Reenactment studies as an emerging field
We have seen that reenactment challenges established disciplinary approaches and crosses disciplinary boundaries. Notwithstanding the difficulties associated with grasping the object of inquiry, reenactment studies is emerging as a new field.
Increasing numbers of scholars identify themselves as belonging to this community of scholars whose ramifying network of techniques and theories is providing new material and new insights into its importance. There is growing consensus about norms of data collection and interpretation, albeit ones that draw on methods, modes of inquiry, and intellectual objects from other fields. There is, moreover, increased institutional support for conducting research, training students, and disseminating and archiving new knowledge via dedicated conferences, meetings, professional organizations, and journals. While colleges and universities in Europe and the Anglophone world have yet to appoint a chair of reenactment studies, this remaining designator of institutional credibility cannot be far off. It can be predicted that within the coming decade, the first department of reenactment studies will begin admitting students.Establishing reenactment studies as an interdisciplinary transnational endeavor will bring a desirable rigor to the field and establish new benchmarks for valid and useful scholarship. This will facilitate communication and cooperation between reenactment studies and other fields. At the same time, it might be asked whether, as Foucault suggests, something might not be lost through the disciplining of the field. At the very least, we can say that reenactment's sometimes productive, often antagonistic relationships with traditional historiography and public history stand to change. We can predict that Anglo-American modes of inquiry will be less likely to dominate the field, as they have up until now, and that the national particularities that currently govern reenactment scholarship will be subject to processes of homogenization—a thesis that is tested in Reenactment Case Studies: Global Perspectives on Experiential History, co-edited by Vanessa Agnew, Juliane Tomann, and Sabine Stach. As Otto suggests, in the past decade, reenactment has moved beyond its “constitutional phase” and perceptions of the field have shifted. Reenactment is no longer to be regarded as an “amateur pastime,” but rather as a field with a “stable epistemic object,” as a “subject of theory that promises to contribute new knowledge.” At this critical juncture in the emergence of reenactment studies, it is worth asking how we would like the future of the field to look: what questions do we, as scholars of reenactment (or as sometime reenactors), want to pose, what new knowledge do we want the field to contribute, and what institutional forms do we want the field to assume?