Animating the past,enduring the present: Labour and heritage production at Waterloo,Belgium

Abstract

This article examines how heritage is produced through labour at Waterloo Battlefield, Belgium. Drawing on 5 months of ethnography as an ‘animator’, I analyse how embodied performance and emotional display rules translate props, spaces and scripts into visitor experience. Findings show that animators’ affective and physical performances are routinised as work amid seasonal, low-paid employment with limited voice in decision-making, while budget cuts shift costs onto frontline staff. Backstage work—cleaning, resetting and preparation—extends the day and remains largely invisible to visitors and management. To manage emotional dissonance, workers rely on surface acting; over time many experience fatigue, burnout and estrangement from the role. I conclude that heritage at Waterloo is manufactured through alienated emotional and bodily labour; recognising that heritage is made through labour is crucial for understanding how production and practice unfold on the ground in contemporary commodified heritage sites that prioritise visitor experience.

Introduction

It’s five o’clock on a bright afternoon in early May. Pierre and I snap the tent flaps shut, swab the cannon, and stack the wooden muskets and a paper-mâché “mummy” onto the cart. I lean into the handle and start the slow roll towards the elevator down to the cleaning area; the axle squeaks, ramrods clink, and the sweet-acrid smell of oil and black powder hangs on my hands. We don’t talk. After 7 hours of standing, talking, moving—sometimes shouting over the crowd—silence feels like shade. I’m already doing the math: how fast I can wipe the muskets, stow the props, and get home to lie down.

We round the corner and two tourists appear. They catch the uniforms and stop us mid-corridor, questions already forming. The cart gives me cover—I keep my hands busy on the handle—while Pierre fields them. He is his usual self: calm, friendly, smiling; a practised warmth settles over his voice as the elevator button glows and the wheels of the cart go still.

“Can we take some photos with you?” It’s a request we never really refuse. “Of course—as many as you want,” I answer without hesitation.

“As many as they want, huh?” Pierre glances at me, then at the tourists. “€10 a photo,” he deadpans. They freeze, eyes wide. Pierre chuckles: “Just joking!” Relief loosens their shoulders; phones appear; they fan in beside us. I edge the cart out of the frame, lift the musket so it reads well but not threatening, and pin a smile in place, trying not to look as wrung out as I feel.

As soon as they turn away, the smiles drop. I wrestle the cart over the elevator lip—the wheels catch, the axle squeaks—and Pierre stands beside me, silent. The doors slide shut, sealing off the corridor noise. He bursts out: “Fuck you all!”

I freeze. Pierre—usually upbeat, smiling, unfailingly friendly with visitors—has never let anything like that slip in front of me. He exhales, straightens. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m just tired—five days in a row.”

After a month on the line with Pierre, the gap acquired an analytic name: emotional dissonance—the mismatch between felt and displayed emotion under codified feeling and display rules (Hochschild, 1983). As animators in Napoleonic uniforms, we deliver pre-scripted “animations” that translate heritage into participatory entertainment within the experience economy and the staged pursuit of authenticity (MacCannell, 1976; Pine and Gilmore, 1999). What appears as personality—brightness, humour, approachability—is in fact emotional labour embedded in scripted roles and disciplined by timing and civility (Ashforth and Humphrey, 1993). This is a form of affective or immaterial labour—the organised production of presence and mood whose value accrues institutionally (Hardt and Negri, 2000; Lazzarato, 1996). The smile functions as an output, calibrated through bodily techniques of breath, voice, and posture. Yet incongruence builds up: cheer delivered on cue when the body is spent, dissonance hardening into strain and burnout (Maslach and Leiter, 1997).

The emotional labour of animators offers an ethnographic entry point into how heritage production operates on the ground—within the contemporary “heritage industry” (Hewison, 1987), an economy that mobilises the past as a source of revenue. Taking this industry seriously means treating heritage as something produced, and scholars in heritage studies have developed different models to analyse this production. Tunbridge and Ashworth (1996) conceptualise heritage as a production chain—from the selection of historic resources through interpretation and packaging to the creation of heritage products—while Bendix (2009) redefines this process as a dynamic negotiation among three loci of agency: society, politics, and economy. Culture, and the cultural heritage extracted from it, emerges through the shifting interplay of these forces.

While a few studies have examined heritage work at the institutional level (e.g. Macdonald, 2002) or through the performances of interpreters (e.g. Handler and Gable, 1997), there remains limited ethnographic attention to how heritage is actually practised and done by institutional professionals (Brumann, 2014: 182). Much scholarship has explored how heritage is shaped by political and economic forces (e.g., Ashworth, 2014; Macdonald, 2013; Smith, 2006), yet less is known about the museums and staff who make heritage—how interpretive authority is performed and how “the past” is negotiated in concrete tourist encounters (Stach, 2021). Rarer still are accounts that treat frontline staff as workers in a heritage economy whose labour produces what visitors finally meet.

