Immediating the Past: British WWII Reenactments as Immedial Experience (Immedia 3/3)

Abstract

British WWII reenactments are usually read as representations of the war, either as performances of collective memory or as entertainment dressed in commemorative language. This third article in a series on immedial coordination reads them as deliberately built environments, on the basis of multi-sited ethnography at three UK events. Reenactment adds a case in which immedial conditions are made on purpose so that present bodies can coordinate through them: wearing wool in August, bearing the weight of a rifle, looking for charges buried in a field, hearing 1940s music. The selection is strict. Heat, noise, drill and collective stillness are made operative, and shrapnel, terror, hunger and ruined towns are left out, while fidelity to the past is sacrificed where it threatens effect. The events sort into three operations: immedial uptake of surviving made things, symbolic coordination that has descended into seamless coordination, and coordination happening live. The Last Post, which stills thousands of bodies, belongs mainly to the second and third, and it is heard against the residues of the afternoon's battle. Authenticity turns out to be a question of provenance, which matters greatly for what a relic is worth and much less for what a tunic does to a body. Reenactment neither makes the past present nor recovers it. It makes selected consequences of past coordination operative within present coordination.

I. Inside a Stuffy Ambulance: What Is Happening Here?

The back of a 1940s ambulance is the hottest place the first author remembers from that summer of 2024. It is a baking August afternoon, the sun still high, and he sits opposite a man he met a few minutes earlier. The man's face is flushed, beads of sweat gather along his hairline, and the discomfort is visible through the wool of his tunic. The ethnographer had chosen that morning what to wear, and the choice was shorts and a loose t-shirt. His companion had no such choice. Every few minutes their conversation is broken off by explosions that shake the ground and set the metal body of the vehicle humming. After one of them, with the ethnographer's ears ringing and the reenactor sweating harder than before, the question comes out: 'What is the point of all this?' The answer is immediate and clearly rehearsed, and it is the answer given by every reenactor the first author spoke to that summer: 'to educate and commemorate.'

Education and commemoration are real parts of the event. They also leave something unexplained. The answer says what participants understand themselves to be doing inside an established symbolic and institutional frame, and it does not say why the wool has to be worn in August by a body that is actually hot. It does not say why explosions have to be loud enough to interrupt a conversation, why weapons have to be handled and vehicles actually run, or why participants spend years acquiring the bodily competences that life in such a vehicle demands. The wool is enforced by a code that requires uniforms to be worn to a high standard of presentation, on pain of holding one's rifle above one's head for a prolonged period. Leaving a safety catch off earns ten press-ups. The sweat in the ambulance is sweat, produced now, by a historically selected material arrangement, in a particular man.

The puzzle can be put as a question. Why is representation not enough? If the purpose were to educate about WWII, photographs, films, museums, books and lectures would do so far more efficiently, and Britain has them in abundance. If the purpose were to commemorate, the Last Post and two minutes of silence would suffice. Yet reenactors go to extraordinary trouble to produce heat, weight, noise, smell, bodily restriction, mechanical vibration and disciplined co-presence. That excess over representation is what this article sets out to explain.

Two readings of such events are readily available, and both treat the event as an expression of something else. One takes it as an expression of collective memory, the performance of a national story. The other takes it as leisure, entertainment that borrows the vocabulary of remembrance. Each has its evidence, and each leaves the sweating man and his ringing ears as incidental. This article treats the event as an environment, a place that has been built so that certain things happen to the bodies in it.

The explanation draws on Living Value Theory, and this is the third article in a series on one of its concepts, immedial coordination. The first, The Trace Before the Sign (Ecks 2026a), defined the relation through a predator's scent, two worn doors and anthropogenic climate change: earlier living coordination alters nonrecursive ground, and later living coordination proceeds through that alteration, usually without noticing it and without access to the activity that produced it. The second, The Lives of Others' Traces (Ecks 2026b), followed the relation through a film about state surveillance, where it interlocks continuously with symbolic coordination and where hidden histories are recovered, if at all, selectively and with great difficulty. Its closing formula was that the past is settled without being completely recoverable.

Reenactment poses the opposite problem. Nothing about the war is hidden from reenactors. Its outlines are taught in school, its symbols are everywhere, and its histories fill libraries. What reenactors do is build conditions in which selected consequences of a known history operate on present bodies. The cases in the first article were found, and those in the second were concealed. Those in the third are made in the open, by people who know exactly what they are doing. Reenactment, we argue, is an organised practice for making selected historical differences operative again in present living coordination. It collects what has survived, reconstructs what has not and manufactures new effects in imitation of old ones, so that present bodies have to coordinate differently.

The argument moves in eight steps. Section II describes how the events assemble their environments, in some detail, because the theory depends on that account. Section III sets the argument against studies of cultural memory and against Peircean semiotics, and states the concept with the precision that the series has given it. Section IV analyses how reenactments manufacture the grounds on which participants coordinate, and what authenticity means for them. Section V takes up the apparent contradictions of the events and the Last Post. Section VI asks why such events can be staged with so little contestation in Britain, Section VII asks what reenactment remembers, and Section VIII returns to the ambulance.

