The research programme Contemporary Enthnography invites all interested to the Academic Hour Seminar:

Past in progress: materiality, touch, and the assembling of 'experience' in American Civil War reenactment - by Mads Daugbjerg.

The seminar takes place on Wednesday, March 13th at 14.15-16.00 in Stakladen, Conference Centre, Meeting room 2.

After the presentation there will be drinks in the Preben Horning room.

Abstract by Mads Daugbjerg:
The article investigates the power of things and materials in the genre of historical reenactment. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among costumed hobbyists reinvigorating the American Civil War, it explores participants’ close connections to specific objects or ensembles of objects, and the crucial role these play in establishing moments of historical ‘experience’ and ‘authenticity’. In doing so, I draw inspiration from studies in materiality and heritage that pay special heed to processes of ‘assembling’ and the establishing of ‘connections’ between human actors, artefacts, and places. I work through a selection of my material from the US Civil War scene in order to address these matters, dividing my exploration into three interrelated clusters. First, I discuss the human-material interweaving or, as I term it, ‘patchworking’, at the heart of these processes. Secondly, I argue that reenactors’ aspirations are fundamentally ‘holistic’ in that they pursue moments of bodily and temporal resonance that go beyond rational learning about history. And thirdly, I suggest that a key attraction of Civil War reenactment is its quality as ‘unfinished business’, an engagement with the past that allows for human and material agency and thus not just for reviving but also for revising selected pasts. As such, it is a ‘past in progress’ that can also be seen, I propose, as an often implicit (but, precisely, enacted) critique-from-below of conventional approaches to learning about and exhibiting history and heritage. In sharp contrast to a classical ‘glass case’ museum paradigm – which also, of course, draws heavily on objects, and celebrates a specific configuration of authenticity – reenactors cultivate an experiential engagement with things that affords a folksier, messier and much more open-ended appreciation of what went before.