Dyssimulation: Reflexivity, Narrative, and the Quest for Authenticity in “Living History”

Abstract

has been defined as simulation of life in another time. That definition is taken from Jay Anderson (1985:3, 459), a folklorist who has aimed both to document the existence of a living-history (principally in North America, but also in Europe) and to legitimate living history as a scholarly subdiscipline. Under the term living history Anderson (1984) groups three types of historical simulation, associated with museums, archeology, and reenactments. Though it was in Anderson's work that we first learned of the term living history (Handler 1987), the present article will neither treat living history as a bounded movement or discipline, nor pass judgment as to what should be included under that term. Rather, our concern with so-called living history is part of an ongoing exploration of how people currently use a discourse drawn from the human sciences to make sense of their lives and experiences. The present article develops three interpretive observations concerning living history. First, a dominant concern of all living-history practitioners whom we have studied is authenticity. Living historians explicitly define authenticity as isomorphism between a living-history activity or event, and that piece of the past it is meant to re-create. In other words, the natives consciously understand authenticity as perfect simulation. However, our analysis shows the relevance of a second conception of authenticity, one that permeates living history but is not consciously understood by practitioners as central to the task of historical simulation. This implicit conception of authenticity concerns the privileged reality of individ-