performative documentation”) 18 embodiment: and becoming 33; and bodily features of reenactors 65; defined 31; of gender 90; heritage as 100–101; and Historically Informed Performance 107; in indigenous reenactments 117, 119; and living history performers 121; and presence 131; through wardrobe 63–64; and trauma reenactments 221; see also bodies emotion and affect: and authenticity 53, 55; and confession 23–24; and documentaries 51, 52; eliciting 1, 9; and embodiment 17, 53; and Historically Informed Performance 107–110; of historical persons 54, 55; and historical work 60; individual and collective 59; Magelssen on 8; in performance scholarship 89; performativity of reenactment evoking 171; in reenactments 34, 56; subjective 54–55; through immersion 18 emotionology 54 emplotment 152 empiricism 4–6, 40 enactments, defined 49–50 English Civil War 25, 185 English Heritage organization 100 ephemerality 113

epistemology, conjecture in 34 Ergiessung concept 212 Esmark, Kim 76 esoteric religious movements 204 Eucharist ritual 46, 202, 203 Europe: educational reenactments in 183; second-person interpretation in 207; see also individual countries European Research Council 79 evidence: archival 13–14; bodies as 9, 14–15; and dark tourism 45; definition and overview 57– 62; and digital information 4; and essentialized identities 65; and experience 9; reenactment groups’ approach to 185 Evreinov, Nikolai: Storming of the Winter Palace 16, 26, 135, 152–155 EXARC Journal 70 executions 46 exhibition format 83 Experience, Memory, Reenactment project 16 experience of reenactments 8–9, 22–23, 38, 63–66, 107 experimental archaeology 3, 16, 67–73, 184, 189 expertise and amateurism 71, 74–78 extra-illustration practice (or grangerizing) 100–102, 103, 104, 105 eyewitness observation 4, 35, 38, 40, 152, 155 Eyüp district (Istanbul) 144 FARBs 57, 75–76; see also acting and actors Farrier, David: Dark Tourist 47 Fast, Omer 112 Fauconnier, Gilles 193 Faustian reenactors 5 Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries 103–104 fetishization 18 fiction 2, 36–38; see also individual works fidelity and infidelity 91 Figgis, Mike 134; The Battle of Orgreave 50–51, 154 figural relationships between past and present 143 filter bubble concept 9 Fink, Eugen 179, 181 first- and third-person shooter games (FPS/TPS) 84; see also individual games first-person interpretation 120–122, 170, 206; see also living history first-person perspective digital games 88 Fitzgerald, Penelope 37–38 Flaherty, Robert 49 Flinders, Matthew 42 fog of war motif 23, 28 Forensic Architecture 3, 6, 39, 43, 79–83, 215; and truth claims arising from 215–217 “Forensic Architecture: Towards an Investigative Aesthetics” exhibition (MACBA, 2017) 83 Forster, Edward Morgan 152 Forster, Johann and Georg 35, 36 fort-da (gone-there) principle 46

257

Index Foucault, Michel: on archives 12; disparate sources accessed by 82; on historical meaning 192; parrhesia concept 129; on reenactment studies 7; souci de soi concept 128; on subjectivities and history 64 fourth wall 24 France, experimental archaeology in 68 Franke, Amselm: “Forensis” exhibition (2014) 83 Fraser, Andrea 112 “freezing” dimension of material documentation 18 Freid, David: Nazi VR 215–216, 216 French realist authors 142 French Revolution 153 Freud, Sigmund 41, 46, 138, 190, 222; “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through” 52 Frézier, Amédée-François 42 Future Generations Ride (North America) 118 “Future Shock” (Alvin and Heidi Toffler) 191 Gable, Eric 121, 192 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 179 Galilei, Galileo 67 Gallagher, Catherine 196 Gallanti, Fabrizio 6, 217 games and gaming 3, 58–59, 84–88, 179–180 Games for Change (organization) 87 Gapps, Stephen 23, 108 “garbsnarks” 58; see also stitch-Nazis; “thread counters” Gaza conflict 81–83 gender issues 65, 89–93, 169, 172, 185–186; see also non-binary and trans* persons; women genizot 149 genocide 44, 45, 116, 117, 215–217, 219–223 Germany: dance heritage in 113; National Socialists in 1930s 69, 69; Weimar Republic period 68–69 gesture 94–96 Getty Images 152–153 ghost images 21 Gilbert, Helen 116, 119 Girard, René 128 Giuliani, Rudolf 40 Glassberg, David 165 Gmelin, Felix: Farbtest, Die Rote Fahne II 17 Goldsmiths College (University of London) 79–81 Golin, Steve 166 Goodman, Nelson 151 grand tours 46 Granger, James: A Biographical History of England 104 Gray, Thomas: Elegy in a Country Churchyard 36–37 Greek culture and mythic history 143, 187– 188, 213 Greengrass, Paul: United 93 51

