Grassroots Memorials: The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death 0857451898, 9780857451897

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Grassroots Memorials

Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

Remapping Cultural History General Editor: Jo Labanyi, New York University and University of Southampton Published in association with the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London The theoretical paradigms dominant in much of cultural history published in English tend to be derived from northern European or North American models. This series will propose alternative mappings by focusing partly or wholly on those parts of the world that speak, or have spoken, French, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese. Both monographs and collective volumes will be published. Preference will be given to volumes that cross national boundaries, that explore areas of culture that have previously received little attention, or that make a significant contribution to rethinking the ways in which cultural history is theorised and narrated. Cultural Encounters: European Travel Writing in the 1930s Edited by Charles Burdett and Derek Duncan Images of Power: Iconography, Culture and the State in Latin America Edited by Jens Andermann and William Rowe The Art of the Project: Projects and Experiments in Modern French Culture Edited by Johnnie Gratton and Michael Sheringham

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Locating Memory: Photographic Acts Edited by Annette Kuhn and Kirsten Emiko McAllister Intersected Identities: Strategies of Visualization in 19th and 20th Century Mexican Culture Erica Segre Fetishes and Monuments: Afro-Brazilian Art and Culture in the 20th Century Roger Sansi Journeys Through Fascism: Italian Travel-Writing between the Wars Charles Burdett Border Interrogations: Questioning Spanish Frontiers Edited by Benita Sampedro Vizcaya and Simon Doubleday Love and the Idea of Europe Luisa Passerina Indispensable Eyesores: An Anthropology of Undesired Buildings Mélanie van der Hoorn Rethinking the Informal City: Critical Perspectives from Latin America Edited by Felipe Hernández, Peter Kellett and Lea K. Allen Grassroots Memorials: The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death Edited by Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

Grassroots Memorials The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death

Copyright © 2011. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Edited by Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

First published in 2011 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2011 Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of Berghahn Books.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grassroots memorials: the politics of memorializing traumatic death / edited by Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sanchez-Carretero. – 1st ed. p. cm. – (Remapping cultural history ; 12) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-85745-189-7 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-85745-190-3 (ebook) 1. Death–Social aspects. 2. Memorialization. 3. Social movements–Political aspects. I. Margry, P. J. (Peter Jan) II. Sánchez Carretero, Cristina. HQ1073.G73 2011 393’.9--dc23 2011018711

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper

ISBN: 978-0-85745-189-7 (hardback)

Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Preface

ix

Introduction Rethinking Memorialization: The Concept of Grassroots Memorials Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero

1

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I. Negotiating Societal Violence 1. “Difficult Remembrance”: Memorializing Mafia Victims in Palermo Deborah Puccio-Den

51

2. Ritual Mediations of Violent Death: An Ethnography of the Theo van Gogh Memorial Site, Amsterdam Irene Stengs

71

3. Between Commemoration and Social Activism: Spontaneous Shrines, Grassroots Memorialization, and the Public Ritualesque in Derry Jack Santino 4. Memorializing Shooters with Their Victims: Columbine, Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois University Sylvia Grider

97

108

II. Contesting Objectionable Death 5. Marking Death: Grief, Protest, and Politics after a Fatal Traffic Accident Monika Rulfs 6. Ghost Bikes: Memorialization and Protest on City Streets Robert Thomas Dobler

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145

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vi

Contents

7. Mourning the Polish Pope in Polish Cities Ewa Klekot 8. Remembering La Tragedia: Commemorations of the 1999 Floods in Venezuela Sandrine Revet

188

208

III. Sociability and Reflexive Antiterrorism 9. Street Shrines and the Writing of Disaster: 9/11, New York, 2001 Béatrice Fraenkel

229

10. The Madrid Train Bombings: Enacting the Emotional Body at the March 11 Grassroots Memorials Cristina Sánchez-Carretero

244

11. Purification and Remembrance: Eastern and Western Ways of Dealing with the Bali Bombing Huub de Jonge

262

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IV. Instrumentalizing Repositories of Memory 12. September 11: Museums, Spontaneous Memorials, and History James B. Gardner

285

13. Piazza Carlo Giuliani—G8 Summit, Genoa 2001: Death, Testimony, Memory Fabio Caffarena and Carlo Stiaccini

304

14. Memorializing a Controversial Politician: The “Heritagization” of a Materialized Vox Populi Peter Jan Margry

319

Notes on Contributors

346

Index

352

Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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Illustrations 0.1. Grassroots memorial in front of the Bank of England, 2008. 0.2. Mirror as a memento mori at the Atocha train station in Madrid, 2004. 1.1. The Falcone Tree, memorial for Judge Giovanni Falcone, Palermo, 2006. 1.2. Commemorative sheet exposed by the Falcone Foundation. 2.1. Sign at the Linnaeusstraat memorial site, Amsterdam, 2004. 2.2. The “ritual expert” rearranging the Theo van Gogh memorial, 2004. 2.3. Detail of the Linnaeusstraat memorial site, Amsterdam, 2004. 3.1. Derry mural by the Bogside Artists, 2008. 4.1. Memorial assemblage at Columbine High School, 1999. 4.2. Fifteen memorial crosses for the Columbine High School victims, 1999. 4.3. Flowers around the Hokie stone memorial at Virginia Tech, 2007. 4.4. Six small crosses erected by Greg Zanis at Northern Illinois University, 2008. 5.1. Newspaper cutting: “Truck killed child,” Hamburg, 1991. 5.2. Girls standing at the site of the accident in Hamburg. 5.3. Newspaper cutting: “Street of Grief,” Hamburg, 1991. 6.1. The ghost bike for David Minor, Eugene, Oregon, 2008. 6.2. Ghost bike memorial, Eugene, Oregon, 2008. 7.1. “Dressing up” a lamppost on John Paul II Avenue, Warsaw, 2005. 7.2. Memorialization on Piłsudski Square, Warsaw, 2005. 7.3. Line of memorial candles along John Paul II Avenue, Warsaw, 2005. 8.1. The chapel built by La Veguita residents, 2003. 8.2. Miniature memorial at Carmen de Uria, 2003. 8.3. Flower scattering at Carmen de Uria, 2003. 9.1. Detail of Chico’s shrine, a local artist, New York 9.2. Shrine of local artist Chico at Avenue A, New York 9.3 Analytical drawing of the composition of Chico’s shrine.

Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

xii 38 56 62 74 80 85 102 111 116 123 130 147 151 159 171 172 197 200 202 214 217 218 233 238 239

viii

10.1. 10.2. 10.3. 11.1. 11.2. 11.3. 12.1. 12.2. 12.3. 13.1. 13.2. 14.1.

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14.2. 14.3.

Illustrations

Posting on a column in Atocha train station, Madrid, 2004. Atocha train station in Madrid, 14 April 2004. Brick column at Atocha train station, 9 June 2004. Western mourners near the Bali bomb site, October 2002. Spontaneous ceremony performed by Westerners on Kuta Beach, 2002. Antiterrorist T-shirt, Bali, 2009. Woman keeps candles burning at a Union Square memorial, New York, 2001. Jeffrey Wiener’s family members distributed a poster during their search after 9/11. Imam Moujahed Bakhach at the exhibition September 11: Bearing Witness to History, Fort Worth, 2003. Memorial at the gates of the church of Nostra Signora del Rimedio in Piazza Alimonda, Genoa, 2001. Letter and rubber balls at the Carlo Giuliani memorial in Genoa. The excavation of the Fortuyn memorabilia from his pseudo-grave in Driehuis, 2004. Photo of the sea of gifts in front of Fortuyn’s home in Rotterdam, 2002. Fortuyn at the “Dutch Heroes” exhibition of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, 2007.

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249 251 254 267 271 273 290 294 298 310 313 321 328 330

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Preface When the media present “breaking news,” the news is often about a tragedy or a disaster. Untimely and sudden deaths—whether the result of terrorist massacres, school shootings, political assassinations, or other forms of societal violence—and collective shrines in memory of emblematic personalities always capture people’s attention, as such deaths confront them with the vulnerability, temporality, and unjustness of life. The mediation of deadly events intrudes on and frightens the living, making it necessary for us to give way to emotions and to manage our anxieties and grievances. Processes of memorialization after traumatic death, which are increasing taking place publicly, have in the last two decades become as mediatized as the disasters themselves. After traumatic events, the world wants to memorialize, commemorate, and subsequently heritagize—although, as explored in the introduction, it is more precise (and more problematic) to say that the “Western world” wants to do these things. The growing importance of public memorialization in Western societies—and especially in the grassroots form of direct action, with its political and performative qualities—stimulated us to bring this important new phenomenon into scholarly focus. As is often the case in the academic world, this volume originated at a workshop we organized at the European Association of Social Anthropologists conference in Bristol on September 20, 2006. The workshop was titled “The Public Memorialization of Death: Spontaneous Shrines as Political Tools.” The topicality of the theme was evidenced by the fact that fourteen presenters explored and discussed the political uses of spontaneous or temporary memorials. Some of the participants are not represented in this book, as their contributions diverged too much from the well-defined focus on “grassroots memorials.” Unfortunately, we also could not include the work by our Argentinian colleague Damián Cioce on the “Cromagnon Republic” nightclub disaster, as he himself suffered an untimely death. Later, in 2007, we contacted some other scholars who were researching the subject and invited them to collaborate. We then organized a second workshop—“Rituals of Mourning: Memorializing, Self, and Society”—at the American Folklore Society Conference in Louisville, KY, on October 24, 2008. These two initiatives led to six additional authors contributing to the book. All this, however, meant that the book needed more preparation time.

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x

Preface

The Bristol workshop drew the attention of Anthropology Today, which in the last issues of 2007 provided a podium to discuss the topic more publicly and to address general questions and case studies. The collegial hospitality extended by the editor of the journal, Gustaaf Houtman, gave us an extra impetus in reflecting both on the idea of the book as a whole and on the individual chapters. We are grateful to those who helped us to bring this book to fruition. In the first place, Jo Labanyi the series editor, who at an early stage acknowledged the topicality of this book. We are thankful to Hester Dibbits, Carmen Ortiz, and Daniel Wojcik for taking the time to comment on various chapters. We also thank those who participated in the online discussion about the semantics of the memorials examined in this book: Simon Bronner, Terry Burger, César González-Pérez, Sylvia Grider, Ellen Lyon, Don Mader, Jack Santino, Joe Sciorra, and Daniel Wojcik. We are indebted to William A. Christian Jr. and Dorothy Noyes for drawing our attention to the Lincoln Memorial Diary, and to Regina Bendix for bringing us together to work on this project. Although personal support is of course important, financial resources were equally constitutive for this project. We therefore thank The Institute of Heritage Sciences (Incipit, CSIC) in Santiago de Compostela, and the Meertens Institute (KNAW) in Amsterdam for their financial help in realizing this volume. We hope that all these efforts have created a book that will both interest and inform not only our colleagues and students but also a wider audience, and that will contribute to scholarly knowledge and stimulate further research on the meaningful phenomenon of memorialization. Amsterdam and Santiago de Compostela, December 1, 2009 CSC and PJM

Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

Copyright © 2011. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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Illustration 0.1. “In Loving Memory of the Boom Economy,” grassroots memorial as art installation, placed by “K. Guy” in front of the Bank of England after the start of the economic crash in October 2008. Photo: Luke McGregor. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

Introduction

Rethinking Memorialization The Concept of Grassroots Memorials

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Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero1

On 13 October 2008, the initial global economic crash had just occurred, and people everywhere seemed to be in a state of shock about what had happened to the world. In the City of London, a memorial was created on a lamppost in front of the Bank of England. It was constructed with flowers, stuffed animals, and crosses and topped with a plaque representing a circle of bleeding roses and the text “In Loving Memory of the Boom Economy.” Letters were attached expressing grievances about what had happened and what was yet to come, like “R.I.P., Rest in Poverty.” It was definitely a grassroots2 memorial, a phenomenon that arose in its modern form in the 1980s and that has become a globally known, mentally inscribed, and practically instrumentalized ritualized expression. Although this “boom” memorial was actually an artistic installation (signed “K. Guy”) and a fine instance of British humor, it is interesting that in case of a traumatic event or crisis, the material template of the makeshift memorial constitutes a recurrent pattern. Such memorials confirm our idea of the value of this emotional and political instrument that is articulated from the grassroots in everyday life. In recent decades, there has been increasing academic interest in the study of the politics of death and memory, the relationship between history and memory, memory and nation building, the memorialization of catastrophes, war and monuments, and links between death and remembrance as well as studies on social trauma and memory from historical, anthropological, and psychological perspectives.3 This book deals with all these aspects through the lenses of a particular type of memorial, namely, the “grassroots memorial.” By this, we refer to the current phe-

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nomenon of placing memorabilia, as a form of social action, in public spaces, usually at sites where traumatic deaths or events have taken place. Many examples in the collective memory are evoked, including the mementos placed at the Mourning Wall in Oklahoma, those deposited after the massacre at Columbine High School, the memorabilia in remembrance of Princess Diana, the 9/11 shrines created in New York, the March 11 memorials assembled at Madrilenian train stations, as well as the shrines and crosses that are erected alongside roads to mark the location of fatal traffic accidents. These forms of memorialization are now socially sanctioned and, in a way, they are expected to appear as part of the commonly ritualized practices that deal with unexpected death and the causes of these deaths. This book focuses on and analyzes the processes of memorialization that express not only grief but also social discontent and protest, and that represent forms of social action. In this volume, grassroots memorialization is understood as the process by which groups of people, imagined communities, or specific individuals bring grievances into action by creating an improvised and temporary memorial with the aim of changing or ameliorating a particular situation. “Grassroots” in the title of this book is taken as a new concept in memorialization and social action studies, as it signifies accurately what happens nowadays after untimely and traumatic death: the creation of memorial bricolages and makeshift memorials in public space in order to achieve change. This authority shift mobilizes the involved community, which through grassroots memorials brings together individuals to participate in actions without being linked to a group-organized initiative. The memorials discussed in this volume provide arenas in which politics, the mass media, the construction of memory, traumatic death, and mourning rituals in public space all come to the fore. They show a hybrid quality: on the one hand as monuments of mourning and, on the other, as foci of protest and resentment, instrumentalized to articulate social or political disaffection. We have chosen to analyze these memorials from a performance perspective and, given the apparently static enactment of the improvised memorials, as a performative event in public space (cf. Schechner 2002: 22–42)—an event in which participants, audience, and media in relation to the material culture memorialize and act on the basis of a combined set of inscribed and incorporated practices (Connerton 1989: 72–73). This approach made clear that these memorializations of death are not only a matter of expressing grief and sorrow but also precipitate new actions in the social or political sphere. We want thus to emphasize the political instrumentalization of memorial sites and to point

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Introduction

3

out their ability to provoke social action from the grassroots. By the latter, we mean that one of the common characteristics of the case studies in this book is that civilians do not place memorabilia or offerings at these sites only in memory of the deceased; rather, their acts also imply a message asking for action (“This should not have happened,” “Somebody has to take responsibility,” “Change now,” “Justice!”) or simply questioning “Why?” They are indeed performances in the Austinian sense, because by the act of memorializing death in public, the participants are also asking for social change: not only to commemorate or to protest, but also to find an answer, to seek an understanding of what has happened, to ask for responsibilities, or to demand changes. John Austin, in his theory about speech acts, focused on a particular type of speech that actually does things (1962). He called “performativity” the capacity for “doing things with words.” These are verbal actions that, by being spoken, achieve social change—for instance, by saying “I do” during the wedding ceremony, one actually gets married. The words are not spoken to state what one is “doing,” but are used to really “do” it. If this idea is applied to grassroots memorials and their contexts, the actions that take place—including the deposition of objects and the interaction with them, and the interaction between people and media—have, as is explored below, a performative quality attached to them. The performative, referring to the intention to accomplish change, is thus not limited to the memorial itself or its memorial space, but includes the agency of individual objects or texts and the behavior of the people involved. Therefore, as Fraenkel argues in this volume, all written documents placed near Ground Zero should be seen as being more performative than informative. Jack Santino elaborates here on the general concept of performance and adds the notion of the “ritualesque” (Santino 2009; this volume). Santino uses this notion to show that the commemorative practices described in this book are public events with an additional performative “ritualesque” character. He perceives them as symbolic, dramatic events that are directed toward societal grievances, and that contain a transformative intent of memorialization toward change. All this indicates that performativity is an inherent constituent of the strong communicative power of grassroots memorials. Contrary to organized grassroots groups and movements in a social or economic sense (cf. Castells 1983), grassroots memorials are usually not created by a constituted group or organization. They are—and that is in line with the subjective turn of postmodernity—created basically on the individual, personal level. As memorialization of traumatic death is per se related to the human existential condition, it therefore provokes

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Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero

strong utterances of grief and of social and political disaffection. Grassroots memorial initiatives can be seen as an ultimate expression of the democratic process; they come from the lowest level of organization and are aimed at influencing social and political situations and developments. In this manner, atomized individuals find each other interrelated in their grief and protest without constituting actual network connections, apart from the commemorative assemblage they collectively give shape to in public space. This, however, does not imply that there are no improvised memorial initiatives of a higher organizational level. Examples are such groups as MADD—the US organization Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which supports and publicizes the erection of roadside markers in its struggle against drunk driving (Grider 2007a: 43)—the global and more virtual ghost bike movement (Dobler, this volume), or the local organizers of silent mourning marches in the Netherlands (Post et al. 2003: 79–186). Another well-known and performative type of improvised memorial, one that is commonly found in Western countries,4 is the roadside memorial (La Cecla 1990; Cheshire 2007; Clark 2007; Collins and Rhine 2003; Everett 2002; Aka 2007; Grider 2007b; Hartig and Dunn 1998; Jipson 2009; Klaassens, Groote, and Huigen 2009; Reid and Reid 2001; Owens 2006; Weisser 2004; Wojcik 2007). Roadside memorials are just one particular form of a grassroots memorial. This book’s perspective, however, is not centered on the private memorialization of “stand-alone” roadside memorials that are initiated and maintained by relatives and friends. Although they do not overtly criticize unsafe driving conditions, it can be rightly argued that each roadside memorial reflects a moral warning and has its implicit grassroots political message.5 The chapter by Monika Rulfs deals with a makeshift memorial created in Hamburg after a nine-year-old girl riding her bike was killed by a truck. The death provoked a form of social protest that was performed in the streets via the materiality of the site that had turned into a grassroots memorial. The only other example in this book related to the phenomenon of roadside memorials is the chapter by Robert Dobler on the global ghost bikes movement, which concentrates on grassroots memorializations that are dedicated to the deaths of bikers who were hit by cars. Apart from these specific case studies is the book’s focus thus on the more ephemeral memorial bricolages and assemblages that are created by accretion by larger, “anonymous” groups of individuals, in order to manage in situ the emotional consequences of traumatic death, to memorialize what happened, and to express explicitly related societal and political grievances in an attempt to influence society, its politics, and its administration.

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Introduction

5

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On Makeshift Memorials and Spontaneous Shrines: The Discourse The practice of mourning and demonstrating by depositing materials of various types in public space to memorialize somebody’s death can be named by various combinations of adjectives and nouns. Each of the combinations has its own history and audiences. Of the adjectives, the most commonly used are: temporary, improvised, ephemeral, vernacular, spontaneous, makeshift, and (in this book) grassroots. The variety of nouns is more limited: shrines, commemoratives, and memorials. The various terminologies linked to the chronologies of the use of the terms, both in academia and in the media discourse, are discussed in this section. The combinations of terms most often used in academia are “spontaneous shrines” and “temporary, improvised memorials.” In 1992, US folklorist Jack Santino coined the term “spontaneous shrines” for “temporary monuments” to political assassinations in Northern Ireland. He did so in a publication that is hard to find, and disclosed it more widely in 2001 as the better alternative concept for academic studies (Santino 1992; Santino 2001: 12–14, 76–77; Santino 2004).6 It was hailed, especially in the American academic world, as a more neutral, scientific term than “makeshift memorial,” whose negative connotations were most strongly felt within the United States. “Makeshift” suggests that a memorial is “crude,” “thrown together,” or “made without respect.”7 And, whereas the last of these qualifications is definitely not appropriate for this type of memorialization, the larger memorials do tend to be crude, sloppy, slapdash, and chaotic. However, these adjectives also describe one of their main characteristics: producing the idea of their honesty and sincerity. For some, the word makeshift would not do sufficient justice to the meaningful dimensions and intrinsic emotional value of the bricolages. Notwithstanding the negative connotations, the use of the term makeshift continued in the media and among the public.8 It touches on the problems related to the changing semantics of vernacular expressions. After 2001—a year in which, as a result of 9/11, the notion of “makeshift memorial” was pervasively used in the media despite all the sensitivities related to the US national trauma—the word stayed without objections in general use for the memorials around Ground Zero and elsewhere in the country without any objections. One would presume that with the considerations related to the 9/11 memorials and memorialization, a term that does not do justice to the meaningfulness of it would be avoided in use. However, an analysis of newspaper articles on

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Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero

makeshift memorials shows this not to be the case. Nor was it suggested that it was in use as an expression with an improper meaning. This demonstrates that for both the general public and the media, the word now seems to have a rather appropriate, generic signification. The academic interest in memorial bricolages emerged in the late 1980s, when the German ethnologist Martin Scharfe evaluated and analyzed the grassroots memorials (Gedächtnisstätten) that had been created, particularly with red roses, following the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme on 28 February 1986, in Stockholm, Sweden (Scharfe 1989). When in 1995 the American sociologist Allen Haney was interviewed about roadside memorials, he stated that such memorials were “becoming increasingly common” (Press Enterprise, 22 February 1995). A year later, however, the Austrian ethnologist Konrad Köstlin stated that he had observed the rise in Europe of the practice of roadside shrines for no less than thirty years, that is, since the mid-1960s (Köstlin 1999: 277). These divergent time frames can be explained by the fact that in the southeastern European Catholic area, this mourning practice existed, or was revitalized, earlier than elsewhere in the world (Rajkovic 1988). From approximately 1980 on, according to Köstlin, the practice spread north, via Hungary, the Czech Republic, Austria, and France, to Germany and the Benelux countries, and finally reached Scandinavia in the 1990s (Köstlin 1999: 278–79; Gustavsson 2008: 30–31). Research affirms that since the mid-1980s, the phenomena of roadside and grassroots memorials in the Western world received, in interaction with the media, new impetus and new forms (Santino 2001; Everett 2002; Clark 2007). This type of public performance has been the focus of scholarly attention for approximately two decades now. Scholars in the fields of anthropology, ethnology, sociology, art, history, geography, folklore, and religious studies have published important contributions based on case studies related to this topic, although not many efforts have been made to draw up a conceptual framework for this phenomenon based on comparative studies.9 Santino, in the first book dedicated to this topic, calls for an effort to theorize this international phenomenon of spontaneous shrines in the context of other commemorative and protest events, such as the demonstrations by the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, the AIDS quilts, or the Bloody Sunday commemorations in Northern Ireland (Santino 2006b: 5; cf. Bouvard 1994 and Rateike 2000). To do so, Santino uses the term “performative commemoratives,” a term that includes, but is not limited to, spontaneous shrines, as he also deals with demonstrations and other performative events and memorial death rites.

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Introduction

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The Rise of the Phenomenon In relation to the use of the terminology and its chronology, it is worth noticing that the number of mentions of the topic in the media is disproportionately high compared to the number of works produced by academics. The most common term used by the media is, as explained above, “makeshift memorial.” A concise analysis of digital newspaper archives supports the thesis that the modern phenomenon of makeshift memorials is, on a mere incidental basis, ascertained in the West from approximately 1980 onward, and can be determined as a new current from circa 1987 onward.10 In relation to the rise of the phenomenon, the alternative designation “spontaneous memorial” started to appear as new expression in the English vocabulary in newspapers incidentally in 1985 and more frequently from 1989 onward, while “spontaneous shrine” was first used in 1990 and due to the rising figures of memorials has appeared more frequently since 1994. Early newspaper articles on the “new” trend of makeshift memorials—such as the memorial for the San Ysidro McDonald’s massacre (1985)—still dealt with them as a fairly unknown phenomenon. Roadside memorials underwent the same expansion. They were noted by the media and became popular among the public when the practice of this mourning memento spread from Mexico to the Mexicaninfluenced southwestern states of the United States, and from the south to the north of Europe. In Australia, the number of newspaper reports on the creation of roadside memorials increased from just one in 1986 to an average of one a day in 2003 (Cheshire 2007: 197–98). The alliterating concept of makeshift memorials represents a theme on which the media are always eager to publish: personal death and trauma. Although newspaper archives have been accessed digitally and then analyzed, it remains difficult to draw up an exact chronology of the emergence/reemergence of the phenomenon. In the media (and also in academia), phenomena are often described from the perspective of personal experience, that is, when they first catch someone’s attention. The vernacular axiom that “one sees it when one has seen it [really noticed it],” is relevant in that perspective. So it proves hardly possible to give a starting time, as there always seem to be older examples. For Kay Turner, the death of John Lennon in 1980 (Turner 2008) is, in retrospect, the point of reference, while older Englishmen would probably pinpoint the Hillsborough football stadium disaster of 1989 (Brennan 2008).11 For most people nowadays, however, the worldwide reactions to the death of Lady Diana in 1997 or the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks are etched on the retina and perceived as the start of mass grassroots memorialization (Walter 1999; Simpson 2006). The objects placed at Dealey Plaza in Dallas,

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Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero

after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, were not well kept in the collective memory as the makeshift memorial was of a smaller scale and the media did not yet pay much attention to it.12 The death of JFK’s son, John Jr., in a plane crash in 1999, however, resulted in a huge and highly mediatized makeshift memorial in front of his apartment building in TriBeCa (New York City). The relativity of chronologies is evidenced by the Lincoln Memorial Diary, a sketchbook dating back to 1865. It was the property of an anonymous artist who reproduced on paper the texts and objects (Lincoln busts, funeral wreaths, etc.) that were publicly posted on storefronts or displayed in front of houses around Union Square and on major New York streets. The texts the author collected could in fact also have been found nearly a century and a half later around Ground Zero: “We mourn our country’s loss” and “Justice not revenge,” although texts like these were outnumbered by those demanding that “such” people be arrested and hanged. These reactions to the murder of the American president in 1865 are an early example of grassroots memorialization and social action.13 Notwithstanding such early examples, a crucial period of change regarding the public mourning of traumatic loss starts around the mid1960s. This change is linked to the civil rights and liberation movements, when the possession, use, appropriation, dealing with, and management of public space—which was still strictly controlled by the government— became contested and appropriated for social action. Protest demonstrations and marches became popular performances in public space and were often related to death, trauma, and mourning. For example, in 1965–66 the mildly anarchistic Provos tried to claim a statue of a street urchin (Het Lieverdje) that stands in an Amsterdam square, and came into conflict with the authorities. As this statue had been financed by the Hunter Cigarette Company, the Provos invented a form of ritualistic direct action (“happenings”) and regularly succeeded in reshaping the statue into a memorial that incorporated candles and smoke and was dedicated to all victims of smoking (Pas 2003: 95–102). In the United States, semipublic space was likewise contested by demonstrators against the Vietnam War. On 4 May 1970, four protesting students at Kent State University were shot dead by the National Guard. The student population’s desire to create a grassroots memorial for them was, however, refused and obstructed by the government, as it was afraid that a memorial would acquire the status of an antiwar monument (Blasi 2002: 168–171). These rather random examples show how place and space, and their control, are related to the feasibility of public mourning. The revolutionary 1960s and its people’s movements not only brought civil rights and

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Introduction

9

awareness, but also gave the public space to the citizen and thus created the spatial conditions for new practices of public performance, of memorializing and mourning. As a late echo of this, Walter argues that the popularity of roadside memorials among the young friends of a deceased person is also strongly related to the public freedom such a memorial offers, and which does not bind one to the strict rules and opening hours of cemeteries (Walter 2008). The coming into being of a new paradigm of public space coincides with new developments of personalization in modern mourning. The 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, which bears the names of the 58,261 US soldiers who died or disappeared during the war, is perhaps exemplary of that cultural change. While national war memorials are usually generic and/or anonymous, here the full names of all the victims are etched into the black marble. No individual victim of this war is to be forgotten or deprived of remembrance and the proper respect. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial represents a major change in thinking about victimship and the emotional perception of death: Every dead human being is one too many, and “justice” should be done to the “injustice” of a premature death. That the “injustice” of all kinds of traumatic deaths (and the “injustice” of what they caused, and the political consequences of such) could be partially healed by public memorialization as in monuments and makeshift memorials became an increasingly popular perception. It was part of a general ethical turn that brought more recognition for victims (cf. Assmann 2006: 277). The highly mediatized “Wall,” as it is named for its monumental appearance, was reappropriated as an informal grassroots memorial, generating a specific protest-related mourning practice.14 As a prefiguration of improvised memorialization, the Wall gave America its generic template for bringing gifts and mementos to a place where nobody is actually buried (Hass 1998: 89–102; Blair, Jeppeson, and Pucci 1991; Allen 1995; Sofarelli 2006).15 The Wall was a major impetus for such responses, and a sanction for expressing such emotions, making the expressions acceptable publicly. These new practices symbolize the changing attitudes toward premature death in Western welfare societies, where death seems to be under control, insecurities are banned from the mind, and unjust, premature death has become unacceptable, in fact a taboo. Therefore, premature deaths may not be meaningless; they must become meaningful. The interest of the media (or, rather, their audience) in unjust death—something that they fear might happen to themselves—made the makeshift memorial and its meaningful instrumentalization an important field for news coverage. The process of individualization that Western cultures underwent in the second half of the twentieth century brought about a decline in

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Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero

family-oriented ways of living (and the possibilities to adopt other ways) and a sharp increase in the number of individuals who construct their own lives and exercise more personal goals, choices, and desires. This development is connected with presentistic forms of performing, presenting, and memorializing, through which individuals seek to make their mark and erect their own “monument,” not only post mortem but also and particularly pre mortem. In democratized and mediatized society, it appears that every individual must count, and not have his or her existence pass unnoticed. As reflected in the vast proliferation of web sites, wikis, blogs, Facebook pages, and postings on YouTube, this kind of memorialization is emphatically present today, especially in its digital form. Nearly everyone seems to strive for his or her minutes of fame on television, and if that is too long in coming, then—as YouTube puts it in its logo—you can “broadcast yourself.” This has perhaps helped to lower the inhibitions for self-motivation of participants of grassroots memorials. The many self-referential messages attached to memorials show that people want to participate personally, and that their idiosyncratic messages should be known to the world. The latter applies not only to mourners and protesters, but also to perpetrators, as we shall see.

