Plimoth Plantation provided a rather high-profile example of the volatility and contingency of this kind of work when, after the economic downturn in 2008, it “ riffed” most of its curatorial staff in an attempt to stay afloat economically. Those without any job security – people in the ever-growing ranks of “contingent” workers within the academy and other areas of the knowledge industry – have far more reasons to be leery. But even those relatively secure knowledge workers were reluctant to expose their occupational lives too directly to the sharp realities of the postindustrial cultural marketplace. I was looking largely at full-time employees within the National Park Service, which is probably the closest equivalent to the tenured professoriate that exists in public history.
As I looked around the public historical world, I saw a pattern of drawing lines around “history” that tended to stop short of historicizing or problematizing the kinds of tourism, branding, and economic redevelopment efforts that public historians’ work is so often embedded within. To my eye, this neutered the critical historical insights that they were intellectually fully capable of making, something that Richard Handler and Eric Gable have also noted in the case of interpreters at Colonial Williamsburg. I saw similar demographics and motivations at work in these interpreters, and although they were decidedly more left-leaning and overtly critical of capitalism than the reenactors, they were also generally unwilling to risk the relative security of their jobs and professions by bringing their critiques too directly into their working lives.
#Olde tyme marketplace professional
That moved me into studying historical interpretation as a professional endeavor, which I did through an ethnographic study of public historians at a large urban national park. This made the weekend refuge something more permanent, but also brought it back into closer contact with the realities of the postindustrial American economy, in which knowledge, service, experience, and cultural production of all kinds are increasingly gobbled up into revenue-generating projects. I did, though, encounter quite a number of younger Gen X and Gen Y reenactors who were becoming more professional about their avocation and finding ways to turn it into an occupation, usually at places like Plimoth Plantation and other living history sites. Reenactors created a weekend refuge rather than a resistance movement, which gave them a sense of having escaped temporarily from the modern capitalist world rather than having to mount any kind of direct challenge to it. In this case, it was framed within an explicitly avocational world. I came away from that with a sense of reenactment as a highly complex response to and expression of ambivalence about many things in contemporary society – for example, changing gender roles, the uneasy patriotisms and nationalisms of the post-Vietnam era, and the iconic figure of the American citizen-soldier.īut through all of this there was also a strand of ambivalence about the broader effects of capitalism and modernity, and I came to see reenactment within a much longer history of anti-modernism. My trajectory as a scholar started with studying historical (mostly military) reenactment in the 1990s. I’m going to talk about Plimoth in relation to two terms: “occupation” (and re-occupation) and “refuge,” in both its social/spiritual sense and in the biological sense of refugium, or an isolated place that provides specialized conditions and habitat for species that can no longer survive elsewhere. So I’ll try to show why that all connects, and what emerging meanings and uses it suggests to me for this place, the myths associated with it, and the tensions and knowledge embodied in those myths.
and we were without power for several days this week after getting nearly two feet of snow just before Halloween. It was particularly interesting to do this because I was doing a lot of it by candlelight. Plenary session remarks at New England American Studies Association Conference, Plimoth Plantation, Plymouth, MAĪ place like Plimoth Plantation is always good to think with, but I’m particularly glad to have been asked to reflect on it now, because as I thought about it this past week, I realized that it let me integrate things I’ve been considering over the whole course of my 20-year intellectual trajectory, which I’ll try to compress as ruthlessly as possible into a few minutes here.
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