Ground Zero 44 Guggenheim Museum 18 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 130 habitus concept 30–31 Hahne, Hans: Stone Age house (Rössen, Germany) 68–69 Haines, Elizabeth 8 hajj pilgrimage 97–99, 176, 187 Halbwachs, Maurice 138–139 Hall, Stuart 198 Handler, Richard 29, 121, 192 handshake gesture 118 Hanning, Reinhold 215 Hansen, Hans-Ole 71, 72 Harrison, Rodney 101 Hart, Lain 76 Harvey, David C. 101–102 Hauka trance ritual (Ghana) 135 heritage and heritage sites 3, 8, 12, 100–105, 144 heroism 26, 38 Hertford pageants (England) 164–165 Hesse Office for Constitutional Protection (Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz) 82 Heyerdahl, Thor 189–190 high culture and political elites 15 Hinz, Melanie 56 Hirsch, Marianne 148–149 historian’s work 59–60, 78 Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA) 209 “historical faith” of readers 197 Historically Informed Performance (HIP) 3, 106–110; see also music and sound historical meaning, production of 27, 55, 191–194 historical reality television 171, 188–189 Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn journal 111–112 Historic Fort Snelling (United States) 120, 121 history: defining 112; disruptive potential of 66; Hayden White on 143; spectral 156; as unfinished 27; Western linear concept of 135 History Will Repeat Itself project (Berlin and Düsseldorf, 2007) 16, 112 histotainment 72 Hjerl Hede and Lejre (open-air museums, Denmark) 69 HMB Endeavour voyage (2012) 189; see also Cook, James Hobbes, Thomas 4, 34–36, 41; Leviathan 198 Hodge, Robert Lee 197 Hofer, Johannes 157 Hoffman, Adina: Sacred Trash:The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza 149–150 Hole-in-the-Day, William 165 Hollywood 117 Holman Jones, Stacy 5

258

Index Holocaust 148–149, 177, 215; see also World War II Holocaust industry 223 Holtorf, Cornelius 131–132 Homer’s Odyssey 39, 95–96 Hooke, Robert 4, 40 Horace: Ars Poetica 217 Horn, Gabriele 112 Horwitz, Tony 193, 196; Confederates in the Attic 112 House (television show) 63, 65, 112 Hughes, Catherine 193 Hughes-Warrington, Marnie 60 Huizinga, Johan: Homo Ludens 178–179 humanistic approaches 70 human rights 79–80 Hume, David 4, 40 Hunnic culture 204 The Huscarls group 184 “hyper-historians” 122 ideas and imagination 4–5, 34, 37, 38, 40–41, 107–109 identity categories 89–90; see also gender; intersectionality iḥrām clothing 97 immersion 130, 134–136 imperialist nostalgia 158 Indian hobbyists 202–203 indigeneity and indigenous reenactments 26, 115–119, 116, 140, 165, 166, 172, 202–204 indigenous dispossession 65 Indonesia, educational reenactments in 183 Indonesian military coup (1965–1966) 94–95 inductive and deductive methods 67 industrial era 85, 120, 164 injustice, spaces of 39 International Workers of the World (IWW) 166 intersectionality 89–90 Iron Age 77 IRWIN collective (Slovenia) 19 Islamic traditions 126, 174–176; see also hajj pilgrimage Israel, Jews and Palestinians in 223 Israeli Defense Forces 79, 81 Iti, Tame 117, 118 Jackson, Anthony 193 James, Henry: The Bostonians 156 Jane Austen Festival (Bath, UK) 171 Japan 222–223 Jennings, Humphrey 49 Jerusalem as pilgrimage site 174–176 Jesus Christ 1–2 Jewish traditions 126, 127, 147–150, 174–176, 187 jingoism 29 Johnson, Katherine Maree 31 Johnson, Samuel: Rambler papers 36

