Military reenactment as a topic of contemporary history: theoretical challenges and research problems
Abstract
Military re-enactment, or collective activities aimed at "re-creating" and performing the violent events of past wars and armed conflicts, all in an "authentic" manner using many period artefacts, represents an almost unexplored phenomenon of contemporary history. The activism of military re-enactors has been quite visible for a long time in many areas of the public sphere, such as various memory policies, significant sites of memory, problems of conscription, civil liberties related to the possession of weapons, etc.
How to understand military re-enactment? The author is the leader of an interdisciplinary team (GAČR 22-07058S), which was the first in the Czech Republic to investigate this phenomenon. In his contribution he will focus on two main areas: 1) the necessarily interdisciplinary theoretical approach to the study of military re-enactment, based mainly on post-positivist oral history, re-enactment studies following the so-called "military re-enactment".
Affective turn in the discipline, Koselleck's theory of multilevel temporality, and finally social and cultural anthropology; and 2) on the location of this interdisciplinary approach in the context of the issues under study, especially the problematic historical subjectivity of the re-enactors themselves (i.e., the cultural forms and processes through which they express it).