Back in the summer of 2011, I spent my evenings sewing linen Jedi tunics (two sets, actually!), not with any particular purpose in mind, but mostly because I figured opportunities would reveal themselves once I had them completed. (During this time I also got myself ordained with the Universal Life Church, since all my friends were getting married and I thought it could be fun to officiate a wedding as a real-life Jedi—since ‘Church of Universal Life’ sure sounds like an Earth version of the Jedi Order to me!). It was about this time that I came across a reference to the Jedi Service Corps, and the Agricultural Corps in particular.
Between having been a leader in my university’s community garden, an internship on an organic farm for a few seasons after graduation, as well as my usual horticulture activities around the homestead, I thought I might have found an outlet I could use to channel my Jedi interests.
My tunic(s) stayed in the closet for the next few years, however, only coming out for opening day of the Episode I 3-D release, and whenever they were needed for pep rallies and such at school (of course, this was when I was knee-deep in creating two complete, text-accurate Middle-earth impressions from scratch, so my attention was focused elsewhere).
Finally, in the spring of 2016, after joining my friend’s ‘Star Wars Historical Re-creationists’ facebook group, I at last had time to think about what kind of Jedi persona I wanted to tackle; I considered what items of kit I already had, what was within my ZPD to try making, and what I wanted to do with my impression.
Suddenly, I remembered the AgriCorps! As a ‘washout’, I wouldn’t be expected to carry a lightsaber, which I felt would make the impression more ‘grounded’, and would help me show that there were more ways to serve the Order than simply as a flashy Knight. As a Jedi based ‘off the beaten path’ on a remote agriworld, I figured my kit should probably include some basic survival gear, which would give me something to discuss and ‘interpret’.
At first, I wanted to have my cake and eat it too, and I tried very hard to shoehorn an AgriCorps-type persona into the later Galactic Civil War/New Republic period. However, it seems that while members of his New Jedi Order sometimes did the same types of activities as the AgriCorps had done during the Republic, Master Skywalker never formally reinstated the Service Corps. To save myself the headache, I decided to wield Occam’s Razor, and just keep the AgriCorps impression in the pre-Empire era where it belonged. Besides, I really do find the various machinations surrounding the Naboo Crisis and Palpatine’s rise to power to be pretty fascinating (especially after reading Darth Plagueis), and I thought it could be a good way to address corruption and money-in-politics in one of my hypothetical interpretive talks.
With the AgriCorps as my chosen vocation, I began the next stage of the persona-development procedure: choosing a time period.
Living History in the Star Wars Galaxy 