Kames, Lord 41; Sketches of the History of Man 35–37 Kant, Immanuel 35, 41, 212 Kaprow, Allan: Baggage 19 Karostas Cietums military (Latvia) 45 Kassel investigation (Germany) 82, 83 Kelly, Ann 12 Kelterborn, Peter 71 Kennedy, John F. 51, 201 Kerman, Joseph 107 Kidd, Jenny 193 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 193 Kittler, Friedrich A. 12 Kivy, Peter: Authenticities 108 Kline, Franz 3 Knighton, Tess 108–109 knowledge, reliabile 23 knowledge production 9, 34 Kontejner collective (Croatia) 19 Kon Tiki expedition (1947) 189–190 Kopytoff, Igor: “The Cultural Biography of Things” 131 Kossinnas, Gustaf: folkloric settlement archaeology project (Berlin) 69 Kracauer, Siegfried 136 Krasner, David 166 Kuma/War (digital game) 85 Kurtz, Glenn: Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film 149 Lake Constance (Germany) 72 Landowska, Wanda 107 Landsberg, Alison 47, 160 Landshut Wedding pageant 72–73 Laocoön and his sons 214, 214, 217 Lartet, Eduard 68 Last Supper ritual 2, 187, 202 Latour, Bruno 131, 160 Lebendige Vorzeit (Living Past) exhibition (Berlin, 1937) 69 Lemley, Mark 217 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 113; Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry 217 Lestrade, Jean-Xavier de: The Staircase 50 Lévi-Strauss, Claude: Tristes Tropiques 158 lieux de mémoire concept 11, 139 Life, Once More project 16 Light, Duncan 44 liminal states 203 litigation, reenactments used in 61–62, 215–216 A Little Bit of History Repeated exhibition (Kunstwerke Berlin, 2000–2001) 112 live action role-play (LARP) 3, 72, 170, 178, 206, 208 living history: definition and overview 120–124; education and personal development, serving 71, 181; and evolution of reenactment 3; and

259

Index experimental archaeology 67, 70; historical digital games compared to 87; and modes of being and doing 23; performative approach of 73; scholarly categorizations of 72; see also open-air museums Living in the Past (documentary series) 188 Locard, Edmond 61 Locke, John 4–5, 34, 40–41 Longinus 211; On the Sublime 210 Longo, Robert 112 Lord of the Rings (novels) 207 Lowenthal, David 142, 143–144 Lucretius 40, 42 ludology 179–181 Lunacharsky, Anatoly 153 Lüttiken, Sven 7, 112; Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art 112 Lyotard, François 151 Maccabees 126 Macdonald, Sharon 141 Magellan, F. 42 Magelssen, Scott 8 “magic moments” 27 see “period rush” Makahiki festival (Hawai’i) 35 Making History (digital game) 84 male-dominated ideals 25, 85, 87 Malthus, Thomas Robert 4, 37, 38; An Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society 35 Mama, Alto 91 Manzella, Christina 19 maritime reenactments 42–43 Marker, Chris: The Last Bolshevik 135 marketplace 18 Marsden, Stuart 32 martyrdom 125–129; see also suffering Marx, Karl 12, 187 material culture 30, 63, 101–102, 130–132; see also objects material witnesses 82–83 McCahon, Colin 3 McCalman, Iain 3, 109 Mecca 97–98 mediality 16, 44–45, 112, 133–137 mediation 5, 16–18 medieval hoods 161–162 medieval reenactments 25, 74, 76, 100 memory: as archive 14, 149; in artistic reenactment 17; collective 17, 44, 138–140, 219; and commemoration 11, 138–141; communal 119; as context dependent 61; and contextualizing history 112; cultural 139–140; Errol Morris on 50; Freud on 52; Hobbes on 40; of the Holocaust 47, 148–149, 176; mediation of 154, 200–201; politics of 65; prosthetic 160; and trauma 220 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 30–31