This ethnographic and theoretical gap calls for rethinking heritage not merely as something managed or interpreted, but as something embodied and practised by heritage practitioners. Within anthropology’s sensory and embodied turn (Classen, 1997; Pink, 2015; Tilley, 2004), heritage has increasingly been understood as a form of lived and affective engagement as research illustrate how heritage can be practised and theorised through embodiment and affect (Handler and Gable, 1997; Waterton and Watson, 2013). Building on these insights, this study situates emotional labour within this sensory and embodied understanding of heritage—showing how the animators produce the very sensorial and affective heritage experiences that visitors come to consume. The research question is: How is heritage produced through labour, and how do the workers who produce it live, endure, and negotiate that labour? While engaging with debates on the precariat and on emotional and immaterial labour, the paper’s primary contribution lies in put the embodied and affective labour of frontline workers in heritage production. It specifies the organisational mechanisms—workflow, display rules, and precarity—through which such labour produces visitor presence, conceptualising this conversion as alienated affect and offering a portable framework for comparative analysis.

Site and method

The Waterloo Battlefield in Belgium—where Napoleon was defeated in 1815—has evolved from a site of contested national memories into a European heritage (e.g., Forrest, 2015). Once celebrated by the victors and ignored by France, it is now framed as a space of peace, reconciliation, and education, particularly after the bicentenary redevelopment in 2015. The site combines museums, reconstructed farmhouses, and daily “animations” that translate history into participatory experience. For EU authorities in particular, Waterloo is mobilised as a symbolic lesson and rallying point for European unity—invoked as a reason to “bring together the peoples of Europe” (Timmermans, 2015); for local government, it is also a vital tourism asset; for the managing insitution, it is a heritage product to be preserved and promoted while attracting greater visibility and visitor reach. Together these actors sustain a heritage practice where commemoration, politics, and market imperatives converge—making Waterloo an emblematic example of how the past is produced and mediated in the contemporary heritage industry.

This article draws on 5 months of shift-based ethnography—roughly one tourist season—at Waterloo Battlefield in Belgium (April–September 2024). I worked as an unpaid student-intern in the role of animator. Having previously conducted fieldwork at the Memorial in 2019, I was already familiar with the management and staff, who welcomed my return and were aware of my research aims. My dual position as researcher and co-worker was openly acknowledged and informed by both the management and the animators. Rather than conducting formal interviews with the latter, I relied on continuous participant observation and informal conversations that emerged naturally during and between activities. This approach avoided adding to their demanding workload while better capturing the embodied and affective dimensions of their labour. Formal interviews were conducted only with management to understand how they envisioned and organised the “animations.” Notes were taken discreetly during breaks and expanded into detailed fieldnotes after shifts, with verbal consent obtained from all participants.

From the situated standpoint of a uniformed animator and researcher, I employ reflexive first-person description as data, corroborated by co-workers’ narratives and observations. My dual role provided close access to the affective rhythms and organisational pressures of the workplace while demanding constant attention to how my presence and participation shaped encounters. Reflexivity was therefore integral to analysis: fieldnotes include not only events and conversations but also my embodied responses—fatigue, frustration, or excitement—as indicators of how heritage labour was experienced. This vantage point allows me to examine how heritage is produced through everyday practices and at what embodied and temporal costs.

Animating the past

Memorial 1815, the only museum complex on the former Waterloo battlefield, was refurbished for the 2015 bicentenary with major public funding and a dual mandate: to commemorate and to generate revenue. Operating primarily on ticket income (€16 per adult), it attracted only about 160,000 visitors by 2018—far below the 500,000 publicly projected as a break-even target. The commemorative mission is thus tethered to measurable performance indicators—visitor numbers, dwell time, and per capita spend—under a self-financing policy grammar (O’Brien, 2014), as symbolic capital is expected to yield economic returns and political legitimacy (Bourdieu, 1986). In 2019, local authorities transferred daily operations to the French company Kléber Rossillon under a semi-public concession, in the hope of attracting more paying visitors. Since then, management has pursued market-oriented strategies: expanding multi audience-oriented programming, and adding animations—live, uniformed, participatory performances that translate heritage into interactive “experience” under the logic of experience economy (Pine and Gilmore, 1999).

Like many battlefields, Waterloo attracts visitors through the emotional pull of war memory and the desire to experience the past firsthand (Foley and Lennon, 1996; Prideaux, 2007; Seaton, 1996). Reenactments and live animations “lighten” the dark heritage of battle (Miles, 2014), transforming violence into participatory education and spectacle aligned with the affective turn in heritage tourism (Biran and Poria, 2012; Fortuna, 2012). For the management, Waterloo is both a site of remembrance and attraction. The animation, as envisioned by the management, are designed to balance that dual function, linking history and entertainment so that visitors both “enjoy and learn”. They provide a “human touch” that connects people to the past and attracts a broader audience.

