Re-Enacting the Past: Heritage, Materiality and Performance - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1138941867 ISBN 13: 9781138941861

Publisher: Routledge, 2015

Synopsis

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 25th 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.

About this title

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1138941867
• ISBN 13: 9781138941861
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 152
• Editor: Daugbjerg Mads, Eisner Rivka, Knudsen Britta