Merrington, Peter 165 metalepsis 24 metaphor 2 miles Christi figure 126 Milgram, Stanley 199–200, 217 mimesis 1–2, 20, 29, 61, 142–146, 198 mimicry 14 Miner’s Strike (Orgreave, South Yorkshire) (1984–1985) 50–51, 134, 152, 154–155 Miniatürk and Vialand parks (Istanbul) 144 Mink, Louis 151 Mise-en-scène 23, 31, 59, 185 Mitchell, William John Thomas 198, 199 mitzvah and memorialization 147–150 mobile museums 184–185 modernity 113, 115, 126–127, 167 Mohammad (prophet) 98 Molyneux, William 40 Mongolian culture 204 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem 41 monuments and muniments 102 More, Thomas: Utopia 43 Morley, Carol: Dreams of a Life 50, 52 Morris, Errol: Standard Operating Procedure 50; The Thin Blue Line 49, 50 Morris, William 101–102 Muhteşem Yüzyıl (Glorious Century) television show 144 Mullen, Gary A. 215 Muñoz, José Esteban 93 museums: art performance reenactments 18; historical digital games compared to exhibitions at 87; and mimetic credibility 20; and museum pedagogues 70–71; participatory programming at 8, 193; see also individual museums Museums 2.0 193 music and sound 3, 8, 13, 60; see also Historically Informed Performance Myall Creek massacre and memorial (Australia) 117 “my time-your time” technique 171 Nagel, Thomas 197 Nakba Day protest (Beitunia, 2014) 82 Namibia, colonial reenactments in 26 Napoleonic Wars 25 narratives: alternative 17; and “dark” events 45; definition and overview 151–155; embodied by reenactors 55; and living history performers 121; nationalist 85; and nostalgia 158; and play 85 Nasielsk (Poland) 149 National Socialists (in 1930s Germany) 69 nature, state of 34–35 Natur und Liebe (silent film) 68 naumachia 25 Nawara, Nadeem 82 “negative evidence” concept 83 Nelles, H.V. 165

260

Index Nelson, Lord 60 Neo-Platonists 34 Network of Experimental Archaeology in Europe (EXARC) 70, 71 Neville, Henry: The Isle of Pines 43 New Salem Historic Site 20–21 New Zealand: colonial reenactments in 26; Land wars (1840s–1860s) 118 Nichols, Bill 49 Nielsen, Carsten Tage 76 Nkanga, Otobong: Baggage reenactment 19 non-binary and trans* persons 91, 91 Nora, Pierre 11, 139 Nordic LARP 208–209 Normandy (France) 102–103 Norsk Folkemuseum (Norway) 120 nostalgia 156–159 Ntuli, Aimée Mica: Cheers to Sarajevo 220–221, 221 objectivity 1, 7, 9, 10, 14 objects and object authenticity 20, 132, 160, 186 Ogden, Charles K. 104 Olick, Jeffrey K. 140 open-air museums 68–70, 77, 120, 170, 206; see also experimental archaeology; living history Oppenheimer, Joshua: The Act of Killing 94–96 “optical unconscious” 134 Orwell, George: 1984 39 Otto, Ulf 5, 7 Ottoman Empire 144 Outback House (television show) 63–64 Owen, Wilfrid 41 ownership, sense of 27 Oxford English Dictionary (OED) 57, 149 Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment 113 Oxford Pageant of Victory 164, 167 Paardekooper, Roland 70 Paddock Wood reenactment (Kent) 47 Paegelow, Dale 80 Pageant and Masque (St. Louis, Missouri) 165, 166 pageantry 8, 72 paidia and ludus 179–181 Pancasila Youth Movement 94 panopticon 216–217 Panorama 1453 museum (Istanbul) 144–146, 145 Pariser, Eli 9 Paris World Exhibition (1867) 67 Parker, Louis N.: The Pageant of Sherbourne 163 Parkerian pageants 163, 167 “participatory politics” 18 passion plays of the Middle Ages 72 Passover ritual 187 pastness concept 131–132 Patchett, Merle 12–13 Paterson Strike Pageant (New York) 166 patriotism 25, 26, 159, 164, 165