During the tourist season of 2024, there are four different animations presented at Memorial 1815: Life of the Soldier, a walk-through bivouac of tents and straw floors—sometimes with a lit bonfire—where animators usher people into canvas shelters and narrate everyday hardship to turn onlookers into tactile participants; To the Rhythm!, a drill block in which an “officer,” “sergeant,” and (when staffing allows) a drummer recruit volunteers, hand out wooden muskets, set cadence, and march the line through basic formations before a live musket demo; Cannon Shot, the crowd-magnet, choreographed like artillery drill as animators rotate roles around the four-pounder and deliver the crack, smoke, and acrid powder that people come to hear and smell; and Surgery during the Empire, a field-hospital tableau where a mannequin, saws, retractors, bullets, a shako, and an ambulance-chariot anchor a grim, sensory lesson in wounds and amputation. Such multi-sensory cues coalesce into an affective atmosphere that translates cognitive learning into embodied memory through sound pressure, smell, and tactile handling (Anderson, 2009; Classen, 2017). Together these cycles run every 30 minutes for most of the day, with each scene blending talk, touchable objects, and timed cues so the past reads as a smooth, immersive experience.

Central to these animations are the verbal and physical performance conducted by animators. To the Rhythm! most vividly showcases the animators’ work. Designed as a Napoleonic drill school, it recruits visitors—especially children—into the line to learn the French army’s basic march, formations, and firing sequence. Under timed commands and cues, the scene turns spectators into “recruits,” making the labour of pacing, instruction, and crowd choreography most visible. By taking part in this mock training, visitors are expected to appreciate how hard soldiers’ lives once were and to value the peace we enjoy today. Humour and light jokes turn what might otherwise be an uncomfortable experience the soldiers actually lived into an accessible, enjoyable activity for families.

By late June, this animation typically opens with drumming. Pierre, who oversees the bivouac, and Bruno, our newest recruit, relish taking the drum. The rhythm rolls across the encampment; layered with Pierre’s calls in French and English, it draws people step by step towards the conscription table. Pierre, in a blue Napoleonic uniform, sits at the table, his voice amplified yet steady: “Do you have problems with justice? Show me your left and right hand. Show me your teeth!” To modern ears the lines are comic; they rest on historical practice: recruitment included checking teeth because biting paper cartridges required good ones.

I stand to the side and size wooden muskets, set the line, adjust spacing. Pierre settles the group into silence, his voice half-joking, half-solemn: “You think today is a relaxed tourist day? You are gravely mistaken. You are now part of the French army!” “Attention!” falls on the beat. He demonstrates: back straight, head high, shoulders square, musket on the left shoulder. I move down the line correcting stances. Pierre carries discipline with a light touch—“This is not a picnic; every movement must be precise.” We start with the left foot—“Which foot moves first?”—and he folds in the straw-and-hay anecdote: “Because many didn’t know left from right, officers put hay on one foot and straw on the other. Peasants knew the difference.” The line laughs; tension drops a notch; attention holds better.

The drum returns. Pierre ties cadence to command—“Left, right, left!” I lead from the front. At first the steps are uneven and the muskets wobble, but after a few rounds they begin to find the beat. Then come formations: the line (shoulder to shoulder for maximum fire) and the column (narrow for moving through tight ground). Pierre explains the tactical trade-offs—“A cannonball hitting the head of a column can pierce the entire file”—while I move within the ranks, adjusting distances and shoulders. Explanation and bodies move together; participants learn in the doing how discipline and rhythm turn scattered people into a unit.

On the open ground Pierre suddenly shouts, “Vive l’Empereur! ¹ ” The line hesitates. He halts the march, turns, and in a director’s mix of seriousness and play asks, “When an officer shouts ‘Vive l’Empereur,’ how do you respond?” He answers himself and repeats the call. The first reply is thin; the third lands louder—this call-and-response on the cue lifts the energy and pulls people from spectator into actor.

Back in line we move to firing motions. Under Pierre’s command I demonstrate “Make ready—Present—Fire,” and the recruits copy it—clumsy the first time, recognizable the second. Pierre points outward: “Look! That’s the enemy!” Laughter rises; wooden muskets come up together; the simulated volley lands—a “playing at the real” moment that delights both participants and onlookers.

Then comes the live musket demonstration. Pierre, hands to ears in exaggerated anticipation, asks me, “Did you hear anything?” I shake my head. He asks Bruno, then the audience—building suspense: “Shall we hear what a real musket sounds like?” We move to the demo area. I shoulder a real flintlock and explain how it works: loading powder, biting the paper cartridge, why left-handed shooters were rare, what range and rate meant. When the explanation is done, the crowd steps back behind the safety line. I fire—sparks, a crack that hangs in the air, the acrid smell of powder spreading across the ground: the senses press the demonstration into bodies.