II. Building a War That Never Happened Here

Three events, three scales

The first author attended three WWII reenactment events in one summer. The smallest was a gathering of about a hundred people at the Dumfries and Galloway Aviation Museum in Scotland. The second, the Yorkshire Wartime Experience near Bradford in West Yorkshire, drew around three thousand. The third was the Victory Show near Leicester, the largest reenactment event in the United Kingdom, with upwards of five thousand attendees and a grass runway that organisers build each year for aircraft of the period. All three were set in rural or semi-rural country. The two English events were held on repurposed farmland, and the Scottish site was attached to a permanent aviation museum with displays of WWII scenes and militaria. None lasted longer than three days. The first author observed from within the crowds and the camps, spent time in reenactors' company and interviewed reenactors, and the quotations below come from conversations at the events. Descriptions of who attended are impressions formed in the field, since no demographic data were collected.

Sound before history

At Yorkshire the first thing to register was a sound. A sonic constant ran through every waking hour: the music of Paul Fenoulhet and The Skyrockets, a typical English jazz orchestra of the 1940s, played over the Tannoy. To the ethnographer the numbers sounded much alike from one to the next. Regular attendees heard something more specific, a cultural atmosphere of slow dancing, the home front wireless and the intervals between battle. It was peaceful music for an inherently unpeaceful time. Had the organisers chosen to broadcast gunshots or the screams of dying soldiers, noises just as strongly associated with the period, the atmosphere would have collapsed. The programming was a calibration of which conditions of the site would be assembled and which would be kept out.

The music is a symbolic production, historical and culturally classified. What comes over the Tannoy is also a recording, a deposit of the band's coordination some eighty years ago, and the musicians are as unavailable to the field as the predator is to the animal in the clearing. Played continuously, the recording sets a pace for walking and talking, forms a background against which conversations are conducted and gives the place a felt atmosphere, and it does so for people who could not name a single title. Two kinds of uptake meet in one sound. Connoisseurs take it up as 1940s dance music, an articulated distinction they are competent in. Others are paced by its tempo without taking up any distinction at all, much as a forensic examiner can study a typed page without reading a word of it. The first lesson of the ethnography is that a symbolic production can be recruited symbolically and immedially at the same time, and that the two are separable in analysis without being separate in the field.

Against this background the battles break out with disorienting force. Pyrotechnics are buried in the ground before each engagement and detonated in a planned sequence, and some of the explosions are big enough to feel their heat from a considerable distance. Blank rounds are fired from rifles and machine guns at ranges far closer than any historical engagement would have allowed, a fact that reenactors themselves acknowledge. One participant said that 'there are serious limitations as battles would have occurred at much longer distances... but to not do these would be revisionist.' The result is a battle that is acoustically compressed. At historically accurate distances, fire would be faint and diffuse for the people watching and taking part, and the event would lose the pressure on the ear and the interruption of attention that close fire supplies.

This is the first of two kinds of fidelity that the article distinguishes. Representational fidelity concerns how accurately a reenactment depicts what happened, and immedial fidelity concerns how closely the differences operative in the present resemble differences that were operative then. The two can diverge, and where they do, reenactors in this study chose immedial fidelity. The battle becomes less accurate in order to become more effective, and the participant's remark shows that the choice is justified afterwards in symbolic terms: leaving battles out would be revisionist.

Things that survived and things remade to survive

The material infrastructure of the events is elaborate. Stalls sell objects unearthed from battlefields: soldiers' helmets, fragments of Luftwaffe aircraft accompanied by corresponding photographs, and landmines laid out on tables beside garden ornaments and memorial crosses marketed as temporary headstones. Deactivated firearms are handled by spectators, who flock to touch them. The first reenactor the ethnographer interviewed said that what first drew him to the hobby was 'the guns.' He called them 'really nice' and 'cool,' and he could recite the worth, rarity, calibre and serial number of every weapon in his collection. He did not mention that many of these firearms, of Allied and Axis origin alike, were designed and used to end lives. At one event a large tarpaulin banner showing the film Fury was on sale, with the tagline 'BEST JOB I EVER HAD': merchandise offered at an event nominally dedicated to commemorating those who died in the war it fictionalises.

The arrangements at the stalls are themselves informative. A fragment of a Luftwaffe aircraft is sold with a photograph, which supplies by symbolic means the provenance that the metal cannot supply for itself. The metal does not announce its own history. A buyer has to discern whether the fragment came from the aircraft in the photograph, from another aircraft or from a workshop, and the photograph and the seller's account may be reliable, mistaken or invented, as in any market in relics. A landmine on a trestle table beside garden ornaments has been brought down to a domestic scale, and a memorial cross marketed as a temporary headstone has entered commerce while keeping the form it has on a grave. Spectators' hands go to the deactivated firearms because those objects can be lifted, weighed and aimed, whereas the photograph can only be looked at. The collector who knows each weapon's worth, rarity and serial number holds the same object as a commodity, a mechanism and a piece of history, and the knowledge he carries is part of how he handles it.

