I don't think that how you feel about a task in the here and now, is any
guarantee of how someone else in another era felt about it. Living
without flush toilets is a different experience when you know in the
back of your mind that you can return to modern conveniences any time
you want.
I'd also argue that people clearly feel different ways about different
things, physically and emotionally, even in the here and now. (For
example, take any discussion on whether modern brassieres are
comfortable.) You were talking about heat tolerance of woolen Mexican
war era coats. From my observation, individuals vary significantly in
how well they tolerate heat. Although, if I really wanted to research
heat tolerance in modern people, I'd read some modern medical studies.
If I wanted to study how the soldiers of the Mexican war felt about
their uniforms, I'd research period written records. For historic
periods where most people were literate, as academic research into how
they _felt_, that makes more sense.than imitating what they did.
I think historic recreation/reenactment is a fine activity, and that
those are perfectly good terms for it. What I see is that the
recreation/reenactment community feels the professional communities of
historians and archaeologists don't respect them enough. So they're
looking for fancier names for what they do. However, that's not going
to get any more respect from academics, probably less if they feel their
terms are being misapplied.
There's nothing wrong with having a personally rewarding and personally
educational hobby. There's no need to claim it's a science, or a
profession, when it's not. And there's no way for people in any given
organization who view themselves as "serious" reenactors, to
differentiate themselves to outsiders, from more casual participants.
But why worry about what other people think, if what you do is
rewarding to you?
Fran
Lavolta Press
http://www.lavoltapress.com
An important part of the experience is to understand how it *felt* to be a person then and there.
It's hard to pin a name on what we're all doing. "Re-creation", which is what the SCA is said to do, implies that we're just making it all up, which isn't inaccurate, but is a sweeping generalization. The fact is that there are a lot of folks in the SCA who are doing what the "re-enactment" community would call "serious" work. The "re-enactors" that I met at Bent's Old Fort - most certainly a small cross-section - seem to be re-creating in a SCA-like manner, albeit with greater restrictions on time, place, etc. My feeling is that "experiential archaeology" sums it up pretty well, and bundles groups doing related things into what should be a cooperative community.
At Bent's, I was doing some casual surveys of how people were dealing with period clothing - wool over linen or cotton - in 100-degree heat. I'm currently working on worsted wool over linen for GFDs, and was seeing if their experience was similar to Robin's, who once opined that the combination was cooler at Lilies than other combinations of fibers. I detected a certain lack of credibility once I had to admit that my arena is the SCA. Although I'm aware of those biases, I never fail to be dissapointed by them.
BTW, the Mexican war-era military coats that the soldiers were wearing were woolen; one of the soldiers wore a linen shirt, one wore a cotton shirt. They said that they were very hot, but felt like they'd acclimatized somewhat after being on-site for 48 hours. They also felt like they'd lost a lot of weight - probably water. ;-)
Melanie in Denver
(Eirene, OP in the SCA)
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