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The Rubik’s Effect Entering into the various conceptual frameworks that have shaped the studies of these type of memorials is an enterprise that could better be achieved using a “cubist” metaphor, which can be described as a “Rubik’s effect.” The Rubik’s Cube is formed by small, colored cubes that can be endlessly rotated in an attempt to get all the reds on one side, the greens on another, and so on with the blues, yellows, greens, and whites. Applying the Rubik effect to our research topic, one of the sides of this “cube book” is formed by the discussions on the degree of the spontaneous, formal or informal qualities attached to the memorials. The second side includes the analytical stress in the temporality of the phenomena we study: In that part of the cube, the concept of being ephemeral is one of the rotating angles that produces the movement of the cube. Another side includes the places in which the memorials are placed. The fourth side consists of the motivation for depositing objects and/or visiting the sites, and the sacredness (or secularity) of the sites. The fifth side of the cube is formed by the material culture at the sites, the ways in which the materialization takes place. Finally, the sixth side is the role of the media in the construction, dissemination, and reproduction of this social event. This introduction follows the structure of the cube and provides enough

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Introduction

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food for thought so that the reader can continue rotating the sides to construct alternative ways to understand this phenomenon. After rotating the colors of the cube, the fourth and last section of this introduction expands the concept of “grassroots memorials,” and ends by unraveling the cube book by delineating how each of the chapters contributes to the main idea of the book.

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Discussing the Formal, the Informal, and the Spontaneous Death and disaster—the events that most commonly incite people to create grassroots memorials—cannot be foreseen, and consequently one refers to the victims of an “untimely” death. This implies that the memorializations are indeed unpremeditated and must, in the case of traumatic death, be enacted. The fact that they are unpremeditated means that one must improvise and start from scratch to create assemblages. Formal ceremonies are fully orchestrated, and one cannot speak or perform as one might want. Grassroots memorials, on the contrary, are basically nonformal; they are not regulated by any institution, and no traditional societal rules or mourning customs—such as the manner of dressing and behaving, or the formulating of condolence writings—are applicable. Everyone can, to a certain extent, bring into a memorial whatever one wants. There is no formal duty, only an idiosyncratic ethical commitment or responsibility. The content of a memorial is not fixed, as the objects and texts are related to the specific trauma. On the other hand, the “spontaneity” with regard to the creative process is limited. Over the years, form and content developed into a seemingly uniform template—a template that has been frequently presented in mediatized representations since the late 1990s. The expressions of material memorialization have thus become inscribed in the human mind and in archival memories, and have also been incorporated as a bodily practice (cf. Connerton 1989: 72–104). Someone knows not only how to start the process of memorialization, but also—being not personally or directly involved—how to continue and add materials in a way that does not subvert or threaten the meaning or dignity of an improvised memorial. Globally broadcast fatal catastrophes and their memorializations contribute strongly not only to the representation of a material template, but also to the idea that after a traumatic death, collective and public mourning is appropriate, or even necessary, for the world and its grieving, for the disturbed community, and for oneself. Action is expected, as is a representational participation by the community, and when the community refrains from doing so, it is felt inappropriate and disrespectful.

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This modeling also contributes to the idea of what a respectful and powerful memorial should look like. This means that people do not want to deviate much from the mediatized forms; in fact, they tend to formalize. One mourner at Columbine High commented to a news reporter, “What’s really sad is that we already know what to bring” (Grider, this volume). Jack Santino’s concept of “spontaneous shrines” (Santino 1992, 2001) has now been accepted in academia. Stengs has criticized the word spontaneous within this concept, however, arguing that spontaneity is rarely the case (Stengs 2003: 38). Doss called it a “misnomer,” because she sees them as scripted and frequently secular: highly orchestrated, selfconscious performances where spontaneity is expressed only in their swift response to trauma (Doss 2008: 8–9). Santino, though, does not use “spontaneous” in this limited sense; instead, he uses it to indicate the unofficial nature of the sites: community, government, media, church—nobody tells the grievers to place an offering at the shrines (Santino 2006b: 12). These practices are thus neither charged nor sanctioned by any institution; individual citizens are their active subject. Nevertheless, some degree of spontaneity and immediacy, depending on the kind of event to which it is a reaction, is discernible when initial memorialization starts, and “new” ad hoc forms and patterns, adapted to the specific case of trauma, need to be constituted. Ewa Klekot adds the relevant observation that “spontaneity” is part of the vernacular vocabulary used by the people themselves, and that it should therefore be perceived as a term with an emic perspective (Klekot, this volume). People often equate “authenticity” with the spontaneity that they experience and designate. The existence of a generally accepted template enhances the idea of authenticity.16 This is in line with the observation of Geertz that “it is the copying that originates” (Geertz 1986: 380). Even if the forms are copied, the contexts differ each time, and therefore the authenticity attributed to a memorial is not a generic cultural one, but an individual and personally achieved “authenticity.” Attributed qualities like spontaneity, authenticity, sincerity, genuineness, and originality form a clue to the active agency and performativity of grassroots memorials. Research by Rulfs reveals that while the media initially abstained from participating in the debate on the Hamburg memorial and the traffic dangers, the emotional atmosphere and the perceived “authenticity” created a more effective communication with the public and local politicians. It is clear, however, that the mixed use of emic and etic meanings and terms obfuscates the academic debate, as in the case of the term spontaneous. However, grassroots memorials can also be called spontaneous because they are usually built up without regard to formal regulations or

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Introduction

13

restrictions. Soon after a death or disaster, individuals assemble, without any specific prior consultation or agreement, with their flowers, texts, and objects. But during their lifetime, grassroots memorials are often not left alone to unorganized accretion or relocation. “Spontaneously” created memorials are confronted by officials, who deal with the memorials’ continuous interaction with public space and the public. Basal organizational structures and “anonymous” self-appointed persons who act as “guards” or memorialization mediators may arise and watch the site, as happened at Theo van Gogh’s memorial site (Stengs, this volume). After the train attacks in Madrid, the candles of the shrines at the train stations where the bombings had taken place were kept burning day and night. At El Pozo train station, women from the neighborhood organized themselves to light the candles, while at Atocha station, the cleaning services (which comprise mostly women) maintained the memorials (SánchezCarretero, this volume). After 9/11, New York City “gardeners of light” arranged and continued lighting the candles and supported community singing at the site. Memorials straddle the realms of public and private space. They impinge on laws and regulations on communal space and on private property. They potentially create conflicts with governments and organizations that deal with public safety and health, esthetics, and juridical and administrative issues. More institutionalizing efforts are sometimes made, and memorials are formally accepted, which provides interesting information about how authorities interact with the sites. In general, however, the communal tolerance that traumatic death creates is only temporary. This tolerance will diminish after some time and can result in long-term juridical conflicts. The staying power of a memorial depends on municipal lenience, and on the memorial’s continued usefulness, the sacrality it generates, and the respect it evokes—which is why regular maintenance is an important ingredient. Weathering, deterioration, and a seemingly “abandoned” site are indications of an approaching expiry date. This moment can arrive after a week or even years, but a site’s lifetime does not depend on the media. It is not the case, as journalists cynically remarked, that they last only until the television cameras have gone (Brick 2004; Grant 2008), although television, the mediatization, does play a significant role in the formation and performativity of a memorial. Memorials disappear when they no longer represent a public statement or lack a communal interest that stems from the death. This implies that memorialization for a dead bank robber or gang member will have a different character than that for a child killed by a truck, also because “dangerous” trucks continue to thunder through the streets (cf. Cooper and Sciorra 1994). But a grassroots memorial is usually tolerated as long

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Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero

as it is well maintained, does not block the pavement or obstruct traffic, and keeps its informal character. The New York sanitation department states that when “the family has had time to grieve … they just kind of go away,” despite the fact that for the state, such memorials are illegal (Brick 2004). The site can be coordinated by the authorities, relocated to a “better” place, framed by protective barriers, placed under surveillance, or partially screened off, especially when it stays for a longer period and the site acquires a semiformal status. In the case of the March 11 train attacks, the workers at Atocha station in Madrid wrote a public letter to their union asking for the removal of the grassroots memorials inside the station because, as summer was approaching, the candles produced unbearable heat, and also because they could not handle being emotionally confronted every day with the tragedy marked by the memorial site (Sánchez-Carretero, this volume). The case of roadside memorials is different. The sharp increase in the number of memorials alongside country roads and highways made governments introduce new regulations, also because of the intrusive private character of these ensembles in public and because of their much longer existence compared to that of grassroots memorials (Klaassens, Groote, and Huigen 2009). In most countries, roads have differentiated statuses and are managed by different boards, and are thus subject to all kind of different policies. Roadside memorials are illegal in fifteen US states, while in the other states they are legal, tolerated, or not subject to regulations. However, there is a tendency, also in the states that do have clear regulations, to act only when problems arise (Jipson 2007, 2009). The Dutch government, for example, decided not to impose a uniform law, but gave the municipalities, provinces, and the national authorities “guidelines” that recommend allowing shrines because of their social aspect (they promote the mourning process) and because they enhance safety awareness, but only when there is no threat to traffic safety and no hindering of road maintenance (Editor 2004). This open policy resulted in a variety of regional regulations and in arbitrariness all over the country. Some provinces therefore decided to ignore the regulations and allow all such expressions, as long as they do not cause any danger. They elected to give more room for this societal need to mourn, also for the practical reason that the provincial administrations, as the managers of motorways, cannot deal in a sensible and responsible manner with emotionally shocked relatives. In practice, it was too difficult to disclose to them the “expiry” date of the “untouchable” memorial and have them clear the site (Editor 2008). As an alternative to the problems of prohibition or quick removal, its replacement with a standard, formally approved sign to indicate the traumatic site, was proposed. In other countries, too, uni-

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Introduction

15

form markings have been developed—however, without much success. The main problem is that these are standardized signs, and thus there is a total absence of the personal, without which no emotional relation for the family and no engagement with the community can be created upon the site. This applies not only to standardized signs but also to generic monuments like for “young traffic victims.”17 However, as said, the formal regulations apply only to roadside memorials; the other types of grassroots memorials enjoy a different status. Cases in which authorities tried to remove a grassroots memorial are hard to find. The collective emotional and political meanings and values of such memorials are simply too large to impinge on their sacral and grassroots qualities and meanings.

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Problematizing Temporality Whereas other types of memorials are frequently built as permanent monuments with a future audience in mind, grassroots memorials are ephemeral and target an immediate audience and immediate effect. However, grassroots memorials that started unanticipated and “spontaneously” can become more formal, and such impermanent memorials start to develop into something more permanent, like an official monument. Nevertheless, one of the grassroots memorials’ major characteristics is that after some time, they disappear or are removed without leaving much of a trace. They are fragile assemblages that are vulnerable to the weather and human interference. The central explanation for grassroots memorials’ short life spans is related to their social and political character. Their rationale is connected to political culture for which evocative messages and a high level of attention and visibility during a short period is central. So these commemoratives have ultimately less to do with preventing forgetting, than with mobilizing and achieving. Consequently, the first anniversaries of grassroots memorialization often fail, as in the cases of Lady Diana (1998) and the murdered Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn (2003). When memorials consist of materials that wilt, decay, or disappear, they are temporary in nature and can disappear as “spontaneously” as they came into being. However, preventive actions can be undertaken to prolong their staying power, by, for example, sealing texts in plastic or making use of sturdier materials. Revitalization of memorialization can be achieved by renewing texts and pictures, and bringing in fresh flowers and plants. In the case of murdered Judge Falcone in the Italian “civil war” against the Mafia, the makeshift tree memorial (the “Falcone Tree”) has endured since 1992, while his grave attracts no visitors and his official stone monument in town is in decay. The anti-Mafia protests,

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Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero

reflected in the “writing for the living” enabled by the Falcone Tree, show a continued performativity of the attached texts, as Deborah Puccio-Den shows in this volume. The writings empower the emotional system in a more effective way than monuments do. The disappearance of grassroots memorials is sometimes due to regulations or the retaking of “normal” life. In the case of the memorial for Diana at the Place D’Alma (Glück 1999), which is above the tunnel where her car crashed, the authorities introduced a strict policy of clearing the site of materials and text graffiti, as it encroached upon the existing French–American friendship monument (a copy of the torch of the Statue of Liberty)—which had been informally renamed the “Princess Diana Monument”—and because of the dangerous traffic situation that has already cost the lives of eight visitors. The city of Paris therefore fenced off the site and tried to erase this lieux de mémoire (Nora 1989) from the collective memory. This policy seemed effective until the tenth annual remembrance of her death revived the spot as a grassroots memorial that addresses critical utterances.18 In other cases, memorials suffered so much from the weather conditions that it was felt improper to maintain them. In the case of Pim Fortuyn, a weather change in combination with the burial erased the logic for keeping separate memorials elsewhere in the country. In New York, the beginning of the New Year (1 January 2002) was perceived as a “natural end” of the grieving period for the events of 9/11. Many people removed their personal memorial from the street, broke it down, or handed it over to a heritage institution as a form of autoheritagization.19 There is a trend in Western societies to preserve the materiality of these memorials. For instance, efforts have been made to preserve the objects deposited at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, which is maintained by the US National Park Service. The practice of giving can also be “experienced” through visual taxonomies from the collection in dedicated picture books like Offerings at the Wall (Allen 1995) and Letters on the Wall (Sofarelli 2006). Other newly created collections that appear in some of the following chapters include the March 11 Archive of Mourning (CSIC, Madrid), the Smithsonian collections of the September 11 attacks (Washington, DC), the Carlo Giuliani Archive (Genoa), and the Pim Fortuyn Collection (Meertens Institute, Amsterdam).20 The major consideration in this part seems to consist in the presumption that these collections represent an alternative testimony of what happened to the shocked community or society involved, notwithstanding a complete change of contexts. This material needs to be archived as it is seen as the solidified emotion of trauma, a materialized vox populi of protest, or the “concentrated expression of grief in a city,” as the re-

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Introduction

17

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sult of a perceived dramatic fault line in national history (Margry, this volume; Collins 2002). But, as Assmann argues, the materiality loses its functionality as a result of being saved and stored (Assmann 2006: 224). A removed grassroots memorial is no longer functional, as the political and communicational qualities are nullified. By entering this process, academics and museum experts also form part of the memorialization process itself, and constitute a factor in the potential “patrimonialization” or “heritagization” of grassroots memorialization (Doss 2008; Gardner, this volume; Margry, this volume; Ortiz and Sánchez-Carretero 2008; Taylor 2003). The way in which the “repositories of memory” are instrumentalized is discussed in Part 5 of this book. In the case explored by Caffarena and Stiaccini in this volume, the Archivio Ligure della Scrittura Popolare at the University of Genoa collected the mementos that enabled a “sublimation of grief ” to a public level at the site where twenty-three-year-old Carlo Giuliani was shot dead during an anti-G8 demonstration in Genoa in 2001. Erika Doss, reflecting on this aspect, points out the ethical problems that arise: Expectations that temporary memorials should be saved—or even made—by public museums and archives raise enormous practical and ethical questions, which museum professionals themselves struggle to answer. Can we realistically expect underfunded and overburdened public institutions to collect, process, house, and display the vast stuff of temporary memorials? Should museums be “managing” these memorials, which means removing them from their visibly public environment (“When? After how long?”) and then storing them in sanitized and generally less accessible archives? (Doss 2008: 18–19; cf. Gardner, this volume).

The ethical questions are indeed central, while the issue she brings up, namely, whether these collections are practically manageable, seems to be on a different level. When society—certainly contemporary Western societies where mediatized personal emotions are rated the highest—asks for the safeguarding of personalized public outcry, it should be the task of governments and the generic institutions to cope with such demands. But the question whether we may conserve, make available, and exhibit personal documents that are not addressed to these institutions and are meant for ephemeral purposes only is more problematical. Many of the people who leave materials at a site do not want to have them conserved, let alone documented or published. Another “disturbing” external factor is the common practice of cleaning, polishing, and preserving these materials to meet the aesthetic and conservational standards of museums. This not only changes the contexts and meanings even more; the materiality is also alienated from what it was and was meant to be, especially when it is depicted as memorial “art” (Gardner and Henry 2002: 42; cf. Ames 2006). And if public exhibition is decided upon, is it possible to preserve

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Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero

“the sacred qualities of the shrine” (Grider 2007: 46), as was the goal at Texas A&M University? Gardner argues in this volume that, in a certain way, the exhibition in the American History Museum was perceived as “holy ground.” The presentation was therefore designed not for interpretation, but to evoke in an idiosyncratic way emotion and memories. The phenomenon of “heritagization” is part of institutionalization processes, as both research centers and archival institutions are involved in the act of constructing new values and meanings. These processes of institutionalization are related to the efforts to formalize grassroots memorials, for instance, in the discussions on legislation permitting or banning roadside memorials and in the facilitating factor of a grassroots memorial as preliminary catalyst for a permanent monument at the same site. In all three cases—collecting grassroots memorials in archives, legislating them, and building permanent memorials or monuments—the institutionalization effort is related to a drive to formalize the informal.

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Place, Space, and the Void Grassroots memorials are not bound to a restricted physical space or limited by borders: They grow by uncontrolled accretion, as shown by, for example, the seas of flowers and messages that came into being after the death of Lady Diana and after the Polish plane crash at Katyn. Nevertheless, a memorial site needs some staging, as it is usually framed against a wall, fence, tree, lamppost, or crash barrier. However, this is for practical reasons: a memorial needs to be built in a three-dimensional way, to offer a shielded reference point for visitors and to protect the fragile ensemble. The limits are defined only by the limitations of the physical environment and by the regulations of the authorities. In order to perform successfully, memorials need staging, a theatrical setting where the public “event” can be displayed and performed in interaction with an audience (Santino 2006b: 6–8; cf. Fischer-Lichte 2005). Memorials are created at, or as near as possible to, the site of trauma, but when a site reaches its physical limits, secondary memorials may arise elsewhere. Substitute memorializing sites are also necessary when the actual site is inaccessible or forbidden, as Béatrice Fraenkel points out in this book (cf. Fraenkel 2002). Alternative locations may then be chosen for their symbolic political, historical, or memorial qualities (e.g., Union Square, NY; Dam Square, Amsterdam), or because of a special connection to the victim(s), like the main gate of the Spanish National Library (because it was the working place of two March 11 victims), the buildings of the Fire Department of New York, or the private home of Theo van Gogh. Major or national catastrophes might spontaneously generate

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Introduction

19

secondary memorials elsewhere in towns or the countryside. When Pope John Paul II died in Rome of old age, the trauma was nowhere felt more strongly than in Poland, where he was commemorated as a national hero, as explored in the chapter by Ewa Klekot. Disasters that have a transnational or international impact will also engender memorials outside the country; for instance, grassroots memorials appeared in front of foreign embassies and other places throughout the world after the al-Qaeda attacks and the death of Lady Diana (Walter 1999: 227–39). An important spatial characterization of grassroots memorials that makes them different from roadside memorials is that they are usually situated in urban environments. Roadside memorials are generally created alongside roads or at junctions in rural or semirural settings.21 It is interesting to note that a simple roadside memorial tends to become a more elaborate grassroots memorial with a more explicit protest character when it is situated within the urban environment, and especially when it is located in the city center.22 The Hamburg example dealt with by Rulfs in this book is exemplary of that; however, newspaper reports on accidents in cities like New York or Amsterdam also make clear that downtown memorials for traffic accidents acquire another, more public status. Such a memorial is never linguistically depicted as a “roadside” memorial, but as a “makeshift” one. This distinction can be explained by the significant observation by an American journalist that passers-by respond to a roadside memorial in direct proportion to how much they know about it (Cheshire 2007: 195). In the city, people pass by and can stand still and observe. The more people know about the phenomenon and a specific case, the more they will notice the reoccurrence of memorials and the more it will mean to them. They will stand still by it, and they might add something to the assemblage; and if something happens to them, they might have this as a memento mori, as an exemplum for themselves. Such a memorial is less isolated from its environment than a roadside memorial, which is seen when passing it in a car. A city’s newspaper or television station will often report on it and make it into an opportunity to denounce the black spots of the urban community. Conversely, the rural roadside memorial should be seen more as a symbol for an individual casualty of unsafety or imprudence, and with which a personal appropriation of place and space takes place, not a public one (Klaassens, Groote, and Huigen 2009: 198). A memorial site can be spatially enlarged by means of additional rituals. In the Netherlands, for instance, a traumatic death caused by “senseless” violence or racial violence nearly always results in an additional grassroots silent march, as such deaths affect society more than “normal” deaths (Stengs 2007). These marches create an extended memo-

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Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero

rial space, as the home of the deceased and the memorial are usually included in its performative trajectory (Margry 2008, 2011). After a certain, but undefined, time, a grassroots memorial is cleared, removed, destroyed, or collected. What remains in situ is a void, a delimited vacancy that continues to represent the trauma and its memorialization. A paving stone at the very spot of the memorial is sometimes removed and replaced by a memorial stone that bears a name or a date. In the case of the Atlanta Olympics bombing (1996), the flat monumental marker echoes a grassroots memorial, as handwritten texts have been etched into the paving at skewed angles (Durbin 2003: 29–30). But even without a permanent marker or monument, the space will remain a meaningful lieux de mémoire, as in the case of the “Diana memorial” in Paris. This makes the efforts to replace the grassroots memorial by a proper monument complicated, especially because the formal monument can never match the performative power of the makeshift memorial. A memorialization for Ground Zero in the form of light columns in Manhattan’s night skyline, although still in anticipation of a permanent monument, was qualified by Maureen Dowd as “architectural muzak” (Dowd 2003). She argued that this “prettified design,” which made no references to the horror, lacked the emotionally empowered narratives of the spontaneous and raw, primal character of grassroots memorials. She suggested, as an alternative, that since “the site itself has so much power that a flag and a void would suffice.” According to Walter Benjamin, the ruins have an effect, and an attraction, because of their quality as ruins, and their indexical nature to point to what it is no longer there (Benjamin 1973). The mixed memorial dedicated to the many young victims of the Beslan school massacre (2004) in North Ossetia is an example of that. The ruins of the school are kept as the monumental casing for the grassroots memorial that came into being on the inside walls and that is maintained by the mourning mothers and relatives. Similarly, the void of a nonpresent memorial that reflects “absence” adds a powerful emotional indexical quality to the emptiness, the beloved ones being no longer physically present.23 After the removal, also the void remains a meaningful space for memorialization. A recurrent delineation of the void as a realm of memory is often reinstated by the annual commemorative practices of family, friends, and pressure groups, and keeps the void meaningful. Problematizing the Sacred and the Secular Both creating life and taking life unquestionably belong to the domain of the sacred. Both are fundamental to existence, and are themes that

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Introduction

21

form for most of mankind an exercising quality attributed to God or the gods. This idea alone brings grassroots memorials a priori in relation to the domain of the sacred or the religious. An orthodox Protestant might perceive and accept a car accident as an act of God. For others, the place where a beloved one died, where his or her soul or spirit left earth for heaven, and where his or her blood soaked into the ground, creates a sacral designation of the site. However, also for those who do not adhere to a religious denomination, the death site is regarded as sacred, though not as part of a religious system, but because of a personal appropriation with which the spot becomes sacred, as it is the exact location where the transition from life to death took place, where the beloved took his or her last breath. Such a site may no longer be besmirched. This emotionally loaded site has become untouchable, “sacred.” And that is indeed the vernacular expression most used by relatives when they speak about the sites they have created or are maintaining (Jipson 2009). It is literally making sacred place and space. With the creation of a memorial, a connectivity is supposed to come into being, ultimately between the deceased and the others in mourning, and not with the divine (Turner 2008). The seemingly odd facet is that these deaths are mourned not only at the place where, having been cosmetically restored, the victims’ bodies are blessed, undergo the proper rituals, and are buried in a peaceful location, but also precisely at the site where death showed its ugliest face— an antiplace where the wrong occurred and that is now ostensibly void of life, and therefore seemingly a site to avoid or deny, as well as a place where there was no divine intervention and from which the salvational supernatural seems absent. The traumatic death, the profound emotionality, the emotions materialized in gifts and mementos, the fragility and ephemerality of the construction, and the agency of the ensemble elevate the ordinary, secular ground into the extraordinary and lead the people involved, religious or not, to designate it as sacred. In the case of great disasters and trauma, especially when children suffer premature death, people often start to doubt the existence of God. Nevertheless, in the case of roadside memorials (as analyzed by Jipson 2009), nearly all who create one regard the death site as more important than the burial tomb at the graveyard, where the deceased is buried in conformity with his or her religion.24 They regard it as a better place to deal with the unspeakable. This is a remarkable outcome, as it signifies a fault line between current and former personal mourning practices. After the crash of American Airlines 587 in Queens, New York only two months after 9/11, a makeshift memorial came into being on a wooden construction prop, and stayed there for more than two years. With the lapse of time, the ground was reclaimed by its owner, who ultimately started a le-

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Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero

gal case. One of the widowers then proclaimed: “This is sacred ground. It became sacred after the crash” (Chan 2003). The fact that, in practice, the concepts of sacrality and untouchability often appear to be exchangeable explains the strong emotions that result from the reclaiming of property or from the banning or removal of memorials; it also explains the problems that curators face when extracting materials from such personalized memorial space for collecting and preserving (Gardner, this volume). In some cases, “sacredness” becomes a sort of multiusable buzzword, as for example Lowenthal stated about the claims of the Australian aboriginals: when they found out that their possession claims were honored only for sacred sites, all sites emerged as sacred (Lowenthal 1998: 236). The sacred usually remains beyond discussion also in the West, even though the secularized West has difficulties in defining “sacred” and “profane.” Research has shown that the more familiar someone is with the phenomenon and with the memorial and the deceased person, the greater he or she will respect the phenomenon, and the more value he or she will attribute to it (Jipson 2009). Because the phenomenon of grassroots memorials was practically unknown when they first emerged in Western societies, the vast memorial for the San Ysidro McDonald’s massacre (1985) was repeatedly attacked by vandals, even though it had been blessed by a Catholic priest (Daily Breeze, 20 November 1985; cf. Foote 2003: 197–200). Communities do not allow the profanation of their dead or of their death rituals. As the phenomenon spread around the world, and the sacred and grieving meanings attributed to them became known, the sites gained a status that generated stonger moral protection against such infractions. This more conclusively shows that the perception of the sacred by others is related to how familiar they are with the phenomenon. Internet discussions on the issue of the banning of roadside memorials, however, reveal that some posters do not grasp the meanings of these assemblages for a community, and in particular for the person who lost a dear one. However, there are also people, in comparable circumstances with a great personal loss, who totally reject the idea of mourning in public and of creating a communal memorial installation (Editors 2009). The sacrality of memorials not only leads to dissension; it can also unite. Grassroots memorials often create a sense of sociability and elicit the sharing of feelings, as explored in Part 4 (cf. also Everett 2002: 81; Doka 2003: 180; Santino 2006b: 13; Truc 2006: 189). Most of the authors in this book describe in one way or another how, during their fieldwork, they witnessed a certain enhancement of social bonds and the reaffirmation or creation of community within groups or nations. This became very evident after 9/11, as Fraenkel states in her chapter, when many people gathered at symbolic locations, such as Union Square. Many went

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Introduction

23

to look for their companions, or to grief, mourn, and “seek solace” with strangers. Someone mentioned that he was struck by “this city’s desire to congregate, to heal” (Waldman 2001). Interestingly, people said that staying at home made them feel more alone; instead of just staring at their television screens, they wanted to go out and participate (Waldman 2001; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2003). This also happened in Warsaw after the death of John Paul II (Klekot, this volume). In Poland, the grassroots actions represented the national community’s cry for help in making sense of the country’s new social and political reality. In New York, people started to pray for persons they did not know. After approximately half a year, the messages and memories posted at the grassroots memorials around Ground Zero became “sorted out;” the positive and optimistic stayed, the resentful disappeared. Those who remained uttered “love, compassion, strength, pride. None were angry or vengeful.” The carefully placed items sent the positive message that the idleness and money of the world is secondary to “joining together, supporting each other” (Halpern 2002). This kind of “sorting out” is relevant to heritage institutions, as they, in the end, will start to gather a partial collection, and that evolution in meanings needs to be acknowledged. The sacred also reveals itself in the name of memorials. The idea of a memorial as a “shrine” has gained popularity in the media and among scholars. This is mainly due to the idea that the bricolage resembles an altar.25 This idea is based on the appearance, content, and practices of the memorials. Indeed, the attribution of sacrality, the use of candles, crosses, saint figurines, and other spiritual or religious objects, texts, praying, and reflective and ritual practices can turn a memorial into religiously embodied “altar ” (Cea 2011). In this, we concur with what Jack Santino (1992) concluded regarding the religious dimensions of such sites. The word shrine is used by Santino because “these are more than memorials. They are places of communion between the dead and the living” and are portals to the otherworld (Santino 2006b: 12). In the first part of his chapter in this volume, Santino elaborates on the characteristics of spontaneous shrines and the aspect of community. In general, however, we regard the term shrine as problematic: It is too suggestive of a compatible, favorably disposed idea of adoration and praying practices at a religious, holy site. We have not found data in previous case studies on grassroots memorials or in the studies in this book to support the single “holy site” paradigm. We therefore prefer to use terms that are more neutral, such as memorial or memorial site, which has allowed the authors in this volume to employ their own terminology. Thus, there are texts in which shrine is used with a religious meaning, while, for example, Béatrice Fraenkel uses it in a strongly secularized signification.

