Anette Elisabeth Warring

AROUND 1968 – DANISH HISTORIOGRAPHY

This article is divided into three parts. The first part outlines the cultural and political leftist revolt of the 1960s and 1970s in Denmark by presenting the different periodizations linked to various aspects of the revolt and by introducing a variety of perceptions of its causes, course and impact. In the next section, apart from pointing out some of the important lacunae, I provide an overview of the genres and topics that characterise the historiography. Studies of social movements and political parties, for example, are heavily overrepresented. In the third and concluding part, I propose that the thematic and methodological distinction in the historiography between the cultural and political aspects of the revolt should be blurred and deconstructed.

Doing pasts: authenticity from the reenactors’ perspective

Abstract This article investigates how authenticity is construed and negotiated in four different fields of reenactment practice in Denmark (Iron Age, Middle Age, World War II and Francis of Assisi). It first outlines some key theoretical positions within recent international academic debate on reenactment and living history. Taking the viewpoint of the reenactors themselves, the article explores and compares how they create, experience and negotiate authenticity in the very process of imitating and embodying pasts. It transpires that authenticity is articulated, construed and evaluated differently, according, inter alia, to whether the primarily purpose is to learn about the past or rather to learn from the past. For some reenactors, the attempt to get as close as possible to the past connects to an ideal of historical accuracy, a standard from which all replicas and performances are measured. Yet a pragmatic recognition that the past can never be recreated completely is constantly present. For other reenactors, the doing of pasts is a way of accessing experiences and values that are felt to have been lost in modernity. At the same time, however, it is all-important to them that the world they imitate is a past that actually existed and not a fictional universe.