Pattrn (multimedia platform) 79 Peirce, Charles Sanders 198 Pennant, Thomas 102 performance and performativity: archives as 13, 13; and contextualizing history 112; critical power of artistic 19; definitions and overview 169–172; and digital games 85; and embodiment 30, 113–114; “evidentiary crisis” of 18; and gender 90, 93; “liveness” of 113; and performance studies 7, 13–14; as research 33; skillful 32–33; see also Historically Informed Performance “performative documentation” (or “embodied documentation”) 18 “period ear” concept 109 “period rush” (or “magic moments”) 23, 27, 29, 63, 76, 181; see also sublime persecution texts 128 Peterson, Michael 50 Petrarch 143–144 Phelan, Peggy 112, 113 Philosophical Transactions journal 40 philosophy of history 60, 135–136, 147 photographs 45, 83 physical environments 14, 31, 47, 62 Pickering, Paul 3, 5, 109 picketing (punishment) 39 Piggott, Stuart 102 pilgrimages 3, 46, 118, 125, 173–177; see also hajj pilgrimage Plato 142, 195, 198, 210; The Republic 4, 211 Platonism 4–5; see also Neo-Platonists play 3, 85, 121, 178–182; see also games and gaming; role-play Plimoth Plantation (Massachusetts) 73, 120, 121, 171, 183 plots and stories 151–152, 155 political bias 29 Pope, Alexander 210 postcolonialism 17, 116 post-conflict resolution 44 Pouncy, Benjamin Thomas 104–105 power and pilgrimages 174, 176 Prague, synagogues in 148 preenactment (or theater therapy) 152–153 presence 15, 37–38, 41–42, 130 presentness 50, 51 primary qualities of the world (theory) 41 “proper imitator” concept 143–144 prosthetic witnessing 47 psychological gesture technique 171 Pufendorf, Samuel von 34 Quintus: Posthomerica 213 Rabinowitz, Paula 50 race and racialization 26, 65, 90, 157, 192; see also African Americans; indigeneity

261

Index Rajk, Lásló xxii, 21–22 Ram Rath Yatra rally (India, 1990) 176 Rancière, Jacques: Le Spectateur Émancipé 18, 19 ranz-des-vaches (Swiss folk song) 157 Rao, Vyjayanthi 14 Rasmussen, M. 71, 72 realism 37, 45, 59, 64, 85–86, 195–197 “reality effect” 86, 192 reality television see historical reality television reconciliation 117, 118, 222 Reed, Jack 166 Reenactment History series 111–112 reenactments: access to history, facilitating 63; artistic approach of 141; and closure 49; dance 113; and distance 200; and distance, creation and erasure of 200; as educational 183, 188; as forced repetition 128; future challenges in study of 8–10; hypothetical 52; interdisciplinary and philosophical approaches to 2–6; internal 40–41; materials accessed in developing 72; in military academies (18th century) 72; overview of 1–2; politicization of 185; practices of 187– 190; queering of 90–93, 91; and reenactment studies 6–8; as rethinking past 135–136; as self-referential performativity 84; sites of 21, 44; study of 111–114; transformative power of 17; “two ‘reals”’ of 109; see also acting and actors Refugee Tales Walk (UK) 176 Regency period 31, 32, 32–33 “Regimentet” reenactment group 77 religious importance of reenactment 1–3; see also Christian traditions; Islamic traditions; Jewish traditions religious sites as heritage sites 173 Renaissance period 143–144 repertoire (in performance) 14, 171 repetition 190, 222 representation 32–33, 198–201 “Resistance 500” task force 222 “restored behaviour” 122, 203 resurrectionism 121 Rethinking History journal 111 “reverse architecture” 217 Reynolds, Daniel P.: Postcards from Auschwitz 45 Reynolds, Peter 71 Richardson, Samuel 197 Ricœur, Paul 136, 142 rituals 2, 140, 182, 187, 202–205; see also hajj pilgrimage Rivers, William Halse Rivers 41 Roberts, Les 14 Robertson, William: History of America 35 Rogers, Samuel 157 Rokem, Freddie 122 role-play 206–209 Roman Catholics 2 Roman-Germanic Central Museum (Germany) 67

