Defining mimesis

Why would a project about future making bear the title ‘Mimesis in Action’?

A short history of mimesis

The term ‘mimesis’ comes from Ancient Greek, as I learnt as a Classics student, before I turned to Cultural Anthropology. Mimesis refers to the act of imitating, presenting anew, or making likenesses. The ancient philosopher Plato was suspicious of mimesis, associating it with doxa, ‘mere’ opinion, rather than truth. He considered theatre performances, with actors ‘mimicking’ someone else, a dubious practice that could lead astray and corrupt the audience, as well as the actors themselves. Plato has had a strong influence on western world views, which has been a factor in the misgivings that persist vis-à-vis copying and imitation as being just that – not the genuine thing. In recent thought about the topic, however, a change in appreciation of mimetic practices has come about (see, e.g., Dupré et al. 2020). In mimicking, in reconstructing and replicating, inevitably, transformation happens, almost in spite of the desire to produce exactly the same thing and copy ‘perfectly’ or ‘accurately’. This turns imitation into a creative practice that requires improvisation and experiment (Ingold and Hallam 2007). It is precisely this transformative potential of mimesis that holds a promise of something new, as a former or older or ‘other’ model is carried forward in time, but with a twist.

Mimesis as transformative

This is why this research project about futuring has the term ‘mimesis’ so prominently in its title. Mimesis is all about human experiences of, and plays with, time, including the future. It allows humans to experiment with going back and forth in time, and creating something in the process (Kalshoven 2018). I am interested in finding out how this ‘mimetic faculty’ (Taussig 1993) works in specific practices. In previous ethnographic research, I worked with so-called ‘living historians’, people interested in specific places and periods in history who seek to ‘mimic’ material culture from the past, creating their own garments in the process and coming together to act out their interpretations of that past. In doing so, they transform their own present and create new models for future performances (Kalshoven 2012). These living historians also acquire insights about the past through their embodied action. Philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has even suggested that imitations may be better than the real thing in that ‘[i]mitation and representation are not merely a second version, a copy, but a recognition of the essence. … They contain the essential relation to everyone for whom the representation exists’ (1975: 103). It is important to realize, however, that recognizing an ‘essence’ is never an innocent process – representations always involve choices that are grounded in political and ideological considerations of which the performers may or may not be explicitly aware. Mimesis can be very controversial. Just think of the thorny issue of ‘appropriation’ when performances involve cultural materials that are considered to belong to people elsewhere or that concern knowledge held as vital to certain communities.

Mimesis in ‘Mimesis in Action’

With ‘Mimesis in Action’, our research team wants to find out which models people look to when they plan for the future. In other words, which mimetic practices take place? Would they think of previous landscapes and practices, or might they want to make a clear break with what came before? May inspiration be found in contemporaneous models that exist elsewhere, through analogy? Or may people draw on a strong metaphor in thinking about their future? And how might such processes work ‘in action’, that is, when preparation for futures actually happens – as is the case in areas of decommissioning, where change is an intrinsic part as past structures are being unbuilt and make room (both physically and conceptually) for new things. Which controversies and which politics occur in arenas of mimetic practice? As Homeric scholar Egbert Bakker argues, mimesis in ancient Greek is an action noun, denoting ‘a relation between an action (i.e., a process) and its model’ (Bakker 2005: 61; italics in original). It is precisely this relation, its negotiating of time, and its juggling of past, present, and imagined models that interests us in ‘Mimesis in Action’, both for its transformative and for its imaginative potential.

References

·       Bakker, Egbert J. 2005. Pointing at the Past: From Formula to Performance in Homeric Poetics. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies.

·       Dupré, Sven, Anna Harris, Patricia Lulof, Julia Kursell, and Maartje Stols-Witlox, eds. 2020. Reconstruction, Replication and Re-enactment in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

·       Ingold, T. and E. Hallam, editors. 2007. Creativity and Cultural Improvisation. Oxford and New York: Berg.

·       Kalshoven, Petra Tjitske. 2018. Entry ‘mimesis’ in Anthropology Beyond Text volume, editor Rupert Cox, in 12-volume International Encyclopedia of Anthropology (general editor Hilary Callan), New York: Wiley – Blackwell.

·       Kalshoven, Petra Tjitske. 2012. Crafting ‘the Indian’: Knowledge, Desire, and Play in Indianist Reenactment. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

·       Taussig, Michael T. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge.