Patchworking the past: materiality, touch and the assembling of ‘experience’ in American Civil War re-enactment

Abstract

This article investigates the power of things and materials in the context of historical re-enactment. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among costumed re-enactors reinvigorating the American Civil War, it explores participants’ close connections to specific objects and ensembles of objects and the crucial role awarded to ‘experience’ and ‘touch’ in this genre of relating to the past. It is argued that three interrelated propositions derived from my analysis allow a better understanding of this popular heritage practice: (1) Re-enactment can be understood as a human-material ‘patchworking’ process, (2) Re-enactment comprises a ‘holistic’ enterprise and (3) A key motivation in re-enactment derives from its ‘unfinishedness’. By attending to these dimensions through a detailed analysis that takes the role of objects and their experiential potential seriously as going beyond ‘representation’, I argue that the re-enacted Civil War serves as an often implicit and non-verbal – but, precisely, enacted – critique of conventional approaches to learning about and exhibiting history and heritage, such as those epitomised by the conventional museum.

Keywords:

• materiality
• touch
• experience
• connectivity
• the American Civil War

Notes

1. The Chestertown ‘tea party’ is the name of a historical incident inspired by the more famous 1773 Boston Tea Party (from which the contemporary American populist/political movement takes its name). It refers to the rebellious actions taken by local Marylanders in response to the British Tea Act, which introduced taxes on tea imported from Britain into the American colonies, raising money for the Imperial motherland. On 23 May 1774, a band of Chesapeake patriots, following the Boston example, forced their way onto a British brigantine and dumped its cargo of tea into the Chester River.

2. http://www.chestertownteaparty.org/. Accessed 7 March, 2012.

3. This is not Warren’s real name. All informant names in this paper have been changed for purposes of anonymity.

4. Earlier landmark studies include Anderson (1984), Handler and Saxton (1988), Snow (1993), Bruner (1994), Samuel (1994), Crang (1996), Handler and Gable (1997), Horwitz (1998), Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998).

5. The ethnographic fieldwork informing this article was conducted over the spring and summer of 2010. It entailed basing myself in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, for a five-month period, during which I investigated and took part in various branches of the local and regional Civil War industry, including joining one of the many groups that conduct historical re-enactment in the area.

6. Thompson describes how the World War I and II re-enactment scene is dominated by a similar belief that the ‘real and common stories of war have been buried by inadequate educational systems, distorted by Hollywood, and silenced or lost by the veterans themselves, especially as veterans die off with their stories unheard’ (2004, 91).

7. In a broader argument on tourism as a ‘self-finding’ practice, Neumann has suggested that while many tourist sites may be materially inauthentic, they are nevertheless places where people work toward ‘selfrealization’ and meaning, ‘attempting to fill experiential vacancies that run through contemporary life’ (Neumann 1992, quoted in Oakes 2006, 239). The literature on authenticity as a core concept of modernity is vast. Classics include Trilling (1972) and Taylor (1991); for some influential signposts within tourism and heritage studies, see MacCannell (1973), Clifford (1988), Cohen (1988), Bruner (1994), Wang (1999), Hall (2006), Knudsen and Waade (2010). For an useful overview, see Lindholm (2008).

8. The terms ‘farb’ and ‘farby’ are used in derogatory fashion to refer to re-enactors or elements considered inauthentic, lacking or out of place, typically used to frown upon those with a historically incorrect impression or attitude. Nobody seems to know exactly where the term stems from, although some say it derives from the phrase ‘far be it authentic’. See Thompson (2004, 212–215), Amster (2007, 18), Hart (2007, 111).

9. This may be likened to the Lévi-Straussian notion of ‘bricolage’ (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 21), with the important difference that this term, for Lévi-Strauss, described a ‘science of the concrete’ (ibid., 1–33) operating strictly on the mental and symbolic level; where ‘the concrete’, in other words, was utilised in the service of thinking and not appreciated for its material or experiential capacities per se.

10. Such moments of felt temporal resonance are also sometimes referred to as ‘period rush’ or ‘Civil War moments’. See Handler and Saxton (1988, 245–246), Agnew (2004, 330), Thompson (2004, 167–173), Amster (2007, 19–24), Schneider (2011, 39–42).

11. Here I am inspired by Schneider’s note: ‘The fight to get the times right – to touch the Civil War – was for many [reenactors] an effort to go back to an idealised time, and the drive to authenticity was a drive to an authenticity that should have been, according to reenactors’ interpretations, not necessarily an authenticity that was’ (2011, 55, italics in original).

12. On the cultural power of the Lost Cause, see also Savage (1997, 129–161), Blight (2001, 255–299), Goldfield (2002), Brundage (2005), Carmichael (2011). The Lost Cause, according to Blight, ‘came to represent a mood, or an attitude towards the past. It took hold in specific arguments, organizations, and rituals, and for many Southerners it became a natural extension of evangelical piety, a civil religion that helped them to link their sense of loss to a Christian conception of history’ (2001, 258).

13. http://www.civilwargatheringofeagles.com/about.html. Accessed 13 March 2012. The conflict known in most accounts as the American Civil War goes under many different names. Most Americans simply call it the Civil War, though a few refer to the ‘War of the [Southern] Rebellion’. Among sympathisers with the Confederate cause, the ‘War Between the States’ is the preferred term – implying a rejection of the label ‘Civil War’ since the conflict, in such a perspective, was not fought between two parties belonging to the same state – although the ‘War for Southern Independence’ or even ‘The War of Northern Aggression’ are also sometimes heard. Some of my informants semi-jokingly referred to the conflict as the ‘Second War of Independence’ (following in the wake of the American War of Independence fought against Great Britain 1775–1783).

14. http://www.civilwargatheringofeagles.com/about.html. Accessed 13 March, 2012.

15. On the argument over the role of slavery vs. states’ rights as primary causes for secession and thus for the Civil War, see Finkelman (2011), Loewen (2011).

16. In his analysis of the early memorialisation of the Civil War, Savage (1997, 131) proposes that ‘the fundamental effect of [retrospectively] installing Lee as the South’s premier representative [rather than Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States] was that it depoliticized the Confederacy after the fact. With Lee as the major historical actor, the story of the Lost Cause became a glorious military record rather than a political struggle to secure a slaveholding nation’.

17. In this particular case, and as an exception, I use the real name of the artist, since his business, performances and products are publically available and promoted, primarily through the internet. See http://www.stanclardy.com/. Accessed 25 March 2012.

18. http://www.stanclardy.com/web_site_revised_4_2011_002.htm. Accessed 22 March 2012.

19. http://www.stanclardy.com/web_site_revised_4_2011_003.htm. Accessed 22 March 2012.

20. On ‘historical reality’ considered as a ‘stowaway’ passenger in historical writing, ‘as what is absently and unintentionally present on the plane of time’, see Runia (2006b, 27).