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Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero

For us, the grassroots memorial site functions mainly as a device to manage emotions and deal with grievances and contestation, rather than to create relations with the supernatural. This explains, to a certain extent, why people mourn at the site of death rather than at the proper grave. This assumption also makes it more understandable why the Ground Zero situation is so complicated, as many people died there of whom no remains were found. Thus, the memorial ground partly functions as the cemeterial site. When the first monumental designs for Ground Zero were presented, they were perceived as too smartened up; the makeshift and spontaneous memorials were remembered as offering “more power and raw passion” and emotional authenticity at this mixed cemeterial and memorial site (Dowd 2003). As a consequence of such opinions and the lack of a monument, the last steel beam to be removed from the remains of the World Trade Center (the “Last Column”) was replaced in August 2009, seven years after its removal, still bearing the names, messages, rosaries, flags, etc. from when it was used as an improvised memorial.26 The first qualification given was that the construction beam formed a “sacred artifact:” It was a powerful witness of disaster, mourning, and anger, and of the quest for the authentic grounding for people’s mourning. What seems to be “only” a makeshift object proves to be the “real thing.” The experiences of authenticity and the sacred come together at that point.27 The sacred is further connected to grassroots memorials, as there is a widespread idea that they are a Catholic practice and contain crosses. The origins are indeed situated in medieval European Christian culture, where, after the Reformation, the practice remained more strongly present in Catholic regions. Köstlin saw this cultural pattern change in the 1980s when, in a certain parallelism to the process of unchurchization in Europe, the practice “conquered” Protestant areas (Köstlin 1999: 280).28 The presence of a cross links memorials to Christian symbolism and materiality. In dominant Christian nations, the majority of these memorials consist of only a cross, or the cross is the most common part of the assemblage.29 This prop unambiguously connects a memorial to the Christian domain, as the cross stands for Christian symbolic references to the resurrection and the afterlife, as a notion of hope for paradise. However, this applies to only a limited extent to the people involved. Many regard and use a cross only as a universal symbol or sign related to death. The cross is now a general symbol of death, a part of the common Western visual memory. Materializing Emotions As explored in the previous section, sacredness is implicit in and attributed to grassroots memorials. The sacredness comes to the fore in

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Introduction

25

rituality, word, or materiality; it is expressed in rituals, objects with religious connotations, or in notes in which this status is described. The link between materiality and death rituals has already been pointed out from various perspectives (Hallam and Hockey 2001). In relation to grassroots memorials, we want to emphasize the idea of, in Erika Doss’s words, the “emotional life” of these memorials, and the particular patterns of the material culture of grief expressed at grassroots memorials as “repositories of feelings and emotions.” The “things that matter” are placed at the memorials to allow for a negotiation process to take place in complex moments and events, such as traumatic death (Doss 2008: 11, 15). Some of the most common materials to be deposited at memorial sites are teddy bears, handwritten notes, flowers, candles, religious paraphernalia, condolence cards, poems, letters, drawings, and photographs. Although the morphological variation is limited in this scripted way of giving, the context differs, and therefore the contents and the meanings also differ. The leaving behind of tokens and mementos can be seen as a way of constituting a relationship between the site and the giver, in which the objects are perceived as the embodiment of the public grief. Objects are meant to realize presence and to bind the living and the dead (Hallam and Hockey 2001: 8), or as Santino puts it: These places of communion put the dead back in the fabric of life (Santino 2006b: 13). But in the case of grassroots memorials, they are particularly meant to realize social action and express protest, actualized by posting symbolic objects or, in a more explicit way, by writings or drawings. The impressive figures related to the Oklahoma Fence express the generally felt need to leave something behind at this memorial: approximately one million visitors left behind some 200,000 objects (Doss 2006: 298). Two of the chapters of this book concentrate on the material aspects of the memorials. Puccio-Den, in her analysis of the memorializing of mafia victims in Palermo, questions whether the use of paper and other ephemeral materials, rather than marble, enables the emotional system of the grassroots memorials to be distinguished from the remembrance system, whose instruments are permanent monuments or books. The second, the chapter by Béatrice Fraenkel, evaluates the writings of 9/11. According to her, candles, flowers, and papers are the elementary units of a sort of grammar of grassroots memorials. As established in her analysis, the force of the writings resides specifically in the act of writing itself: “to choose a support, to use a form of characters, a lay out, to address a message, and to publish and diffuse it” (this volume). As a focal site for emotions, a memorial reflects a delicate balance between feelings and tensions (Sánchez-Carretero, this volume). The differing views can also create tensions, which leads to debates on the

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Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero

composition. Someone will remove objects or texts that seem to be inappropriate, often without anyone noticing the act. The debate on the question whether all lost lives related to the high-school massacres should be remembered led to the theft and destruction of crosses and to an ardent debate in the Christian-Evangelical community, as Sylvia Grider discusses in her contribution. Another example of the removal of the inappropriate and, in this case, of preventive censoring, came to the fore in the virtual memorial sites for Pim Fortuyn. These memorialesque registers of condolence and protest were not handed over by the Internet provider to the family until they had removed all the negative postings (Margry 2003: 128).

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Mediatization The topics of death, trauma, and personal loss are recurrent mediatized themes, and the particular aesthetics of grassroots memorials makes these memorials particularly appealing to the media. The media influence memorialization after traumatic death in two ways (cf. Lundby 2009). First, when the disaster is subject to real-time television coverage. For instance, the live confrontation with dying people and the subsequent collapse of the Twin Towers added enormously to the emotional impact and the subsequent inclination to participate in the public memorialization. Second, the inclination to participate is also stimulated by the way the media report on the memorials themselves: The more attention they get and the more they are used as powerful backdrops for newscasters and interviews, the more they become iconic of postdisaster activities and events. The Columbine memorials proved to be “photogenic” and were continuously used as backdrops by the networks (Grider, this volume; cf. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2003). In a way, this focus reduced “Columbine” to these memorial shrines. Television and the Internet could by vicarious participation even provide a sense of community and national cohesion. Television functions as an extension of a memorial or, better, mediates its performativity. As a consequence, in the case of Columbine, it encouraged persons from all over the country who could not visit the memorial to send objects along with a request to add them to the memorial. These requests were, however, not honored, as the objects were “artistically” displayed in a separate room with a complete lack of performative interaction, as they were placed at a formal, emotional distance (Grider, this volume). The mass media are part of our daily lives, and they reproduce reality but also create and diffuse new ritual forms. After a tragedy like the

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Introduction

27

March 11 attacks in Madrid, what models of performative symbolic action do citizens have at hand? The most obvious answer would be the models that are portrayed and presented by the mass media. A particular ethnographic account of the role of mass media in the creation of these globalized rituals has still not been fully explored, and this is one of the studies we hope this volume will further stimulate. Irene Stengs has initiated this line of study in this volume by concentrating on the role of broadcasts regarding the mourning in the aftermath of the assassination of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam in 2004. Stengs uses Couldry’s model for analyzing media authority, media rituals, and the ritual space of the media (Couldry 2003, cited after Stengs, this volume). The relevant role of the mass media in these performances of grief cannot be overemphasized, as it influences, reproduces, and produces models for these mourning rituals in public spaces. After an event that causes death and that is socially felt as traumatic, the mass media play a role both in the diffusion of what happens and the creation of the trauma itself. The localized traumatic event permeates various spheres (e.g., national or supranational) through the media. In determining the significance of the memorials, in addition to considering the performative nature of the individuals concerned, the importance of the involvement and active role of modern media such as television and the Internet needs to be assessed in the creation and perception of the memorials. Extensive media exposure of public events gives rise to ongoing interference between the media and the people who create memorials. Both the persons and the media are the central mediators in what are termed “performative memorials” to reflect the broad performative power of the memorials, realized both by the memorial sites and by the individuals and mediators who are in situ involved (Margry 2007). In the case of the death of Princess Diana, the media played a double role:30 at the memorials, they were the accused party and had to communicate this to the public. Later, when movie makers took up these topics, the performative power of the grassroots movement, including its social issues, was prolonged and reiterated. Stephen Frears’s movie The Queen (2006) reignited the issue of the paparazzi and of the troubled relation between the British Crown, the Princess of Wales, and the country’s citizens. A comparable function reflects the controversial documentary Bowling for Columbine (2002), in which Michael Moore, inspired by the huge and debated forms of memorialization after the high-school massacre (cf. Grider, this volume), embroidered on the causes of societal violence and gave ammunition to the gun control movement. This debate was regenerated after the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, when the media were censured for their extensive coverage of the traumatic

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Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero

deaths and the memorializations, as the shooters had been inspired by the coverage of previous shootings to replicate the act, and had thus found the minutes of world fame they were after (Lexington 2009). The media’s active involvement and interaction with the public is often clear, but usually there is more. Extensive media exposure of the construction and effect of the memorials creates an added performative effect of the memorial enactment as a whole. This is usually visualized by media outside the physically circumscribed area, and is perfectly compatible with the view that performance is “everywhere linked to the interdependence of power and knowledge” (Schechner 2002: 114). The mediational role of the memorial sites appears to be decisive in the interaction between messengers, the public, and the media for the dynamics and the process of memorializing.31 The round-the-clock mediatization of 9/11 activated people to go out and participate in the street, and to help or to discuss or add messages to the memorials (Waldman 2001). This agency of the memorial was also clearly present after the murder of the politician Pim Fortuyn. At this point, we must also address the related phenomenon of virtual memorials or cyber shrines (cf. Grider 2001). After the introduction of the Internet, the World Wide Web started copying real life into a virtual one. For example, virtual memorials and condolence registers have been created. The possibility to participate from home in the process of overcoming traumatic events stimulated many people to write down their feelings and opinions. Compared to traditional registers, the virtual ones are much more detailed, as people are free to write their entries anonymously and at ease while they are at home. The anonymous nature of the Internet is conducive to all kind of abusive language and politically, socially, and racially incorrect opinions. Virtual memorials also influence the material ones—as there is a rapid exchange of information via the Internet about what happened and about the protests—and communicate narratives and visuals (Punt 2002; cf. Dobler, this volume). This process may also engender altered narratives or manipulated visuals. When real memorials are gone, virtual ones can continue to spread messages of protest as demonstrated by, for example, a site for the Cromagnon nightclub fire in Buenos Aires in 2004.32

Analyzing Grassroots Memorials Performativity and Politics In this book, we put forward the thesis that grassroots memorials constitute a form of individualized political participation and social action.33

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Introduction

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These memorials fit in processes of individual participation in different levels of society and are disconnected from traditional classes, ethnicities, and other imagined communities. A conclusion that can be reached after comparing the case studies analyzed in this book is that a major element that connects grassroots memorials is their implicit or explicit political significance. Their increasing popularity since the 1980s seems to relate to processes of globalization and society’s distancing from formal politics and administrations. In cases of existential crisis after a traumatic loss, people search for atonement and compensation, and they particularly want to express their discontent about the injustice of what happened. The underlying idea is that untimely deaths caused by street violence, traffic accidents, or other forms of disaster are not supposed to happen in developed and highly medicalized welfare states. So when such deaths do occur, searches for rationalizations of death are started, often out of posttraumatic desperation. One reason why people take action themselves in an attempt to bring society back is their desire not to be dependent on suffrage or representatives. On an individual or family level, traumas resulting from fatal traffic accidents are usually expressed by means of personal roadside memorials, which form a focal point for the mourning and grieving of relatives and friends. They have a limited emanation. Disasters that stir up a greater part of society can find their expression in larger grassroots memorials that transcend the personal and address society. Massive commemoratives materialize at sites that are considered suitable as public stages. Such sites offer everybody an opportunity to partake in the power of such memorials through a “performance of self ”—a notion that has been defined as a performance influenced by surroundings and public alike, and that serves to pass one’s own views on to others (Goffman 1959: 17). From that perspective, such memorials are conducive to individual exhibitions of emotive, social, or political identity in public space. Grief is one of the strongest human emotions, and it provokes various kinds of actions (Walter 1996), including actions that can be instrumentalized. In Holst-Warhaft’s words: “For the angry, the ambitious, the deranged, the persecuted, and the marginalized, the energy of extreme grief may offer a unique opportunity for social mobilization and political action” (Holst-Warhaft 2000: 9). Monika Rulfs’s Hamburg case study (this volume) is a clear example of the performative effects of grassroots memorials. In it, she shows that the demands of the “mourning in protest” were met as a result of the grassroots memorialization. The element of a feared meaninglessness of life was perhaps decisive in the mobilization process. This anxiety was expressed in the deceased child’s memorial texts: “Your death should

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Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero

not be meaningless.” In other words, by means of grassroots memorialization, the death of Nicola was instrumentalized to rally the dangers of vehicular traffic in urbanized areas. Through this form of action, the people involved made meaningful Nicola’s life—or rather, the taking of Nicola’s life. As Jack Santino (this volume) rightly states, in each memorial event, the individual identity of the deceased is constructed according to the needs and nature of the group involved. It thus becomes clear how Nicola’s identity was transformed from a playful child into an icon in the battle against heavy traffic. The creators of grassroots memorials are active producers of meaning and symbolism, thanks to the input of a substantive, narrative dimension. In analyzing oral and textual performances, two interrelated events need to be distinguished in the narratives: “the event that is narrated in the work and the event of narration itself ” (Bakhtin 1981: 255). The texts are therefore not to be regarded as autonomous elements, but as an active, integrated ingredient in the production of meaning. Texts, images, and symbols instigate conversations and debates among the visitors. This happens whether the texts are printed in large fonts or are handwritten in small characters. This encourages visitors to and participants in a memorial to come closer both to the object and to each other—an effect that Fraenkel (this volume) calls the “hidden power source” of a memorial. This is an aspect that makes people act: read, write, offer, communicate, politicize. Some memorials are placed horizontally, while others, as explored by Sánchez-Carretero in this volume, are placed vertically on walls, as verticality allows for a more direct interaction via the writing on top of somebody else’s message, producing a palimpsest effect. In the case of the March 11 memorials at Madrid train stations, the verticality also reflected the messages’ more aggressive tone toward politicians and terrorists. As accretion and additions change the situation and effect, or enactment, of memorials, this process continuously generates new conversations and discussions at the memorial sites. Such an effect proves to be especially pronounced when authors, in placing messages or objects, can immediately be held accountable. Such interactions help integrate the memorial within its spatial context. The performative nature of a memorial landscape brings about its own style of communication, in which both the act of expression and the performer matter, and which prove difficult for the visitor to circumvent. New meanings can be generated in the process. And, therefore, the performativity of a memorial site conditions the way the public can come to terms with traumatic death. We consequently must take a closer look at the public event itself in order to understand the “logics of their design,” which helps to establish the meanings of all ritual practices at issue (Handelman 1998). When Rich-

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Introduction

31

ard Bauman argues that “narratives are the sign, the events their external referents,” he is advocating a performance-centered analysis that ties in with other performance approaches (Bauman 1986: 114). Cultural categories underlying actions—and the ways in which form and substance have been added to the memorials—are based on such an integrative vision of text, language, and culture. Erika Fischer-Lichte has argued that culture should not be perceived as text alone, but also—or especially—needs to be understood as performance (Fischer-Lichte 2005).34 According to this line of reasoning, cultural expressions in the form of grassroots memorials create a dynamic, expressive process that helps people define who they are as individuals and as collectivities. Everyday life and especially symbolic events and rituals figure as sites of enactment of the human cultural drama.

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Death and Trauma Deaths and disasters have always been marked with deep attention, mourning, and rituality. An important question is why people create the type of memorialization that we refer to as grassroots memorials. And is it an actual change? Mixtures of public and private rituals are not new, as many funeral ceremonies and other mourning rituals mix these spheres, depending on the deceased’s status and position in society, and simplified versions of grassroots memorials have been documented in Christian culture since the Middle Ages. As a widespread European practice, crosses marking the legal, public reconciliation of manslaughter (“murder crosses”) and crosses of remembrance after fatal accidents or sudden death (“memory crosses”) were, from the fourteenth century onward, erected on public sites and alongside roads (Brockpähler 1963: 122–28; Osch 1981: xii–xvii). Apart from punishment, a judge could urge the placing of such a memorial. These memorials had the purpose of marking the site, commemoration, respect, and warning; they often also gave a brief description of what had happened. This can be understood as a prefiguration of the roadside memorial, but in its function it was more what we now call a grassroots memorial, although it was initially a legal obligation to erect such crosses. Even though the two practices should be formally considered different, in daily life they influenced each other strongly. After the Reformation, the mixed ecclesiastical–civil reconciliative Sühnepraxis disappeared, while the custom of placing commemorative crosses continued; for example, it was still in existence in Westfalen in its traditional form in the early twentieth century (Brockpähler 1963: 133). In the United States, the example was the Mexican descansos, which was found in the southwestern states from the seventeenth century on.

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Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero

So can we, apart from these obvious historical roots, speak of fundamental changes in mourning culture, and—to cite Fraenkel (this volume)—are we confronted with a “new culture of disaster?” Or, in Walter’s words, are we witnessing a “new public mourning” (Walter 2008)? What is fundamental is that mourning has become related to the utterance of grievances, and the public deliberately seeks to bring about change in a performative way. This is not limited to disastrous events or to events of a larger scale, but includes tragedies on the family level and to personalities who have a high mass-media impact. As this phenomenon has become widespread in Western societies, it embodies innovations in both the mourning culture and the culture of social action. This, however, leaves the question why memorials are erected for people who have been killed in disasters and traffic accidents, for instance, and are not found in front of hospitals where children have died of cancer or other grave diseases in “untimely” and “unjust” ways. Such markers are also not found in front of private houses after domestic accidents—a matter that also came up in the New York Times (Editors 2009) in relation to a discussion on roadside memorials—which can illuminate the question why people create memorials in public space. In the case of children dying of cancer or due to a domestic accident, the memorialization process generally takes place only in the home, and is usually materialized in the form of shelves of photographs or museumized sleeping rooms. Age (or better, youth) is not always a determining factor for creating makeshift memorials, although in many cases the fact that the trauma concerns children proves to be decisive. The principle that “the younger, the more unjust” seems to apply. As regards the Genoa killing in 2001, Caffarena and Stiaccini (this volume) wonder whether the victim’s representation and memorialization would have been as massive as it was, had his personal appearance—young, small, slender, vulnerable body, baby face—been that of an older man. The representation of corporality is another factor to investigate in relation to memorialization processes. A preliminary observation can be made about the effect of gender. As in many places mourning is mostly performed by women (Holst-Warhaft 2000: 4), female participation is dominant at those memorials that tend to be more of a shrine or are related to a deceased relative (roadside memorials).35 In the case of the Madrid train bombings, women organized themselves to keep the candles burning (Sánchez-Carretero, this volume). But in other cases of grassroots memorials where the protest and political elements are dominant, active male participants are in the majority, as observed in the Fortuyn memorials, which constituted more male than female debating arenas, something that was mirrored in the written texts, which contained political messages.

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Introduction

33

A categorization of the different forms of memorialization and of the absence of memorialization might lead us to the answer to the question why people create memorials in public space. We discern different attitudes toward deaths that generate grassroots memorials. These attitudes depend on two factors: the person who passed away, and the cause of death. In general, grassroots memorials appear if the person who passed away is a personality with a high mass-media status (the Pope, Lady Diana, Michael Jackson, etc.) or if those who are killed are considered “victims.” In both cases, the mass media are a crucial element for enabling a grassroots memorial to acquire its active agency. Among the causes of death that give rise to the grassroots memorials analyzed in this book, the typologies vary from traffic accidents to memorials for the victims of school shootings, victims of terrorism, plane crashes, or political assassinations, or a variety of causes that are linked to the deaths of popular celebrities. In cases in which the deceased is not a famous person, the logic of the creation of the concept of “victim” plays a role. It seems that the avoidability of death is not the only issue: personal responsibility is also important. As long as death cannot be avoided, as in the case of fatal diseases, there is a significantly greater inclination to accept it, without bringing it to the public. Diseases are inherent to body and life, and can be accepted as a fait accompli in which human interference plays no role. For example, fatal domestic accidents are not as well accepted, as they are regarded as being related to the families’ failure to ensure the safety of their members, and the accidents cannot be attributed to external factors. Along with mourning, feelings of guilt or shame are predominant emotions in this category and are usually accompanied by a wish to keep the tragedy out of the public eye, to keep it backstage, and eventually obliterate it. Kenneth Foote referred to the aspect of mourning as the “mark of shame” (2003: 174–213). In cases of private shame and guilt, no public makeshift memorials come into being. The logic of grassroots memorials for victims needs the group recognition that the blame belongs to the realm of “the other.” “Senseless” violence, traffic deaths, and terroristic or natural disasters are human instigated or represent a hazard from outside, beyond personal responsibility, allowing one to blame the “other.” However, the strong separation between both analytical fields seems to be in decline, as, for example, memorialization processes are becoming increasingly present in hospitals. This is expressed by, for example, public registers (in German, Anliegebücher), in which reflections on personal situations can be recorded (Barna 2000). Although guilt and shame are often related to all mourning, in the case of grassroots me-

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Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero

morials they are overcome by the emotionally driven power to mourn in public and to react. Although death or a corpse cannot be owned, death can be claimed or appropriated by persons other than the direct relatives. This mechanism hardly plays a role in the case of roadside memorials, which are usually regarded as private, notwithstanding the fact that others also add objects and participate in the mourning. The principal difference is that grassroots memorials are claimed, used, and instrumentalized by persons other than family and direct friends. The relevance of these deaths is perceived as more important than “private” casualties; they create greater traumas and thus become public issues. As individuals, the relatives lose control over the mourning and memorialization practices. In single-death cases—as for example after the killing of Theo van Gogh by a Muslim fundamentalist—the family, helped by its social position, was able to maintain control over the winding-up process. For example, they changed the usual deployment of a silent march for mourning and protest, into a deafeningly noisy gathering, which was more in line with van Gogh’s controversial opinions, as explored in Irene Stengs’s ethnography of his memorial site. This also touches upon the very sensitive issue of the death of perpetrators, as analyzed by Sylvia Grider in the chapter dedicated to the Columbine High and Virginia Tech massacres.36 The process starts during the body count: Are the shooters to be included in the number of casualties? Are they, in the case of Columbine High, kept backstage or are they too allowed to become front stage—represented in “victim” crosses? During the aftermath of this massacre, there were several attempts to erase from memory the names of the young shooters. But also in the case of roadside memorials, the question of victim and perpetrator plays an important role. There seems to have been a shift in that regard. In the 1970s/1980s, especially in southeastern Europe with its male car culture and “traffic wars,” Köstlin found that memorials were mainly made for young male car drivers, victims of their own desire to drive fast.37 If we compare that to contemporary practices, these “petrified rhetorics” articulating a warning to drive carefully have turned into memorials accusing car traffic of violating the young, the vulnerable, and the innocent by killing children and bicyclists. This comes to the fore in the political goals of the ghost bike movement, as well as in the Hamburg case in this book. One last question about whose death is being memorialized is related to the location of the death, and whether or not grassroots memorials are culture specific. It is evident that the geographical distribution of grassroots memorials (and roadside memorials) is strongly developed in

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Introduction

35

Europe, the Americas, and Australia. Tony Walter links this type of memorialization to Western societies, “where the mass media and ideas of freedom, individuality and personal choice are well developed” (Walter 2008). The notion of “the West” is quite problematic, as stated above, but Walter’s idea works for most of the examples the editors of this book came across. For instance, in Buenos Aires an extraordinary example of grassroots memorial was created after the Cromagnon nightclub fire in Buenos Aires,38 and Argentina fulfilled Walter’s two conditions: It has an established mass media and developed ideas of freedom, individuality, and personal choice. Interestingly, the memorializing practices that Sandrine Revet describes after the 1999 landslides in Venezuela diverge from other Western forms. The issue she addresses is how in underdeveloped, rural areas, where the media-furnished templates of grassroots memorials are hardly known, communities create other forms. The official 1999 landslide monument is informally reinterpreted on the local level as uttering social critique of authorities and landowners, while the grassroots-built local chapel allowed reconciliation with the “bad deaths” that had occurred in the community (Revet, this volume). However, grassroots memorials are not as strictly “Western” as they may seem. For example, in the Philippines a grassroots assemblage was created after the Ozone Disco Club fire in 1996 in Quezon City and remained in place for a few years. After the Indian Ocean tsunami (2004), small, personal memorials were built for drowned Western tourists; and after typhoon Morakot (2009), the people of Taiwan built traditional small, temporary altars for their relatives on the streets. In the same year, the memorial street signs created after the death of former President Roh Mo Hyun in Seoul were yet state organized. In this volume, Huub de Jonge shows that the al-Qaeda attacks on Bali (2002), which were mainly against tourist facilities and tourists themselves, led to some grassroots memorialization for the tourists involved. Contrary to the local practice, a permanent monument was also created; it became a major attraction, for both Westerners and Indonesians, and is still used for placing objects and letters. The Balinese purification rituals to restore the disrupted sacred balance by wiping out all tangible traces of the tragedy did not allow the Balinese to participate in the mourning practices of the international community, especially because for some the bombing confirmed the idea that the intrusion of Western tourists had led to the spiritual and cultural pollution of their island. By stimulating discussions on terrorism, for example, the commemoratives around the monument proved useful for community building in an atmosphere of tension between the various ethnicities and religions in Indonesia.39

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Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero

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The Cube Unraveled The chapters of this book help to advance the understanding of grassroots memorials as an important element in the mourning processes of contemporary societies. Grassroots memorials increasingly form part of vernacular cityscapes throughout the world. The grassroots memorials case studies in this book focus on nine countries in Asia, Europe, and North and South America: Indonesia (de Jonge), Germany (Rulfs), Italy (Caffarena and Stiaccini; Puccio-Den), the Netherlands (Margry; Stengs), Northern Ireland, UK (Santino), Poland (Klekot), Spain (SánchezCarretero), the United States (Dobler; Gardner; Grider; Fraenkel), and Venezuela (Revet). To unravel the cube of the multifaceted perspectives that grassroots memorials entangle, our concluding remarks are focused on two main ideas delineated in Part 1. The first deals with our thesis that the grassroots memorial format gives a ritualized and sanctioned (and massmediated) model to be used to implement social actions at various levels. Although this is a book both on memorialization and heritagization and on social action, we argue that, as the case studies show, the social action and the political dominate the memorialization in grassroots memorials. In their material form, and based especially on the related meanings, improvised memorials have an intrinsic performative impact and agency; they are effectively employed, and, in this sense, we argue against Doss, who states that these memorials fail to magnetize social force and political action (Doss 2006: 315). The second main idea is related to the individual and noninstitutional quality. A major aspect of grassroots memorials that should not be forgotten is that their seemingly makeshift, improvised character is actually their foremost quality. It best expresses their provenance, namely, individual human emotion. They do not represent a collective idea of mourning or grievance invented by “others” and embodied in artistic, formal, and sanctioned monuments. Although they constitute emblematic places and spaces and show patterns and formats of a structural and global kind, memorials are also indexes to dissatisfactions, values, and ideological opinions in a particular group or in a society as a whole. These ideas are explored in Part 2, which is dedicated to the role of grassroots memorials in times of violence and the negotiative power of grassroots memorials. Grassroots memorials deal with the daily insecurities that people do not accept; they reflect the fear of death and express the feeling of being insignificant and powerless. As a way to escape the sense of lack of control, the idea that “something needs to be done” is repeated in the case studies analyzed in this book. The narrative of the need to contribute to

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Introduction

37

the hurt community is a constant in the ethnographies of these memorials. The linking thread of Part 3—Contesting Objectionable Death—is the reactions to deaths that are not accepted, while the focus of Part 4 is on the reactions to terrorism and the performances of group binding at the grassroots memorials or the cohesive effects for the involved community. Finally, Part 5 concentrates on the instrumentalizing of repositories of grassroots memorials, analyzing the efforts to make permanent what was intended to be more or less ephemeral. It shows how, despite applied ethics, heritagization processes of grassroots memorialization result in a change of material “authenticity,” contexts and of meanings.