Back near the bivouac, Pierre closes the scene: “The last order—and the one you’ve been waiting for.” He points to the pot over the fire. “The soup is ready! The order is—to the soup!” He raises his musket with comic solemnity. “On the order, raise your weapon and give your best war cry—an ‘ooo!’ from deep in your chest!” The first try is limp; the second is full-throated. Laughter breaks formation. The group disperses. I collect the wooden muskets one by one; some visitors snap photos or chat, others peel off towards the next stop.

To the Rhythm! illustrates how the animation works in practice through embodiment and interaction. The drill scene synchronises bodies, gestures, and emotions so that discipline becomes play and spectators become participants. Sound and movement bind visitors into a fleeting formation where laughter, repetition, and bodily coordination give history a tangible, affective form. The past, in this sense, is not merely represented but momentarily inhabited—a sensory choreography that fuses instruction with entertainment and transforms history into shared presence. Heritage, here, regains its embodied and affective character (Waterton and Watson, 2013) through the animators’ work.

Analytically, this vignette shows how such embodiment is sustained through coordination, affect, and material design. Props such as uniforms, drums, and wooden muskets help, but what ultimately matters is whether the encounter feels real enough to lean into (Duan et al., 2019). Through distinct roles—Pierre as officer, Bruno as drummer, and I as sergeant—we coordinate talk, gesture, and rhythm so that words and movements not only read place but also write it into being as a site to be experienced (Overend, 2012). What appears as demeanour—timing, stance, tone—operates as a reproducible technique that produces a coherent visitor experience (Jonasson and Scherle, 2012). On this ground, visitors briefly inhabit the early nineteenth century—marching, drilling, witnessing musket fire—an edutainment hybrid promoted by management (Radder and Han, 2015; Stach, 2021). The material inventory is constitutive rather than decorative: muskets, drums, and tables translate narrative into touchable form (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998). Yet authority is staged as hospitality. We are not officers and visitors are not recruits; we operate in a heritage economy where satisfaction is paramount and friendliness must never lapse. This is a front-stage role maintained through mood management that follows institutional frontstage display rules of warmth, humour, and availability (Goffman, 1959; Hochschild, 1983). The officer’s command is thus bracketed by the sensibilities of the service sector—a form of staged authenticity that feels “real enough” within family-friendly, risk-managed bounds (MacCannell, 1973).

Taken together, these dynamics reveal how animators produce heritage as experience through processes of packaging and interpretation (Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996). Through their embodied work—recruiting and framing participation, positioning and pacing bodies in relation to space and script, and timing voice and gesture so that actions read as intended—they transform a predesigned historical performance into marketable experiences that visitors can consume. The coupling of workflow (cadence, sequencing, reset) and display rules (open face, light touch, constant availability) organises not only what visitors feel but also what workers must feel like. Under seasonal precarity, this coupling shapes the production of alienated affect—emotions institutionally configured into saleable outputs that can estrange animators from product, process, and, at times, self.

Labour and precarity

Reading through to the rhythm, the qualities that make animating the past compelling as heritage hinge on making the work disappear as work. In this setting, affect is generated by staged hospitality: visitors must feel welcomed, guided, and safe while briefly acting as historical figures. That hospitality rests on a familiar premise across service and cultural sectors: that animators act from “passion” — a term they themselves often use, which I read as love of history and a willingness to share it — rather than as waged, often alienated, labour. Framed this way, friendliness and patience are naturalised as temperament, obscuring the training, scripting, and effort that actually produce them (Cech, 2021; Warhurst and Nickson, 2007). Yet, as with other forms of affective and service work, this seemingly effortless warmth is crafted and costly: it is trained and routinised, paced to scripts and safety protocols, audited through tight schedules and internalised norms, and sustained by constant micro-coordination of voice, gesture, timing, and crowd repair. In short, what reads as spontaneous charm is scripted emotional labour—deliberate and often exhausting work that keeps history legible and pleasurable.

The very rhythms that make emotional labour reproducible—its repetition, pacing, and codified gestures—also define the form of the animation itself. As in other performative forms of tourism (Edensor, 2000; Urry and Larsen 2011), these encounters are co-produced by animators and visitors in the sense of a guided, mediated encounter through the mutual management of attention, timing, and feeling (Cohen, 1985). Each animation at Memorial 1815 follows a recognisable rhythm of service work—preparation, delivery, and reset—through which interaction itself becomes the product. Before each performance, props and space are quickly made legible, and animators through performances set the stage. The scene runs on a simple loop: voice sets tempo, gesture holds attention, humour eases tension. Visitors echo back—laughing, repeating commands, posing—so interaction becomes the medium of history. Whether bivouac or cannon, the task is to turn objects and movement into immersion, then end cleanly and reset. This “reset” work is largely invisible to visitors yet central to sustaining flow. Edge work such as posing for photos or answering extra questions routinely extends shifts beyond the timetable, folding physical effort, affective display, and self-management into the same repetitive cycle.

