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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Incipient Games: Restoring The Past Through Play In Historical Reenactment, Luke Konkol
Incipient Games: Restoring The Past Through Play In Historical Reenactment, Luke Konkol
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis is an ethnography of an historical reenactment group which stewards a living history village portraying the nineteenth-century “Wisconsin frontier.” It analyzes productions from improvisations, to scripted vignettes, to a “whodunit” mystery game. Across their practice, reenactors are met with a host of challenges including ‘authenticity,’ balancing constructionism and objectivism, visitor engagement, educating the public, and the bleeding together of period techniques and modern thinking. Such challenges push against the boundaries of analyzing the project of reenactment (or larger social life) as theatre. Given terms like “play-acting” and “role-playing” in the space of reenactment, this thesis examines this phenomenon …
Over The Ropes: Boundary Play In Professional Wrestling, Ethan Ingram
Over The Ropes: Boundary Play In Professional Wrestling, Ethan Ingram
Theses and Dissertations
Within the anthropology of performance, scholars have traditionally considered theater, spectacle, sport, and ritual performances in terms of the discrete boundaries of space and time that separate these events from daily life and in terms of the disparate roles that demarcate performers from audience members. Professional wrestling, a popular performance genre in the American Midwest, exhibits features that challenge these boundaries through the collaborative construction of the event by performers and audience members. Audience interaction is an essential part of wrestling performances, characterized by routine and contextually understood behaviors that performers can process as evaluative feedback. Moreover, during wrestling matches, …