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*

*

*

It was movie director Gus Van Sant who made in 2003 the film Elephant 40 about the Columbine High School shooting. Van Sant filmed the general timeline of the day several times from the multiple viewpoints of the main characters involved, addressing it thus from different perspectives. The Palme d’Or–winning movie suggests that there is not always an answer to the question why, a question many people pose after disasters or accidents. It brings up that there is just not for everything a remedy, solution, or an acceptable answer, and that touches upon the main indexical quality of the grassroots memorial: an antidote to helplessness, an instrument to deal with traumatic death. Understanding grassroots memorials ultimately contributes to the analysis of the taboo of the uncontrollable, untimely, and unjust dead mourned in these memorials, and expressed via public space for communication. In most of the cases explored in this book, the identification process with the victims produces a virtual substitution at the memorials: The “something needs to be done” together with “It could have been me” (see illustration 0.2, next page) turns grassroots memorials into strong sources of potential action, which explains the social relevance of knowing more about them and their instrumentalizations.

Notes

1. The participation of Cristina Sánchez-Carretero in this book was part of the CRIC (Cultural Heritage and the Reconstruction of Identities after Conflict) research project funded by the European Union 7FP (Ref. 217411); and the “The Archive of Mourning” project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Culture (HUM2005–03490). 2. The word grassroots has been used since the late nineteenth century in relation to the digging hype of gold that could be found “everywhere,” even in the grass roots. At the beginning of the twentieth century, grassroots meant more than that: down to grassroots” wasedited thenbyalso for looking at the basic facts of Grassroots Memorials : “getting The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, Peterused Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero

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Illustration 0.2. Mirror on a wall at the Atocha train station in Madrid as a memento mori, saying in Spanish: “Look at yourself: It could have been you.” Picture from the Archive of Mourning, the visual documentation of the al-Qaeda bombing on 11 March 2004. Photo: Víctor Fernández.

a matter. It was a metaphorical derivation from the idea that “beneath the visible blades of grass, keeping the grass alive and making it grow, are the simple roots.” The American lexicographer Charles Earle Funk stated that it was in the grassroots that you could truly understand a situation and effectively respond to it [italics by the editors], see http://www.answers.com/topic/grassroots-democracy. Accessed 22 August 2009. 3. On the topic of trauma and memory see, for instance, Antze and Lambek (1996), Caruth (1995), Edkins (2003), Stier and Landres (2006); see Ashplant, Dawson, and Roper (2000) for war memory and commemoration; on memory and nation building see Boswell and Evans (1999), Eidson (2000), Gillis (1994), and the classic study by Connerton (1989); on death, grief, and memory see Hallam and Hockey (2001), Lattanzi-Licht and Doka (2003), Walter (2008); on the political uses of grief and memory see Holst-Warhaft (2000), Mitchell (2003); on the sense and memory see Seremetakis (1994); on the topic on hurtful memories see Dolff-Bonekämper (2002), Etkind (2004), Sturken (1997), Tunbridge and Ashworth (1996), White (2000), and particularly Young (1993; 2000). Young in his book Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning discusses vernacular memorials to the Holocaust before artistic, governmentally organized memorials were built (Young 1993). On the general topic of commemoration there are countless references. Memorials are becoming so widespread and influential that some authors talk about “memorial mania” (Doss 2008). Erika Doss defines it as “the contemporary obsession with issues of memory and history and an urgent,

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Introduction

4. 5.

6.

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7.

8.

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excessive desire to express, or claim, those issues in visibly public contexts,” describing contemporary acts of memorialization as “exorbitant, frenzied, and extreme” (Doss 2008: 7). This will be worked out further in her monograph: Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. “Western” in this volume is understood to include Europe, Australia, and North, Central, and South America. When political motivations are involved in the creation of a roadside memorial, they are always of a secondary status, see Klaassens, Groote, and Huigen 2009: 196. As his initial publication was difficult to obtain, other scholars claimed the concept or got an implicit claim attributed (cf. Jorgensen-Earp and Lanzilotti 1998). In the same year as Santino’s more accessible publication, in 2001, Sylvia Grider published her often-quoted article online: “Spontaneous Shrines: A Modern Response to Tragedy and Disaster,” New Directions in Folklore 5 at http://www .temple.edu/isllc/newfolks/shrines.html, followed by Grider 2000; later she updated the first text and referred to Santino: http://www.temple.edu/english/isllc/ newfolk/shrines_update.html. See also the claim of Ivan Strenski, Material Culture and the Varieties of Religious Imagination at http://www.shrines.ucr.edu/ article.html. Later on, Santino became less sure that this concept was indeed the appropriate term (Santino 2006b: 14). The result of an e-mail discussion in June 2009 with folklorists, journalists, and translators (see Preface) was that the “makeshift” semantics definitely have a residual negative connotation as poorly made, inferior, sloppy, cheap, trivial, etc., and that it also has the idea of something temporary, for the real thing (the official, permanent monument) to come—although in itself, “makeshift” is not necessarily negative. A connection was also made to the DIY movement, in which makeshift things have to be put together by someone (like memorials). It is, nevertheless, the term that has a generic use in the media. Journalists added that copy editors played a role on the use of the term: they rely on earlier examples; once there is a precedent, they tend to revert to it; the shortness of the expression and also the aspect of “make” would give a clearer idea for the reader of what it is about. On the other hand also political correctness, the term being regarded as elitist, seems to have provoked the disuse of the term in American academia. Internet searches on 23 and 24 June 2009 gave a clear insight into the frequency of the terms used in the media. On the Internet, the term “makeshift memorial(s)” was, with more than 56,000 hits, the most frequently used; for “spontaneous memorial(s),” 11,170 hits were counted; as for “spontaneous shrine(s),” 2,250. For these results the single and plural forms of the terms are added. The term “ephemeral memorial(s)” proved to be used more in relation to art (projects). The website Newslibrary.com, which contains millions of articles from 2,544 North American newspapers (from 1977 on), gave a result of 15,028 articles dealing with “makeshift memorial(s),” only 464 dealing with “spontaneous memorial(s),” and 145 dealing with “spontaneous shrine(s).” A specific search in the web archive of the New York Times resulted in 688 hits for “makeshift memorial(s),” 18 for “spontaneous memorial(s),” 10 for “spontaneous shrine(s),” and 3 for “ephemeral memorial(s).” The term “temporary memorial” was usually applied to an “interim” memorial, a preliminary construction to a permanent monument. In addition to several articles and one small monograph by Erika Doss (2008), two book-length comparative studies on grassroots memorials have been published,

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10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

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19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

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namely, Jack Santino’s Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death (2006a) and Jennifer Clark’s Roadside Memorials. A Multidisciplinary Approach (2007). The first book concentrates on spontaneous shrines in general, the second on a particular genre, namely, roadside memorials. When we leave out of the statistics the earlier references of “makeshift memorials” in relation to permanent monuments from the past or to the Second World War. From the beginning of the 1980s, in the US media reported memorials were related to major political issues like the 1989 memorial—in front of the Chinese consulate in Los Angeles—for the victims of the Tiananmen massacre in Beijing; the field of flowers and messages after the plane crash in Lockerbie in 1992; or the memorial created in November 1995, beneath the coffin of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, outside the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem. http://www.liverpoolfc.tv/lfc_story/memorial/. Ironically, in 2003—the fortieth anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination—many makeshift, grassroots memorials were created in Dealey Plaza and elsewhere in the United States, often by conspiracy theorists, and used to demand from the government the truth about the murder of the president. Manuscript of Brown University, see Ted Widmer, “New York’s Lincoln Memorial,” New York Times, 17 April 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/ opinion/17widmer.html. Accessed 19 June, 2009. One of the strongest forms of protest is the annual “Run for the Wall,” see Dubisch (2005). This seems to coincide with trends in Europe, where, for example, the grave of Jim Morrison, who died in 1971, attracted hardly any mourning fans, until 1981 when his life became newly mediatized through a very successful movie. This template, however, affects on the contrary the idea of spontaneity, like in the Hamburg case: the seemingly spontaneous reaction of the people was a constructed form of collective direct action in response to a shared experience and utilized the expressive means from an easily accessible repertoire of grief and protest (Rulfs, this volume). Thematic “cancer forests” for victims of cancer are conversely successful, as relatives find there the possibility to create also a personal monument, see Post (2008). See Daily Mail, 31 August 2007 at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article479020/Diana-tributes-laid-Paris-tunnel-crash-site.html. Accessed 15 September 2009. As museums were then hesitant to collect “active” memorials, the public started asking for preservation, see Gardner, this volume. See Doss for more examples of collections of grassroots memorials (2008: 16–17). In addition, see examples by some of the authors included in this book (Grider 2001: 6; Caffarena and Stiaccini 2005; Gardner and Henry 2002). Weisser describes the geographical spreading factors for roadside memorials (2004: 72–73). Köstlin (1999: 280) confirms this difference in memorialization; Weisser (2004: 72–73), however, does not differentiate between urban and rural practices. The winning design for the World Trade Center Memorial in New York proposes two large voids, open spaces containing recessed pools, that resonate with the feelings of loss and absence; the memorial is called “Reflecting Absence.” For his research, Jipson interviewed 127 persons (95 percent were relatives, 80 percent were female, and 70 percent were white). All declared that although the

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27. 28.

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memorial does not replace the gravestone in the churchyard, the memorial is more meaningful to them. In Italy, for instance, the usual term is altarini. In Spanish, the terms used are altares spontáneos (cf. Ortiz 2011; Sánchez-Carretero 2006, 2011) and santuarios populares (Chulilla et al. 2005). http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2009/08/24/2009–08–24_steel_beam_ from_world_trade_center_returns_to_ground_zero_as_memorial_to_sept_ 11.html. This also fully supports Bendix’s position that searching for authenticity is fundamentally an emotional and moral quest (Bendix 1997: 7). The Netherlands, for example, is divided geographically by religion, but shows no significant difference in the diffusion of memorials between the Protestant north and the Catholic south (Klaassens, Groote, and Huigen 2009: 191). For Australia, Jennifer Clark sampled roadside 430 memorials; a cross was used in 93 percent of the memorials. In the United States, most of them contain a white cross. In Christian countries crosses are thus widely applied, while, reciprocally, in strongly secularized countries, such as the Netherlands, the cross may appear in less than 20 percent of roadside memorials (Klaassens, Groote, and Huigen 2009). Franzmann pointed at the mimicry of the cemetery (with its crosses) that takes place at a memorial (Franzmann 2007: 173). Walter claims that the role of the media in shaping behavior has been overemphasized. His research on Diana’s mourning demonstrates that the media were more effective in changing perceptions than behavior. The idea existed that the entire British population was mourning at public spaces, and while his research shows that this was indeed the perception, the majority did not mourn their princess publicly (Walter 2008). We therefore challenge the opinion of Fischer-Lichte that performativity can only be realized from the principle of strict copresence, having “actors” and “public” at the same location, cf. Fischer-Lichte 2005: 22–23. http://baires.elsur.org/archives/cromagnon-memories-of-young-lives-lost/; see also http://www.collectivememory.net/2009/09/remembering-tragedies-cromagnon .html. Accessed 5 October, 2009. See, for example, in the related heritage field, Bagnall (2003). Although Fischer-Lichte’s concept is based on theatrical productions, it is also applicable to mourning rituals and social and political action. In the context of this book, however, we digress from her principles of strict copresence of “actors” and “public” at the same location; there is no absolute delineation of performative effects on-site as even the performativity of a memorial can be mediatized (cf. Fischer-Lichte 2005: 22–23). 80 percent of the persons involved in his research on roadside memorials were female, see Jipson (2009). After the closure of chapter editing, two new articles on this sensitive subject were published: J. William Spencer and Glenn W. Muschert, (2009). “The Contested Meaning of the Crosses at Columbine,” American Behavioral Sciences 52, no. 10 (2009): 1371–86; Kathleen W. Jones, “The Thirty-third Victim: Representations of Seung Hui Cho in the Aftermath of the ‘Virginia Tech Massacre’,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 2, no. 1 (2009): 64–82. For example, in Australia in the 1990s, youth machismo regarding driving and heroic aggression was still celebrated in “conservative” memorials, cf. Hartig and Dunn 1998.

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38. Paper presented at the EASA conference in Bristol, 20 September 2006, by Damian Cioce under the title “‘Tragedy Cromagnon’: Metamorphosis and Coexistence of Two Shrines, the Popular and the Official.” 39. The editors of this book, however, have not been able to find substantial references to other vernacular grassroots memorials either in Arab countries or in Africa; an exception was the makeshift memorial for the murdered South African Boer Eugene Terre’Blanche at his farm. If they exist, they remain undocumented and a domain to be investigated. In most of the mentioned cases in these areas, grassroots memorials are related (and tolerated) to disasters that involved foreigners or “Westerners.” It is interesting to note that, as can be observed in Iraq, the usually highly formalized observance ceremonies for fallen US soldiers now are combined with personal memorialization: http://www.naztoday.com/news/ arizona/2009/05/troops-in-iraq-afghanistan-honor-their-fallen. Accessed 15 September, 2009. 40. The title Elephant refers to the story that when blinded people try to describe an object (in this case, an elephant) by touching different parts of it, they all come to different conclusions.

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References Aka, Christine. (2007). Unfallkreuze. Trauerorte am Straßenrand. Münster: Waxmann. Allen, Thomas B. (1995). Offerings at the Wall: Artifacts from the Veterans Memorial Collection. Nashville: Turner Publishing. Ames, Rebeca. (2006). “Managing Emotions. Spontaneous Shrines and the Collections of 9/11.” Master’s thesis, Columbia University, New York. Antze, Paul, and Michael Lambek. (1996). Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York: Routledge. Appleton, Josie. (2004). “Monuments to the Facts: Observations on Remembering 9/11.” New Statesman, 12 January. Ashplant, Timothy G., Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper, eds. (2000). The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration. London: Routledge. Assmann, Aleida. (2006). Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik. München: C. H. Beck. Austin, John L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bagnall, Gaynor. (2003). “Performance and Performativity at Heritage Sites.” Museum and Society 1(2): 87–103. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barna, Gábor. (2000). “Gästebücher an Wallfahrtsorten, in Krankenhäusern und Hotels: neue, schriftlichen Formen und Quellen, ritualisierter Verhältnissen.” In Klára Kuti and Béla Rásky, eds., Konvergenzen und Divergenzen. Gegenwärtige volkskundliche Forschungsansätze in Österreich und Ungarn. Budapest, 29–42. Bauman, Richard. (1986). Story, Performance, and Event: Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bendix, Regina. (1997). In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Benjamin, Walter. (1973). Tesis de filosofía de la historia. Madrid: Taurus.

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Grant, Jason. (2008). “Where Seven Died, a ‘Shining Star.’” New York Times, 3 August. Greenspan, Elizabeth L. (2003). “Spontaneous Memorials, Museums, and Public History: Memorialization of September 11, 2001 at the Pentagon.” Public Historian 25(2): 129–32. Grider, Sylvia. (2000). “The Archaeology of Grief: Texas A&M Bonfire Tragedy Is a Sad Study in Modern Mourning.” Discovering Archaeology 2(3): 68–74. ———. (2001). “Spontaneous Shrines: A Modern Response to Tragedy and Disaster.” New Directions in Folklore 5 (October). http://www.temple.edu/english/isllc/newfolk/ shrines_update.html. Accessed 30 August 2009. ———. (2007a). “Public Grief and the Politics of Memorial: Contesting Memory of ‘The Shooters’ at Columbine High School.” Anthropology Today 23(3): 3–7. ———. (2007b). “Collection and Documentation of Artefacts Associated with Roadside Memorials and Spontaneous Shrines.” In Jennifer Clark, ed., Roadside Memorials. A Multidisciplinary Approach. Armidale, NSW: EMU Press, 41–55. Gustavsson, Anders. (2008). “Rituals Around Sudden Death in Recent Years.” Folklore. Electronic Journal of Folklore 38: 23–44. Hallam, Elizabeth, and Jenny Hockey. (2001). Death, Memory & Material Culture. Oxford: Berg. Halpern, Kay. (2002). “Notes From Ground Zero.” New York Times, 6 June. http://www .NYTimes.com/2002/06/06/readersopinion. Accessed 22 August 2009. Handelman, Dan. (1998). Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events. New York: Berghahn Books. Haney, C. Allen, Christina Leimer, and Juliann Lowery. (1997). “Spontaneous Memorialization: Violent Death and Emerging Mourning Rituals.” Omega. Journal of Death and Dying 35(2): 159–71. Hartig, Kate V., and Kevin M. Dunn. (1998). “Roadside Memorials: Interpreting New Deathscapes in Newcastle, New South Wales.” Australian Geographical Studies 36(1): 5–20. Hass, Kristin Ann. (1998). Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Berkeley: University of California Press. Holst-Warhaft, Gail. (2000). The Cue for Passion: Grief and Its Political Uses. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jipson, Art. (2007). Breakdown of State Laws and Policies on Roadside Memorials. http:// graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/roomfordebate/State_Roadside_Mem_ Laws.pdf. Accessed 31 August 2009. ———. (2009). Roadside Memorials in the Community. A Scientific Study of Roadside Memorials. Dayton: Criminal Justice Studies Program, University of Dayton. http:// www.slideshare.net/ArtJipson. Accessed 27 August 2009. Jorgensen Earp, Cheryl R., and Lori A. Lanzilotti. (1998). “Public Memory and Private Grief: The Construction of Shrines at the Sites of Public Tragedy.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84: 150–70. Kear, Adrian, and Deborah Lynn Steinberg, eds. (1999). Mourning Diana. Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief. London: Routledge. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. (2003). “Kodak Moments, Flashbulb Memories: Reflections on 9/11.” Drama Review 47(1): 11–48. Klaassens, Mirjam, Peter D. Groote, and Paul P. P. Huigen. (2009). “Roadside Memorials from a Geographical Perspective.” Mortality 14(2): 187–201. Klekot, Ewa. (2007). “Mourning John Paul II in the Streets of Warsaw.” Anthropology Today 23(4): 3–6.

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Köstlin, Konrad. (1999). “Roadside Memorials. The Cross in European Culture.” In Anders Gustavsson et al., eds., Folk Religion: Continuity and Change. Papers Given at the Second Symposium of the SIEF Commission on Folk Religion in Portugal September 1996. Lisbon: Instituto de Sociologia e Etnologia das Religioes, 277–85. La Cecla, Franco. (1990). “Sacralità nel guard-rail.” In Sofia Boesch Gajano and Lucetta Scaraffia, eds., Luoghi sacri e spazi della santità. Torino: Rosenberg and Sellier, 105–9. Lattanzi-Licht, Marcia, and Kenneth J. Doka, eds. (2003). Living with Grief, Coping with Public Tragedy. New York: Brunner-Routledge. Lexington. (2009). “Reflections on Virginia Tech. A Senseless Massacre that Teaches Us Nothing.” Economist, 11 April, 45. Linenthal, Edward. (2001). The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory. New York: Oxford University Press. Lowenthal, David. (1998). The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lundby, Knut, ed. (2009). Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences. New York: Peter Lang. Margry, Peter Jan. (2003). “The Murder of Pim Fortuyn and Collective Emotions. Hype, Hysteria and Holiness in the Netherlands?” Etnofoor 16(2): 102–27. ———. (2007). “Performative Memorials: Arenas of Political Resentment in Dutch Society.” In Peter Jan Margry and Herman Roodenburg, eds., Reframing Dutch Culture. Between Otherness and Authenticity. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate: 109–33. ———. (2008). “Politiek Rouwen in het Publieke Domein. Rouwmonumenten en Stille Tochten.” In Eric Venbrux et al., eds., Rituele creativiteit. Actuele veranderingen in de uitvaart- en rouwcultuur in Nederland. Zoetermeer, Netherlands: Meinema, 101–19. ———. 2011. “Civil Religion in Europe. Silent Marches, Pilgrim Treks and Processes of Mediatization.” Ethnologia Europaea, 41–42. Margry, Peter Jan, and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero. (2007). “Memorializing Traumatic Death.” Anthropology Today 23(3): 1–2. Mitchell, Katharyne (2003). “Monuments, Memorials, and the Politics of Memory.” Urban Geography 24: 442–59. Nora, Pierre. (1989). “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26: 7–24. Ortiz, Carmen. (2011). “Memoriales del atentado del 11 de marzo en Madrid.” In Cristina Sánchez-Carretero, ed., El Archivo del Duelo. Análisis de la respuesta ciudadana ante los atentados del 11 de marzo en Madrid. Madrid: CSIC. Ortiz, Carmen, and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero. (2008). “Archivos etnográficos, memoria y nuevos patrimonios: el caso del Archivo del Duelo.” In Xerardo Pereiro, Santiago Prado, and Hiroko Takenaka, eds., Patrimonios culturales: educación e interpretación. Cruzando límites y produciendo alternativas. San Sebastián, Spain: Ankulegui, 155–170. Osch, Bernhard. (1981). Sühne und Gedenken; Steinkreuze in Baden-Wurttemberg. Stuttgart: K. Theiss Verlag, xii–xvii. Owens, Maida. (2006). “Louisiana Roadside Memorials: Negotiating an Emergent Tradition.” In In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 119–45. Pas, Niek (2003). Imaazje! De verbeelding van Provo (1965–1967) / Provo: The Image Game (1965–1967). Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek. Post, Paul. (2008). “The Pilgrimage to the ‘Cancer Forest’ on the ‘Trees for Life Day’.” In Peter Jan Margry, ed., Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World: New Itineraries into the Sacred. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 281–97.