Roman reenactments 72 Romantic age 37 Roosevelt, Franklin 35 Rosaldo, Renato 158 Roth, Philip: The Plot Against America 35 Rouch, Jean: Les Maîtres Fous 135 Rouen (France) 102, 104 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 35, 157 Rushton, Steve 17, 153, 154, 200–201 Rwanda: dark tourism in 45; reconciliation plays in 223; genocide in 45 Saalburg Fort (Germany) 72 Saint Benedict 128 Saint Cecilia 127 Saint Demetrius 126 Saint George 126, 126 Saint Sebastian 127 Samuel, Raphael 74, 77–78, 110, 121 Sasse, Sylvia 153 Sassoon, Siegfried 41 satellite imaging 39 Saussure, Ferdinand de 198 Saxton, William 29 Sa’y ritual 98 Scandinavia: experimental archaeology in 67–68; open-air museums in 69 Schaerf, Eran 112 Schechner, Richard 170, 171, 203 Scheer, Monique 53–54 Schiller, Friedrich 178 Schindler, Bill 71, 72 Schlunke, Katrina 117 Schmidt, Robert Rudolf 68 Schmidt, Theron 92–93 Schneider, Rebecca 7, 27, 91, 112–114, 161, 194 Schroeder, Jonathan D. S. 5–6 Schwarz, Anja 5, 7–8, 108 scientific method 67, 83, 191 Scott, Joan W. 7–8, 65 Scott, Walter: The Heart of Midlothian 104 scripted battles 28–29 second-person interpretation 122, 207 secularization 125–126 Sehested, Frederik: “Stone Age” house (Odense area, Denmark) 67–68 the senses 63; sensation, sensory 22, 34, 38, 40–41, 53, 63, 88, 221 Settler and Creole Reenactment 111–112 sex and sexuality 89, 90, 172; see also gender Sfard, Michael 79 Shakespeare, William: King John 37 Shalson, Lara 18 Sherman, Bernard 108 Siberian culture 204 Siege of Sarajevo (1990s) 86 Simpson, Edward (or Flint Jack) 68

262

Index site-specificity 51 Skansen open-air museum (Sweden) 120 slave auction reenactments 45, 185, 222 slavery in the Americas 157, 166 Smith, Adam 37, 96 Smith, Allison: The Muster reenactment 193–194 Smith, Laurajane 193 Smythson, Robert and John 100 Sniper Elite (digital game) 84 Snow, Stephen Eddy 170, 171 Sobchack,Vivian 31 Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) 123, 170, 208 Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) 101–102 Socrates 125 Something Wild (film) 158 Sontag, Susan 113; Regarding the Pain of Others 45 Sooke, Alistair 32 Sophists 210 South Africa: colonial reenactments in 26; historical pageants in 165 South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission 94 Soviet Union: October Revolution 16, 26, 152–153 speech act theory 90; see also Austin, J. L. Spenser, Edmund: The Faerie Queene 100 Sprague, Joey 89 Sprat, Thomas: History of the Royal Society 5 Srebrena krv (Silver Blood) performance 219 Stach, Sabine: Reenactment Case Studies: Global Perspectives on Experiential History 7 stadial theory 35, 38 staging 23 Staley, David 215 Stanislavski, Constantin 171 state-sponsored violence 39, 79–80 St. Dunstan’s Pageant of Peace 167 Steedman, Christina: Dust 12 Stein, Howard 223 Sterne, Laurence 197 Stewart, Kathleen 157 Stewart, Susan 156–158 stitch-Nazis 8, 58, 76; see also “thread counters” Stone Age 72, 184 storage memory 139 Strasberg, Lee 171 strategy games 84, 88 Strauss, Mitchell D. 74–77 Stukeley, William 102 stumbler’s body 47 sublime 210–212; see also “period rush” suffering 126, 213–218; see also martyrdom Sullivan, Catherine 112 supplementation technique 104 Sweet, Rosemary 102, 104

