Conclusion
If the field of reenactment studies intends to develop general findings about experientially based knowledge-making in its glocal expressions, the case studies in this volume show how promising, yet also challenging, this aim might be.
The volume is underscored by a desire to investigate the extent to which the phenomenological characteristics and modes of inquiry evince similarities and differences across national borders and between academic traditions. Under investigation are the questions of which research discourses are held in common, how theoretical frameworks and terms translate and migrate, and where the analysis is determined by national12 Vanessa Agnew, Sabine Stach, and Juliane Tomann particularities and where it is not (or no longer). Positing that national concepts would be subject to a process of gradual homogenization, the case studies suggest a mixed conclusion. On the one hand, the studies in this volume reveal the continued dominance of Anglo-American research modes; on the other hand, these reenactment analyses make apparent just how strong the imprint of national academic traditions nonetheless remains.Having said this, it is worth noting our inherent positionalities and the shaping nature of our institutional contexts: most of the contributions to this volume stem from researchers who received their academic training and socialization in Europe, the United States, and the Commonwealth, making our window on global reenactment far from comprehensive. The studies of reenactment in Indonesia, Cambodia, Japan, and China, for example, cannot claim to represent an autochthonous perspective, while reenactments in the Subcontinent, Africa, and Central America are not treated at all. The volume thus provides only a piecemeal approach to what may be thought of as a global phenomenon. Here, a practical dilemma of many global projects emerges, a dilemma that is not limited to reenactment studies: how can researchers engage in conversations across disciplinary and geographic boundaries if they do not agree on common terms? The difficulty posed by a lack of shared terminology is exacerbated by the fact that access to specialized academic tools, including literature, libraries, and archives, is not equally available. Within the context of reenactment studies, this discrepancy is twofold: it concerns the gap that exists between scholars in the Global North and those of the Global South as well as the cleft that sometimes arises between practitioners of reenactment and academic researchers.
R.
G. Collingwood, whose views on reenactment in The Idea of History hinged on the assumption of the past’s unfamiliarity to the present, argued that history qua reenactment was not tantamount to equating historical exegesis with the spectacle of past lived experience (1946). Rather, the purpose of reenactment, loosely defined, was—as Chandler and others point out—to mediate the distance between past and present via the historian’s imaginative and reflective capabilities. Yet, as Paul Pickering (2020) argues in relation to Collingwood, and pace Chandler, this could also involve an element of the experimental and experiential. Historical understanding, with its associated problems of evidence, perspective, interest, and reckoning, could be tackled by attempting to do things over in an intellectual as well as material, bodily, and affective way. Adopting this charge, reenactment studies might seek to go beyond local case studies to investigate the global moment of experiential history itself. They might do so not in order to assign proprietary or originary claims to historical knowledge-making and the role of the reenactor-historian but to examine the ways in which reenactment can reveal common forms of experience that remind us of a shared present and of the potential for a shared future.