The stalls and displays suggest a distinction that matters for the argument. The historical ground on which reenactment draws comes in at least three kinds. There are surviving traces, such as the unearthed helmet, the fragment of fuselage and the original rifle, which are matter that was formed for the war and has come through it. There are reconstructed equivalents, such as reproduction uniforms and rebuilt camps, which are made now to reproduce a form without continuity of matter. And there are newly produced effects, such as present-day pyrotechnics, which imitate a consequence of the war (heat, pressure, noise) without reproducing its cause. In the series' terms the three differ in origin and can coincide in uptake. Only the first has been through the war. The distinction cuts across the line between the authentic and the fake, because a reproduction tunic and an original one can both make a body hot, and because the pyrotechnic charge has no authentic version at all.

The England problem: war without ruination

The spatial staging of the events rests on a structural fact. Britain fought no land battles on its own soil during WWII, so every reenacted engagement has to represent a foreign place on English farmland. Battles therefore cannot portray the ruination of war. Before an engagement and after it, the field looks much the same.

At one event the Battle of Monte Cassino was reenacted. That battle levelled the town of Cassino and has been counted by some historians among the war's most difficult urban destructions to justify (Murray and Millett 2000). In the reenactment the destruction amounted to a few pyrotechnic explosions, and nothing acknowledged the ruination caused by British artillery and bombing. British soldiers could fall in a theatrical way, and Italian homes destroyed could not appear at all. What the field valued was the falling of British soldiers, and what it lacked was the ruin of anyone's house. The staging reproduces a pressure on the ear and an excitement of attention with the consequences of that pressure left out, and the field keeps its ordinary surface because the surface is where the audience stands.

Kinship, commitment and the forgotten army

Among the reenactors is a group of six men who represent a division of the Lancashire Fusiliers, 'the forgotten army,' which served in India and Burma during WWII and has been, as one member put it, 'lost in the grander narratives of history.' They have placed their small display in woodland, to suggest a jungle, and they report that spectators engage with them more deeply than with the larger and more spectacular set-ups. All six have kin who served in the division. They use family stories to shape the way they reenact, although they insist that they are 'not trying to be those men.' One of them described how a veteran he had befriended, through reenacting the veteran's old regiment, was moved by the fact that reenactors were 'so interested in displaying what it was like to live in war and not just kill.'

The Fusiliers' choice of woodland to stand in for a jungle shows how little of a setting needs to be reproduced. The trees supply enough environmental affordance, shade, cover and a closed horizon, for the kit and the bodies to do the rest, and nothing else of Burma is required. Their display also reverses the usual hierarchy of spectacle, since the small and quiet set-up engages spectators more deeply than the large ones, perhaps because what is offered is a coordination that can be joined as well as watched.

These family stories, veterans' accounts and kin connections matter in a particular way. Their effect is to shape which traces become salient for the present reenactors, and which material practices are worth undertaking: which kit to acquire, what to place in the woodland, how to stand and move. They bring back none of the men who served, whose relations with one another ended when they died.

Festival, crowd and the day's arc

The feeling of the events is that of any large festival: wristbands, barriers, marshals in high-visibility clothing, cadets handing out leaflets. By visible impression, almost all the reenactors the first author met were men and almost all appeared to be white, and many attendees came as families, some of whom reenact together. A man was overheard saying to a friend, 'I don't know what John would think of this... he's either Scottish or Northern Irish,' which revealed in passing that differences of national identity stay active even inside a seemingly unified frame of British remembrance. The events produce shared conditions of experience, within which individual positions continue to diverge, and they produce no consensus.

Each day has the same temporal shape. The morning is given over to browsing, food stalls and interactive attractions: BB gun ranges, fortune tellers and a British Army recruitment trailer. Intensity builds through the afternoon with skirmishes, vehicle demonstrations and the day's main battle. Then, abruptly, the register shifts. The Ode to Remembrance is recited, the Last Post is sounded on the bugle, and two minutes of silence are observed by everyone present, one or two thousand people who minutes earlier were watching explosions advertised on the event's website as an 'ACTION PACKED & FUN DAY OUT FOR ALL THE FAMILY.'

III. From Cultural Memory to Immedial Coordination

What cultural memory theory explains

The study of collective memory has given the sociology and anthropology of the past some of its best tools. Halbwachs (1992) showed that remembering is socially framed, maintained in groups and supported by shared frameworks. Aleida Assmann (2021) and Jan Assmann (2011) described how cultural forms stabilise and transmit what a society retains. Nora (1989) drew attention to places and objects as anchors of memory, and Connerton (1989) brought bodily practices into the account. Research on sound, the senses and touch (Damousi and Hamilton 2017; Paterson 2009) and on reenactment as an affective practice (Gapps 2009; McCalman and Pickering 2010) has since added a good deal. These traditions have been organised overwhelmingly around questions of retention, transmission, representation, inscription and social framing. Even where bodies, objects and places enter the analysis, the leading question remains what and how they allow a past to be retained.

