ABSTRACT
Contemporary re-enactment is a large, multifaceted industry, encompassing at one end committed, decidedly individualistic groups and at the other occasional participants engaging in easy leisure activities.1 Re-enactment is not simply warrelated, although a large proportion of it relates to combat (and it is not necessarily ‘genuine’ war-related, with live-action role play of fantasy scenarios increasingly common). It is global, with re-enactment occurring across the world. The membership is generally white, mainly male, and relatively well off in terms of money and time.2 Re-enactment as a collectivised experience is defiantly outside mainstream professional ways of thinking about the past, as Vanessa Agnew argues: ‘Reenactment performs political and cultural work that is quite distinct from more conventional forms of historiography.’3