From 11:00 to 17:30 in summer, the four programmes cycle continuously every thrity minutes. Each run lasts more than 20 minutes, leaving little—sometimes no—respite between slots. Aside from a thirty-minute lunch, animators are constantly standing, walking, talking, and demonstrating. The front stage does not end when a segment ends: in the narrow seams between cycles we answer questions, pose for photos, redirect foot traffic, and reset props—what amounts to edge work that keeps flow and legibility intact for the next group. Even without formal supervision, the timetable and the crowd act as a metronome; we adjust tempo and tone to hold attention and keep the corridor open.

After the final animation, reset continues. Everything is packed and racked; the cannon is cleaned; the tent is struck. We wheel the cart back to storage to clean the muskets and prepare gunpowder for the next day’s cartridges. By the time these backstage tasks are finished, the clock often reads well past 19:00. And the day does not end at the door: commuting still awaits—brief for those living nearby, up to 2 hours for colleagues travelling from Brussels or farther.

The animators’ job is heavy and crucial in the vision of the management, yet their working conditions do not reflect the essential contribution they are making to the institution. In practice, their employment is deeply precarious—shaped by seasonal, volatile demand and mirroring the wider tourism pattern in which roles like tour guiding are often informal, low-wage, and weakly protected (De Beer et al., 2014; Robinson et al., 2019). Among the 11 animators I worked with during the fieldwork, 9 were students, two of them were even under the age of 18. Only two held permanent contracts—and they happen to be nonstudents. All others were students on temporary contracts, whose work is considered as temporal, replaceable, and cheap.

Compared with similar roles, animator pay remains conspicuously low. While there is no official statistics, a survey put the average gross hourly wage of tour guides in Belgium at about €15. ² By contrast, student animators at Waterloo earn €9.60–12.57 per hour, and the permanent members earn €12.8—well below that benchmark. Average working hours in Belgium are about 34.5 per week ³ ; the two permanent animators at the Memorial report roughly 37 to 38 hours on paper—higher than the national average—yet their pay remains well below that of comparable guiding roles and only €100 more than the legal minimum ⁴ .

Motivation also varies sharply. A few student workers with a strong interest in Napoleonic history—or active reenactors themselves—stay beyond a single season and most often speak of passion for the past. The rest, largely local students seeking summer income, view the position as a temporary job; they seldom return the following year, and visitors sometimes remark that certain students “look unhappy.” The site thus runs on a continuum of affective and pragmatic labour: enthusiasm supplies dedication and stability, while short-term necessity supplies flexibility and low cost. Together they sustain the daily operations of the institution, showing how both passion and pragmatism—affective attachment and structural precarity—are folded into the same economy of heritage production. At the same time, passion itself becomes part of the mechanism of exploitation: genuine commitment supplies meaning and endurance where material reward is scarce.

Tom’s story exposes the Memorial’s reliance on student labour—those who stay out of passion—and its narrow repertoire for reciprocating what that labour produces. In March 2024, he filled in for three consecutive days without pay to cover a colleague on paternity leave, acting out of attachment to the Napoleonic period and a sense of responsibility to keep the schedule intact. Later, he asked for a small token of thanks—a €20 Napoleon figurine from the gift shop—but was told it was “not appropriate” to request such a thing. The response was polite but distancing; management offered a 10% discount instead, a gesture so trivial it landed as a brush-off. For Tom, the figurine was symbolic—a small way to materialise his link to the site and have his extra effort acknowledged in tangible form. Instead, his unpaid contribution disappeared into routine expectation, revealing how informal acts of commitment that keep the machine running are rendered invisible.

Like Tom, the animators are subjected to systematic marginalisation within the heritage industry at Waterloo. This is organisational precarity: insecurity is reproduced not only by seasonal contracts but by a structure that withholds progression routes and voice (Kalleberg, 2009; Standing, 2011). The pattern sharpened in 2023, when the cultural manager ⁵ —an ex-animator who led the team—was replaced by a reception staff member with no animation experience. The role’s fungibility signals managerial deskilling and epistemic injustice towards embodied, front-line knowledge, bypassing Pierre, who has effectively run the bivouac for years. What follows is recognition without power: Pierre receives the title “Head of the Bivouac,” which expands responsibility but not authority or pay—a familiar mechanism of precarisation in cultural work in which accountability grows while decision rights and remuneration do not (De Peuter, 2011). He remains without a seat at Monday meetings of the management, a vote on content, or a lever on resources; nominal promotion doubles as normative control, extracting loyalty and extra labour while keeping governance closed. A title circulates; the work remains the same.