Each approach foregrounds a different part of the problem. Halbwachs asks what frameworks make recall possible, the Assmanns what stabilised media carry a culture's past across generations, Nora what places condense, and Connerton how bodily practices keep social forms alive. In each case the unit is what is retained and transmitted, and the bodily and material features of an event are read for what they carry. Words such as atmosphere, affect and embodiment have been brought in to name what is left over, and each of them names something real. What they leave unnamed is the relation that connects such features to history: the way earlier coordination has changed the ground on which later coordination proceeds. The ethnography invites a different question. How does prior living coordination continue to alter the conditions under which later living coordination occurs? A past can matter to the present because it has left behind differences that change what present bodies do, and retention of content is only one way in which it does so.

Beyond the index

A second tradition is equally available and would read the events as semiosis from end to end. In Peirce's terms the whole battle is an icon of war, resembling what it stands for. The helmet on the stall is an index, connected to its wartime use by a real causal history, and for Peirce an index is a sign even before anyone attributes it to its object, as a bullet hole is a sign of the shot whether or not anyone has the sense to attribute it to one (Peirce 1931–1958, 2.304). The insignia, the unit names and the bugle call are symbols. Such a reading misses little of what the events display, and it absorbs all of it into the sign relation.

The series has argued for declining that absorption (see The Embodied Limits of Peircean Semiotics). The sweat in the ambulance stands for nothing. It is produced by wool, August and a body, and it would be produced in the same way if nobody present knew what a 1940s tunic was. The helmet's dents can enter the coordination of the hand that lifts it before anyone treats them as standing for a battle, and when a buyer does ask what made them, the entry into a sign relation is a later and contingent achievement of his inquiry. Living Value Theory keeps open a domain of consequential differences that are produced and taken up without functioning as signs. In reenactment that domain is large, because it is the domain the reenactors have built.

Immedial coordination stated precisely

Immedial coordination is the temporal relation through which earlier living coordination alters nonrecursive ground and later living coordination proceeds through that alteration, without requiring recursive availability of the original producer or activity (Ecks 2026a). Five clarifications, developed across the series, are needed.

First, nothing in this definition makes immedia into entities. There is no stuff called immedia, and the adjective names a kind of coordination and no kind of thing. A helmet, a rut in a field, a worn step, the cut of a uniform or a spatial arrangement is simply a difference in the world that earlier living brought about.

Second, immedial coordination is no sixth mediation. It can be produced and taken up through embodiment, being-with, multiversal dwelling, multimateriality and multisymbolization, as a temporal relation across them (see What Are the Five Mediations?). Symbolic activity can itself produce alterations that later enter immedial coordination, as the dance band's recording does, and the symbolic character of an originating activity does not decide how all its consequences will be recruited.

Third, the residue itself is nonrecursive. It does not respond to the beings who meet it, and this is what makes it usable as ground. Time converts effortful, responsive living into traces of this kind (see A Very Pretty Home), and the traces remain consequential after those who made them have gone (see Mixed Time).

Fourth, uptake is recursive and has a level, and residues have none. A living being meets the difference, adjusts to it, notices it, questions it or reclassifies it. Much uptake occurs at L1, as absorbed coordination without separate salience. A difference can catch at L2, be opened into a question at L3, be stabilised in methods and categories at L4 and be reconsidered as a framing at L5 (see The Wonder of What Works Well and Recursive Openings). A boundary follows. Where a consequence of earlier coordination persists in a living body, as a skill or a scar does, it remains part of a selfrecursive counterpart and falls outside the strict definition. The reenactors' competences are best understood as uptake of other people's deposits, such as manuals, films, equipment and instruction, and not as deposits in themselves.

Fifth, the distinction between immedial and symbolic coordination is itself an L4 stabilisation (Ecks 2026b). It distinguishes ways in which earlier coordination remains consequential, and it does not divide the field into an immedial zone and a symbolic zone. Its value lies in what it makes visible.

Three operations

The second article in the series added a distinction that reenactment needs at every turn. Recursive descent is the movement by which coordination that once required explicit recursive engagement becomes fluent, including symbolic coordination descending into L1. A competent driver follows a stop sign without interpreting it, and the sign remains symbolic because the driver's response depends on competence in an articulated distinction (Ecks 2026b; see What Do Symbols Do?). Recursive descent and immedial coordination are different distinctions. A symbol's seamless operation at L1 does not make it an immedial residue, and the later opening of a residue does not make the residue a symbol.

Three operations can therefore be told apart in the field, and the analysis keeps returning to them. The first is immedial uptake, in which bodies coordinate through things that earlier activity made or left: wool, a rifle's weight, a runway, a recording. The second is descended symbolic coordination, in which articulated distinctions such as a drill command, an insignia, a rule about safety catches or a bugle call are followed fluently at L1. The third is coordination happening live: a bugler playing, a crowd falling quiet together, marshals and reenactors watching one another. The first article's six questions keep the three apart. What earlier activity produced the consequential difference? What persisted beyond that activity? Who takes it up, and how? Through which mediations? At L1, or recursively opened? And where does symbolic activity produce, redirect, conceal or reconstruct the history? Origin, persistence and uptake are separate questions, and their answers need not belong to the same mediation.

