39 PRACTICES OF REENACTMENT

Alexander Cook

Reenacting the past is a widespread human activity that takes diverse forms and serves a variety of purposes. When people think of reenactment today, many consider it an eccentric hobby that involves dressing up in period clothes and playing out a reconstruction of historical events—a battle, voyage, or moment of political crisis.

It is often associated with escapist fantasy, nostalgia, and an acute interest in the minutiae of material culture in the olden days. To some it seems to be a peculiarly modern or even postmodern practice, reflecting a sense of contemporary alienation and longing for lost community. While forms of historical reenactment have proliferated in recent decades and reflect aspects of popular culture in many places in the world, reenactment is by no means a recent invention.

Viewed anthropologically, reenactment can be seen as a deeply embedded part of human cultural life in many societies over the longue duree. Wherever behavior is codified, ritualized, and repeated, forms of reenactment can be said to be involved. In this sense, historical reenactments have been central to the establishment and sacralization of political authority for centuries across the globe, from Asia and the Pacific to Europe, Africa, and the Americas. They are embedded in the symbolism of coronations, rituals of office, and formal state events which seek to establish the historical continuity of governance. In zones of contested sovereignty, from Northern Ireland and the Balkans, to Australia or the United States, forms of reenactment can serve as devices for asserting or disputing ethnic rights (Agnew and Lamb, 2009). At times of political upheaval and innovation, forms of reenactment can also serve to sanction new arrangements. Revolutions are often accompanied by the semiotics of restoration, by allusions to the deep past and invocations of ancient precedent as Karl Marx famously observed (Marx, 2000 [1852], pp.

329-331). Reenactments are also integral to religious life. For Jews, the rituals of Passover involve a symbolic reenactment of the dietary experience of Exodus from Egypt. In Christian communities, reenactments from the Last Supper are played out every Sunday as members of the congregation take Holy Communion. Among Muslims, the hajj can be thought of as a ritual of reenactment that, via an act of anamnesis, makes the past and the future present to the observer (hajj; ritual; pilgrimage). Reenactment has also long played a significant role in popular culture. Scenes from the Trojan War and other episodes of Greek mythic history were regularly performed in the theatres of Athens. Epic battles from the recent or distant past provided a narrative frame for gladiatorial combat in the Roman colosseum (Auget, 2012). Traditionally, and indeed today, practices of reenactment may be conducted to appease the Gods, to expiate sin, to commemorate the achievements of ancestors, to assert authority, to promote social unity, or to transmit technical knowledge between generations. Reenactment may combine several of these functions.

In its most familiar forms, historical reenactment today involves a variety of groups ranging from enthusiastic amateurs to state-funded performers and professional scholars. The purposes of reenactment can also range from the deeply personal to the educational to the aggressively political. At the amateur end, across the globe, any given weekend will see groups of dedicated reenactors gathering in groups to perform renaissance dance, to recreate medieval hymnody, to reconstruct garments using original methods, to prepare food, to wear the shoes that their ancestors might have worn—both figuratively and literally. Such reenactors often share a deep commitment to historical authenticity in matters of appearance, deportment, speech, and so on. Often, they will seek to recreate specific events from the past: famous battles or other moments of communal significance.

At other times, they reconstruct more generic phenomena: charivari (mock parades involving rough music), feasts, tournaments, and the like. In many cases, reenactors simulate forms of bodily experience from the past through acts of self-discipline and self-fashioning: dietary privation and bodily restraint, such as corsetry, are widely practiced, as is the alteration of hair and sometimes even bodily marking and piercing among more extreme acolytes (suffering). In some cases, reenactors role-play specific characters from the past, researching their lives, reading their words, and seeking to inhabit their mental space as far as possible. The internal culture of reenactment communities values deep historical knowledge in matters of daily life and material culture, technical skills that facilitate creative reconstruction such as needlework or swordsmanship, and a heroic commitment to the physical hardship associated with “authentic” recreation (expertise and amateurism) (Gapps, 2009). In this sense, the practices of reenactment combine the intellectual with the somatic and the kinetic. Time in the library (or, increasingly, on the internet) supplements processes of physical discipline and acts of endurance. Many reenactors maintain, moreover, that the somatic aspects of reenactment—the act of creating and wearing period clothes, for example, or of learning to sail a tall ship—facilitate insights into the past unavailable in other ways. While many academic historians view such claims with skepticism, recent scholarship illustrates some openness to ideas of this kind (Johnson, 2015b).

For educational purposes, reenactment is sometimes used to “bring history to life”—either as visual spectacle for an audience or as emotional experience for participants. In simple forms it serves in classrooms, from primary school upwards, as a device for engaging students, inviting them to make an imaginative leap that, its advocates hope, will lay foundations for historical empathy and understanding.

