09-15-2003, 03:56 PM
I'm not a scholar, nor a re-enactor, and I hope therefore I'm fairly neutral in all this, but your last statements worry me:<br>
<br>
"Academia is way too hidebound... If I only wanted to know what "scholars" thought, I'd just read the books and not reenact."<br>
<br>
Surely scholars are experts, the people who have read the primary sources, viewed the art, and discovered as much as they can about the subject; written books (usually for love of the subject, not money) to put that knowledge into the public domain. Where would re-enactment be without such scholars?<br>
<br>
Surely the point of re-enactment is to emulate, to the best of the current state of knowledge, the practices and thought processes of people of the past? In the process, re-enactors (who are also often scholars themselves) feed back information to the scholars, testing academic theories and postulating new ones.<br>
<br>
But a re-enactor surely cannot run too far in advance of what is known or reasonably extrapolated from the existing evidence, because then they are not re-enacting, but speculating. So, for example, a re-enactor might well be able to suggest how a particular excavated artefact might best be used in the light of wearing a replica, but cannot invent a whole new artefact which "they must have used; my common sense tells me so."<br>
<br>
I am a teacher of ancient history; everything I say to a class is labelled either as supported by the primary sources, to which I refer them, or as my own unverifiable opinion. I cannot allow myself or my pupils to confuse the two. If being constrained by the sources is being "hidebound", then call me hidebound.<br>
<br>
Forgive me if I am being dense or missing something; as I say, I'm neither a scholar or a re-enactor.<br>
<br>
Shaun <p></p><i></i>
<br>
"Academia is way too hidebound... If I only wanted to know what "scholars" thought, I'd just read the books and not reenact."<br>
<br>
Surely scholars are experts, the people who have read the primary sources, viewed the art, and discovered as much as they can about the subject; written books (usually for love of the subject, not money) to put that knowledge into the public domain. Where would re-enactment be without such scholars?<br>
<br>
Surely the point of re-enactment is to emulate, to the best of the current state of knowledge, the practices and thought processes of people of the past? In the process, re-enactors (who are also often scholars themselves) feed back information to the scholars, testing academic theories and postulating new ones.<br>
<br>
But a re-enactor surely cannot run too far in advance of what is known or reasonably extrapolated from the existing evidence, because then they are not re-enacting, but speculating. So, for example, a re-enactor might well be able to suggest how a particular excavated artefact might best be used in the light of wearing a replica, but cannot invent a whole new artefact which "they must have used; my common sense tells me so."<br>
<br>
I am a teacher of ancient history; everything I say to a class is labelled either as supported by the primary sources, to which I refer them, or as my own unverifiable opinion. I cannot allow myself or my pupils to confuse the two. If being constrained by the sources is being "hidebound", then call me hidebound.<br>
<br>
Forgive me if I am being dense or missing something; as I say, I'm neither a scholar or a re-enactor.<br>
<br>
Shaun <p></p><i></i>