Thor Heyerdahl’s 1947 performative experiment, to sail a raft from Peru to Polynesia, was lauded as a feat of ingenuity and endurance. Largely undertreated is the racially motivated theory undergirding Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki project—that the first settlers in Polynesia were a race of bearded, white-skinned supermen who remained deities in both South American and Polynesian mythology. Contemporary commemorations, however, emphasize feel-good stories of human achievement over Heyerdahl’s racist performance.

To pre-expose deployment-bound troops to combatants' unconventional tactics, the Army has constructed vast simulations of wartime Iraq and Afghanistan. Termed “Theatre Immersion,” these sites feature entire towns bustling with costumed villagers. The largest facility is at Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert. It is part of a long tradition of performance and war games, but never before has a military simulation worked to produce an environment with this kind of scale and attention to fidelity.

The shift to “living interpretation” in the second half of the 20th century redirected the trajectory of museum work. Living bodies were said to give a more real experience of the past than could historic objects. But what about those pigs, cows, chickens, and sheep found at every major living history museum? Nowadays museums seek rare breeds or they breed contemporary animals to bring them closer to descriptions found in historic documents. What are the ethical and political implications of “backbreeding”? Will museums determine that some backbreeding is legitimate, while others are the stuff of mad-scientist films?