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04-25-2022, 08:04 PM
I'd been pondering this concept over the past several days during my reignited interest in wild west outlaw culture...
"Wild West Outlaws: Historical Superstars Of American Culture"
https://www.sectual.com/thread-17130.html
Then I see this new video from Safiya Nygaard's channel where they visit the Virginian colonial re-enactment town...
I felt like the timing was more than just coincidence and now I know that I have GOTTA put this topic out there.
On my travels, I visited several wild west tourist attractions with historical re-enactments where actors were employed as saloon girls, saloon pianists, and various other acting positions dealing with historical themes.
I found it fascinating. It was very clear to see that these people had a very genuine passion for what they were doing... it wasn't just a job. Not by a longshot.
I want to know about the spiritual and possibly karmic meaning behind devoting one's life to historical re-enactment.
I want to explore the idea of whether or not there's anything "wrong" with it.
Wouldn't devoting one's life to historical re-enactment be, in a sense, a forfeiture of the PRESENT? Wouldn't that be a "bad" thing on a spiritual/karmic level? Wouldn't it kinda be a shame?
Is it a passion for history/culture... or is it something deeper for these historical re-enactors?? Do you think a majority of them might even confess that they feel there is some type of unfinished business between themselves and the era they are trying to keep alive in the present-day?
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Is it as simple as deciding that the world today just kinda sucks, and they'd rather re-live a period of history that just feels better to them??
I know there have to be other topics about this around the net, so I'll look for them. But I am gonna need to think it through and express my own thoughts about it because I think it's a very fascinating and significant (psychologically, spiritually, and otherwise) tendency that some humans display.
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It's a certain kind of roleplay...
It's a type of acting that seems to fuse the art with real life.
I'm very curious to hear what professional reenactment performers have to say about this in their own words.
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Where better to start...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_reenactment
Quote:While historical reenactors are generally amateurs, some participants are members of armed forces or historians. The participants, called reenactors, often do research on the equipment, uniform, and other gear they will carry or use. Reenactors buy the apparel or items they need from specialty stores or make items themselves.
I notice that a lot of them seem to be very interested in history, they seem to be historians who took it all a step further and are perhaps a little bit more creative and interesting (individually) than your typical "boring" history professor might be.
They also seem to really get off on making their own period items... like in Safiya's video where the women were making their own rouges and other beauty potions that were popular during the era. There's passion behind this... they don't do it because it's a 'job', they care about it. So why do they have this attraction to certain historical eras? What causes it? How does it come about and why?
Quote:Activities related to "reenactment" have a long history. The Romans staged recreations of famous battles within their amphitheaters as a form of public spectacle. In the Middle Ages, tournaments often reenacted historical themes from Ancient Rome or elsewhere.
Again... this is a quality that people have exhibited all throughout time, even back when "history" was new. What is the psychology behind this? Is it deeper than psychology? Is it spiritual? Is it karmic? And if it were karmic, what would be the purpose, what could be accomplished by a life devoted to reenactment??
Quote:In the nineteenth century, historical reenactments became widespread, reflecting the then intense romantic interest in the Middle Ages.
It IS romanticism... it is VERY close to what most people would consider "love" to be.
Quote:Categories of reenactors
FARBs
"Farbs" or "polyester soldiers", are reenactors who spend relatively little time and/or money achieving authenticity with regard to uniforms, accessories, or period behavior.
. . .
Mainstream
Mainstream reenactors make an effort to appear authentic, but may come out of character in the absence of an audience. Visible stitches are likely to be sewn in a period-correct manner, but hidden stitches and undergarments may not be period-appropriate. Food consumed before an audience is likely to be generally appropriate to the period, but it may not be seasonally and locally appropriate. Modern items are sometimes used "after hours" or in a hidden fashion. The common attitude is to put on a good show, but that accuracy need only go as far as others can see
Aha, so there are ranks of reenactors. Here in the "Mainstream" category, we start to get into the deeper levels of devotion.
So let's see how deep the rabbit hole goes...
Quote:Progressive
At the other extreme from farbs are "hard-core authentics", or "progressives," as they sometimes prefer to be called. Sometimes derisively called "stitch counters", "stitch nazis", or "stitch witches." "(t)he hard-core movement is often misunderstood and sometimes maligned."
