Abstract
Participants at today’s Rocky Mountain rendezvous dress in pre-1840 clothing and gather to camp in period shelters and engage in an assortment of history-based activities. These encampments, which last several days, evoke the Rocky Mountain rendezvous of fur traders and beaver trappers that occurred between the years 1825 and 1840. Rendezvousers usually describe what they are doing as re-enactment of history. In this dissertation I argue that rendezvous are better described as theatre, as a special time and space in which actors impersonate characters while an audience watches. Through ethnographic study of four rendezvous and research of the popular journals surrounding the buckskinning culture, I examine how the playful improvisational theatre at rendezvous facilitates exploration of personal identity as part of a shared national American identity. This exploration may involve impersonating characters from pre-1840 American history, practicing traditional crafts such as blacksmithing or leather work, shooting period flintlock rifles, cooking meals over open fires, playing traditional music, and other activities. According to the rules of rendezvous, the theatrical “sets,” “costumes,” and “props” must be historically authentic, so the environment lends an aura of authenticity to its “plots,” even though these plots do not make any effort to reproduce specific historical events. The lived experience at rendezvous thus looks and feels like living in history, but is in fact improvisational theatrical play with historical symbols. This play can and does displace “factual” history and manufacture its own versions of the past. Because personal and national identities are closely linked to memory, and since a nation’s “memory” is its history, the improvisations at rendezvous quite literally change history. The degree to which such manufactured historical myths resemble verifiable academic history varies considerably among rendezvousers, depending on the quality of the historical research done and the ability or willingness of the researcher to critically evaluate the data. Since historical myths work actively within a culture, defining possible identities and informing political action in the present day, this examination of how the American myths evoked at rendezvous are created, challenged, and affirmed at rendezvous has broad implications for other cultures and their mythologies.
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