Le passé sans l’histoire. Vers une anthropologie culturelle du temps

Abstract

Historians live in the belief that history and memory are the only modes of existence of the past in society, and that the way we use the past is essentially ideological and patrimonial. But the fact is that the past appears in a large number of works of art and practices devoid of any historicity, as an aesthetic and dramatic category. Working from empirical material (films, screenplays and role-playing games), we are able to observe how an interest in the past (with emphasis on the Middle Ages) may be quite remote from an interest in what has really happened.

Keywords

• past versus history
• modes of historicity
• film
• live action role-playing game
• fiction
• Middle Ages