Working with Pierre, I watch frustration pool into a kind of sharp humour. “Puppets,” he says at one point, summing up how it feels to carry responsibility without voice. When the animation budget was cut from €3,000 to €150—so thin that animators began paying out of pocket (later reimbursed) to patch props and keep scenes readable—there was no consultation. When the gunpowder allowance per cannon shot was reduced—enough to produce two misfires during my fieldwork—there was no communication from management. Yet the expectation held steady: we were to deliver the same high-quality performances. The costs of those decisions—duller effects, extra explanation, apologetic humour, the time and money to improvise fixes—were effectively shifted downstream to the animators.

The repetitive nature of the labour, coupled with precarious working conditions, erodes animators’ passion for the job. One August evening, after cleaning the equipment and readying it for the next day, Pierre and I drag our tired bodies towards the exit. The Memorial is eerily quiet; offices sit dark and empty. Passing the managements’ rooms, I remark—almost absentmindedly—“Everyone in the offices is already gone.”

I do not realise my comment catches on something raw. Pierre’s face tighten—resignation edge with anger. “Yes,” he says, “they all disappear after five as quickly as they can, while we work two more hours like slaves.”

His two words do heavy work. Disappear summons an image of staff vanishing at the stroke of five, slipping into a world spared the physical and emotional burdens that define our day. Their absence is not only spatial but moral: a clean break from the labour that continues after the shutters come down. We are left in the emptied site, surrounded by the remnants of performance—props to stow, powder to portion, muskets to clean—tasks that few outside the bivouac ever see.

Slaves, while jarring, names the felt imbalance between what animators do and how that work is valued. As an emic metaphor, it indexes depersonalisation—the sense of being treated as interchangeable “hands”—that emerges when display rules must be kept under high demands and thin recovery (Hochschild, 1983). It marks a sense of powerlessness: expectations that bind without giving a say; hours that stretch without acknowledgment; a smile that is required even when the body is spent. Sustained load with limited opportunities to recuperate drains emotional resources, weakening the front-stage persona and tipping towards burnout—emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and diminished personal accomplishment (Maslach and Jackson, 1981). The comparison is hyperbolic and historically fraught, but the sentiment tracks the hierarchy we live in, where front-stage physical and emotional labour is naturalised under a rhetoric of passion and rendered invisible to those who set the schedules and make the decisions. The labour that produces the heritage experience thus becomes itself a site of dispossession: animators give not only their time and bodies but their feelings and vitality, converting enthusiasm into a consumable atmosphere that leaves little residue for themselves. In this sense, heritage production is sustained by a paradox—the very affect that enlivens the past simultaneously exhausts those who perform it.

Enduring the present

Pierre’s brief outburst in the elevator, as described at the start, is therefore unsurprising. The ongoing requirement to perform—friendly, enthusiastic, open on requests—sits at odds with what animators actually feel: fatigue from hours of standing and talk; disappointment under precarious contracts and thin pay; and anger at being sidelined in decisions while being asked to absorb cuts with their own time, tone, and bodies. That mismatch is classic emotional dissonance from emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983): the regulated management of feeling and expression to meet organisational display rules even when inner states diverge. Ashforth and Humphrey (1993) treat emotional labour as impression management that can enhance performance when audiences perceive the display as sincere; at Waterloo, animators work precisely in that register, crafting credible warmth and light authority so their affect reads as genuine and meets the institution’s goal of entertaining—and holding—visitors.

However, Morris and Feldman (1996) underscore the sustained effort and attentional control required to keep such displays in place, and Grandey (2000) shows how organizational display rules require the active modulation of emotion to meet workplace demands. In practice, this regulation typically takes two forms: surface acting, modifying outward expression without altering felt states (e.g., fixing a smile, swallowing irritation, smoothing one’s tone); and deep acting, attempting to reshape inner feeling to match the required display, often through cognitive reappraisal, visualisation, or empathic perspective-taking. The animators at Waterloo overwhelming employ the first.

This surface acting is palpable in daily routines. When I first begin working as an animator, I am struck by how my colleagues sustain cheerfulness through long, repetitive days. They remain performative and upbeat—even minutes after admitting how tired they are. One crowded day in June, Pierre and I are drained after running animations since morning. We finally steal a minute by the campfire. He yawns again and again, poking the fire as he mutters about his “Head of the Bivouac” title and the decisions made above. “It’s so tiring,” he sighs, half-smiling, eyes fixed on the tourists. “Such a beautiful day… people should go to the beach instead of coming here.” Moments earlier, he had been perfectly polite and buoyant with those same visitors he now hopes will leave.

