Paper short abstract:

The paper depicts how the inhabitants of a living history centre in Latvia appropriate history both for making a living by performing for tourists and creating a home for themselves, a life-world that combines elements of medieval and modern times.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on long-term ethnographic research among a group of historical re-enactors in Latvia who have adopted the Middle Ages both as a life-style and a source of livelihood. The group permanently resides in a living history centre where they practice and perform 15th century martial arts for their own enjoyment, but also for tourists in order to finance their life-style. While the place is presented to tourists as "history itself", a chronotope devoid of modern detail, contemporary objects and practices get fused with the medieval in the everyday lives of the inhabitants. Drawing upon recent scholarship on historical re-enactment that understands the practice as a way of democratizing historical knowledge and as a method for approaching the past's affective side (Agnew 2004 and 2007), the paper attempts to shed light on how the fictions of history become objects of desire to be recreated and celebrated as means to achieve perfected contemporary lives.