Re-Enacting the Past: Heritage, Materiality and Performance

by Mads Daugbjerg (Editor), Rivka Eisner (Editor), Britta Knudsen (Editor)

Overview

What is re-enactment and how does it relate to heritage? Re-enactments are a ubiquitous part of popular and memory culture and are of growing importance to heritage studies. As concept and practice, re-enactments encompass a wide range of forms: from the annual ‘Viking Moot’ festival in Denmark drawing thousands of participants and spectators, to the (re)staged war photography of An-My Lê, to the Titanic Memorial Cruise commemorating the centennial of the ill-fated voyage, to the symbolic retracing of the Berlin Wall across the city on 9 November 2014 to mark the 25^th anniversary of its toppling.

Re-enactments involve the sensuousness of bodily experience and engagement, the exhilarating yet precarious combination of imagination with ‘historical fact’, in-the-moment negotiations between and within temporalities, and the compelling drive to re-make, or re-presence, the past. As such, re-enactments present a number of challenges to traditional understandings of heritage, including taken-for-granted assumptions regarding fixity, conservation, originality, ownership and authenticity. Using a variety of international, cross-disciplinary case studies, this volume explores re-enactment as practice, problem, and/or potential, in order to widen the scope of heritage thinking and analysis toward impermanence, performance, flux, innovation and creativity.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781138294844
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	06/16/2017
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.69(h) x (d)

About the Author

Mads Daugbjerg is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University, Denmark.

Rivka Syd Eisner is a postdoctoral research fellow with the UFSP Asien und Europa at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Britta Timm Knudsen is Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Communication at Aarhus University, Denmark.

Table of Contents

1. Re-enacting the past: vivifying heritage ‘again’ 2. Re-enacting process: temporality, historicity and the Women’s Liberation Music Archive 3. From a colonial reinvention to postcolonial heritage and a global commodity: performing and re-enacting Angkor Wat and the Royal Khmer Ballet 4. Patchworking the past: materiality, touch and the assembling of ‘experience’ in American Civil War re-enactment 5. Between narratives and lists: performing digital intangible heritage through global media 6. Performing heritage (studies) at the Lord Mayor’s show 7. The time travellers’ tools of the trade: some trends at Lejre 8. Drought and Rain: re-creations in Vietnamese, cross-border heritage