Re-enactment's (em)bodying of history

Abstract

Despite academic protestations, re-enactment is a highly popular mode of public history, in museums, official festivals, documentaries, movies, hobby groups and even school education programs. It is also, perhaps against our will, emerging in numerous academic fields as a salient (albeit problematic) topic of analysis. Particularly amongst historians, however, it remains on the fringe, held at arm’s length, the charismatic, but troubled (and troubling) relative. This dissertation questions some of the academic preconceptions regarding re-enactment, analysing the experiential, performance based and embodied aspects of the practice as areas of significant potential. How can we further elucidate the possibilities and pitfalls of re-enactment for learning about the past, and present? In what ways should/could we understand the affect and effects of such embodied sources? The increasingly interdisciplinary nature of academia encourages us to utilise theories and methods from multiple disciplines, to complement, and address the limitations of each. I do so by utilising historiography, anthropology, philosophy and performance studies theory to comparatively analyse the historical sensibilities, methods and issues of specific case studies of recreational re-enactment: Danelaw Medieval Fighting Society in Sydney, Australia; the Earthly Delights Historic Dance Company in Canberra, Australia; and the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, Britain. This comparative assessment follows individual ethnographies, which consider themes that emerged in the fieldwork with each; and how these groups/events perceive and approach the golden chalice and Achilles heel of re-enactment: authenticity - a notion that I return to throughout this document.