Description
To the question what motivates them, historical reenactors generally have two answers: one is related to memory and refers to keeping the past alive; the other is related to the ‘thrill’ of being ‘immersed’ in the past while reenacting a historical event. Often referred to as the ‘period rush’, this experience is generally recognized, but treated with suspicion by scholars. After all, being led by irrational motivations may result in a mythification of the past in reenactments (Apel 2012). The emphasis on immersion adds to the often-heard scholarly assessment that historical reenactments are rather poor examples of historical representation (De Groot 2011). While understanding historical re-enactment as a form of ‘affective history’ (Agnew 2007; McCalman and Pickering 2010), this papers offers a different approach to the ‘period rush’: it aims at conceptualizing the phenomenon in the framework of Johan Huizinga’s and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s theories of play (Huizinga 1949; Gadamer 2004). By applying ludic theory it is shown that the immersiveness of the ‘period rush’ need not be understood as a being immersed in the past itself, but as a being immersed in the play of the reenactment. Highlighting the play-element of historical re-enactments will show that they often function as historical simulations – operationalized models of historical reality and of the behaviour of historical actors – rather than as mere representations of the past. In this way this paper aims at constituting an analytical framework for the interpretation of immersion in the context of historical re-enactment that acknowledges that we are not dealing with the past itself, but with its traces.| Period | 1 Nov 2018 |
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| Event title | Conference Historical Reenactment and New Ways of Enacting History: Interdisciplinary Dialogues |
| Event type | Other |
| Location | MadridShow on map |
Research programs
- ESHCC HIS