IV. How Reenactments Manufacture Immedial Grounds

From surviving traces to engineered conditions

WWII has left extraordinarily heterogeneous traces: physical objects, photographs, military technologies, uniforms, architecture, family histories, landscapes, songs, institutional commemorations, national classifications, and bodily techniques that were recorded and can be relearned. A reenactment gathers some of these and manufactures others. It is an apparatus of selective immedial production. The apparatus modifies the nonrecursive environment of the present so that the people in it must coordinate in ways they otherwise would not, and it creates no separate field of experience.

A selection principle is at work. Reenactors do not collect everything. What gets selected is what a body can bear and a crowd can watch: the heat of cloth and not the cold of a winter campaign, the report of a rifle and not the wound it makes. The historical template governs which differences are to be made operative, and the limits of the participants' bodies and the organisers' responsibility govern how far.

The runway at the Victory Show is the plainest case of ground being made ready. Organisers build a grass runway each year so that aircraft of the period can take off and land as they once did, and the found land of a farm is altered to carry a past machine. Applied to it, the six questions give clean answers. The earlier coordination is the organisers' work. The altered ground is a prepared strip that persists without responding to anyone. The later uptake belongs to every pilot, marshal and spectator who moves around it, almost always at L1. The template is the machine's own requirements, and the ground is made to suit them.

The uniform

Return to the wool in August. The uniform is a historically classified object, a symbolic marker of unit and allegiance, a material constraint, a thermal environment, a regulator of posture and an object of disciplinary inspection. None of these can substitute for the others, and the three operations run through it together. The heat, the restriction and the fatigue are immedial uptake of a made thing: tailors cut the cloth to a 1940s pattern and are absent from the field, and the wool works on the wearer whatever he knows about it. The insignia is a symbolic distinction that fellow reenactors take in at a glance, so that its uptake has descended into fluency. The inspection that enforces the standard of dress is symbolic coordination at L3 and L4, a deliberate judgement of correctness backed by the threat of a rifle held overhead. A reenactor who reads about the uniform and a reenactor who wears it are in different positions, because putting on the right cloth produces differences that knowledge of the cloth does not produce.

The uniform also shows that uptake has levels while the cloth has none. For a seasoned reenactor the wool is probably absorbed, a condition of the day that needs no attention until the heat becomes extreme. For the novice, or the ethnographer who sits beside him in shorts, the heat of the vehicle catches at L2 as something worth asking about. One material difference meets different uptake in different people, and the event has places for each of them.

The weapon

The rifle can be treated in the same way. Its historical identity can be narrated symbolically, in type, date, army and use. Its weight, centre of balance, trigger mechanism and length reorganise posture and handling in ways that any holder meets, whatever they know about it, and in an original weapon these features carry the wear of wartime hands as well. Training changes the holder. The drill that reenactors learn from manuals, films and other people is articulated instruction that descends, over years, into fluent handling, so that an experienced reenactor no longer thinks about the safety catch any more than a driver thinks about a stop sign. The rule remains symbolic throughout. Its descent is what lets attention go elsewhere. Other participants respond to how the weapon is handled, and the corrections that follow, with the press-ups for an omitted catch among them, show the object entering a web of mutual watching. The rifle is a nonrecursive thing, and the code around it is enforced by living people who answer to one another.

The deactivated firearms at the stalls show the immedial part in miniature. A spectator who lifts one, adjusts the grip and registers the weight has entered a coordination with an object that was made for killing, and nothing needs to be communicated for this to occur.

Pyrotechnics and acoustic compression

The explosion is manufactured now, and it is no trace of WWII. Its design is nonetheless historically motivated, and the six questions separate its parts. The earlier coordination is the crew's work that morning, burying charges in the ground and wiring them in a planned order. The altered ground is a charged field, nonrecursive and waiting, through which the afternoon's events will proceed. The later uptake is the detonation sequence itself, carried out by a crew for whom the plan has descended into routine, and the heat, pressure and shaking ground that every body on the field then undergoes. Reenactment is therefore more than the activation of residues. It builds new grounds from historical templates, and the template governs the effect to be achieved, not the means by which it is achieved. The close-range blank fire belongs here too, since it is a template adapted for the field. Spectators are inside the same acoustic field as the participants, and everyone feels the ground shake and the air thump. Burying the charges and fixing their order is a way of scheduling nonrecursive events so that living attention can be gathered and released at intended moments.

Staged in the open

The second article in the series noted that a person can deliberately arrange material conditions that invite another to reconstruct a misleading history, as when an object is planted or evidence is staged (Ecks 2026b). Reenactment stages historical conditions on a very large scale, and it misleads nobody. Everyone on the field knows that the charges were buried that morning, that the tunics were sewn last year and that Cassino is in Italy. The staging is open and consensual, and its effects do not depend on anyone believing a false history. The heat of reproduction wool works as well on a wearer who knows it is reproduction as on one who does not.