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Post, Paul, Ronald L. Grimes, Albertina Nugteren, P. Pettersson, and Hessel Zondag. (2003). Disaster Ritual: Explorations of an Emerging Ritual Repertoire. Leuven, Belgium: Peeters. Punt, Michael. (2002). “More Sign than Star: Diana, Death, and the Internet.” In Angela Ndalianis and Charlotte Henry, eds., Stars in Our Eyes: The Star Phenomenon in the Contemporary Era. Westport, CT: Praeger, 85–102. Rajkovic, Zorica. (1988). “Roadside Memorial Signs for Traffic Accident Victims.” Narodna Umjetnost 2: 167–78. Rateike, Jutta. (2000). “The American Quilt: Aesthetic Practice and Cultural Criticism.” PhD dissertation. University of Düsseldorf. Reid, Jon K., and Cynthia L. Reid. (2001). “A Cross Marks the Spot: A Study of Roadside Death Memorials in Texas and Oklahoma.” Death Studies 25: 341–56. Sánchez-Carretero, Cristina. (2006). “Trains of Workers, Trains of Death: Some Reflections after the March 11th Attacks in Madrid.” In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 333–47. ———, ed. (2011). El Archivo del Duelo. Análisis de la respuesta ciudadana ante los atentados del 11 de marzo en Madrid. Madrid: CSIC. Sánchez-Carretero, Cristina, and Carmen Ortiz. (2008). Rethinking Ethnology in the Spanish Context. Ethnologia Europaea 38(1): 23–28. Santino, Jack (1992). “Not an Important Failure.” Spontaneous Shrines and Rites of Death and Politics in Northern Ireland. In M. McCaughan (ed.). Displayed in Mortal Light. Antrim: Arts Council, [no pagination]. ———. (2001). Signs of War and Peace: Social Conflict and the Use of Public Symbols in Northern Ireland. New York: Palgrave. ———. (2004). “Performance Commemoratives, the Personal, and the Public: Spontaneous Shrines, Emergent Ritual, and the Field of Folklore.” Journal of American Folklore 117: 363–72. ———, ed. (2006a). Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. (2006b). “Performative Commemoratives: Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death.” In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 5–15. ———. (2009). “The Ritualesque: Festival, Politics, and Popular Culture.” Western Folklore 68(1): 9–26. Scharfe, Martin (1989). “Totengedenken. Zur Historizität von Brauch-traditionen. Das Beispiel Olof Palme 1986.” Ethnologia Scandinavica 19: 142–53. Schechner, Richard. (2002). Performance Studies. An Introduction. London: Routledge. Seremetakis, Nadia C., ed. (1994). The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Simpson, David. (2006). 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sofarelli, Michael. (2006). Letters on the Wall: Offerings and Remembrances from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books. Stengs, Irene. (2003). “Ephemeral Memorials against ‘Senseless Violence’: Materialisations of Public Outcry.” Etnofoor 16(2): 26–40. ———. (2007). “Commemorating Victims of ‘Senseless Violence’: Negotiating Ethnic Inclusion and Exclusion.” In Peter Jan Margry and Herman Roodenburg, eds., Reframing Dutch Culture. Between Otherness and Authenticity. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 159–79. Stier, Oren Baruch, and J. Shawn Landres. (2006). Religion, Violence, Memory, and Place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Strenski, Ivan. (2003). Material Culture and the Varieties of Religious Imagination. Riverside: University of California. http://www.shrines.ucr.edu. Sturken, Marita. (1997). Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. (2004). “The Aesthetics of Absence: Rebuilding Ground Zero.” American Ethnologist 31(3): 311–25. Taylor, Diana. (2003). The Archive and the Repertoire. Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Truc, Gérôme. (2006). Le cosmopolitisme sous le coup de l’emotion: une lecture sociologique des messages de solidarité en reaction aux attentats du mars 2004 à Madrid. Hermès 46: 189–99. Tunbridge, John E., and Gregory J. Ashworth. (1996). Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict. Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons. Turner, Kay. (2008). “September 11 Memorials. Tracing the Traces of their History.” New York: Brooklyn Arts Council. http://www.brooklynartscouncil.org/files/downloads /BAC_Sept__11_Essay_Dr__Kay_Turner_2008–1.pdf. Accessed 27 August 2009. Waldman, Amy. (2001). “After the Attacks: The Memorials. Grief Is Lessened by Sharing and Solace from Strangers.” New York Times, 14 September. Walter, Tony. (1996) “A New Model of Grief: Bereavement and Biography.” Mortality 1(1): 7–25. ———, ed. (1999). The Mourning for Diana. Oxford: Berg. ———. (2008). “The New Public Mourning.” In Margaret S. Stroebe, Robert O. Hansson, Henk Schut, and Wolfgang Stroebe, eds., Handbook of Bereavement Research and Practice: 21st Century Perspectives. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 241–62. Weisser, Jennifer A. (2004). Micro Sacred Sites: The Spatial Pattern of Roadside Memorials in Warren County, Ohio. Master’s thesis, University of Cincinnati. http://www .ohiolink.edu/etd/view.cgi?acc_num=ucin1085506011. Accessed 12 September 2009. White, Geoffrey. (2000) “Emotional Remembering: The Pragmatics of National Memory.” Ethos 27(4): 505–29. Widmer, Ted. (2009). “New York’s Lincoln Memorial.” New York Times, 17 April. http:// www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/opinion/17widmer.html. Accessed 27 August 2009. Wojcik, Daniel. (2007). “Pre’s Rock: Pilgrimage, Ritual, and Runners’ Traditions at the Roadside Shrine to Steve Prefontaine.” In Peter Jan Margry, ed., Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World: New Itineraries into the Sacred. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 201–37. Young, James E. (1993). The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. (2000). At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Part I

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Negotiating Societal Violence

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Chapter 1

“Difficult Remembrance” Memorializing Mafia Victims in Palermo

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Deborah Puccio-Den

This article, which reflects on the forms of memorialization of “Mafia victims,” focuses on one particular site: the Albero Falcone (Falcone Tree). At 5:58 PM on 23 May 1992, a section of the expressway between Palermo and Puntaraisi airport, near the hamlet of Capaci, blew up, killing judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife, judge Francesca Morvillo, and three members of their police escort. The section that blew up had been packed with explosives by a Mafia commando. On the day of the attack—which came to be called the “Capaci massacre”—Palermitans spontaneously assembled at the foot of the tree (a huge ficus magnolia) growing in the square in front of the assassinated judges’ apartment block. Tens of thousands of Italians also gathered in this Sicilian town. While the state funeral was proceeding, offerings were spontaneously left at the foot of the tree, which is on Via Notarbartolo, in the heart of one of the smartest and safest neighborhoods of Palermo. Starting on the day of the attack, this tree, which was immediately baptized the “Falcone Tree,” was transformed into a civil shrine.1 The area around the tree gradually filled with flowers, gifts, photos, and especially writing. Letters and drawings—scribbled or sketched on the spot using materials that were at hand (pencils, felt tips, notepad pages, Post-its)— are still wedged in crannies right to the top of the trunk. How can we explain the persistence of the practices surrounding it, the acts of offering initially inspired by the emotion of the Capaci massacre? This paper examines the future of the Albero Falcone now that the assassinated judge’s remembrance has taken on more institutionalized forms, in particular through the creation of the Fondazione Giovanni e Francesca Falcone (Giovanni and Francesca Falcone Foundation).2

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Through this particular case, this paper reflects more broadly on the ways in which anti-Mafia remembrance is inscribed in the topography of Palermo. Makeshift memorials have spontaneously sprung up at the scenes of murders carried out by Mafia members. Decorated with flowers by the victims’ families, they are visited regularly by Palermitans who go on macabre tours during which the recent history of the city is told, with its succession of attacks and multitude of “heroic” characters who have died in the line of duty. Here, I explore the concept of “inscription,” as defined by Paul Ricoeur (2000: 183) as the placing of a message, written or graphic, onto a physical medium. In doing so, I draw on the meaning that Ricoeur gave to this concept (Ricoeur 2000: 527), which evokes Pierre Nora’s concept lieu de mémoire,3 stressing the relationship between writing and space. The aim of this article is to explore “inscription” in the broad sense of the word, as a commemorative practice in the Palermitan space, accenting the link between remembrance and the place to which this remembrance is attached. These family-scale commemorative initiatives are complemented by the commemorative policy implemented by local authorities. The political aspect of “spontaneous shrines” has already been pointed out (Santino 2004: 369). What is the relationship between these “spontaneous” forms of commemoration and the commemorative program instituted by the state? On a broader note, what is the public writing policy on Mafia victims? There are essentially two aspects to this policy: one is educational—involving pedagogical activities in primary and secondary schools—while the other is based on town planning, involving naming streets after Mafia victims and, for the most important of these victims, having monuments erected in their names. I examine these two aspects through, on the one hand, the pedagogical initiatives inspired by the figure of Judge Falcone and, on the other hand, the street-naming procedures in Palermo and the controversies it has provoked. From a methodological point of view, this article is based on an autoethnography about my own experience as a citizen of Palermo who was involved in the moral tensions that unsettled Italy in the 1990s, when, for the first time since 1946, the ethical and political foundations of the First Republic were severely shaken. At the time of the Capaci massacre, I was starting to observe the ways in which the anti-Mafia movement was mobilizing. This fieldwork4 partly fueled this essay on the various commemorative practices initiated in the city of Palermo. Some sources were reinvested with new meaning. Photographs taken by two anti-Mafia activists who are now well-known photographers, Letizia Battaglia and Franco Zecchin, were able to capture the interactions between visitors to the Falcone Tree and the behavior of these visitors toward the tree.5

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This study also draws on other materials. I conducted many interviews with members of anti-Mafia associations and foundations in Sicily. In addition to these oral sources, I used publications by people involved in various ways in the fight against the Mafia. The aim of these ostensibly historically accurate and objective publications—which were written by journalists with the help of citizens who view themselves as “witnesses” and published by the most prestigious publishing houses and distributed in their thousands—is to illuminate the dark, contentious, and controversial side of anti-Mafia remembrance, which forms the heart of the issue of this essay. Due to their widespread circulation in anti-Mafia circles, any article on the commemorative practices of this movement that failed to make reference to these texts would be incomplete. Activists’ writings and drawings placed at or sent to the Falcone Tree since 1992 have also been examined as frameworks for practices and action.6 In this chapter, I show how these writings have contributed to establishing the anti-Mafia movement as a group, basing my premise on theories of the performative value of writing (Fraenkel 1992, 2002, 2007). From a practical perspective, this involves looking not only at what the writings say, but also at what they “do” (Austin 1970). By examining the question of the performativity of writing, I explore the performativity of anti-Mafia remembrance. This part of my work is also based on the consultation of archived graphic materials found at the Falcone Foundation: letters, drawings, and poems that continue to shape the remembrance of the assassinated judge. While focusing on the content conveyed through the writings, drawings, and other “graphic objects”7 attached to the Falcone Tree, this study also concentrates on the physical writing media (Petrucci 1980, 1995). I question whether the use of paper rather than marble enables the emotional system—characterizing the time when the “spontaneous shrines” (Haney, Leimer, and Lowery 1997; Santino 2006; Margry and SánchezCarretero 2007) were created—to be distinguished from the remembrance system, whose instruments are monuments or books. Can the unsettled and shifting forms of Capaci massacre commemoration stabilize, and possibly become fixed, through the institutionalizing processes initiated by the Falcone Foundation? This essay therefore analyzes the tension between institutionalized forms and noninstitutionalized forms of remembrance; this remembrance is viewed as a process and is studied over the long period of time that has elapsed since the massacre. The starting point of this essay is the “event” (evento in Italian) that took place on 23 May 1992. I first question the appropriateness of this indigenous qualification that induced a change in the way Palermitans grasped the Mafia and the tools to fight against it. I then explore the

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heuristic dimension of this qualification, discovering its semantic weight in the social sciences (Bensa and Fassin 2002). The analytical notion of “event” displaces our attention toward the act of “witnessing.” This I study in the context of the progressive implementation of the anti-Mafia movement. I analyze the institutionalization of this movement through the creation of the Falcone Foundation and its role in the construction and management of the remembrance of the assassinated judge. Starting from the special characteristics of this remembrance—namely, the difficulty in fixing durable supports and the controversies still aroused today—I expand on our reflection concerning the contradictions of the anti-Mafia remembrance, considering its problematic relationship with power and the state. In the framework of the failings of the official remembrance, the forms of grassroots memorialization become even more important.

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23 May 1992: The Event In the words of the secretary of the Falcone Foundation: “What happened on 23 May 1992 is an incredible event because Palermitans behaved uncharacteristically, doing things they would never have done before. For the first time, our entire city, the whole of Palermo, expressed its indignation and a need for justice and freedom from Mafia violence.” Was it the spectacular nature of the violence deployed in the Capaci massacre that led to reactions similar to those engendered by the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York (Fraenkel 2002; Zeitlin 2006), and those on 11 March 2004 in Madrid (Sánchez-Carretero 2006): gatherings, the collective building of makeshift shrines, and the frenetic use of writing as the final means of communication between the living and the dead and a way of forging a bond between those who consider themselves survivors? The spontaneous nature of the Falcone Tree gathering has been highlighted by various participants: “I was barely twenty at the time. I remember I was going somewhere on my moped. When I heard that Falcone was dead, I turned around and drove to his home, just like that, inexplicably.” The spontaneity of this tribute to the assassinated judge contrasts with the official acts (state funeral, exhibition of the five coffins in a chapel of rest) instituted by the government, which was widely suspected of Mafia collusion.8 Writing and placing messages under the Falcone Tree seemed to be the first resort for outraged, frightened, and lost Palermitans: “I was overcome, profoundly overcome, by the Falcone massacre. I must protect my country, and the only weapon I have is to write to you,” wrote

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Memorializing Mafia Victims in Palermo

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Patrizia.9 The Albero Falcone became a rallying point for anti-Mafia supporters and a catalyst for the emotions that citizens were experiencing: “It was a day of untold violence. The violence in the air, and the rage in people, were palpable,” recalled the secretary of the Falcone Foundation. The instruments of protest flags and posters made by activists were left at the “Tree,” the starting point for human chains and the end point for antiMafia demonstrations. Through its link with protest actions, writing came out of the private sphere and assumed a critical register. Is writing an instrument that enables a shift from the intense and visceral emotional reaction provoked by the “moral shock”10 of the attack, to forms of protest and expressions of grievance that might stir Palermitans to political action? The political period known as the “Palermo Spring”—which was spearheaded by mayor Leoluca Orlando and saw the communists join the municipal government—ended in the late 1980s, but the will to renew the political system continued to thrive: “You can crush a flower but you can’t prevent Spring” (Amurri 1992: 46), wrote Simone on a bit of paper stuck with tape to the trunk of the magnolia tree. The Falcone Tree was a place where the Palermo Spring rhetoric could take permanent root, becoming the focal point of its perpetuation. Through the Falcone Tree, the Palermo Spring blossomed once more, this ephemeral season became less transient, and the anti-Mafia protest took root in the heart of the city. The setting up of committees, associations, and foundations; the creation of new networks;11 the exploration of new forms of protest (such as hanging a white sheet from the window, a practice adopted by housewives) were the first fruits of this new spring, and Leoluca Orlando’s creation of the political party La Rete on 21 April of the following year was the culminating point of this period. This “cross-disciplinary” party aimed to draw members of all political persuasions, united by a common cause to fight for justice. This “net” (translation of the Italian word rete) endlessly extends the full branches of what can be called the anti-Mafia Tree. In many representations of the Albero Falcone, the written pieces of paper blend in with the ficus magnolia leaves. The branches link the anti-Mafia supporters and their founder, the judge, who is embodied in the tree trunk in certain pictures. These little messages, individually or collectively signed, formed the initial framework of this movement,12 whose founding memory is anchored in the collective emotion experienced around the Falcone Tree. One of the most striking aspects of the letters stuck to the Falcone Tree is the origin of their authors. The Capaci massacre elicited intense emotion throughout the country: the Mafia is going to become a national issue. Likewise, many Italians who, until then, had felt that the anti-Mafia fight was of little or no concern to them, traveled to Palermo to pay their

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Deborah Puccio-Den

Illustration 1.1. The Falcone Tree, memorial for Judge Giovanni Falcone in the Via Notarbartolo in Palermo, 2006. Photo: Deborah Puccio-Den.

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final tributes to the five victims. Some of them are among the writers at the Falcone Tree: We want you to know that, now more than ever, the will and strength to continue the fight bravely, as you did, lives on in us, the youth from all over Italy. This is not only a voice that comes from the Sicilian people, it is something greater that also concerns us, the youth from the North.—The “Youth of Milan” (Amurri 1992: 142) I came from Treviso to Palermo today to be close to Sicily and the Sicilians, people I know to have wonderful hearts, determination, talent and feelings. … Long live Sicily. Long live Italy!—Mario (Amurri 1992: 105) Thank you, judges FALCONE and / BORSELLINO for having / taught us that simple and honest / men can defeat the / Mafia and for having encouraged us to / carry out a lifetime pilgrimage of hope and ACTION.—Vincenza, who came to Palermo from the town of Cosenza, in Calabria, to pin her small piece of paper to the Falcone Tree (Amurri 1992: 117)

Inspired by the figure of this judge who died for the state, many Italians acquired a national conscience, a sense of belonging to a nation under attack, and wished to defend their country against members of the Mafia, who had become attackers or foreigners. A change occurred in the way that Mafia members were perceived: They were suddenly no longer viewed as people to be protected by silence—as one is required to do for close relatives and friends with regard

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Memorializing Mafia Victims in Palermo

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to a (still) foreign state. On the contrary, in a shift to side with the state, members of the Mafia were now to be denounced as enemies. In Sicily, the very act of accusing the Mafia, in black and white, on paper tacked up in public space, is an event, an act that breaks with the past. Falcone’s death tested the Sicilians’ capacity to modify atavistic behavior: “I pray to the Palermitans that they will do you justice, by climbing the wall of omerta [code of silence] that they have built all these years,” wrote Corrado from Milan. “May the bombs, massacres, and violence not crush people but rather destroy the silence that has been engulfing us for too long,” wrote Tiziana, a Sicilian. During these dramatic days, many other letters were written by Palermitans and sent to their court in order to report any detail that might help the investigators identify those responsible for the massacre. According to the magistrates, this was the first time that such a phenomenon had occurred. After the Capaci massacre, it was not so much the behavior of the various protagonists that changed, as their cognitive frameworks. The Capaci massacre, in which three bodyguards also died, showed that the Mafia association called Cosa Nostra, by also attacking the “innocent,” was a danger to public order, democracy, and the very idea of the state. To understand the scope of this problem, one must remember that Italy is a relatively young nation,13 one that was discredited by fascist nationalism and was unable to reward its resistance heroes, who were sidelined in the post–World War II government as a result of the Cold War equilibrium in which the Christian Democrats played a pivotal role. It was therefore a nation without heroes, until redeemed by the “sacrifice” of government representatives, starting with the murder of General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa (September 1982) and culminating ten years later with the attacks on Falcone and Borsellino.14 These sacrifices affirmed the intrinsic value of the state, and some of these victims were turned into heroes or martyrs (Puccio-Den 2008b). From its beginnings as a space of transient writing, the Falcone Tree gradually became the place for inscribing the memory of a national event. For the first time in Italy’s recent history, individual experiences are seen to merge in the collective experience of a national drama: “Wherever you go in Italy, there is not a single person who doesn’t remember what they were doing at 5:58 on 23 May. Everybody remembers extremely accurately and, every day, I meet people who start telling me what they were doing at the very moment the judge was assassinated.” The tree has become a place where memories are crystallized in space, because many of the people who were in Palermo on 23 May 1992 decided to set in writing the memory of that day and the thoughts and feelings it inspired. Writing, then, leads to an initial shift from an emotional system to a bearing-witness system.

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I used the term event as an indigenous category mobilized by the parties involved. Here, I explore another sense of this word: as a heuristic tool reconsidered by the social sciences and, in particular, by the French historians and epistemologists who are interested in remembrance issues. In the latter sense, an event is, specifically, “That about which somebody bears witness” (Ricoeur 2000: 229). “In order for there to be an event,” writes Pierre Nora, “it needs to be known” (Ricoeur 2000: 212). When one examines the messages placed under the Falcone Tree, one is surprised by the monotony of this writing.15 The repetitiveness of the content, in contrast, highlights the importance given to the act of writing itself, of being on the scene and leaving proof of one’s passing by. Those who gathered around the tree describe themselves as “witnesses”: “They were people who freely decided to … who felt the need to bear witness,” explained the secretary of the Falcone Foundation. Aside from their differences, which are often very slight, the letters placed under the tree all contain the witness’s implied statement: “I was here” (Dulong 1998). Here, writing serves to bear witness, lending it a real, visible, and tangible aspect. Unlike the memory of the event, which is recounted by a speaker to an attendant audience, the writing attached to the Falcone Tree speaks, “off-line,” to anyone who can read, communicating this basic message to them: “I came here to bear witness to the event of Giovanni Falcone’s death.” It is their presence on the scene, proven in writing, that institutes the Capaci massacre as an event. The journeys to Palermo that many anti-Mafia activists made in the weeks and months following the attack kept alive the memory of the judge and the other victims. Written testimony was therefore proof of one’s commitment to the anti-Mafia cause: Falcone: / Today, nearly one month since the / Capaci massacre, I find myself in / Palermo, you know, I felt the need to write these few lines / and to pin them to the tree below / your home, to testify that / your memory, and that of your wife / and bodyguards, is still alive in me.—Giuseppe (Amurri 1992: 220).

We have therefore shifted from an emotional system to a remembrance system, which was very quickly taken over by the Falcone Foundation.

Institutionalizing Remembrance: The Falcone Foundation The concept of remembrance contains two ideas: the duty to learn lessons from the past, and the duty to commemorate victims (Gensburger and Lavabre 2005). The Falcone Foundation16 takes care of these two tasks, the first through educational programs extending from Palermo to

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the whole of Italy, and the second through commemorative actions carried out on the anniversary of the judge’s death. These two aspects are linked, the commemorative ceremony being the culminating point of the course taken by students in those schools that participate in the foundation’s “legality”17 projects. Through these commemorative practices, the memory of this traumatic event is reprocessed collectively. Between two and five thousand students come to Palermo every 23 May. Their socialization begins in the “legality train.” This vehicle, which is chartered especially for the occasion, travels throughout the country, filling up with demonstrators as it moves down the boot of Italy. When it gets to Palermo, the youths are supervised by the foundation’s organizing body. The mobile commemorative celebration travels to key sites in the life and death of Judge Falcone: the bunker room and the Falcone Tree. It is in this bunker, which was built near the Ucciardone prison to house the “Maxiprocesso” investigated by Giovanni Falcone,18 that the work done by the students over the academic year is presented in turns. A committee is charged with awarding a prize to the best works. The judge’s story is then relived, brought up to date, and experienced through readings, songs, films, videos, plays, and musical performances. Each school therefore contributes to rewriting a national story whose celebration turns it into legend.19 Since 1992, there has been a shift from the immediacy of the event to the eternal present of myth. While the students fill the bunker, the works of art (posters, paintings, etc.) they have created and brought from their schools are put up outside. A huge white sheet, prepared by the foundation, is hung on the inside wall of the bunker: “It is a time for them to write, a spontaneous time that we have created.” The contradiction aptly shows the tension between allowing freedom of expression and overseeing remembrance. This sheet, which is as white as a piece of paper, bears an inscription in black: “Dear Giovanni … ,” an encouragement to “express one’s own thoughts about the event, remembrance, Judge Falcone’s values, etc.,” the secretary of the foundation continued. Signing one’s message is essential,20 even though the multitude of individual signatures end up merging together. At the end of the commemorative day, the white sheet is barely visible behind the tangle of words left there by the participants. The sheet will be kept by the foundation to perpetuate the image of this transient group. Once the students have shown their works to the jury, one after the other, each striving to give his or her personal best, they merge into a single procession in which no distinction is made between ages: “We identify with each other as a group because, on 23 May, we speak a common language, irrespective of our age differences.” This is part of the magic of this day: speech and writing mingles. The youths parade

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through the streets of Palermo, carrying the banners and placards they have made and signed collectively in the names of their schools. These banners and placards are placed at the end point of their journey, the Falcone Tree, which is approximately two kilometers from the bunker room. What we see on 23 May is not so much the event that is supposed to be commemorated, as the group commemorating it beneath the shade of the ficus magnolia. The requiem mass that completes the commemorative event is held in a church that is chosen according to the number of participants. It is preceded by a “secular communion” of great emotional intensity: “This is the actual commemorative moment. For us, the commemoration occurs at this point, under the Albero Falcone.” The Falcone Tree takes the place of the judge’s grave in the cemetery of Palermo, which is visited very little except by the family and a few curious people who are passing through, revealing the desire to remove the assassinated judge from ordinary mourning procedures. Besides remembering their dead, the relatives of Giovanni and Francesca Falcone can complete the mourning process. The foundations and “memorial houses”21 therefore help to organize collectively constructed remembrance systems and articulate them with forms of mourning developed within the family. But this mourning celebration transcends the boundaries of the family and the Falcone Foundation: “The force of Judge Falcone is impossible to contain. We do our work but it is his memory, being so powerful, that draws people.” This magnetic, captivating force holds the participants truly fascinated for a moment. At the very minute the attack occurred: Silence resounds after the State Police trumpet call, then there is absolute silence. Not a sound is to be heard for a long, long time. The silence goes on and on; it is one of the most incredible silences I have ever heard in my life. It’s as if, suddenly, everyone had disappeared.

The Falcone Tree, standing upright like a stele and decorated with photos of the bodyguards and the two smiling judges,22 displays the standard expressions of a memorial to the dead: “In eternal memory of all those who have died in the struggle against the Mafia” (Amurri 1992: 28). If this silence is a secular form of prayer resembling the funeral rites and commemorative ceremonies for fallen World War I soldiers (Prost 1984: 209), the Albero Falcone, this spontaneous shrine in memory of Mafia victims, takes the place of a war memorial. The secretary distinguishes between the functions of the Falcone Tree and those of the Falcone Foundation, presenting the latter as a driving force for “real change, which has nothing or little to do with emotionalism.” It would therefore be wrong to accept this distinction between the

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emotional system and the remembrance system. Emotion is what revives this memorial site; without it, it would be as static and lifeless as the memorial built by the state in memory of the Capaci massacre victims.

Remembrance in Stone, Remembrance on Paper The secretary of the Falcone Foundation described the official monument erected to the memory of the assassinated judge:

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On the expressway where the attack occurred lies the only spot that truly recalls the judge’s death. Stone pillars are engraved with the victims’ names and, on the hill, on the exact spot where the Mafia members pressed the remote control, a white canvas is painted with the following words in red: “No Mafia.” All this is part of the monument project initiated by the government.

This state monument, which is solemnly decorated with wreaths every 23 May, is disregarded by the public, neglected by anti-Mafia activists, and ignored by tourists: “Every now and then,” the secretary added, “somebody places a flower there; but it is not the Falcone Tree!” People rarely stop on this section of the expressway linking the airport to the city, despite the fact that the road has been widened to allow for this. The local authorities have also designated other spots to commemorate Giovanni Falcone and Francesca Morvillo, all in vain. A garden in the heart of Palermo is dedicated to them, but the commemorative plaque, which is not maintained, is weather-beaten and some of its iron letters have become dislodged, making the judges’ names illegible. Thus, the tree is the real monument in memory of the Capaci massacre victims, even if reduced to its basic function as a writing medium.23 Palermitans and visitors from elsewhere, sometimes from other countries and the Americas, continue to keep this spot “alive,” through their offerings, practices, and above all their writing, which continues to accumulate on the tree trunk. However, the fact that this anarchical monument, where everyone comes to express their thoughts and sign them with their hands, has not been replaced by a memorial with an officially approved sentence engraved in black and white, perhaps also indicates the difficulty in pinning down the memory of Giovanni Falcone, this undisputed “hero of our times” who was so disputed in his lifetime. Memorializing the death and, through it, the life of Judge Falcone is also achieved through authors’ writings that aim to communicate the same message the foundation strives to spread throughout Italy, beyond the physical and spatial boundaries of the Falcone Tree. The foundation secretary explains:

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Illustration 1.2. Commemorative sheet exposed by the Falcone Foundation in order to enable ”communication” with Giovanni Falcone; it is completely covered with the writings of participants of the annual memorial day. Photo: Deborah Puccio-Den.

We tell young people that Falcone’s life was not easy. Through us, they therefore no longer see Giovanni Falcone as a victorious hero, in the traditional sense of the word. Giovanni Falcone did not win his battle. Giovanni Falcone lost, but he never gave up fighting. This is what we try to impress upon young people’s minds: Giovanni Falcone’s commitment as well as the adversities he encountered along the way.

Many books have been written about Judge Falcone, as they have about other Mafia victims.24 These posthumous biographies are now a literary genre in their own right, with their own particular standards and codes. This literature is controversial and militant, opposing the hero worshiping of anti-Mafia protagonists after their deaths, and highlighting the obstacles they encountered while they were alive, political barriers that reveal the highly compromising relationship between part of the Italian political leadership and the Cosa Nostra criminal organization. Francesco La Licata, author of Giovanni Falcone’s official biography (La Licata 2002), to which the family gave their official backing by agreeing to play the role of “witnesses,” decries the hostility of some of the judge’s colleagues and superiors. The Storia di Giovanni Falcone

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tells how the anti-Mafia judge’s enemies increased in number as his fame spread, winning over the public and transcending borders. La Licata recounts how Falcone’s comrades in arms handed him over to the Mafia, holding him wholly responsible for the government’s repressive action. The “traitors” are therefore the “enemies on the inside” installed in the courthouse known as the “Poison Palace” in Palermo. The same line of argument is found in Alexander Stille’s book, Nella terra degli Infedeli (1995).25 Referring to the famous novel Dalle parti degli Infedeli by the Sicilian writer and intellectual Leonardo Sciascia (1993),26 Stille suggests that the “infidels” Falcone and Borsellino were fighting were not only the members of Cosa Nostra, but also the people the two judges viewed as their natural allies, that is, the institutional representatives who betrayed them.27 In these books, the veneer of the official memory starts to wear thin, revealing the dark side of the story.28 Under the shade of the magnolia, those participating in the 23 May ceremony hear the orthodox version of the life and death of Falcone, transformed into a national hero, accompanied by the authorities who now form part of the commemorative process. This reveals the modifications that this originally dissenting performance had to undergo, shifting from an angry, raw protest register to a smooth, complacent celebratory register. Does this mean this spot has now lost the power specific to “places of remembrance” (lieux de mémoire) to generate “a new story” (Ricoeur 2000: 528), delegating its protest function to other writing and not that attached to the “Tree” on the anniversary of Falcone’s death? Unlike other anti-Mafia organizations, the Falcone Foundation is not an organ for criticizing the state. Although it does consider that the state partly “betrayed” Falcone, it does not use the commemoration as an opportunity to spark controversy. As one of the rare anti-Mafia organizations to be recognized and funded by the regional government (even though it is well known that this government is administered by politicians who are involved with the Mafia), it regularly invites institutional representatives to the commemorative ceremony. To understand the complex relationship that the Falcone Foundation maintains with institutions, we should perhaps recall Giovanni Falcone’s answer when asked: “Are you prepared to sacrifice yourself for this state?” His reply was: “Do you know any others?” However, now that the judge has been assassinated, to what extent can the memorial policies instituted by the city of Palermo meet the need to recall the wounds inflicted by the Mafia and elements of the government and society, through complicity or indifference, on other elements of the same government and society?