For similar reasons, it has become a popular device within historical film and documentary. In this context, reenactment can range from the traditional device of using paid actors to simulate events and recite speeches to provide relief from the monotony of talking heads, to a more systematic attempt to recreate the supposed “experience” of the past for participants under observation (living history). A range of documentaries have sought to engage audiences by subjecting modern volunteers to the rigors of life in past ages. A pioneering version of such programs was the series Living in the Past (1978), which invited a group of participants to experience life in the iron age for the delectation of viewers. Such programs proliferated in the new millennium, particularly in the Anglophone world and Germany, where they have included such projects as retracing James Cook's first Pacific voyage (The Ship, 2002), experiencing trench warfare on the Western Front (The Trench, 2002), life in a Canadian gold rush (Klondike: The Quest for Gold, 2003), exploring the social mores of Jane Austen's England (Regency House Party, 2004), or, more recently, subjecting participants to the trials and tribulations of life in an early Victorian tenement (Victorian Slum House, 2016). The success of the genre has

Practices of reenactment

seen it gain its own label, “historical reality television,” reflecting a habitual fusion of historical data, observational film, and the voyeurism of contemporary “reality” programing (Figure 39.1).

Within historical filmmaking, reenactment often serves two purposes: it is used as a pedagogical tool, but producers often claim that it can also serve as an investigative method in its own right. There can be no doubt that visiting sites of memory, or even simulating the bodily experience of a past era, can only take us so far in recapturing its mental world (memory and commemoration). Despite these obvious caveats, practices related to reenactment have played a significant role in recent enquiries into the past.

In particular, the reconstruction and use of period technology and material culture has contributed to recent historiography of science and technology, arts and crafts, engineering, and so on. Often this has taken the form of “experiments”—attempts to determine what can be achieved with certain technology, to reconstruct manufacturing processes or examine the long-term consequences of agricultural practices on soil quality, for example. The subfield of experimental archaeology is devoted to research of this kind, its practitioners attempting to reconstruct past practices for everything from stone tool construction to ceramics, building, and burial. One early and controversial example of such experiments was the Kon Tiki expedition of Thor Heyerdahl (1947), in which the Norwegian adventurer and scholar attempted to prove the viability of human settlement of the deep Pacific from the Americas by sailing a balsa wood raft eastward from Peru. Despite the success of the expedition in demonstrating the technological and geographical feasibility of such settlement, the majority of scholars today reject Heyerdahl’s hypothesis of American origins for the

Figure 39.1 The author at work: voyaging to observe the Transit ofVenus at Lord Howe Island in 2012, on board the replica of HMB Endeavour.This voyage was a reenactment of Captain James Cook’s First Voyage, mounted by the Australian National Maritime Museum. Source: Australian National Maritime Museum collection.

Polynesians, citing linguistic, archaeological, and anthropological evidence for settlement from Asia. Heyerdahl’s experiment illustrates one broader limitation of experimental archaeology— demonstrating that something can be done is not proof that it was done. Nonetheless, experimental archaeology is now widely considered a legitimate subfield of research that can shed useful light on specific issues (Outram, 2008).

Reenactment is a flexible concept that has been applied to an enormous range of human activities ranging from solemn religious ritual, to scholarly technique, to casual pastime. In this sense, reenactment is a term that can be, and has been, deployed within a range of different idioms to describe very different practices. Despite the professional skepticism about reenactment felt by many historians, the influential 20th-century philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood argued that reenactment lies, or should lie, at the heart of all historical thinking and research. In his eyes, historians’ ultimate goal is to “re-enact” the thought of past actors in their own minds and thus to create inter-temporal understanding (Collingwood, 1994 [1946], pp. 39, 444-451). For Collingwood, reenactment was not the physical recreation of a scene, or the public performance of an event, but a kind of mental practice, based on the philological reconstruction of the original meaning of texts and the contexts in which they were created. It was an act of imaginative engagement informed by rigorous scholarly protocols. Other disciplines use the concept of reenactment in quite different ways. In psychoanalysis, for example, the concept of reenactment has long been tied to the pathologies of human development. From Sigmund Freud’s early comments on “repetition compulsion,” psychoanalysts have seen the patterns of repetition in individual lives, and sometimes in societies as a whole, in terms of an impulse to return to formative experiences (Freud, 2003 [1920]). Increasingly, that phenomenon has been conceptualized in terms of the link between reenactment and trauma. These two examples alone highlight some fundamental contrasts between different conceptions of reenactment. For Collingwood, reenactment was a conscious, purposive, and investigative activity linked to the human desire for knowledge. For Freud and many of his followers, reenactment is a compulsive, largely unconscious, behavior that reflects psychological distress—it is a symptom of unresolved stress.

In some ways, these uses of the term reenactment take us a long way from its common association with the performative recreation of aspects of the past. In others, however, they serve to highlight issues that remain pertinent to scholars who seek to understand the social significance that reenactment can hold in many of its forms. Certainly, many practices of reenactment today contain some investigative component, where participants seek to learn something about the past through acts of creative reconstruction. Some reenactments also seek to work through traumatic aspects of the past, performing a therapeutic role for communities trying to live with difficult histories (production of historical meaning). In both endeavors, success is often a subject of ongoing dispute. Thus, historical reenactments, like many practices that seek to bring the past into imaginative dialogue with the present, remain contested ground both between communities and within them.

39 PRACTICES OF REENACTMENT

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