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
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-than- human. 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
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 melange 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.