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Politics of Remembrance, Poetics of Remembrance29 We have examined the various ways in which the public constructs memory. The “duty of remembering” concept is also political. Although it can be defined as a wish to remember victims, this memory is also maintained through officially assigned place names, in line with administrative procedures that depend on municipalities’ choices with regard to their history, or what they regard as their history. Inscribing the memory of the Capaci massacre, with its surnames and forenames, in the city of Palermo should ensure this traumatic event is not forgotten. However:

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Far from Palermo, you will find as many Falcone streets as you like. In Palermo, they fight over where a Falcone street should be placed. Every now and then, they talk about it and then, for reasons unknown, the problem is not resolved. They talk about it, but nothing gets done. On the other hand, if you look at city maps in Italy, you’ll find a Falcone street in practically all Italian cities and villages, in the most unlikely places. … Because he is without a doubt a national figure!—secretary of the Falcone Foundation

National, yes, but not local, according to the secretary of the Falcone Foundation. Administrators retort that their initiatives are hindered by practicalities: The lack of availability for new place names in the city center means that such honors for more recent historical figures—for example, those who have distinguished themselves in the anti-Mafia struggle—are relegated to new areas in the suburbs. Proposals to name secondary roads after figures that their families consider crucial to Italy’s history are met with disappointment. The refusal by the Falcone family to have a “minor” road named after the famous judge is a case in point: “On the one hand, you have the city and its inhabitants, who would like an appropriate place; on the other, we have the practical problem of finding a place that meets these needs,” said architect Salamone30 in an attempt to justify himself. In the light of this contradiction: “The Falcone Tree is an informal place of remembrance that the city has appropriated … and which has already been integrated into customs and the collective imagination.” It is better for these dissatisfied relatives to see their dead honored in this memorial that sprung up spontaneously in the middle of Palermo, than have their hero reduced to the rank of a minor figure. While most public spaces belong to the state, which lays down the rules for displaying written communications, selecting the type of graphic objects and how they are used by their target audience (Petrucci 1980), the users of these spaces nonetheless appropriate them in many ways. They leave their mark on them and manipulate their meaning, never allowing themselves to be reduced to mere spectators or passive readers. The

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authorities’ tolerance of these “spontaneous shrines” is also due to their discomfort with this deadlock. Salamone continued:

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Our administration has allowed citizens the possibility to express themselves through these physical signs within the territory. … On the spot where Boris Giuliano, the head of the Brigata Mobile, was assassinated, there is an official plaque; however, on the spot where Judge Terranova was killed, there is a little shrine. This was not put up by the administration, but by his family. It is a place where you can put a plant, leave some flowers. There’s a plaque. … it’s a little shrine, you can call it that. … And there are many others spread throughout the city: Where the administration has not met citizens’ needs, where it has failed or been remiss, this void has been filled by family, friends, and relatives.

Another aspect of the “difficult remembrance”31 of anti-Mafia activists is revealed: the failings of the city administrators and their negligence with regard to Mafia victims. Can we expect more of local authorities that are partly in league with Cosa Nostra? Other examples that cannot be explored in detail here illustrate this contradiction, such as the monument erected in honor of Padre Puglisi, the priest who was assassinated in the working-class area of Brancaccio on 15 September 1993. On this strange monument (it is shaped like an enormous, transparent leaf ), each participant at the inauguration wrote a sentence, which was then immortalized by being sealed beneath a layer of plastic. After this writing performance in which authorities with suspected Mafia links also participated,32 this memorial site was abandoned and then “profaned.” The plaque in honor of Giuseppe Impastato is also a case in point. The difficulties encountered by the family and comrades of this far-left activist, who was assassinated on 9 May 1978, in having a main street named after him, followed by vandalism of the plaque erected on the seafront in the town of Cinisi, show that these commemorative undertakings are committed to paper rather than stone, because their controversial nature prevents them from being inscribed on more lasting media. The difficulty in assigning the names of Mafia victims to enduring media reveals the contentious nature of these commemorative undertakings. The Falcone Tree has never directly been subjected to violence, “profanation,” or Mafia acts of aggression. During the months following the attack, this site, a possible target for Mafia members, was under twenty-four-hour armed military surveillance. But the Mafia did not attack remembrance, and it underestimated the force of public writing, for this writing is performative nonetheless. When questioning the reasons that inspire people to write about, on, or to the dead, Armando Petrucci (1995), historian and epigraphist, observed that funerary writing is not intended so much for the deceased as for the living. Commemorative acts

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create a far stronger link between the living than they do between the living and the dead. Is the writing left on sites erected in memory of Mafia victims not indicative of the disparate nature of the anti-Mafia movement, clearly shown by the diversity of these messages? This writing does not emanate from the state but from separate individuals, who all sign their messages. In the absence of a mutually agreed truth, each person signs his or her independent statement. However, if the idea or ideal of mutually agreed commemoration contradicts the very nature of remembrance as an individual action,33 how can we postulate a way of remembering that is consonant with democracy when the events are shrouded in a “civil war”? 34

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Conclusion The permanence of the emotional system and the difficult access to remembrance indicate the reversibility of all commemorative undertakings that are related to the anti-Mafia struggle. Controversial literature that talks about how institutional representatives hindered those who are now viewed as heroes reveals that the “true story” of the anti-Mafia movement is, perhaps, impossible to write given the diversity of conflicting memories. The question remains open, like a gaping hole that cannot be filled by the calm and reassuring writing of a bygone past. Given the impossibility of this story, all the possibilities of remembrance are deployed, including these transient forms of writing that we were tempted to view as intermediary phases, occurring before memory is fixed, and that we must now consider permanent, perpetuating the “difficult remembrance” of the anti-Mafia movement.

Notes 1. I use the ambivalent term civil shrine, which lies between the religious and the secular. The religious aspects of the commemorative practices in honor of Judge Falcone are explored in Puccio-Den (2008a). This essay is included in the collection of essays entitled Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World (Margry 2008), which discusses the premise of a “secular religion.” Several case studies show numerous examples of “pilgrimages” that, although not made to holy people, are nonetheless infused with a religious sentiment through the types of acts, words, and gifts they give rise to. 2. I use the abbreviation that is in general use: Falcone Foundation.

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3. This concept (“place of remembrance”) was first introduced to the social sciences by Les lieux de mémoire, a work in several volumes published under the supervision of Pierre Nora between 1984 and 1993. 4. Several essays resulted from this period of research. They are published together in Puccio-Den 2009. 5. One of these photographs is published and analyzed in Puccio-Den 2008a. 6. The book L’Albero Falcone (Amurri 1992) contains typewritten copies of these notes and reproductions of the drawings, collages, and photos found on the trunk or at the foot of the magnolia tree in 1992. I describe the writing medium each time it is presented in this book, which is a precious source for reconstituting initial reactions to the Capaci massacre. 7. This term, which refers to objects of great visual power that combine written and figurative signs, is taken from Béatrice Fraenkel. I would like to express my gratitude here to her. The material for this essay was presented at seminars she leads at EHESS, and some of the working theories were discussed within her “Anthropologie de l’écrituer” (IIAC-EHESS) research group. 8. The link between the ruling parties (essentially the Christian Democrats and the Socialist Party) and the Mafia association Cosa Nostra had been outlined several times in anti-Mafia investigations. One year later, in 1993, the First Republic collapsed in the upheaval generated by the Mani Pulite operation and the trial of Giulio Andreotti—a key politician in all postwar governments—began in Palermo. 9. This quotation is taken from L’Albero Falcone (Amurri 1992). The many signed and dated messages compiled in this book enable the age and origins of their authors to be identified, as well as when they were placed under the Falcone Tree. 10. This concept is taken from Christophe Traini, as defined on page 23 of his HDR (accreditation to supervise research) (2008), “Emotions, paradoxes pragmatiques et valeurs socials. Les ressorts de l’engagement.” Université Paris I–Panthéon Sorbonne, supervised by Johanna Siméant. 11. On the shift from the protest system to the creation of new networks, see Jaspers 1997: 106. 12. On the performative power of writing, see Beatrice Fraenkel’s work (2002) on the spontaneous writing that flooded the city of New York after the September 11 attacks. 13. The unification of Italy dates back to 1861. 14. Paolo Borsellino was the victim of an attack on 19 July 1992, two months after taking over from Giovanni Falcone at the Palermo court. 15. This is not specific to our case study, but common to many other scenes of spontaneous writing in the wake of a disaster, as in the scenes studied in New York by Fraenkel (2002). 16. The Falcone Foundation (Fondazione Giovanni e Francesca Falcone) is an NGO recognized by the UN and funded by the region of Sicily. It is chaired by Maria Falcone, the assassinated judge’s sister; the vice-president is Judge Alfredo Morvillo, Francesca’s brother. 17. As Maria Falcone outlined to me, the Falcone Foundation does not wish to define itself “negatively” as an anti-Mafia organization; it prefers to describe itself “positively” as a prolegality organization. 18. The 1984 “Maxiprocesso” (Maxi trial) was the first to be brought against Cosa Nostra as a Mafia organization. 19. This is the case with certain plays such as Storia di Giovannuzzu beddicchiu (“The Story of Handsome Little Giovanni” in Sicilian), which uses the formal structure

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20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

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27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

Deborah Puccio-Den

of the cunto (an epic form designed to tell tales of Charlemagne’s knights fighting the infidels) to narrate the story of the judge’s life. This theme, which is linked to the new perception of Mafia members as infidels, was developed in Puccio-Den 2009, particularly the last chapter. On the importance of the signature, individual or collective, in writing operations, see Fraenkel 2002. This is what certain anti-Mafia organizations have chosen to call themselves. Examples include the one in Cinisi that arose following Cosa Nostra’s assassination of far-left activist Giuseppe Impastato on 9 May 1978. This organization, consisting of relatives of the victim and volunteers, has its headquarters in the victim’s house, which has become a kind of museum. The photograph of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino wearing a smile that reveals their bond has become the archetypal image of the anti-Mafia movement. In another picture under the tree, we see the judge with his wife, Francesca Morvillo, who is also smiling. On the monument as document, see Petrucci (1995). This bibliography is huge and would be impossible to list here. I have studied biographical works on another judge assassinated by Cosa Nostra, Rosario Livatino, for whom a beatification process by the Vatican is under way (Puccio-Den 2007); the biographies of the priest Giuseppe Puglisi, who is also being beatified (Puccio-Den 2008b); and bibliographical literature on Giuseppe Impastato, a farleft activist killed by the Mafia in 1978 and initially identified as a terrorist. Original title: Excellent Cadavers: The Mafi a and the Death of the First Italian Republic (1995). This documents the persecution a Sicilian village priest endured from the highest echelons of the Vatican for having allowed the Communist Party to win the municipal elections. The example often referred to by biographer Francesco La Licata is of public prosecutor Pietro Giammanco who, as Giovanni Falcone’s superior, is said to have hindered judicial investigations, particularly those involving ties between the Mafia and politicians. Many judges recorded their final days in notebooks that show the degree of pressure they were under when fighting the Mafia. For an example, see L’agenda rossa di Paolo Borsellino (Lo Bianco and Rizza 2007). I assume the dichotomy of Michael Herzfeld (1997), who speaks of the concept of “social poetics” to outline the boundaries of cultural identity, by exploring the differences between official models of national culture and the experiences of ordinary citizens. Quotations from the architect Salamone, who is in charge of place naming for the city of Palermo, and whom I interviewed in July 2007. He joined the anti-Mafia struggle in the late 1970s and was secretary to the Jesuit priest Ennio Pintacuda. Pintacuda was a driving force for major change in the Catholic world, upsetting the balance of power with the Christian Democratic Party, in power in Italy since the end of World War II, due to its ties with the Sicilian Mafia. “Difficult remembrance” (la memoria diffi cile) is Umberto Santino’s expression about the remembrance of Giuseppe Impastato (Impastato 2002). In particular, the former regional president, Salvatore Cuffaro, indicted with aiding the Mafia organization Cosa Nostra (2010).

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33. This subject is explored in the text by Lavabre and Gensburger. For both authors, remembrance is a controversial space par excellence. While it is possible to create a universal history, it is impossible to remove this controversial aspect from remembrance. 34. Many Sicilians regard the struggle between the Mafia and the anti-Mafia as a “civil war.” On the forgotten duty of societies that have experienced a civil war, the historical case of Athens has been admirably analyzed by Nicole Loraux (1997).

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References Amurri, Sandra, ed. (1992). L’Albero Falcone. Palermo: Fondazione Giovanni e Francesca Falcone. Arlacchi, Pino. (1994). Addio Cosa Nostra. I segreti della Mafia nella confessione di Tommaso Buscetta. Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli. Austin, John Langshaw. (1970 [1962]). Quand dire, c’est faire. Paris: Gallimard. (translation of How to Do Things With Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: Clarendon Press). Bensa, Alban, and Eric Fassin. (2002). “Les sciences sociales face à l’événement.” Terrain 38: 5–20. Dulong, Renaud. (1998). Le témoin oculaire. Les conditions sociales de l’attestation personnelle. Paris: École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Fraenkel, Béatrice. (1992). La signature. Genèse d’un signe. Paris: Gallimard. ———. (2002). Les écrits de septembre. New York 2001. Paris: Textuel. ———. (2007). “Actes d’écriture. Quand écrire c’est faire.” Langage et société 121/122(3– 4): 101–12. Gensburger, Sarah, and Marie-Claire Lavabre. (2005). “Entre ‘devoir de mémoire’ et ‘abus de mémoire’: La sociologie de la mémoire comme tierce position.” In Bertrand Muller, ed., L’histoire entre mémoire et épistémologie. Autour de Paul Ricoeur. Lausanne: Payot. Haney, Allen C., Christina Leimer, and Juliann Lowery. (1997). “Spontaneous Memorialization: Violent Death and Emerging Mourning Ritual.” Omega 35(2): 159–71. Herzfeld, Michael. (1997). Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York: Routledge. Impastato, Giuseppe. (2002). Lunga è la notte. Poesie, scritti, documenti. Palermo: Umberto Santino. Jaspers, James M. (1997). Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography and Creativity in Social Movements. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. La Licata, Francesco. (2002). Storia di Giovanni Falcone. Milan: Feltrinelli. Lo Bianco, Giuseppe, and Sandra Rizza. (2007). L’agenda rossa di Paolo Borsellino. Milan: Chiarelettere. Loraux, Nicole. (1997). La cité divisée: L’oubli dans la mémoire d’Athènes. Paris: Payot. Margry, Peter Jan, ed. (2008). Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World. New Itineraries into the Sacred. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Margry, Peter Jan, and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero. (2007). “Memorializing Traumatic Death.” Anthropology Today 23(3): 1–2. Muller, Bertrand, ed. (2005). L’histoire entre mémoire et épistémologie. Autour de Paul Ricoeur. Lausanne: Payot.

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Nora, Pierre, ed. (1984–1992). Les lieux de mémoire. Paris: Gallimard. Petrucci, Armando. (1980). La scrittura. Ideologia e rappresentazione. Turin: Einaudi. ———. (1995). Le scritture ultime. Ideologia della morte e strategie dello scrivere nella tradizione occidentale. Turin: Einaudi. Prost, Antoine. (1984). “Le monument aux morts.” In Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 1, La république. Paris: Gallimard, 195–225. Puccio, Deborah. (2001). “L’ethnologue et le juge. L’enquête de Giovanni Falcone sur la Mafia en Sicile.” Ethnologie française 31(1): 15–27. Puccio-Den, Deborah. (2007). “De la sainte pèlerine au saint martyr. Les parcours de l’antiMafia en Sicile.” Politix 77: 105–28. ———. (2008a). “The Anti-Mafia Movement as Religion? The Pilgrimage to Falcone Tree.” In Peter Jan Margry, ed., Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World. New Itineraries into the Sacred. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 49–70. ———. (2008b). “Victimes, héros ou martyrs? Les juges antimafia.” Terrain 51: 94–111. ———. (2009). Les théâtres de ‘Maures et Chrétiens.’ Confl its politiques et dispositifs de réconciliation (Espagne-Sicile, XVIIe-XXe siècles). Turnhout: Brepols. Ricoeur, Paul (2000). La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Sánchez-Carretero, Cristina. (2006). “Trains of Workers, Trains of Death: Some Reflections after the March 11th Attacks in Madrid.” In Jack Santino, ed., Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 333–47. Santino, Jack (2004). “Performative Commemoratives, the Personal, and the Public: Spontaneous Shrines, Emergent Ritual, and the Field of Folklore.” Journal of American Folklore 117: 363–72. ———, ed. (2006). Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Santino, Umberto. (2000). Storia del movimento antiMafia. Rome: Editori Riuniti. Sciascia, Leonardo. (1993 [1979]). Dalle parti degli Infedeli. Milan: Adelphi. Stille, Alexander. (1995). Nella terra degli Infedeli. Mafi a e politica nella Prima Repubblica. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori (translation of Excellent Cadavers: The Mafi a and the Death of the First Italian Republic. New York: Vintage Books). Zeitlin, Steve (2006). “Oh Did You See the Ashes Come Thickly Falling Down? Poems Posted in the Wake of September 11.” In Jack Santino, ed., Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 99–117.

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Chapter 2

Ritual Mediations of Violent Death An Ethnography of the Theo van Gogh Memorial Site, Amsterdam

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Irene Stengs

Shortly after 9:00 on Tuesday morning, 2 November 2004, my husband called me at my office to tell me that he had just heard on the radio that a man had been shot on Linnaeusstraat in Amsterdam, and that the victim was probably Theo van Gogh. It was uncertain whether or not van Gogh—if the announcement indeed concerned him—had survived the attack. Within an hour, however, all uncertainty was gone: Van Gogh, a well-known Dutch film director and provocative publicist on the issue of Islam and immigration, was dead. The killer, a man in Muslim attire, had been arrested in the nearby Oosterpark after a brief exchange of gunfire with the police. As a researcher in the areas of mourning and public ritual, I cancelled all my appointments for the day and the days to come, and left for the scene of the murder. I had no doubt that the spot where van Gogh had died would become the nation’s focus of attention for a while, and that a large ephemeral memorial would appear. In the Netherlands, as in many other places in the world, lethal incidents—whether killings, work-related accidents, or traffic deaths—nowadays almost inevitably evoke public responses of grief and mourning, and more often than not, a temporary memorial will be one of those responses. Within this setting, people follow certain scripts from a shared ritual repertoire, without needing formal influence or instruction. Such public commemorative practices therefore develop in accordance with general expectations and

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within a given framework (Doss 2006, 2008; Kear and Steinberg 1999; Santino 2006; Stengs 2007, 2009a; Walter 1999).1 Indeed, in response to the death of Theo van Gogh—a high-profile death with a major political impact—a large ephemeral memorial did take shape on Linnaeusstraat. Van Gogh’s house also became a site of commemoration and protest, albeit on a more modest scale. Taking the Linnaeusstraat Theo van Gogh memorial as its empirical focus, this contribution argues that ephemeral memorials may be considered ritualized sites that not only “are,” but at the same time “act” and interact with the social reality through which they are constituted. In other words, ephemeral memorials are performative practices. Hence, we should not think of “the” Theo van Gogh memorial as just a material structure that existed for a certain period of time, but as a site that passed through a continuous sequence of varying forms, intentions, and interpretations. It is my objective to highlight the interdependency between specific practices of mourning, the sites that evolve from them, and the media. The media, in this perspective, do not appear as independent channels broadcasting “news” by reporting on “current events;” instead, they may be seen as mediating sites and practices that impinge on and are an intrinsic part of the politics of mourning, thus creating the social spaces in which such sites may be located. Nick Couldry’s concepts of “ritual space of the media” and “media rituals” are important theoretical tools for my analysis of the Theo van Gogh memorial. To grasp how the media mediate and cocreate the social world, we need to ask questions of power. Couldry’s objective is to deconstruct “the belief or assumption that there is a centre to the social world,” and that, in some sense, the media speaks “for” that center, namely, “the myth of the mediated centre” (Couldry 2003: 2). The naturalness of this assumption reveals the high concentration of symbolic power with which media institutions are generally invested. In order to move beyond a narrow perception of media rituals to particular actions at particular moments in particular places, Couldry emphasizes that ritual actions happen in a social space, the construction of which should be the main topic of investigation, thus promoting the study of ritualization rather than of rituals (2003: 12, 29–30). In contemporary society, the media are cardinal in defining social space: “We only can grasp how some media-related actions make sense as ritual actions, if we analyze a wider space which I call the ritual space of the media” (2003: 13, italics in original). The media make social space into ritual space, because they define power and the ways power is dealt with, while obscuring the nature of power and its very existence. This wider space encompasses all social life, from everyday practices to more condensed forms of actions,

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in which “media-related categories” and “media-related values” are reproduced (2003: 14, 29–30). The most important categorical differentiation made by the actors in this social space is the difference between things (persons, actions, events) that are “in” (on, or associated with) the media, and things that are not “in” the media. The attribution of a more intense degree of reality to things that are “in” the media than to things that are not “in” the media (2003: 27, 48), leads to the former being placed above the latter in a hierarchical relationship. At first glance, one would expect the murder of van Gogh to have evoked a nationwide response of shock and abhorrence. Yet, the murder, itself a culmination of societal conflicts over immigration issues, acted as a catalyst that intensified these conflicts and allowed them to be played out in the open in the consequential memorial practices. I would argue that these conflicts were for a large part precisely about access to the media, existing power relations, and established opinions. I will follow Eyerman in using Victor Turner’s model of social drama to understand the events that followed the murder (Eyerman 2008: 4, 14–16). Social dramas are, in Turner’s words, “units of harmonic or disharmonic social process, arising in conflict situations” (Turner 1987: 4). Turner distinguishes four phases: “breach, crisis, redress, and either reintegration or recognition of schism” (Turner 1982: 69, italics in original). A social drama unfolds after a severe breach of a norm (the murder, in our case), followed by a mounting social crisis: “a momentous juncture or turning point in the relations between components of a social field” (1982: 70). Next, adjustive and redressive mechanisms appear that counter the widening of the crisis. In the case of the van Gogh murder, as I show later, the two phases of “crisis” and “redress” fell in the period between van Gogh’s murder and his funeral. “Crisis” and “redress” have a strong potential to reveal, because of their liminal characteristics: They are interjacencies (or interjacent phases) linking more stable periods of the social order (Turner 1987: 4). During these phases, antagonisms and fissures that underlie and structure day-to-day interactions and power relationships may suddenly come to the surface. I have therefore chosen to limit myself to the ten-day period between the murder and the funeral. Here, my approach differs from that of Eyerman, who also seeks to assess the murder’s long-term effects on Dutch society, and considers the phase of “redress” to be much longer (cf. Eyerman 2008: 15–16). My ethnographic research on the genesis of the van Gogh memorial started with my departure for Linnaeusstraat that Tuesday morning at around 10:00, and ended after nine days with the memorial’s removal at 8:00 AM on Wednesday, 10 November. Van Gogh was killed a mere five-minute bicycle ride from my home, which meant I could stay on

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Illustration 2.1. “Will be removed on 10 November 2004, 7:30 AM, upon the van Gogh family’s request.” Sign at the Linnaeusstraat memorial site, Amsterdam, 8 November 2004. Photo: Irene Stengs.

Linnaeusstraat almost all the time.2 Since an ethnography encompassing the entire generation of the memorial would entail too much detail for the purpose of this essay, I have selected the moments, situations, and practices that I consider the most enlightening.3

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The First Hours The first question that forced itself upon me when starting the ethnography of this memorial was: Where to start? Where to pinpoint the inception of the memorial? In general, what is the actual moment that a memorial comes into being? At face value, the placing of the first flower or attribute in memoriam of the victim would seem a self-evident starting point, as only then does a memorial take its material shape. From another point of view, however, this act is as much the outcome of a chain of actions as it is a starting point: Before the act of placing, the actor has bought his or her flowers or written his or her note, and then journeyed to the place, having made up his or her mind to do so. Another “natural” starting point for an ethnography would be the murder itself, a starting point I have chosen elsewhere, as have many other authors on related topics. However, a murder becomes a broader social reality only when it is made public through the media. I have therefore taken my first encounter with the news of the murder as the starting point for my ethnography. The radio announcements of an event like the van Gogh murder may seem the mere passing on of a fact, or of a piece of information. However, as I have indicated, such news has immediate effects on the world and should therefore be seen as a mediation. The symbolic power invested in the media gives their voices the authority required to be effective, that is, “worthy of being believed, or, in a word performative” (Bourdieu 1991: 69–70, italics in original). The van Gogh murder news established what may be understood as a rupture, a distortion of the equilibrium of relationships that constitute society, an instant suspension of everyday life (cf. Turner 1987: 24). Such suspensions have temporal and spatial dimensions. As regards the former dimension, the news of the murder suspended everyday schemes and routines, making people do other things than they would normally have done, and allowing them the time to do so. Time already fixed and scheduled became open and empty. Regarding the spatial dimension, the news suspended the normal functions of the place where the murder had been committed (i.e., a bicycle lane and the adjacent main road and sidewalk), and transformed it into a place of mourning, debate, and protest, and a hot spot of nationwide attention. This once ordinary part of public space was now delineated as out of the ordinary. To substantiate what the opening of this, temporally and spatially, liminal space implied in the case of the van Gogh murder, I present a selection of the encounters I had with people on Linnaeusstraat in the first few hours following van Gogh’s death, as well as of my observations of the transformations undergone by Linnaeusstraat itself.

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I arrived at Linnaeusstraat within two hours after the assassination. As expected (my own actions were in any case entirely based on the anticipated actions of others), between fifty and one hundred people had already gathered. The street was fenced off with barriers on both sides, and guarded by police officers. Van Gogh’s body was still lying there, halfway between the two fences, and hidden from view by a blue tent. I decided to stay by the barrier on the Oosterpark side, intuitively the “main entrance” to the street because this side faces the city center. A mobile unit of the Dutch national broadcasting organization arrived at the same time as I did. Quite a number of journalists and their entourages were already present.4 More than a mere symbolic boundary, the barriers functioned from the outset as the material demarcation, separating those allowed inside (people “in” the media; in this case photographers, cameramen, and reporters) from “ordinary people” (people not “in” the media), and visualizing Couldry’s analysis of the naturalized hierarchy and power inequality that go with this categorization. The fence simultaneously illustrated the strong attraction of “the place,” which, as I explain below, may be understood as the attraction of “the real” (cf. Lisle 2004: 15). Everybody present was waiting for things to come, which basically meant, as I felt it, the removal of the barriers. Our attention was powerfully drawn to that spot in the middle of the street, to the blue tent, the waiting ambulance, the investigators moving around in their astronautlike outfits. During the first hour of waiting, people were quiet, standing around and occasionally engaging in quiet conversations. The shared knowledge of what had happened still consisted of sketchy details: The identity of the victim, the ethnic background of the killer, the fact that van Gogh had been shot, and the possibility that he had also been knifed and that the knife had been left sticking out of his body. I found myself standing next to a man in his sixties. When I asked him why he had come to Linnaeusstraat, he said that he felt that by doing so he was showing his respect for the victim, and because he felt the urge to “have been there.” He had felt so before, in particular when Pim Fortuyn had been murdered (see note 2), as well as when other people had been killed by “senseless violence.”5 He added that such events usually happened elsewhere, in another city and too far away for him. He was unable to leave his wife alone for long, so he never went. But Linnaeusstraat happened to be nearby. He had a general feeling that “society was in decay:” “I therefore had to come and see for myself. In fact, I wish I’d been there when it happened, because this murder will have a great impact.” His explanation points to the interwoven significances of “place” (“the place where it happened”) and physical presence (the urge to have

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been there in person). The man had felt the rupture and sought to locate himself physically in the event, in this “history in the making,” by going there. Such motivations and sentiments are by no means unique or exceptional. Virtually all sites of violence or catastrophe attract vast numbers of people. In her analysis of tourists “gazing at Ground Zero,” Lisle rejects the easy interpretation of such people as being unreflective and merely disaster tourists, as such an interpretation “fails to account for why people feel the need to gaze upon sites of tragedy in person” (2004: 16, italics in original). Instead, she connects our desire to “consume sites of atrocity” with our desire to touch “something real” (2004: 4, 15). Such sites, in her interpretation, are considered the only places left untouched in a world where “everything else is mediated, simulated, banal” (2004: 15). The seductive element is their quality of authenticity, the promise of access to the real. At that moment (it was then about 1:00 PM), there was no time to reflect on what I was being told. All of a sudden, a potted plant surrounded by a circle of six burning candles had appeared on the other side of the barrier. It must have been placed there less than a minute earlier, but unfortunately I had missed that moment. A man in the crowd, who was standing in front of the plant, pointed out the woman who had placed the attributes. I approached her to ask why she had done so, and why she had chosen these particular attributes. I initially thought I understood what she was saying, but then suddenly realized that I did not. She started telling me that although she is a very, very open-minded person, this event was the “bloody limit,” that it was beyond comprehension that something like this could happen. So far, I felt that we were on the same track, but then she started repeating that she was a liberal and hospitable person, and that she had traveled around the world, meeting all kinds of people, and did not resent foreigners at all—but that it had now become clear that all these Arabs really did not belong in our country, and that it would be better if they left, all of them, right now, and went back to where they had come from. And that it had come this far, that it had got this bad, was definitely the fault of Cohen (the Amsterdam mayor) and his soft policy. It had upset her, as had the waiting: Nothing was happening and the body just lay there. Something needed to be done; a sign had to be made, a “sign of respect” for him. She had therefore returned to her house (she lived just around the corner) and come back with the plant and the candles, because they had been the only things in the house that seemed appropriate for the purpose. But that hardly mattered, or not at all. The only thing that mattered now was that a sign of respect had been made.

