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 simulated, 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 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.
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