Switzerland: experimental archaeology in 67; lake dwellings in 72 symbols and signs 2–3, 5, 198 “syncopated time” 113 synesthesia 40 tableau vivant genre 163 Tahiti, social structure in 35 Taruskin, Richard: Text and Act 108 Taussig, Michael: Mimesis and Alterity 143 ṭawāf ritual 97–99 Taylor, Diana 14, 119, 171; The Archive and the Repertoire 113 Taylor, Sunaura 31 technological advancements 49, 215; see also digital information and technology television reenactments 23, 39, 63, 171; see also individual shows Temple Mount (al-Ḥaram al-Šarīf ) ( Jerusalem) 174–175, 175 temporality 6, 14, 117 Tertullian 128 thanatourism 45–46 Thatcher, Margaret 154 theater 72, 92–93, 169, 206, 207 Theatre-Style Larp (term) 209 theatrical archives 13 theatricality of historical knowledge 7 third-person interpretation 122 This War of Mine (digital game) 86 Thompson, Edward Palmer 135 Thompson, Jenny 26; Wargames 75–77 “thread counters” 58; see also garbsnarkers; stitch-Nazis Tierra del Fuego, social structure in 35 Tilden, Freeman 191 Time magazine 157 Toby (uncle of R. Hodge) 196 Toffler, Alvin 191 Tomann, Juliane: Reenactment Case Studies: Global Perspectives on Experiential History 7 Tonga, sacrificial rituals in 35 Total War (digital game) 84 Tower of London 207 trauma 41, 114, 219–223 The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman 42 tribal social structures 35 trompe l’oeil paintings 142 Trotsky, Leon: History of the Russian Revolution 135 Trump, Donald 35, 40 truth: in artistic reenactment 17; authority over historical 15; and British interwar pageants 167; and forensic architecture 6; and martyrs 129; and political power 40; and reenactment studies 7, 10; and suffering 215, 217–218; and “truthiness” 23 Tübingen Institute of Prehistory 68

263

Index Turkey: cultural politics in 144; educational reenactments in 183; see also Ottoman Empire Turkle, Sherry 161 Turner, Edith 174 Turner, Mark 193 Turner,Victor 174, 203 Turner Prize 39, 43, 83 Tyson, Amy M. 121 UNESCO’s World Heritage program 101 United Kingdom (UK): Ancient Monuments Act (England, 1882) 101–102; authentic materials, market for 161; educational reenactments in 183; historical pageantry in 163–167; improvisational theater in 206 United States (US): animated reenactments in court 62; authentic materials, market for 161; educational reenactments in 183; Emancipation Proclamation 165–166; first-person interpretation in 207–208; historical pageants in 165; improvisational theater in 206 Unteruhldingen (open-air museum) 68, 72 Uricchio, William 180 US National Parks Service 186, 191 Uthco, T. R.: The Eternal Frame 51, 201 Vancouver, G. 42 Van der Pol, Bik 112 van Gennep, Arnold 203 van Gogh,Vincent 2 Vansina, Jan 139 Verwoert, Jan 17 Victoria (Queen) 207 Victorian age 64, 65, 66 Viking period 25, 184, 184 Viking ship replica 68 Vincent, Joyce 52 violent images 45 Virchowian cultural anthropology 68 Virgil: Aeneid 95, 213–214, 217 virtual reality (VR) 3–4, 10, 58–59, 86, 215–217 visitor management 44 Visser, Barbara 112 Völkerschauen (“ethnographic shows”) 115 Volokh, Eugene 217 von Ranke, Leopold 57 Vorlauf, Dirk 70

Walls, Peter 109 Walpole, Horace: “An Account of the Giants lately discovered” 42; Strawberry Hill 102 wampum belt tradition 118 wardrobes 63–64, 65, 74–76, 97, 110, 121, 172 “wargasm” 27, 196, 212 war psychoses 41 Waterson, Roxana 119 Watkins, Alex 19 Watkins, Peter: La Commune 123 webcams 21 Weizman, Eyal 79, 82; “Forensis” exhibition (2014) 83 Welles, Orson: Citizen Kane 159 Wenzel, Jennifer 158 Wenzel Geissler, P. 12 Werktreue 107 White, Hayden 142, 151–152 White, John 171 white pride sentiment 193 Wieder und wider: Performance Appropriated (Vienna, 2006) 113 Wild West shows 26 Williams, Raymond 7–8, 65; Keywords 57, 195 William the Conqueror 102 Willis, Thomas 42 Wilson, Nick 106, 107 witnessing see eyewitness observation women: in American Civil War reenactments 186, 192–193; bodies of 64, 65, 66; and queering of reenactments 91; as writers 36; see also gender issues World Exhibition (Chicago, 1893) 68 World of Warcraft (digital game) 88 World War I 25, 200 World War II 25, 46–47, 74–76, 77, 84, 185; see also Holocaust Yearbook of Experimental Archaeology 70 Yesh-Gvul (human rights group) 81 Yozgaton, Halit 82 Yugoslavia, former 219 Žižek, Slavoj 158 Żmijewski, Artur: 80064 17

“zoo humans” 115 Zusman, Karen: Hasidim Post Sukkah at Coney Island 148

264