This is why authenticity behaves so oddly in reenactment. Authenticity is a question of origin and provenance. The second article's three objects at a junction, an authorised stop sign, a patch of red lichen that resembles one and an unauthorised imitation, have their counterparts here: an original helmet, a faithful reproduction and a pyrotechnic charge that imitates a shell without reproducing it. Their histories of production differ completely, and in the immediate coordination of a body on the field they may do much the same thing. Provenance matters greatly for what a thing is worth and for what it means to the people who know its history, and it matters much less for what it does to a body. The stalls are where recursive discernment of provenance is concentrated, because that is where provenance has a price. The ambulance is where it barely matters at all.

Preparation is part of the event

The weekend is the visible end of a much longer process. Participants have spent years, in some cases decades, buying and collecting, researching units and battles, learning to handle weapons, assembling uniforms and cultivating the bodily competence that allows them to operate within the event's constraints. The Lancashire Fusiliers have built their display, their kit and their reasons for being there around the histories of their own kin. The reenactment begins long before the reenactment. Much of the preparatory work consists of taking up deposits of other people's earlier coordination, in the form of manuals, photographs, equipment and instruction, and of letting what was first effortful descend into fluency. The weekend concentrates a distributed history of coordination and activates capacities that months and years of work have built far from the field.

What cannot be reconstructed

What the events leave out is as informative as what they assemble. There is no friendly fire in any observed reenactment. There is no shrapnel, and there are no live bullets. No one is injured permanently, no one is terrified of dying, and no one is conscripted unwillingly. There are no levelled towns, no hunger, no sexual violence, no war crimes and no displaced civilians. Monte Cassino arrives on English farmland as a few explosions and some falling soldiers, and the town is left out.

The boundary marks a threshold of survivable coordination and has little to do with accuracy. The event seeks enough difference to reorganise the present body, and not enough to destroy the possibility of returning to ordinary life. Heat is allowed but not lethal heat, noise but not deafening injury, proximity but not threat, constraint but not an irreversible consequence. Because the stakes of war cannot be reproduced without ending the people who reproduce them, they are reproduced in buffered form, as pressures the body registers and the person survives (see The Wonder of What Works Well). The buffering is maintained by organisers and marshals, by the rules that govern the handling of weapons and by the participants' own care, and it is part of what the event is. It also helps to explain why a war can become a day out. The experience can be enjoyed precisely because the metabolic stakes that make war terrible have been taken out of it, while enough of the surrounding conditions remain for the body to know that something is being undergone.

V. Fun, Mourning and the False Problem of Contradiction

The events can appear contradictory. They contain shopping, family entertainment, 'cool' weapons, military spectacle, collecting, historical education, familial remembrance, bodily discomfort, explosions, recruitment, mourning and silence. The study of reenactment has treated this coexistence as a problem to be resolved or as a productive tension (McCalman and Pickering 2010). The coexistence looks contradictory only on the assumption that every element has to express a single coherent symbolic message.

The same crowd is, within the space of an afternoon, a clientele, an audience, a set of families, a company of collectors and a congregation. A stall sells a memorial cross as a temporary headstone, a recruitment trailer sits beside a fortune teller, and a child fires a BB gun at a target while an adult stands guard over a picnic. These are different counterpart relations, each with its own demands on attention, and none of them is a mistake in the staging.

The alternative is to describe a succession of differently configured living coordinations over the course of a day. The morning's browsing, the afternoon's skirmish and the evening's silence organise bodies, attention, relations and objects in different ways, and each is locally coherent. An object can also be several things within moments of each other. The gun can be a collector's piece, a weapon, a mechanically fascinating artefact, an anchor for a family history and a moral sign of killing, and none of these exhausts it. The collector's fascination with 'really nice' firearms and the reflection that they were made to kill do not need to be reconciled into one attitude, since they arise in different forms of uptake, and the contradiction appears only when an analyst expects a single symbolic attitude to govern the encounter. Not every ambiguity dissolves in this way. Whether a banner reading 'BEST JOB I EVER HAD' is compatible with commemoration remains a live moral question for participants and observers alike, and it is posed at L3 and L4.

The mourning that the day supplies is brief, collective and bounded. It has a signal to begin and a measured duration, and ordinary activity resumes when it ends. Whether it amounts to mourning in the sense of those who lost kin in the war is a question the ethnography cannot answer. The Fusiliers' relation to their own kin's service suggests that for some participants the commemorative frame of the day sits alongside more particular, family-based remembrance, and that the two need not be the same.

The Last Post

The Last Post is the sharpest test of the series' distinctions. The call is a symbolic form, a melody with a long history of use at funerals and remembrance. When it sounds, conversation stops and the noise of the site collapses. Bodies become still, and thousands synchronise their stillness without anyone directing it. The spatial orientation of the crowd changes, and the duration of the silence is collectively measured. Remembrance becomes embodied without ceasing to be symbolic. Because the effect so far exceeds the propositional content of the call, it is tempting to describe the moment as the most concentrated immedial coordination of the day.

