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 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 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.

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. 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.

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.

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-scene, what appears to be an insoluble equation vis-a-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 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).

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 man- of-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 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 ungelost [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 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.