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.

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).

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 as genuine 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.

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.

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-scene to performances, but the focus on authenticity created other, at times unexpected, issues.

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 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 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

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