The six questions show why the temptation should be resisted. The call is played now, by a living bugler. What the crowd takes up is a symbolic form in the course of its performance, and for most of those present that uptake has descended into fluent L1 coordination. They know what the call is without needing to think it, and they stop, as a driver stops at a sign. The stilling depends on competence in a symbolically articulated distinction learned over many Novembers. Those without that competence, a small child or a visitor from abroad, fall silent too, because they take up the stillness of the people around them, which is live being-with among counterparts who attend to one another (see Being With Others Doesn’t Mean Having to Think about Others). Neither descended symbolic competence nor the being-with of a crowd is immedial coordination. The surplus of efficacy over content is real, and it belongs to these two operations.

The immedial lies in the ground on which the silence falls. The afternoon's battle has ended and left its residues: smoke drifting across the field, spent blank cases in the grass, turf churned by vehicles, wool still warm on the reenactors' backs. These are consequences of coordination that is over, and the silence is undergone through them. Two minutes without sound are a different thing on a field that was shaking an hour earlier than in a quiet church, and nobody needs to reconstruct the battle for the difference to operate. The call also acts back on the afternoon symbolically, placing the explosions in a commemorative frame. In one short sequence a live performance, a descended symbolic competence, the being-with of a crowd and the residues of an ended battle are coupled in practice and distinguishable only in analysis. The value of distinguishing them is that it shows how the stillness of thousands is accomplished by several operations at once, only one of which is immedial.

Table 1 gathers the elements analysed so far under the questions of origin, persistence and uptake. It is a summary and makes no claim to be an exhaustive classification.

Table 1. Elements of the reenactment field by origin, persistence and uptake.

VI. Why This Can Be Done Here: Britain, Memory and Recursive Permission

The usual way of asking why such events are staged in Britain is to ask why they could not be staged elsewhere, and it is too categorical. A better question is this: under what conditions can specific historical differences stay coordinationally available without immediately provoking recursive opening and contestation?

In Britain a long-standing public stabilisation of WWII around victory, sacrifice, endurance and a justified war supports a great deal of institutional work: Armistice Day, the Poppy Appeal, school assemblies, media, monuments and museums. It forms a kind of heroic memory that, as Chakrabarty (2007) observes, becomes possible because Britain emerged on the winning side (see also Ecks 2023), and it supports what Sontag (2003) calls an illusion of consensus. Under that frame, uniforms, weapons, aircraft, battle displays and martial excitement can remain comparatively backgrounded within a legitimate commemorative setting. A British soldier's uniform can be taken up as absorbed historical equipment, at L1, by people who are not asking what it stands for.

Permission in this sense is no matter of someone granting leave. It describes the condition under which uptake of a historical difference can stay at L1 for most of the people involved. Monuments, calendars, curricula and the ritual year of remembrance are symbolic stabilisations with long material afterlives, and their uptake has descended so far that a uniform or an aircraft is simply part of what the day contains. Where that settled frame holds, the assemblage does not have to justify itself in each encounter, and attention can go to the kit and the field.

The stabilisation is strong and it is contestable. The ethnography records differences of national identity that survive inside the frame, a division of the army that feels 'lost in the grander narratives,' and the selective absence of destruction from the staged battles. A dominant stabilisation is available and strong enough to frame these events, and it does not make the whole symbolic order settled.

In Germany, equivalent material configurations are more liable to provoke L3 and L4 opening around guilt, legality, fascism, perpetration and political identification. We have no ethnography of German events, so this is a hypothesis, and it concerns the recursive availability of historical differences. The same object, in a different mesocosm, meets a different uptake. A uniform that can operate as relatively absorbed equipment in one setting may immediately become an askable political object in another, and recursive opening, in which a sedimented ground becomes newly available to engagement (see Recursive Openings), can be provoked by the assemblage itself. Opening there would also turn quickly into discernment of intention: whether the person in the uniform is commemorating, collecting, performing or identifying, a question that the uniform cannot answer for itself. Legal limits on the display of certain symbols would add their own force, but the hypothesis does not depend on them. The Orange marches through Catholic areas of Northern Ireland suggest the same point from a different direction. A sound, route, banner or bodily formation can become recursively opened because of where, and among whom, it occurs.

VII. What Does Reenactment Remember?

The study of memory defines remembering by what is retained. Reenactment suggests a narrower contribution, which does not claim to define memory as a whole. A past can matter because it has left behind differences that alter future coordination. Some of those differences are symbolic, some material, some spatial, some embodied skills, some institutional permissions, and some are relations among these. Reenactment deliberately collects, reconstructs and recombines them.

The kinds of difference that a reenactment carries can be listed, and each has an anchor in the ethnography. Symbolic forms are present as unit names, insignia and the labels that tell spectators which battle is under way. Material differences are present in helmets, uniforms, vehicles and weapons. Spatial arrangements appear in the runway and in the woodland made to stand for a jungle. Embodied skills are visible in weapon handling and dress, and institutional permissions in the calendar of remembrance and the commemorative frame that closes the day. The relations among these matter as much as the items. The kit is worn within a code, the code is enforced within a unit, and the unit stands inside a commemorative frame that makes the whole thing acceptable.

