ABSTRACT
Living history is both a movement and a practice that seeks to simulate how lives were lived in the past by reenacting them in the present. The impulse to embody the past in the present through performance, re-storying the past through poetry, prose, drama, dance, music, or ritual, is a shared human experience, found in all cultures and at all times. As a movement, however, living history is conventionally traced to the open-air folk museums that became prevalent in Europe, particularly Scandinavia, in the late 19th century. Associated with the nationalist project seeking to delineate boundaries and peoples, open air museums such as Skansen in Sweden (1891) and Norway’s Norsk Folkemuseum (1894) were also responding to fears that pre-industrial cultures (language, customs, practices of everyday life) were either disappearing or were threatened by external forces. Open air museums focused primarily on tangible heritage, particularly buildings and furnishings, although folk music performances, dances, and cultural events such as craft demonstrations were often staged. As an ethnographic practice, the construction of open-air museums involved the identification of representative period pieces that could be moved to a central location and reassembled in order to maximize exposure to local publics. As such, they can be seen as part of the larger project associated with other disciplinary impulses associated with governmentality, such as museums, world fairs, libraries, and shopping malls (Bennett, 1995). As forms of historical reenactment, open air museums were largely static experiences: visitors were passive consumers of reconstructed or reassembled heritage sites and of the dance, music, or craft demonstrations put on show.