Okay so as we can see, just like in ANYTHING else that involves people... there's a certain sector of snobby and haughty personalities who take things VERY seriously and would criticize inaccuracy in an exacting and cliquey way.
Quote:Progressive, cont.
Hard-core reenactors generally value thorough research, and sometimes deride mainstream reenactors for perpetuating inaccurate "reenactorisms". They generally seek an "immersive" reenacting experience, trying to live, as much as possible, as someone of the period might have done. This includes eating seasonally and regionally appropriate food, sewing inside seams and undergarments in a period-appropriate manner, and staying in character throughout an event. The desire for an immersive experience often leads hard-core reenactors to smaller events, or to setting up separate camps at larger events.
These immersive progressive reenactors are the ones I think I've come across the most, at least in real life. I saw these people taking their "job" VERY seriously... to them, it was a way of life.
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(04-25-2022, 08:29 PM)Chatwoman Wrote: And if it were karmic, what would be the purpose, what could be accomplished by a life devoted to reenactment??
This is what I'm most curious about...
What are the karmic implications?
Are people who devote their lives to historical reenactment trying to learn or play out something they were unable to complete during a previous lifetime?
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So I went on YouTube and typed in what I consider to be a mildly punny take on a famous movie/book title, "Interview with a Reenactor" and this exactly titled video came up first...
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Oh this is a good one...
I mean listen to what they're saying...
For them, this IS spiritual.
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3:32, see that guy ain't even American (I assume) but he's doing this.
WHAT IS THE DEAL WITH THIS?!?!?!?!?!?!
I'm absolutely fascinated.
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Amanda Blake, Miss Kitty from Gunsmoke, spent 1/3 of her life playing the character...
In 1955 at age 26 she started on the show, and she left the show in 1974, age 45.
She married 4 times. Her fifth husband was Mark Spaeth, a bisexual (I believe he was simply gay) man, and I guess she functioned as a beard for him. He died of AIDS in 1985, and she died of the same in 1989 at 60 years old.
https://news.amomama.com/277521-gunsmoke...origi.html
Ironically, he claimed that she gave it to him. Considering she was never promiscuous and he was gay/bi, I'm guessing it came from him. But back then I don't think as much was known about AIDS. Maybe he genuinely believed it really did come from her. Sad story all the way around.
But I thought I'd mention Gunsmoke in this thread because it ran for 20 years and that's a VERY long time to play a role, especially a period piece. It's kind of like reenacting.
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https://metv.com/stories/amanda-blake-ga...er-married
This article says she pushed hard to get the role and wouldn't settle for otherwise. Sounds like destiny to me. Maybe even the same kinda pull toward destiny that these historical reenactors feel.
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(04-27-2022, 02:50 AM)Chatwoman Wrote: You know, I love the fashion of the old west.
The women, particularly the barmaids, had a visually appealing stylistic flair.
But the cowboy attire is what I really love.
I wouldn't wanna have to wear the female garb of the time.
I'd have to invent my own kind of wild west inspired attire.
(04-27-2022, 03:07 AM)Chatwoman Wrote: I'll tell you one thing I don't like about Gunsmoke...
It's Miss Kitty's false eyelashes.
That makeup is over the top.
Maybe in the 1950s the general public didn't know about false lashes and the makeup artists just used them for pure enhancement thinking no one would know they weren't real.
All I know is that shit ain't accurate for the time period.
That said, the way I'd be dressing for wild west roleplay ain't appropriate for the time period either, so who am I to judge?!

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The re-enactors seem to be engaged in something that is far greater than the sum of its/their parts. I like your inclusion of the term "spiritual". I wonder to what degree the imagination features? I would think greatly.
What's the closest time travel analogy in the re-enactment context? That we are going back in time, or that we are bringing the past into the present, (or the future, as relative to the past)? Definitely the latter analogy.
We can't travel back in time, but we can reconstruct things that have existed in the past. You don't go back in time physically; you travel forward in time to recreate what happened in the past in the future, in order to inspect it again. In reversable computation, time is still moving forward.
The universe has novelty in it, which is proof that time both exists and is a fundamental force that creates space. It yields unpredictability, but not as a sign of entropy, rather, as a sign of assembly.