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To me, the account was bewildering and shocking. Within two minutes, the woman had reasoned from “being liberal and hospitable” through “going abroad and meeting foreigners,” to the statement that “all Arabs should leave the Netherlands.” And as for placing the blame explicitly with the mayor—well, how had that come to her mind? At that moment, I was sure that this was the extreme standpoint of a single individual. Over the days to come, however, I would learn that the woman’s view was widely shared (although many other opinions existed as well). In this perception, Arabs/Moroccans/Muslims were generally held responsible for the murder of Theo van Gogh, together with everyone who favored a permissive immigration and integration policy, the epitome of these persons being Job Cohen, the mayor of Amsterdam. The immediate impact on me of the conversation with that woman was that I now saw the attributes she had placed (which for a brief moment constituted the entire “Theo van Gogh memorial”) in a totally different light: They had changed from a materialization of sympathy or respect, into a sign for seclusion and exclusion. I cannot tell whether other people felt the urge to do something since we had been waiting around for so long, or whether the appearance of the first attributes triggered others to follow, but while I was making notes of what I had just heard, I noticed that someone had laid red roses at a spot some ten meters away. I also failed to notice the person who laid a bunch of yellow roses at the same spot soon afterward. Then a man appeared with a bouquet of sunflowers, an attribute indexical to van Gogh by association,6 and a brief note. Bouquets of sunflowers would soon become the hallmark of the memorial. This association had also been made by others, either independently or because they had been inspired. Another man placed a film container next to the sunflowers. He told me that he appreciated Theo van Gogh because of his movies. When he had heard about the murder on the radio, he had immediately brought the container as a tribute to “van Gogh the movie maker.” The speedy appearance of mourning attributes made me realize that something similar might be happening on the other side of the fenced-off part of the street—or would the general perception be that this side was the street’s main entrance and hence “the place to be?” I forced myself to leave and take a look. Things were much quieter at the other barrier; there were only a few “media people,” and two police officers keeping around thirty bystanders at bay. A few meters behind the barrier, a portrait of MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali had been laid on the bicycle lane, and was partly covered by a bouquet of sunflowers. The sunflowers were clearly not freshly bought but had been taken from a vase, and the portrait had been torn from a magazine. The poignant juxtaposition with the blue tent

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down the street evoked a possible future in a split second: Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a next victim. Not long before (September 2004), Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Theo van Gogh had coproduced Submission, a controversial short movie highlighting the relationship between the Koran and the abuse of Muslim women. The murder cast a shadow over the fate of this strongly anti-Islam MP, a former Muslim herself. As incantations to prevent a similar fate from befalling Hirsi Ali, texts had been written around the portrait, two of which were clearly visible from behind the fence: the Sixth Commandment (Thou shalt not kill) and the sentence “Keep your bloody paws off our bloody little A.”7 Both messages allow for more than one interpretation. The biblical commandment could be read as, “Thou shalt not kill Ayaan Hirsi Ali,” but in a broader sense might be seen as a religious conviction of the van Gogh killer and his, then still presumed, religious motivation. The second message requires a more extensive explanation, especially if one is not fully conversant with Dutch politics. First of all, it is a rephrasing of the famous World War II Amsterdam expression, “Bloody Huns, keep your bloody paws off our bloody Jews,” but the connection is probably indirect. The expression had been rephrased in 2002 by the mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen, in a tête-à-tête with the then Amsterdam alderman for education, youth and integration, on the evening after the city council elections. Unaware that the conversation was being recorded by a television crew, the alderman had spoken of “fucking Moroccans,” and the mayor’s reply had been “but they are our ‘fucking Moroccans.’” At the time, the broadcast had led to considerable upheaval. The rephrasing on the Hirsi Ali portrait thus disseminated an antidiscrimination message and support for Job Cohen in the political debate on the integration issue, in opposition to the stance voiced by, for instance, the woman at the other barrier quoted above. As not much was going on there, I returned to the other side of the fenced-off area. The “sunflower–annex–film container spot” was now developing into a more extensive memorial. The film container was almost covered by flower bouquets, and candles had been lit. A new kind of attribute had also appeared: cigarettes. Van Gogh had been a chain-smoker and, in direct opposition to the general standpoint of the time, an ardent campaigner for the freedom to smoke. In the meantime, an “ordinary person” dared to enter the “in the media” area: He had confined himself to the task of arranging and rearranging the memorial, and relighting the candles. To the outsider, he may have appeared to be “just a citizen.” However, as someone who had carried out fieldwork at other memorial sites in Amsterdam, I recognized him from earlier occasions when he had performed the same self-assigned tasks as a “ritual expert.” Someone,

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for instance, had placed a small cactus—the first of many and a direct reference to van Gogh (“sharp and cutting”) and his former television program “A Pleasant Conversation” (Een prettig gesprek). Van Gogh had always concluded by presenting to his guests a cactus that they had to kiss (as a symbolic act, a demonstration of not fearing the consequences of one’s actions). The “ordinary person/ritual expert” moved the cactus

Illustration 2.2. The “ritual expert” rearranging the Theo van Gogh memorial in its first hour of existence (2 November 2004). Photo: Irene Stengs. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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to a more central place, that is, onto the film container. It is my observation that such “ritual experts” are part and parcel of virtually all public mourning sites and related events. His ritual function allowed the “ritual expert” to remain behind the barrier, and within the boundaries of the police and media space. The possibility for other ordinary people to transgress the fenced area for a brief moment to bring their attributes to the evolving memorial further illustrates this potential of ritual. If the barrier had been there only to demarcate the zone of police investigation, nobody would have been allowed to cross. In addition, the presence of the media in the zone also lent it the character of a media space—but not a common media space, however. The media were present in anticipation of the common ritual response to exceptional death, by public violence or of a celebrity. The anticipation made the place a ritual space in advance. The inherent liminal character of the anticipated ritual, rather than the mere presence of the media, granted the transgressability of the boundaries. Once they have entered this “ritual space of the media,” people cannot but perform: they present themselves and their opinions, implicitly or overtly, and intentionally or not.

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Freedom of Speech Right from the beginning, written messages testified more or less explicitly to the considerations of those who had brought them to the place of the murder. Even the first bunch of sunflowers carried a note that revealed a first glimpse of what would soon appear to be a major field of contestation connected with the van Gogh murder. The note read: “A freedom fighter has been murdered, farewell Theo, Hein.”8 Freedom, in this perspective, referred in particular to freedom of speech, one of van Gogh’s primary hallmarks being his continual voicing of blunt opinions on sensitive matters. The second note added also addressed the topic of “freedom of speech”: Dear Theo! 2–11’04 Freedom of expression … What are we heading for? Soon people will no longer dare to say anything. … When will this finally get through to them in The Hague? How many more to come? How many more to go?! Senseless! See you in heaven xxx Maaike9

The “freedom of speech” topic echoed the public outcry surrounding the murder of the rising populist politician Pim Fortuyn on 6 May 2002, Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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an act that is generally considered the first political murder in the Netherlands since 1672.10 The well-clad, edgy, and charismatic politician— popular because he voiced otherwise taboo topics on “immigrants’ lack of adaptation,” “the backwardness of Islam culture,” and the “danger of the Islamization of our culture”—had made his motto Loquendi Libertatum Custodiamus (“Let us watch over the freedom of speech”). A famous phrase of Fortuyn was, “I am a man who says what he thinks and does what he says.” Hence, his murder was regarded as the silencing of free speech.11 In an article on the sacralization of mediated images in Sweden and Finland, Sumiala-Seppänen and Stocchetti use the concept of “diachronic association” to understand such echoes in relation to the Swedish response to the death of Anna Lindh (murdered in 2003). In their words: “The main distinctive characteristic of diachronically established comparisons is that they create a sort of continuity between events happening in different spaces and at different times” (2005: 242–43). The murder of Anna Lindh became associated diachronically with the death of Olof Palme, the prime minister of Sweden, who was murdered in 1986. Significant traits in this particular association are that both victims were politicians; politicians who, in accordance to the Swedish ideal of democracy, lived without bodyguards or any other form of protection, with the people instead of separated from the people, and hence, by implication were committed to the same ideals (2005: 243). Likewise, the main diachronic association of the death of Theo van Gogh is with the death of Pim Fortuyn. Both murders were political murders that happened against the background of the increasing tension related to the immigration and integration issue. Although Fortuyn was a politician and van Gogh an artist, they shared controversial (that is, at the time, “politically incorrect”) opinions on Islam, Muslims, and their integration into Dutch society, opinions that they openly and frequently voiced in public. Although the two victims were killed by assassins from entirely different backgrounds,12 their deaths were interpreted along parallel lines: Fortuyn was murdered because he “said what he thought,” while van Gogh was murdered because of his liberal and uncompromising use of “freedom of speech.” Sumiala-Seppänen and Stocchetti argue that a diachronic association has both a scaring and a reassuring potential, “scaring because it shows the continued presence of this type of death for people who represent the wider national community and its values” and “reassuring because it institutionalizes this type of death, it makes it familiar, it prescribes the appropriate behavior and the nature of the collective response” (2005: 243). With regard to “scaring,” the diachronic associations evoked by

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the van Gogh murder are that of political murder aimed at silencing free speech and erasing civic society, and the ruthless evil of indiscriminate, uncontrolled violence against the moral order of that society. With respect to reassurance, the diachronic associations determined or, in the words of Sumiala-Seppänen and Stocchetti, prescribed the ritual to follow, of which—in the case of the van Gogh murder—the memorial was only one dimension. However, I would like to add to Sumiala-Seppänen and Stocchetti’s more conceptual approach that diachronic (and all other) associations become visible only in and through actions inspired by the event. Or, in other words, the ritualized practices that follow such an event are part of and shape a new reality that is produced and altered in the actions. This reality is not clear cut and one dimensional, but ambiguous and a matter of contestation. Like any other memorial, the Theo van Gogh memorial was a materialized political confrontation and a site of negotiations about interpretations.

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Relocation, Crisis Around 3:30 PM, a hearse carried Theo van Gogh’s body away from Linnaeusstraat. The moment it left, Amsterdam sanitation department employees arrived and started to carefully collect, with the assistance of the “ritual expert” introduced earlier, all the attributes and put them on a small truck for transportation, in order to rearrange—or should I say “translate”—them into a memorial on the spot where van Gogh had died. The barriers were then removed, an act that had an unforeseen effect on everybody waiting there, including myself. We all rushed toward the memorial at an accelerating pace, as if attracted by magnetic force. I found the moment both weird and embarrassing: What were we heading for, after all? Here, I want to return to Lisle’s analysis of the need to see for oneself. Following Jenny Edkins in her discussion of Dachau concentration camp tourists, Lisle speaks of a “need to face the horror” (Edkins quoted in Lisle 2004: 16). Gazing at catastrophes reveals a voyeuristic need, which entails both attraction and repulsion. Those of us who were on Linnaeusstraat knew that we would find a small memorial, consisting of the attributes we had just seen, on the spot where van Gogh was killed. The attraction to the place implied a forbidden desire to see traces of the violence (“the real”) that had been committed a few hours earlier, a desire fed by the knowledge that such traces, should these indeed be visible, would fill us with abhorrence. Such desire for the object of horror is taboo, which accounts for the embarrassment experienced by myself, and

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no doubt also by others. In the words of Lisle: “We were driven by the possibility of witnessing something authentic, but shamed by the voyeurism required to gaze upon ‘the real’” (2004: 17). The place of the murder, as argued above, had been “delineated out of the ordinary,” which was also materially manifest from the site of the memorial being fenced off. This did not imply that the boundaries of the site had become fully determined. In the hours and days that followed, the city authorities adapted the barriers to the expanding collection of flowers, drawings, notes, and objects. The conversations and the initial attributes discussed above already indicate the main themes of the social crisis, namely, the danger of Islamism, weak politics and politicians (particularly as regards the issues of immigration and assimilation), the decay of Dutch society and Dutch values (tolerance and freedom of speech in particular), and senseless violence as a social problem. The phase of crisis is a phase of “people taking sides” (Turner 1982: 108). Many of the expressions of sympathy for van Gogh and his opinions at the memorial site voiced people’s opinions and sentiments about the above issues. These could take the form of personal messages directed at Theo van Gogh, the bereaved, the killer, or various politicians, or of more generally formulated writings directed at society, Islam, the government, or humanity. Next to various photographs of Theo van Gogh, drawings (by both children and adults), cartoons,13 and small installations were common forms of expressions. In the days to follow, more and more people brought their messages carefully sealed or otherwise protected from the wet November weather, counteracting as it were their ephemerality and demonstrating that they were meant to last and remain legible as long as possible. Most messages were brief and plain, such as a sheet of white paper bearing the text “the Netherlands = country of mediators.”14 Or, on the bottom of a cardboard box: “A true Muslim would never do such a thing.”15 Or, on a sheet of orange paper: 16 “If you don’t agree with the beautiful Netherlands, move to another country. Be aware that this path will take you nowhere. This is no way of speaking, NOWHERE. N +J.”17 Or, a framed text with the “saying” Islam = Islaf, meaning in effect: “Islam is cowardly.”18 Others had expressed similar opinions in full-page notes. Although I did not witness anybody removing an attribute from the memorial, there was some censorship. One example was a card, probably placed on Thursday morning 4 November, that had disappeared that same afternoon. The card depicted a man who, while penetrating a goat, turns his head toward a volcano erupting in the background. The attached text read: “Freedom of speech takes precedence over religion. Fundamentalist goat fuckers forget this.”19

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Illustration 2.3. Detail of the Linnaeusstraat memorial site, Amsterdam, 4 November 2004. On the right, a portrait of Theo van Gogh; on the left, a note to “Teo van Coch.” Photo: Irene Stengs.

An illustrative example of what could be called a “mini-installation” was a small transparent box containing wads of cotton wool that was placed on the evening of the first day. The Dutch word for “wad” (watje) is also slang for a “wally” or a “tit.” Texts on the box read “wads for Cohen” and “leftist wallies,”20 the latter referring to the Dutch Labor Party (Partij van de Arbeid), of which Mayor Cohen is a prominent member. A dunce’s cap with the text “Hey old fatty, your stretched-out leg will be missed”21 visualized a perception of van Gogh as society’s court jester, ready to trip somebody up. Seeing citizens taking sides, authorities and politicians decided to take counteractive and channeling measures, the general fear being that the murder might spark a chain of violent conflicts between autochthonous and Muslim or allochthonous Dutch. The first redressive initiative was taken on the day of the murder. In the press conference he gave at 1:00 PM on the Tuesday, the mayor made a general appeal to come that evening to Dam Square in Amsterdam for a mass “noise wake.”22 Precisely the mobilization of cultural performances—which potentially encompasses any genre “from tribal rituals to TV specials”—is characteristic of this third, redressive phase (Turner 1982: 108). In the following section, I

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present the noise wake as such a ritualized cultural performance that was aimed at redressing the crisis and yet articulated its contents at the same time.

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Redressing the Crisis The idea of a noise wake had arisen in the context of the “usual” response to manslaughter or other cases of lethal violence in the public domain, namely, the silent march. It is reputed that Mayor Cohen had first suggested organizing a silent march. This suggestion would have been turned down by van Gogh’s family and friends, as van Gogh had detested silent marches: a noisy event seemed a more appropriate commemoration. The noise wake would start at 8:00 PM, preceded by the sounding of the bells of all Amsterdam churches and the hooting of the trains at Amsterdam Central Station, which is well within hearing distance of the place of the wake, Dam Square. As I approached Dam Square, I became part of a fast-growing stream of people heading in the same direction. I suddenly became aware of the sounding of the bells in the Zuidertoren, and then I heard other bells as well. At Dam Square, an enormous crowd filled the entire space from the Royal Palace to the Krasnapolsky Hotel, from the Bijenkorf department store to Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum.23 In answer to the call to bring anything that could produce noise as a token of protest, people had brought frying pans, pan lids, whistles, drums, trumpets, amplifiers, ghetto blasters, firecrackers, etc. The majority of the public were “white,” and included adults as well as children. One sign read: “Headscarves off, Cohen out.”24 Somewhere in the midst of the crowd, someone waved the Pim Fortuyn flag. The center stage of the event was set up in front of the Royal Palace. In addition, the live television broadcast of the event was shown on a large screen next to the podium. Television producer Lennart Booij—a pupil and friend of Theo van Gogh—opened the event by inviting all participants to make a deafening noise. The noise, which was symbolically led by a bass drummer on the platform, lasted for eight minutes. Next, Mayor Cohen and the minister of immigration affairs (Rita Verdonk) gave brief speeches. As each of them embodied a different political side in the immigration/Islam debate (the mayor a moderate, the minister a hard-liner), their appearances and speeches evoked both applause and noise from the various constituencies within the audience. The mayor emphasized the unanimous disgust and abhorrence felt by the Amsterdam citizens, while the minister stated that

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“the limit had been reached.” The speeches were followed by two minutes of “deafening silence.” Toward the end of the noise wake, the diachronic association Pim Fortuyn–Theo van Gogh became powerfully manifest. All of a sudden, “Pim Fortuyn” appeared in the huge round window on the top floor of Madame Tussaud’s. From high above the square, Fortuyn’s wax statue watched the crowd below, evoking extra outbursts of yelling and other forms of noise production.25 Altogether the event lasted about twenty-five minutes; the drummer announced the end with another brief round of drumming, which was complemented by noise from the participants in the square. After that, most people left, but some stayed to make noise, play music, and dance, which created a kind of festive atmosphere. The noise wake was broadcast live as a political event of extraordinary order, as a “media event.” Media events, according to Couldry’s reworking of Dayan and Katz’s Media Events (1992), are “large-scale eventbased media-focused narratives where the claims associated with the myth of the mediated centre are particularly intense” (Couldry 2003: 67). I have selected two aspects of the national broadcast that illustrate how Couldry’s analysis helps to understand how the media construct social power during such events. As authorized interpreters of social reality, the joint national public broadcasting organizations were able to focus on, or leave out, aspects of the happening (initially announced by the television presenter as a “noise march”). First of all, I want to mention that many of the participating politicians were given individual attention by showing them in close-up, often accompanied by the mentioning of their names and specific political alliances (some were briefly interviewed). In this way, the national broadcast created and sustained the idea that the center of society was temporarily located in Dam Square, and that the selected people-in-the-media represented that center. Second, the broadcast had partly a redressive role, stressing the positive societal aspects of the public responses. During the entire event, the camera alternated shots of the speakers with close-ups of the public and their various signs, banners, and noise equipment. Clearly in view, at least twice, were for instance signs bearing the text “No assassinations in name of my Islam” and “Muslims against violence.”26 In contrast, however, signs like “Headscarves off, Cohen out,” the Pim Fortuyn flag, and other messages of a similar political signature were not highlighted, but at most skimmed over in the passing of the camera. This, however, did not prevent anti-Muslim violence from being perpetrated. In the aftermath of the assassination, several Muslim schools and mosques in provincial towns were the targets of attempted arson.

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A People’s Protest? In this section, I leave the well-orchestrated media event of the noise wake and return to the Theo van Gogh memorial site. The site was constituted by the actual place, the attributes, the people, and the media reporting, and I now want to explore the contribution of the presence of those people and their actions. Like all ephemeral memorials, the Theo van Gogh memorial was a material articulation of people’s feelings of grief, fear, and anger, and therefore a site of mourning, anxiety, and protest—expressed by many people, in this case. In this respect, the memorial appeared to be a form of direct democracy and, by implication, these people appeared to be “the people.” As said, a large number of people felt compelled to express their feelings at the site. Who were they, and how can the extent and diversity of the involvement with van Gogh’s death be interpreted? Theo van Gogh belonged to the upper layers of society, by descent and by his professional prominence. Most of his films, shows, and writings were intended for an intellectual audience. For example, Submission was cofinanced and broadcast by the Dutch “intellectual” and “leftist” broadcast organization, the VPRO. This programming excluded by implication the majority of Dutch television viewers as an audience. It was the murder that made van Gogh “everybody’s Theo,” a “Theo of the people.” In other words, “Theo” became a temporal receptacle for the existing feelings of dissatisfaction and frustration discussed above, well beyond the circles of the intellectual elite. Reading from the memorial, most of the objects placed—flowers, cuddly toys, cigarettes, cactuses—do not allow the establishment of the background of the people who placed them. As with all ritual, differences in intention, interpretation, or meaning remain concealed in the ritual acts. The only attributes of such memorials that may reveal something are the written statements: The spelling and language of many of the notes of the Theo van Gogh memorial suggested that their authors had a modest educational background. While I was at the memorial, I recognized a few people I knew, for instance, my neighbor and a colleague from my institute. These intellectuals brought flowers or lit a candle, attributes that become anonymous immediately afterward. What were the eventual political implications of this assembly of contributions from the intellectual elite, the middle class, and the working class? The broad societal involvement with the Theo van Gogh memorial may partly be read as a bridging of existing political divisions, and the arising of a new, albeit temporary, moral community. Yet, as we have seen, in today’s media-saturated society, other hierarchies prevail over

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the divisions along socioeconomic lines. When comparing the situation at the memorial with the noise wake and its main contributors (and the same holds for the cremation service discussed below), the main difference between the people who made their opinions manifest is their “natural” access to the media, as opposed to the lack of any access. In Couldry’s terms, Lennart Booij, Rita Verdonk, and Job Cohen already belonged to the media-defined center of Dutch society. In this perspective, the anonymous contributors to the memorial were all equal in their lack of media access. Hence, the “ordinary” people of today are those whose social networks do not connect to media networks, irrespective of their birth, education, or income. Although involvement with the Theo van Gogh memorial makes “ordinary people” “people in the media” for a moment (it gives them their “fifteen minutes of fame”), they basically remain “outside.” Graeme Turner (2006), writing about the phenomenon of ordinary people becoming celebrities in and through television shows, warns that it is too optimistic to interpret the increasing media presence of ordinary people as a form of democratization. I understand media access through memorial sites as another manifestation of the same development. Understanding “the democratic process” as a process that establishes a more equal access to power, the power exerted through this form of media access, in the end such memorials do not substantially alter people’s lack of political power. Turner therefore suggests the concept “demotic” to describe such processes (Turner 2006: 156–58). The demotic potential of ritualized sites like the Theo van Gogh memorial lies in their ability to force a breach in the existing media cordon surrounding the media-established center. However, such a breach is usually as temporary as the memorials themselves. Through this breach, “ordinary people” can literally step into the media space that is normally inaccessible to them. Set in motion by ritual, the breach opened by the Theo van Gogh memorial was eventually closed by another ritual—the cremation ceremony—as is demonstrated in the concluding section below.

Closure I have delineated the period between the murder and the funeral—a period in which the polity sought, through redressive measures and performances, to heal the societal fissure—as one of liminality. In both the organized and the unorganized performances, Dutch society presented itself to itself, which marks this liminal phase as also being essentially reflexive (cf. Turner 1982: 75). The opinions, criticisms, and advice articulated in the rituals provided society, as it were, with feedback on its

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current state.27 For the sake of clarity, in this perspective “closure” means closure of the crisis phase as such; it was not the end of the sphere of hostility surrounding immigration and Islam, which was to remain hardened over the years to come. Although we should acknowledge that social crises can never be entirely “solved,” the ceremony came closest to a closure of the liminal period. As it was well covered by the media, the ceremony was another high point of interconnectedness between ritual, space, and the media. At the end of this section, I return to the aspect of closure from the perspective of a breach in the media cordon as introduced in the previous section. Van Gogh was cremated on Tuesday, 9 November at a cemetery on the eastern edge of Amsterdam, not far from where he had lived or far from the place of his murder. For the occasion, the cemetery (the Nieuwe Oosterbegraafplaats) was closed to the general public. Apart from separating people who had a personal relationship with the deceased from the general public, the spatial arrangements provided a hierarchical division within the latter category. Admission to the cemetery’s auditorium, where the actual farewell ceremony was held, was restricted to the family and intimates of the deceased. The latter included, as a result of the nature of van Gogh’s activities, quite a few media people (both producers and celebrities). A large tent had been set up next to the auditorium for public figures, politicians, government representatives, journalists, and other people who had not been part of van Gogh’s inner circle, but who had been invited because his death was a public occasion. Those in the tent could follow the service on a screen. Another space had been delineated in the street in front of the cemetery entrance. Here, people who had not been personally invited gathered to follow the ceremony on a large screen. This group comprised neighborhood or Amsterdam people, activists, researchers, uninvited journalists, and anybody else who felt the urge to be there, a total of perhaps five hundred people. The ceremony was broadcast live on national television, so that the general public would be able to follow the event at home. Again, the selection of images and the presentation format made this media event more than a neutral registration of “things taking place.” The way the broadcast provided closure is a good example of how the media work to affirm and construct social bonding (cf. Couldry 2003: 66). To understand the potential of the broadcast, I first want to mention the presenter who was selected to provide the voice-over commentary, Maartje van Weegen. This television presenter is particularly well known from her covering of royal funerals, marriages, and other state and royal events. Her voice made the ceremony perceptible as a national event. Yet, at the same time, and albeit implicitly, her voice also lent weight and

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national importance to the involvement of the media themselves. The choice of van Weegen clearly illustrates Couldry’s observation that in the context of media events, “media work hardest to ground the representational authority on which they rely for their everyday practice” (Couldry 2003: 9). Another significant element of the broadcast was the skipping of the actual opening of the ceremony (a solo by a well-known Dutch violin player); instead, the audience was provided with a day-to-day presentation of “the most important news items” from 2 November until 9 November. Each day was presented in the form of an obituary, a broad white frame with the respective dates in black. The design was inspired by the title of van Gogh’s film about the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, 0605, which in its turn rephrased 9/11. Within the white frame, compilations of brief images summarized each day. The media thus gave the van Gogh murder and its aftermath a narrative structure, with a beginning (2/11) and an end (9/11),28 and by doing so, they led the way in forging a closure of the crisis. During the speeches, close-ups of the speakers alternated with closeups of celebrities (including politicians) and, less frequently, with images of the audience in the street, again establishing the authority of the television medium. The images of the ordinary people in the street made them “representatives of the people,” as opposed to the select company of politicians in the restricted area. Each speech, including the opening speech by van Gogh’s mother, received applause in the auditorium, in the tent, and in the street. This expressed support and unity, and therefore added to the closure potential of the event and intensified the event’s character of being a performance.29 Important in this respect are the remarks made in several speeches about the recent anti-Muslim attacks: Theo would have strongly condemned these as the opposite of free speech. We thus have to consider not only the ritual power of the media in such societal events, but also their active involvement therein, and the choices made. For family and friends, the cremation ceremony meant the closure of a hectic and chaotic period; for them, the period of private mourning could begin. For society, the broadcast of the ceremony also meant the closure of a hectic and chaotic period: society could now proceed as usual, albeit with hardened oppositions, for at least a while. After the broadcast, a few more violent incidents against Muslims took place, but the element of threat and violence that had lingered in the atmosphere gradually faded away. Apart from that, the cremation ceremony put an end to the demotic media access offered by the memorial. As I show below, the breach was closed by the cremation ceremony, and not, as seems plausible, by the clearance of the memorial itself.