As a few children run towards the bivouac, he murmurs, “Fuck those children running towards us.” The bitterness flickers only for a second before the professional smile returns. He greets them as if he had been waiting all day, leading the drill with crisp authority and easy jokes—the charismatic captain families love to follow. The session runs smoothly; the visitors leave delighted. The only person who seems less than happy is Pierre himself. What the crowd reads as genuine cheer is, in that moment, meticulously maintained display—a polished front masking exhaustion and irritation so that flow and legibility hold. This near-instant emotional switching is the visible edge of display rules: keep the scene seamless so visitors do not “fall out of the play” (Ashforth and Humphrey, 1993; Hochschild, 1983).

What I first noticed in colleagues, I soon felt in my own body: the same surface acting that fixes a smile in place when patience has run out. As I answered questions and posed for photos, my face stayed even, but inside I was silently shouting, wishing visitors would drift away. The repetition of warmth and composure—slot after slot—suppresses the irritation that fatigue would otherwise release; the dissonance turns inward and gradually erodes emotional resources (Morris and Feldman, 1996). By the end of my internship, I was counting down the days: I knew I would return to Waterloo, but never as an animator.

Our lived experience makes plain that we are enduring the work—its physical, intellectual demand and the continual effort required to sustain emotional labour. Behind the relaxed and enjoyable laughing at a staged military school rests a heavy material underbelly: bodies in wool that rub and heat; black powder and wooden kits that must be lifted, counted, and cleaned; timed talk that must remain audible in wind and chatter; and front-stage resets that regularly spill past the printed day. There is no slack elsewhere in the system; smoothness is made possible by a slow expenditure of energy and affect that remains off the books. What looks like spontaneity is in fact maintenance: the ongoing work of keeping a scene legible, safe, and pleasurable in conditions that would otherwise let it splinter.

Apart from that, the required display—friendly, enthusiastic, open—collides with felt states of fatigue, disappointment, and irritation. We regulate feeling and expression to meet display rules even when inner states diverge. Crucially, in a day organised by paced production units, dissonance is not incidental but a structural by-product of rhythm and legibility: the beat must hold, so variance is absorbed by the body (Thompson and Smith, 2010). Across the season, that regulation accumulates as burnout: emotional exhaustion, creeping cynicism, and a sense of diminished efficacy (Maslach and Leiter, 1997). The symptoms are small but legible in our experience and turnover among student animators is strikingly high. During my stay at Waterloo, three left for other jobs; as Pierre put it, “they (the students) never come back after three months here.”

For those who joined out of passion, affect has a double valence: it rebrands the work as pleasure even as it binds workers to the schedule. In creative and cultural work, people often name their practice through a rhetoric of love, passion, and self-realisation, making the investment of feeling appear naturally positive; yet this is precisely how attachment becomes a technique of control (Gill and Pratt, 2008). Students who join out of passion for Napoleonic history take pride in offering an “authentic,” immersive experience and often choose to stay for fulfilling their personal interests, yet in doing so they also engage in emotional labour like others and help sustain a system they themselves frequently resent in terms of low pay, high demand, and a lack of resources.

Unlike other forms of work under neoliberalism, emotional labour trades directly in affect as both means and product. Workers are required to recognise, regulate, and direct feeling under explicit feeling/display rules, and their demeanour is audited as performance and commodity rather than treated as personality (Mastracci and Adams, 2018). In heritage production at Waterloo this has two consequences. First, smiles, warmth, and light authority become required outputs that are converted into positive feedback brand advertising—value captured from demeanour itself (Gill and Pratt, 2008). What matters is not only what is done, but what is felt. Second, when pressure increases, gaps are bridged not with more time or tools but with more feeling—extra explanation, apologetic humour, tighter pacing—so that the costs of keeping the scene intact are absorbed by bodies and moods. For example, when management cut the powder allowance per cannon shot, animators had to explain to visitors why the report was weaker than expected—adding extra work to the role. On this ground, alienation takes shape—emotional dissonance among its signs—across the product, the process, and the self, even as visitors experience the interaction as authentic and enjoyable.

The animators’ labour at Waterloo thus reveals a form of alienation peculiarly profound within the neoliberal experience economy. Emotion and affective doings-in-practice—the “little rituals of gesture, utterance, and the use of appropriate prostheses” (Thrift, 2008: 90)—are patterned, organised, and regulated into routinised tasks (Wetherell, 2012). As demonstrated in the ethnography, under the neoliberal experience economy these routines are actively commodified in Waterloo’s animation work. Alienation is produced on site: emotion does not sit inside individuals but circulates across bodies, props, scripts, and spaces, “sticking” to uniforms, cues, and scenes in ways that orient conduct towards the sanctioned tone of a “good” visit (Ahmed, 2014). This process manifests across the classic Marxian dimensions of alienation (1844[1978]): from the product, as the affective intensity they generate is captured for profit while they face low pay and high demands; from the process itself, which is transformed from personal feeling into a timed, regulated performance governed by scripts and display rules; from their species-being, as their fundamental human capacity for emotion is instrumentalized and estranged, often in conflict with their internal feelings.