Common physics will posit that everything already is -- and can be predicted with enough data. However, if you look at a sliver of reality, such as what is afforded in the window of any given re-enactment, you'll see that novelty is ever being created as we move forward in time. So, to a degree, the re-enactors are simultaneously engaged in novelty research and novelty expansion without necessarily being aware (?). This makes me think of the question of AI -- if the AI is doing everything that we do in order to facilitate a complete replica of consciousness, IS it in fact consciousness, or is it just completely unaware and going through the motions so as to appear conscious? In a novel universe, however, with enough novelty, eventually AI will be conscious. To this end, I think it's fair to say, with enough novelty, eventually re-enactors will relive the past and ostensibly be the past.
In the case of re-enactment -- particularly within organized groups who make great effort to recreate details with exact precision -- the presence of novelty is palpable; both the novelty that has expanded to arrive at that point, and the new novelty created by every re-enacted detail; the greater the detail and precision of the re-enacted event, the greater the expansion of novelty in the process of unveiling. It's like taking a current causal graph and overlapping it with a past causal graph to yield a future causal graph, that is then "enacted" as a "re-enactment", making the event of the re-enactment massively more novel and complicated than the original, and -- as stated -- the re-enactments that pay tremendous attention to detail and "getting it right", and execute on a high level, produce greater novelty than average, as in order to realize greatness in the form, there is more energy put forth, more time spent, more intensity, more high-level talented people culled, more rehearsal, greater exposure through audience, word of mouth and media coverage, and so on, then what might exist in a lesser effort.
And imagination features prominently -- of course it does -- which is further proof of novelty, even though it's tempered into a collective agreement. In other words, I might have a personal view of what happened during an event in the Civil War, and in reading many different texts I can "see" this event from different angles, and "imagine" what actually happened. However, if I am with five other people, each with their own imagination, then the spaces where our visions are the same will feature in our forward effort, and the spaces where we differ will either feature if a majority exists, or fall away if in the minority, and in this fashion the event is eventually brought from the past by committee, into the relative future, and is presented anew, and tremendous novelty is the residual.
That we are here discussing re-enactment could be seen as a point of "causal novelty", if you will, fed by many re-enactment events, and in the grander scale of assembly, is now a source point for another explosion of novelty spokes bursting outward. This very post is producing novelty, within this seemingly small context of "a thread", in the larger context of "this forum", from which much novelty is created, but not without having first come from the imagination of a woman in Kentucky, who may have been doing her own re-enactment of something when the thought arose. An interest in re-enactment might be nestled in the very creation of this forum.
Consider a group of people from the future who try to re-enact the entirety of all the posts of Interstellar by reverse engineering; parsing the data in a super sophisticated way with a technology that we can't yet predict -- one that allows them to see us all as we currently are, or "once were", from their vantage, and spend 5-to-? years recreating the entirety of it -- including how the posts are spaced and timed -- every last detail -- every last laptop, cpu, cell phone, apartment, house, car of each and every person who has posted here, even re-enacting every lurker, such as people who happened upon one page over the course of five minutes and never returned. A thorough and precise re-enactment of every moment of Interstellar history. There's much novelty to be both gleaned and generated from such an endeavor. This is a worthy vehicle for that level of exploration -- the kind of exploration that re-enactment affords.
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(04-27-2022, 05:32 AM)Atma Wrote: That we are here discussing re-enactment could be seen as a point of "causal novelty", if you will, fed by many re-enactment events, and in the grander scale of assembly, is now a source point for another explosion of novelty spokes bursting outward. This very post is producing novelty, within this seemingly small context of "a thread", in the larger context of "this forum", from which much novelty is created, but not without having first come from the imagination of a woman in Kentucky, who may have been doing her own re-enactment of something when the thought arose. An interest in re-enactment might be nestled in the very creation of this forum.
Damn this is a great point...
It's almost like the real question is, where does "history" end and "reenactment" begin??
I think it's also important to consider WHAT is being reenacted. The most "karmically" obvious is war/battle reenactment. It's not hard to understand how something that involved a lot of lives being cut short requires a karmic payment.
The purpose behind reenactment, the lure and the draw that people feel in their souls... it's a human tendency to understand things more deeply, to do things justice, to offer remembrance and honor, to romanticize and enjoy that rapturous feeling of being taken to another time.
If time is just an illusion, then does it really matter if someone spends a great deal of their life participating in reenactment?
Is reenactment by an organization of people meant to evoke a past time in an effort to change the present?