The series puts this in a particular light. The Lives of Others' Traces concerned recovery, the slow and partial process by which a hidden past becomes questionable and reconstructable, and it concluded that the past is settled without being completely recoverable. Reenactment does something else with a settled past. It makes no attempt to recover the war, which is in any case extensively documented. It selects consequences of the war and makes them operative again in the ground of the present, where they are mostly taken up at L1. Archive and reenactment are therefore two different relations to the same settledness. The archive opens what had been closed, and reenactment renews what had stopped working, and neither brings back what happened.

Remembering can accordingly involve making traces operative, and making a past representable is only one of the ways. The object of reenactment is a present coordinational environment deliberately reorganised through historically derived traces, and no absent event becomes present again. This avoids the claim that reenactors experience what war was really like. They plainly do not, and the missing devastation is central evidence of it. The dead remain what they are, nonrecursive from the standpoint of the living. The reenactors do not coordinate with them, and what the dead did to the ground is what the reenactors take up. The living can answer back, however, and they do. The veteran who was moved by the reenactors' interest in what it was like to live in war and not just kill is a living counterpart whose response feeds into what the reenactors do next. In this respect the practice resembles remembrance in the ordinary sense, since it remains answerable to the people who were there.

What the reenactors undergo is a set of consequences of the war, selected and reconstructed to a degree that a body can bear: the heat of wool, the weight of the rifle, the pressure of explosions, the discipline of a unit and the stillness of a crowd.

VIII. Conclusion: Making the Past Operative

Return to the ambulance. The man is still sweating, and the explosion still shakes the metal cab. His answer, to educate and commemorate, remains true. What the argument has added is that the tunic, the vehicle, the disciplinary expectations, the explosions, the historical classifications, the other reenactors and the August heat have been brought together on purpose, so that they modify present living coordination.

Nothing has been resurrected. The soldiers are mostly dead, the battlefield is elsewhere, the fear is controlled, the injury is simulated and the ruin is absent. Yet it would be wrong to call the result a representation.

British WWII reenactments do not bring WWII back. They assemble a present in which selected differences produced by, inherited from, classified through and reconstructed out of WWII become operative again. Wool makes bodies hot. Rifles reorganise posture. Engines reshape the acoustic field. Kinship makes particular histories matter. Pyrotechnics seize attention. The Last Post, taken up fluently by a crowd that knows it, stills thousands of bodies on a field still marked by the afternoon. Some of these differences originated in wartime, some survive as traces, and others are newly produced in imitation of them. Many become part of the nonrecursive ground through which new living coordination proceeds, and they interlock at every point with symbolic coordination, much of it descended into fluency. That is what makes reenactment more than representation.

Taken together, the three articles in the series describe three relations between living and the altered ground it inherits. In the first, the ground is found: life coordinates through the consequences of earlier life, mostly without noticing, across scales from a scent to a climate. In the second, the ground is concealed and occasionally recovered: symbolic and immedial coordination interlock in histories that their participants cannot see, and recovery is selective, fallible and incomplete. In the third, the ground is made in the open: people deliberately manufacture immedial conditions from historical templates so that their own bodies will coordinate through them. In all three the distinction between immedial and symbolic coordination is an analytical stabilisation and no partition of the world, and in all three most of what remains consequential is never articulated.

The argument has limits that should be stated. It rests on three events in one summer and on observation and conversation, not on measurement of what participants feel, and it makes no claim about how widely its findings hold. It shows what the events assemble, what they leave out and how they are justified. The Germany contrast, in particular, is a hypothesis that comparative fieldwork could test. The past does not return. Its differences are made to matter again.

Selected References

Assmann, Aleida. 2021. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Assmann, Jan. 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2007. "History and the Politics of Recognition." In Manifestos for History, edited by Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan and Alun Munslow. London: Routledge.

Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Damousi, Joy, and Paula Hamilton, eds. 2017. A Cultural History of Sound, Memory, and the Senses. London: Routledge.

Gapps, Stephen. 2009. "Mobile Monuments: A View of Historical Reenactment and Authenticity from Inside the Costume Cupboard of History." Rethinking History 13 (3): 395–409.

Halbwachs, Maurice, with Lewis A. Coser. 1992. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McCalman, Iain, and Paul Pickering, eds. 2010. Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Murray, Williamson, and Allan R. Millett. 2000. A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Nora, Pierre. 1989. "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire." Representations 26: 7–24.

Paterson, Mark. 2009. "Haptic Geographies: Ethnography, Haptic Knowledges and Sensuous Dispositions." Progress in Human Geography 33 (6): 766–88.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1931–1958. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Edited by Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and Arthur W. Burks. 8 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

LVT corpus references

"A Very Pretty Home": Time, Memory, and the Continuous Transformation of Life into Nonrecursive Traces (Series: You Are My Rock)

Being With Others Doesn't Mean Having to Think about Others: Interrecursivity in Humans and Other Animals

Mixed Time: Pastness, Futurity, and the Differential Temporalities of Living Value

Recursive Openings: From Ground to Question and Back to Ground

The Embodied Limits of Peircean Semiotics

The Wonder of What Works Well: How Living Value Theory Discovers Questions

What Are the Five Mediations? (Core LVT 3/4)

What Do Symbols Do?