ABSTRACT
There are several productive tensions between archiving—the collection of documents, objects, photographs, and other material to create historical records—and reenactment practices. Archives, whether formal or informal, aim to act as a source of information about the past that is laid down away from normal social use for future interpretation. In Pierre Nora’s terms, an archive is a lieu de mémoire, a space that contains “moments of history torn away from the movement of history, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded” (1989, p. 12). By contrast, reenactment seems to fit more easily into the category of activities that create what Nora calls milieux de mémoire: rich, living environments of memory that are intended to produce a social sense of historical continuity (memory and commemoration).
