Petra Tjitske Kalshoven

Moving in time, out of step: mimesis as moral breakdown in European re-enactments of the North American Indian Woodland

What constitutes a dance step executed just right? Does its success reside in its faithfulness to an ‘original’ model or script or in a feeling experienced by the dancer interpreting the model in a new context? This is the kind of epistemological, and moral, dilemma that was often voiced during my fieldwork amongst Indianists, amateurs involved in re-enactment of Native American lifeworlds on European soil. In Indianism, museum-quality replicas made by and worn on European bodies function as heuristic tools in exploring ‘what life was really like’ in other times and places. Focusing on Woodland Indianist performances and replicas in a variety of European settings, I suggest that Indianism, as an amateur engagement with re-imaginings and reifications of the North American Indian, faces constant moral breakdown because of its unease with the transformative nature of mimesis.

The World Unwraps from Tiny Bags: Measuring Landscapes in Miniature

Taking its cue from the combination of life-size and miniature re-enactment that takes place in living history settings, this paper explores human play with scale, focusing in particular on what happens when historical and fantasy figures are made to dwell in miniature landscapes. I discuss relations between modellers and the miniatures that they display in dioramas or manipulate in war games, drawing on multi-sited fieldwork leading up to a small-scale exhibition I organised in Aberdeen in 2008. Taking issue with a discourse of disenchantment in modernity, which has led to a renewed interest in embodied human presence in a material world, I argue that the pleasure that modellers derive from miniature landscaping is a quintessentially contemporary pleasure that owes as much to contact and immersion in materials as to a distancing and abstracting from the miniature terrain through different forms of measurement and layers of representation. This interplay between closeness and distance is brought into sharper focus through discussion with an artist who has made playful use of railway modelling materials in his artwork.

Piecing Together the Extinct Great Auk: Techniques and Charms of Contiguity

Extinct as a result of overhunting and habitat loss, the great auk, or garefowl, leads a hidden taxidermied existence in museum storerooms, sheltered from potential further degradation. As an environmental icon, however, the bird inspires a lively political economy of re-creation. Engaging from an anthropological perspective with practices of collecting, representing, and re-creating the great auk, I combine testimonies from Cambridge ornithologist John Wolley’s mid-nineteenthcentury Garefowl Books with contemporary ethnography among taxidermists and model makers in Britain and Belgium to argue that remnants, re-creations, and reenactments of the extinct great auk offer a material substrate from which to grasp a human drive to achieve contiguity with a lost species. Re-creation as a form of attentive reanimation by dedicated experts takes shape both discursively and plastically, predicated on assumptions about natural appearance and behavior that may not reflect evidence from historical records. Animated by what I call techniques of contiguity, reconstructions play a persuasive role in expressing and shaping human perceptions and imaginings of past environmental disaster and future environmental opportunity. Contiguity is achieved, on one hand, through performances of bodily kinship between human practitioners and dead or extinct animals and, on the other, through plays on resonance with specific organic materials, including garefowl remnants in Victorian taxidermied auks and plumage from related seabirds used in contemporary auk reconstructions. The reanimated great auk lives to tell stories of ethographic entanglement and continues, through its presence in museum spaces, to provoke both thought and action in a time of unprecedented numbers of species extinctions. (Text from author’s abstract)