Imitation is the highest form of flattery... there are micro examples of historical reenactment that we can see in our own lives every day. Take for example when I was a kid in the 2000s, I was obsessed with the 1970s. Through the allure and the fixation, I feel that I experienced a HEIGHTENED and IMPROVED version of what the '70s may have been (don't know, wasn't there). At the time, I was told by people who actually were alive in the '70s that they were boring and shite. But in my own 'reenactment' experience, that wasn't the case at all. So what was better... the "original" 1970s, or my version of it? Well, for me, the answer is clear. My recreation was better.
If eras of time are just 'vibes' influenced by unseen forces, energies, and alignments of the gears/wheels of the matrix machine, then perhaps reenactment is indeed a process of refinement.
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(04-27-2022, 01:57 PM)Chatwoman Wrote: If eras of time are just 'vibes' influenced by unseen forces, energies, and alignments of the gears/wheels of the matrix machine, then perhaps reenactment is indeed a process of refinement.
What an incredible idea -- a process of refinement.
In your specific case of taking your idea of the 70's (which was largely informed by your elders sharing their ideas of what their own experience yielded, and fictional or documentary-based media such as movies and television), and then implementing your own subsequent vision, which was, from your then-current vantage, buoyed by decades of novelty expansion both in society at large and within your subjective context (on a largely tangential note, I'd like to say I believe that the terms "subjective" and "objective" are going to be done away with as we grow in our understanding of consciousness, novelty and time), you created a new kind of vibe, which then has gone on to inspire the people you've attracted, such as myself. If someone came along and wanted to make a film of your life, they would be interpreting your interpretation of the 70's, adding yet another layer of novelty, and then producing further novelty from that yield. My question is, can re-enactment, both in the context of the OP and in media, really be a source of refinement, with novelty rising exponentially between efforts?
I'm interested, now, in the differences between re-enactment and documentary filmmaking, in terms of considering refinement. Which can get closer to source?
We refer to documentaries as "nonfiction", but when you consider the process of creating a narrative -- not REcreating, but simply creating ("narrative" is imposed on "reality", both in quotes because, in the spirit of your observation, where does one begin and the other end?) -- which is vital to documentary filmmaking -- and when you consider the process of editing footage, and the process of paid actors "re-enacting", "dramatically", "reality", so that we can have a visual of something that wasn't caught on camera, the term "nonfiction" becomes more and more problematic. I think re-enactment has a far greater capacity to recreate a lower-level novel event into the increasingly higher novel moments that comprise our "present", then does the documentary effort, as pure re-enactment doesn't require narrative, but only a pure stream of data, such as "these were the uniforms; these were the weapons; this was the field where it took place; this was the body count". Narrative might be imposed by omission, also known as interpretation, if we don't know how the body count was arrived at exactly -- who did the shooting, who caught the bullet, from what angle was the gun fired, in what position on the field was the combatant who died, so forth.
The only way film can get closer to an original event than re-enactment is with raw footage, assuming zero imposed narrative and zero editing -- or any other action which would change the footage into something other than what it was in its original form. Right? I'm tempted to say "obviously, yes, it is the single closest source to 'what happened'". But what if the lighting and camera angle of source footage isn't an adequate representation of what it actually was to the human eye? Then you could have people come in and restore the footage in a way that more clearly represents what happened, but that would be a massive introduction of novelty passing between the moment that was 'captured on film', and the process of restoration, which yields a more clear but less close view of what happened. It might be the clearest representation of what happened, but if it was restored yesterday, it would be the least close. That this is not a contradiction is kind of crazy. I think a great example of this is Peter Jackson's restoration of The Beatles "Get Back" footage. The software used literally did not exist prior to the restoration.
My subsequent thought is that re-enactment cannot ever truly refine at large, as each iteration is born out of greater amounts of novelty, and then yields ever more so, but it can refine on the microcosmic, in terms of getting more and more clear with the terminology used to refer.
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Learning about history in order to understand the future... that's basically what he's saying.
So this is another reason some people might be into historical re-enactment.
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I like their cooking videos. Showing what people ate way back when.
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Yeah, the cooking videos are usually their most popular...
They really have an extensive collection of vids on a lot of different topics though.
I don't see how they could ever run out of things to talk about.
I love the fact that they don't do anything divisive or political...
Their channel is a good escape from all the BS, and it's always wholesome.
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