Read together, the paradox is stark. Within the heritage production of the experience economy, a smooth, cheerful visit is engineered by scripting, pacing, and affective regulation that keep the scene legible while slowly wearing down those who perform it. As the production rhythm tightens, surface emotion sands down fatigue and conflict, and interpretive depth gives way to safe, consumable history (Handler and Gable, 1997; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998; Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996) The result is a profitable interface and an alienated back-end: short-term visitor satisfaction purchased at the cost of workers’ wellbeing.

Conclusion: Heritage production Through labour

After finishing a busy day in August, I talk with Pierre about my research and raise the question of “passion.” He thinks for a moment. “I had passion before,” he says, “but now it’s gone.” When he first started, the role felt like a dream: after answering phones at an insurance company, being paid to “play a soldier” was exhilarating, even fulfilling.

Over time, he explains, that feeling changes. He insists he still has some passion, but not for the Memorial itself—in other words, not for the job as currently organised. Weekends on rota, little appreciation for the time he and his colleagues put in, and a steady contrast with management’s schedules—weekends off, regular hours—have worn it thin. “It’s the animators who are doing all the job, and the memorial is exploiting us,” he says. His metaphors are vivid: animators are “orange juice,” squeezed until all value is extracted; at another point, “like an animal,” used for labour without regard to well-being.

His reflections bring to mind a story he told earlier. Another animator once pleaded with the director for more materials, hoping to bring more “passion” into the work. The request was refused. As Pierre recounts it, the director replied that he didn’t need passion; he needed animators to treat animation as a “job”. For Pierre, this crystallises the institution’s priorities: “He does not care if the animators are happy,” he says. “In the end, the animation is more about money.”

The vignette summarises the paper’s finding: the heritage experience at Waterloo is produced through labour—specifically waged emotional and immaterial labour (Hochschild, 1983; Lazzarato, 1996). Frontline animators use bodies, voices, timing, and mood to engineer participation and keep scenes legible and attractive for tourist-consumers, delivering scripted friendliness and enthusiasm so visitors briefly inhabit a packaged past. The past is performed through bodily practices in a business setting: smiles, warmth, and excitement circulate as institutional value rather than personal expression. Placed in its political-economic setting, affect functions as an extractable input: revenue is prioritised while the labour that generates “good feeling” remains precarious—low wages, unstable contracts, thin materials budgets, little discretion, scant recovery time. Institutional display rules (be friendly, enthusiastic, available) collide with felt states (fatigue, disappointment, irritation); the gap is managed predominantly through surface acting, which across a season accumulates as burnout—exhaustion, brittle humour, depersonalisation, and diminished efficacy. Seen through a labour lens, the consequence is alienation—estrangement from product, process, and self.

In this article, I shift the study of heritage production away from narrative, discourse, and curatorial design to the frontline where heritage is actually practised. Through embedded ethnography, I specify the micro-infrastructures by which frontline workers produce heritage experiences: pacing and resets, cueing and scripts, display rules, the choreography of bodies and props, and the continual work of keeping scenes legible. Crucially, I foreground emotional labour as integral to this production process—the regulated management of tone, warmth, and lightness under explicit display rules—showing how affective maintenance is planned, queued, and audited alongside other tasks, yet often at the expense of workers’ well-being. In doing so, I recentre labour—rather than narrative alone—as a decisive medium of production, demonstrating how value is generated through on-site practices and affective work as much as through curatorial intent. The analysis details how these practices convert design ambitions into deliverable experiences, linking production to outcomes such as visitor satisfaction—a key operational metric in the contemporary heritage industry.

While this article focuses on frontline workers’ emotional labour and its role in the production of heritage in practice, future ethnography could foreground visitor co-production, which is only briefly addressed here: in experience-economy settings like Waterloo, tourists’ expectations, moods, and moment-to-moment responses help script what counts as a “good” visit (Falk and Dierking, 2013). Attending to how visitors envision their visits—and how these orientations are negotiated on site—would show when “cheerful smoothness” is demanded, when interpretive depth is welcomed or resisted, and how staff react. Extending this line, a visitor-centred study can also test message reception: whether the interpretive aims built into design are in fact received by audiences. As classic work at Colonial Williamsburg shows, experiences calibrated for comfort and enjoyment can crowd out critical engagement, with visitors often treating the site as entertainment and missing the educational intent (Gable and Handler, 2000; Handler and Gable, 1997). Therefore, visitor-focused research would contribute to the understanding of the entire production and consumption phase of heritage while yielding practical insights for practitioners to reconsider their roles and methods within today’s consumerist tourism landscape.