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The spatial arrangements of the cremation ceremony (auditorium, tent, street) were not only made according to levels of intimacy, but also represented the conventional media hierarchy. Leaving van Gogh’s family and friends out of consideration, it is clear that the periphery (the street) was meant for ordinary people, while access to the center (auditorium plus tent) was reserved for celebrities and media professionals. As a matter of course, the broadcast focused on the ceremony, on the speakers, yet alternated with close-ups of the attendant celebrities. The few close-ups of ordinary people, as “representatives of the people,” did not change these representatives into media people this time. In terms of substantial media access, they were no different from the “ordinary people” watching the broadcast at home. They had no active role in this well-orchestrated ceremony, other than simply being there. In this respect, the cremation ceremony differed from the (equally well-orchestrated) noise wake, where “the people” were explicitly asked to perform, noisily and originally. The congruence between the two rituals, on the other hand, is that in both cases the people present duly followed the directions given by people “from” or “in” the media. The memorial site, however, was not organized by celebrities or the media elite, and only at this place were “ordinary people” at the center of the media’s interest. Yet, as explained at the beginning of this essay, the genesis of the memorial is entirely intertwined with the involvement of the media, media anticipation being key to the process. Precisely because the format of such memorial sites is media driven, the fact that they are media channels for ordinary people does not imply any altering of the existing media-defined social hierarchy: The symbolic power still remains with the media and those who are “naturally” part of the media space. The smooth closure of the breach brought about by the van Gogh cremation ceremony confirmed that the media elite remained in control of media access throughout the social crisis caused by the murder. At 7:30 AM on Wednesday, 10 November (the morning after Theo van Gogh’s cremation), the sanitation department removed the memorial from Linnaeusstraat “at the request of the van Gogh family.”30 An announcement had been placed at the memorial on 8 November. Hardly anybody, the media included, had deemed the removal significant or interesting: there was no audience except for myself and the occasional passer-by. The place of the murder returned to be an unmarked, ordinary part of the street, which has received little special attention since.31 The silent ending of the Theo van Gogh memorial site empirically illustrates the above conclusion that the cremation ceremony on 9 November had established the closure of both the crisis and the breach in the media cordon. At that moment, the Theo van Gogh memorial site ceased to be,

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in Couldry’s terms, a media-related space. Consequently, the clearance of the site—one might even wonder if one can still speak of a “memorial” at this stage—was not part of the ritualized events, but an ordinary public work.

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Notes My gratitude goes to Jeroen Beets for his useful comments and his assistance in editing. An earlier version of this article appeared in Quotidian 1(1) (Stengs 2009b). 1. I want to add that even the creative, individual contributions and elaborations to fit the situation and the deceased form a specific practice within the general ritual repertoire. 2. I should add here that van Gogh’s death had quite an emotional effect on me. Although Dutch politics and society had become increasingly polarized since 9/11 and the assassination of the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002, it was beyond comprehension that now, suddenly, “we” had reached a stage that artists and intellectuals had to fear for their lives. So I went to Linnaeusstraat as an anthropologist, but also as a Dutch person, an Amsterdammer, an Amsterdam intellectual, and a person from the neighborhood. 3. My research at the memorial site mainly consisted of following and recording the evolution of the memorial as precisely as possible. I therefore regularly photographed the entire memorial and as many details as possible. Primary observations were in what manner people were present at the site: The manner in which they presented their attributes to the memorial, how they remained and behaved, how they engaged in conversations or remained silent, and the topics of conversation. I also paid attention to the presence of the media: which media, when, where, and what they did (filming, interviewing, recording conversations). 4. The desk offices of several major Dutch newspapers (Volkskrant, Het Parool, NRC Handelsblad ) and several commercial broadcasting companies are located within five minutes of Linnaeusstraat. 5. On the Dutch notion of “senseless violence” (zinloos geweld ), see Blok 1991, 2001; Stengs 2003, 2007; Vasterman 2004. On the public commemorations of Pim Fortuyn, see Colombijn 2007; Margry 2007. 6. Via the famous “Sunflowers” by painter Vincent van Gogh (a great-uncle of Theo van Gogh). 7. In Dutch: “Ge zult niet doden” and “Blijf met je rotpoten van onze rot A’tje.” 8. In Dutch: “Een vrijheidsstrijder is vermoord, vaarwel Theo, Hein.” 9. In Dutch: “Lieve Theo! 2–11’04 Vrijheid van meningsuiting … Waar gaan we heen? Durft straks niemand meer wat te zeggen. … Wanneer dringt dit écht door in Den Haag? Hoeveel moeten er nog komen? Hoeveel moeten er nog gaan?! Zinloos! See you in heaven xxx Maaike” 10. In 1672 the de Wit brothers (influential political figures) were lynched as scapegoats in a complex political and economic crisis. The murder of Fortuyn, however,

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11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

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20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

Irene Stengs

is associated with the primordial political murder in the Netherlands, namely, that of William I, Prince of Orange, in 1584. William was killed by order of King Philip II of Spain for his role in the Netherlands’ declaration of independence from Spain. During my fieldwork at the Pim Fortuyn memorial sites, such freedom appeared absent, however. I have never felt so strongly silenced as in the tense atmosphere there. Any “wrong” remark seemed hazardous. Pim Fortuyn was murdered by Volkert van der G., who is generally categorized as a “leftist animal rights activist.” Cartoons by at least two well-known Dutch cartoonists (Joep Bertram and Greggrius Nekschot) were left at the memorial site (although we have to leave open the possibility that the cartoons merely very much resembled the styles of these two artists). In Dutch: “Nederland = land van bruggenbouwers” (literally “land of bridge builders”). In Dutch: “Een echte Moslim doet zoiets niet.” Orange is the Dutch national color (see note 10 on the Prince of Orange). In Dutch: “Als je het niet eens bent met dit mooie Nederland, ga dan naar een ander land. Weet dat je op deze weg nergens komt. Dit is niet de manier van spreken. NERGENS. N+J.” The Dutch word laf means “coward.” In Dutch; “Het vrije woord gaat boven religie. Dat vergeten fundamentalistische geitenneukers.” The card and the text refer to van Gogh’s infamous description of fundamental Muslim men as “goat fuckers.” In Dutch: “Watjes voor Cohen” and “Linkse watjes.” In Dutch: “Hé, ouwe vetzak, Je gestrekte been zal gemist worden.” Dam Square is not just Amsterdam’s central square; it is also the symbolical heart of the nation, featuring a Royal Palace for important ceremonies of state, the New Church (the scene of coronation ceremonies), and the national World War II monument. Approximately 25,000 people participated in the noise wake. In Dutch: “Hoofddoekjes af, Cohen weg.” In the course of the gathering, a memorial had evolved around the national World War II monument. The memorial resembled the Linnaeusstraat memorial in many details: cactuses, cigarettes, anti-senseless-violence messages, film containers, sunflowers, and bottles of beer and wine. Even the self-assigned “ritual expert” I had met earlier that afternoon was present to rearrange everything to his personal liking. With a burning torch in his hand, he seemed the guardian of the spot. Toward the end of the wake, a new category of attributes appeared in the memorial when many people left their signs, banners, whistles, pans, and wooden spoons. In Dutch: “Geen moorden in naam van mijn Islam” and “Moslims tegen geweld.” In addition to the noise wake and the memorial (a material articulation of both crisis and redress), two other redressive performances were organized by neighborhood organizations (including the local mosque) and Dutch-Moroccan organizations, respectively. The organizing parties attempted to redress the crisis by addressing the topics of contestation that concerned them specifically. Their efforts may also be read as attempts to render the crisis meaningful by converting certain values into the system (see Turner 1982: 75–76). The Dutch order of noting down dates as “date first—month second” is opposite to the American order (9/11).

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29. It is not a Dutch custom to respond with applause to funeral speeches. Public funerals are occasionally different, though. For instance, the public applauded when the hearse carrying the body of Pim Fortuyn passed by (as did the public that had come to witness the funeral procession of Princess Diana). 30. The memorial at van Gogh’s house was also removed. After consultation with the bereaved, the objects constituting the memorials are now kept in the Amsterdam City Archives. Six hundred of the notes and pictures have been restored and preserved, and are now on permanent display on the archives’ web site. 31. In commemoration of van Gogh a monument, entitled De Schreeuw (The Scream) was unveiled on 11 March 2007 in the Oosterpark. Van Gogh is modestly commemorated here on the anniversaries of his death. Until so far, only the so-called friends of Pim Fortuyn, a small group of dedicated Fortuyn followers, briefly commemorate van Gogh at Linnaeusstraat, before conducting a more extensive ritual in the Oosterpark.

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References Blok, Anton. (1991). “Zinloos en zinvol geweld.” Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift 18: 189–207. ———. (2001). Honour and Violence. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1991). Language and Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Colombijn, Freek. (2007). “The Search for an Extinct Volcano in the Dutch Polder: Pilgrimage to Memorial Sites of Pim Fortuyn.” Anthropos 102(1): 71–90. Couldry, Nick. (2003). Media Rituals. A Critical Approach. London: Routledge. Dayan, Daniel, and Elihu Katz. (1992). Media Events. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Doss, Erica. (2006). “Spontaneous Memorials and Contemporary Modes of Mourning in America.” Material Religion 2(3): 294–318. ———. (2008). The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials. Towards a Theory of Temporary Memorials. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Eyerman, Ron. (2008). The Assassination of Theo van Gogh: From Social Drama to Cultural Trauma. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kear, Adrian, and Deborah L. Steinberg, eds. (1999). Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief. New York: Routledge. Lisle, Debbie. (2004). “Gazing at Ground Zero: Tourism, Voyeurism and Spectacle.” Journal for Cultural Research 8(1): 3–22. Margry, Peter Jan. (2007). “Performative Memorials. Arenas of Political Resentment in Dutch Society.” In Peter Jan Margry and Herman Roodenburg, eds., Reframing Dutch Culture. Between Otherness and Authenticity. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 109–33. Santino, Jack, ed. (2006). Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Stengs, Irene. (2007). “Commemorating Victims of ‘Senseless Violence’: Negotiating Ethnic Inclusion and Exclusion.” In Peter Jan Margry and Herman Roodenburg, eds., Reframing Dutch Culture. Between Otherness and Authenticity. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 159–79. ———. (2009a). “Spontaneous Shrines.” In Clifton D. Bryant and Dennis L. Peck, eds., Encyclopedia of Death and Human Experience. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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———. (2009b). “Dutch Mourning Politics. The Theo van Gogh Memorial Space.” Quotidian 1(1). Sumiala-Seppänen, Johanna, and Matteo Stocchetti. (2005). “Mediated Sacralization and the Construction of Postmodern Communio Sanctorum: The Case of the Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh.” Material Religion 1(2): 228–49. Turner, Graeme. (2006). “The Mass Production of Celebrity. ‘Celtoids,’ Reality TV and the ‘Demotic Turn’.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 9(2): 153–65. Turner, Victor. (1982). From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications. ———. (1987). The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications. Vasterman, Peter. (2004). Mediahype. Amsterdam: Aksant. Walter, Tony, ed. (1999). The Mourning for Diana. Oxford: Berg.

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Chapter 3

Between Commemoration and Social Activism Spontaneous Shrines, Grassroots Memorialization, and the Public Ritualesque in Derry

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Jack Santino

The death of any individual strikes at the hearts of the living. Family and friends mourn a lost life; a community recognizes a permanent loss. If a death is thought to have been needless—or worse, politically motivated—mourning may well take on the trappings of public protest. Along with the official rituals of church and state, we often see, as the editors of this volume suggest, a kind of “grassroots memorialization,” in which individuals are mourned as a form of social action. When the causes of death are objectionable, foreseeable, or avoidable, people often mourn publicly in protest (Margry and Sánchez-Carretero this volume; Senie 2006). In this essay, using as an example the annual commemoration of “Bloody Sunday” in Londonderry (Derry), Northern Ireland, I argue that public memorialization is generally located in a conceptual field that ranges between commemoration and social activism. That is, to greater and lesser extents depending on the types of memorializations and the circumstances of their creation, acts and objects of public memory both refer to known persons and events, and propose attitudes, social positions, and social actions regarding those deaths and the circumstances that caused them. This continuum is evident both in performative public actions—such as parades or demonstrations, where the emphasis on a specific social agenda is often overt—and in material cultural objects, such as statues, which have the appearance of permanence and immu-

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tability. Although my emphasis here is on the phenomena I have named “spontaneous shrines,” I want to situate these within a range of events and materials so that we may more clearly see the particular dynamics of each. Derry has been the site of some of the worst and most spectacular clashes associated with the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, including the 1969 “Battle of the Bogside” and the 1972 Bloody Sunday killing of fifteen demonstrators by the First British Parachute Regiment. These events are remembered in multifarious ways—orally, visually, kinesically—in the Bogside itself, the working-class Roman Catholic area of Derry; and indeed throughout the city. As one leaves the Bogside, however, one will encounter a number of alternative interpretations of the events in question. Herein, I am focusing on the memorials of the residents of the Bogside: the photorealistic murals that align Rossville Street, where the civil rights demonstration was held; the monuments that now occupy that space; the annual memorial rally and procession; and the spontaneous shrines people have made of the monuments. By “spontaneous shrines,” I refer to those temporary memorials that people construct, on their own initiative, to mark the site of untimely deaths. These memorial assemblages (Santino 1986) are usually made up of flowers, candles, personal memorabilia, and notes, as well as religious icons. Any or all of the above may be present, and different circumstances will call for different elements. Deaths that are due to automotive accidents are usually marked (when they are marked) by a cross; mass-scale paramilitary attacks are frequently reacted to with written messages to the deceased and to the general public; and in the United States, a gangrelated murder is marked by a mural and a shrine containing elements that are meaningful primarily to gang members (Cooper and Sciorra 1994). Further, people often use these sites to hold vernacular memorial services and other rituals of commemoration, at the time of the deaths and on significant dates thereafter. Differences in the artifacts and images that comprise a shrine will also vary nationally, such as the use of the black ribbon and the image of white hands in Spain in response to ETA attacks, football scarves in Northern Ireland, or Buddhist symbols in Japan.1 Although the term spontaneous shrine has gained some acceptance (cf. Grider 2001), it is still somewhat controversial. By “spontaneous” I do not mean to imply that the actions of memorializing an individual at a place that is significant in the context of his or her death are impulsive (though they may be) or frivolous (which they never are); rather, I use the term to refer to the self-motivation of the actors involved. That is, their decision to create or contribute to such a site is generated by

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their own desires and by having witnessed friends and family doing the same. These shrines are not the result of an official directive from state or church; indeed, they are often frowned upon by representatives of those institutions. I have termed these assemblages shrines because they are more than simply memorials. I have been told repeatedly by people involved that it is important to them to leave a memento at a death site because it is the last place at which the person was alive. Thus the sites, and the shrines, often signify life rather than death, at least in a sense. The notes that are left there are communications with the deceased, with those who are beyond this world. Moreover, as Steven Zeitlin has shown, the notes are often written from the point of view of the deceased (2006; cf. Fraenkel 2001). The shrines are seen as a portal to the otherworld, a place where two-way communication can occur. For this reason alone, they can be viewed as shrines. Moreover, they frequently serve as destinations for journeys that are routinely dubbed “pilgrimages” (Dubisch 2005). And, of course, they celebrate the individuals who have died. They are more than memorials that have a secular or vernacular (if religious or spiritual) quality to them; they are a kind of folk shrine (see Santino 2006: 12). There is another aspect to spontaneous shrines, namely, the fact that they appear in public space and command public attention. The notes, for instance, may be written to the deceased, but they are publicly displayed, and are often intended for a wide readership (at the least, it is understood by contributors to a shrine that their notes will be viewed by a broad audience). The deaths that these shrines draw attention to were caused by circumstances that are a part of the public discourse. One reason why spontaneous shrines are a part of the public landscape, the culturescape (Appadurai 1990), is because they index public issues, whether it be drunk driving, teen suicide, police brutality, or paramilitary violence against civilians. Spontaneous shrines are created, when possible, at the actual sites where the deaths occurred, or as close to them as possible. When access to a site is not available, people place their objects—notes, flowers, personal items, all of which are messages to and representations of their relationship to the deceased—at a place that is suggestive of the actual site, or is related in some way to the persons killed. As stated above, people frequently state that the site itself is important to them because it is the last place the deceased was alive on this earth (Santino 2006). The shrines are on the ground that is itself a part of the event being referenced. By forcing attention to a place that was physically a part of the occurrence of dying, and that is often hallowed by the blood of the dead, spontaneous shrines not only commemorate the deaths of individuals but also draw attention to the reasons for those deaths and to social

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ills that need to be addressed. The implicit logic seems to be, had these issues been properly addressed, these deaths need not have occurred; or, alternatively, if we the people do not become aware of these issues, more such deaths will occur. I have suggested above that spontaneous shrines represent unofficial responses to untimely deaths, and to certain salient social issues. In doing so, I have constructed a dualistic framework between official and unofficial rituals and commemorations. While I think that this is a useful, indeed crucial, parameter in these cases, we must be aware that there will be a range of ritual responses to such deaths. A number of commemorative events for a single individual’s death may be held by that person’s family members, colleagues (fellow students, co-workers), church, and possibly his or her fellow citizens within a civic polity. Some of these are formal events, while others are less so. Deaths that touch on the culture of the ruling government—such as those of soldiers, police officers, or firefighters—will be met with ostentatious civil ritual. In these, the deaths are described as heroic sacrifices that further the foundational assumptions of that governing body; that is, they will be placed within official discourse. The first implication I want to draw from this is simply that in each memorial event, the deceased individual’s identity will be constructed according to the needs and nature of the group involved. A concomitant implication is that these identities, these constructions, may not always be congruent or compatible with each other. A family may want to erect a homemade cross beside the road at a place where a loved one died, but officials may not allow this. Officials sometimes replace the hand-constructed memorial with what they deem to be an acceptable alternative marker. This compromise is very often deemed unacceptable by the people concerned. We see here a clash over public space—who has access to it, who defines it, and who controls it (Everett 2002). Likewise, in Northern Ireland memorial murals were painted for members of paramilitary groups. The deceased are depicted in military dress and described as soldier–martyrs. At the same time, the notes and messages left at spontaneous shrines employ an entirely different discourse: Deceased individuals are addressed according to their family relationship (“Daddy,” “Grandpa,” “Peter”). The people who create the shrines refuse to use the language of paramilitary rhetoric, and insist on naming the personal, familial relationship that the same paramilitary actions have destroyed (Santino 2000). Spontaneous shrines frequently, by their very nature, also challenge hegemonic claims to space and the control of discourse. Clerics have been known to object to their existence, and to the events—the unsanctified rituals—that occur at them, since they exist outside the control of the

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official hierarchy of the church (Westgaard 2006). Commercial interests do not want them on or near their property for fear of losing business. And city officials are constantly negotiating their validity.

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Ranges of Commemorative Activities in Derry The second largest city in Northern Ireland is officially named both Londonderry and Derry, but is referred to only as Derry by the Catholic and nationalist citizens of both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. While it is viewed today as a success story of power sharing (the majority of the city’s population is Catholic, and the city council is an integrated one), it has a troubled past. The name is derived from an Irish word—Doire, anglicized to Derry—but it became Londonderry with the usurpation of the city by colonial “planters” (in this case, the London Company) in the seventeenth century. This conflicted discourse surrounding the city’s name is matched in a number of public memorial events. Memorialization is not new to Derry. Protestants and Unionists parade twice a year in memory of the lifting of the Siege of Derry in 1689, when the forces of King William of Orange broke the forces of King James. In December of each year, an effigy is burnt of Robert Lundy, the governor of Derry, who had decided to come to terms with James’s army prior to the arrival of William’s forces. The Burning of the Lundy, and the biannual parades, are spectacular events that dominate the city: Large numbers of people (many of them from outside the city) gather to enjoy the music and bonfires and to celebrate the events that they see as having been crucial to the continued existence of a Protestant state for Protestant people in the island of Ireland. The Roman Catholic residential area, known as the Bogside, lies down the hill, outside the walls of the old city. There, the more recent events of the Battle of the Bogside and the infamous Bloody Sunday are commemorated in murals, monuments, and an annual demonstration. On 12 August 1969, during a procession of the Apprentice Boys (a fraternal organization, similar to the Orange Order, named for the apprentice boys who prevented Lundy from meeting with the opposing forces), residents of the Bogside met the parade (which they viewed as invasive and triumphalist) with resistance. Rocks and bottles were hurled, and the scene quickly became a full-scale riot. Homemade Molotov cocktails were met with the brunt of the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s might. No-go areas were created by the residents; someone painted the gable-end of a house with the legend “You are now entering Free Derry.” The RUC

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mobilized tanks to bulldoze the barricades. The battle was waged for thirty-six hours, and is referred to as the “Battle of the Bogside.” A few years later, in January 1971, a peaceful demonstration for Catholic civil rights was shattered by bullets fired by the British armed forces: Fourteen demonstrators were killed outright, and another died in hospital. This has become widely known as “Bloody Sunday,” and these events are seared into the public imagination of the Irish of all backgrounds. Making matters worse, an initial investigation into the actions of the British forces by a member of the British parliament entirely exonerated the soldiers. Today, these events are remembered in several spectacular ways. The area where the demonstration was held has been rebuilt, but it is surrounded by murals, painted in a photorealistic style (unlike those in Belfast and other parts of Northern Ireland), that depict famous scenes from that day: A child wearing a World War II gas mask and shielding himself with a bed spring; Father Daley waving his handkerchief as a flag of truce as he desperately tries to carry a wounded man to safety; the faces of the people killed. On a large, grassy traffic island, there are highly significant monuments to the dead, including the original gable with “You Are Now Entering Free Derry.” Next to it is an H-shaped block of granite that represents the infamous H-block cells of the Maze prison, where Republican prisoners were held. At the other end of the traffic island, the names of the fifteen people who died on Bloody Sunday are inscribed. On the various occasions that I visited the spot, I saw objects such as a Illustration 3.1. Mural by the Bogside Artists. Images of Bernadette Devlin, children fighting sodiers, a woman rattling a litter bin lid, and the iconic Free Derry wall. Photo: Peter Jan Margry, 2008.

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plastic statue of the Blessed Virgin placed there, and on other occasions, flowers. This monument is not a gravestone; no-one is actually buried at this site. In a way that is similar to the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, DC, this public monument was seen as incomplete and provoked a response, a need for personalization, to honor the dead in an ongoing, open-ended way. In addition to the murals and the monuments, which are more or less permanent, the Bloody Sunday deaths are annually commemorated, as people take to the streets carrying banners painted with the faces of the loved ones who were killed. This kind of symbolic dramatic event is clearly addressed to a societal grievance that I call “ritualesque” (Santino 2009; 2011). The annual Bloody Sunday demonstration usually comprises family members carrying large images of the loved ones who were killed. The event simultaneously mourns and commemorates the fifteen people who were killed that day and is also a public protest against the unfair treatment of Roman Catholics under British rule generally, and what is viewed as a cover-up by the British authorities specifically. Because of this duality of mourning and outrage, of “mourning in protest,” as Harriet Senie (2006) calls it, these commemorations are a prime example of a ritualesque public event. This term complements the well-known term coined by Mikhail Bakhtin, the “carnivalesque.” In my studies of spontaneous shrines and other public memorializations of death (Santino 2006), I noted that such phenomena simultaneously commemorate people who have died, usually in an untimely manner, and call attention to the circumstances of their deaths (drunk driving, police brutality, paramilitary violence, etc.). In doing so, spontaneous shrines ask the spectator to take a position on those circumstances, that is, to condemn them or to change them. As such, these phenomena are inherently political. They are also performative, in the sense that J. L. Austin had in mind for certain vocal utterances that change social situations by being spoken (“I solemnly swear,” “I now declare you husband and wife,” and so on). Spontaneous shrines and many public memorializations of death, such as the reading aloud at the steps of the US Capitol of the names of the soldiers who have died in Iraq or the making and displaying of the AIDS quilt, are, along with memorializing, also attempts to change some aspects of society. It is this transformative intent that is “ritualesque.” These events, while primarily symbolic, are also instrumental—they are designed and intended to produce change, or action, directly. The ritualesque, then, refers to instrumental (rather than purely expressive) but still symbolic public actions that are done to make a difference, to cause a change in social attitudes and behaviors, to make something happen.

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I derive this concept from a consideration of several public events, not all of them political. Again, Austin’s concept of “performative utterances” is important here; he noted a class of verbal actions that accomplish social change by virtue of being spoken (in the appropriate circumstances by the appropriate individuals). Most of these are associated with rites of passage. It is this concept of performativity that we see in rituals generally—both rites of passage and other rituals—in that rituals are designed and understood to cause change (such as during a wedding, as suggested above, or the transubstantiation of bread and wine during a Catholic mass). These changes, though empirically unprovable, are felt to be real by those who participate in and accept the terms of the ritual. Outsiders will consider them symbolic actions, but to those within the belief system in question, they are real, albeit social, changes. Ritual in context, then, is instrumental rather than expressive. It is symbolic instrumental action. I am thinking here of ritual in an unproblematized way. That is, societies recognize certain ceremonial events—weddings, masses, bar mitzvahs, inaugurations, etc.—as ritual. There are, however, other events that share some of the characteristics of ritual but are not themselves fully ritual. Cultural symbols (images, gestures, objects), processions, music, and so forth are often used to address social issues. These are often political events, such as antiwar protests, but we also see emergent memorialization on significant anniversaries such as that of the Holocaust, or of Derry’s Bloody Sunday. Moreover, we can include programs that aim to discourage teenagers from drinking and driving by staging the aftermath of a fatal car accident, using the Grim Reaper and actual police and rescue personnel to make the point (Miller 2003). Though they address a social rather than a political problem, these too are ritualesque. In Austin’s sense, the performative refers to this intention to effect change, and that is how I prefer to use the term. However, to call a genre “performative” simply indicates that it exists only in enactment, such as in a dance or a parade. To avoid ambiguity, and also to reach further with the idea, I believe we can acknowledge the ritualesque as a dynamic of public events. Just as many events have elements of carnival that we call “carnivalesque” but are not themselves fully carnival, many events share elements of ritual without being fully ritual and can therefore be called “ritualesque.” Many large-scale festive events have this quality. For instance, both Gay Pride Day and Earth Day are concerned with social attitudes, and are in some way intended and designed to modify attitudes and behaviors. “El Día de la Raza” in the United States also shares this quality. Likewise, while many political demonstrations—whether against war, nuclear en-

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ergy, or gun control—may appear (and be) quite festive in their gatherings of large numbers of people, they are held with a particular purpose and goal. Together, the concepts of “ritualesque” and “carnivalesque” represent two poles of public events. They are not opposites. The Gay Pride Day antics, for instance, are very often fully carnivalesque, but in this case the carnivalesque is used in ritualesque ways: It is the very display of carnivalesque, festive inversion, of the public display of skin, that is done to challenge onlookers to rethink their attitudes and assumptions. The deaths of individuals are often publicly commemorated as a form of protest. In the examples from Derry presented above, we can see a range of commemoration, from large, biannual parades in the city center celebrating a three-hundred-year-old victory that is viewed as a charter for the contemporary status quo of the union of Northern Ireland with Great Britain; through performative ritualesque demonstrations in which images of deceased individuals are publicly displayed in protest against that status quo and against the discrimination, violence, and sectarianism the demonstrators associate with it; to personal ritual acts of remembrance. Objects and murals stand as reminders of the flare-up of conflict and the use of deadly force; together they create a space that is valorized by communal resistance. These monuments stand where the battles and the deaths occurred, and serve as indexes to them. They represent the area where people who are widely felt to be innocent of any wrongdoing were killed. As a result, the gravestone-like monument that has the names of the dead engraved upon it is a site of participatory, ongoing ritual activities, the laying on of flowers, the leaving of sacred icons. This is done singularly and spontaneously as individuals are so moved. The parades of the Apprentice Boys are held on the walls of Derry, high above the Bogside, from whence, it is said, British snipers premeditatedly shot and killed civilians. Space, place, ritual, and memorialization are collapsed here, as each relies and builds on one another in the continual multivocal construction of meaning, and society. There is always a continuum from commemoration to performativity (seeking to cause change, following Austin) at all levels. Official statues often appear only to commemorate, but their performative work is to create the sense of normativity, and is thus invisible. Older war memorials and the statues of generals become invisible. James E. Young has suggested that the construction of an official memorial marks the first stage of forgetting (1993). This is why the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was so revolutionary—it disrupted this discourse of normativity regarding military power and allowed for, called for, participation, completion, by members of the public, members of the community it served (cf. Dubisch 1993). Official memorials signify that things are as they should be; there

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has been loss and suffering, a rupture in the metanarrative, but the official memorial seeks to contain that rupture and define it according to its own terms. Social structure is naturalized. But each monument, each ritual act, and each ritualesque event speaks to and for its own group.2 The various types of Derry memorials reflect the importance of agency, and the placing of objects on the memorial markers demonstrates a personal and communal incorporation of material culture into communal sacred space. While the placing of a flower or a plastic statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary may well reflect a community ethos and belief system, it also is a singular act by an individual, who mourns the dead and despises and condemns the conditions that caused that death.

Notes 1. See Sánchez-Carretero in this volume. Some of the variations among types of shrines have been noted by Thomas (2006). 2. On monuments naturalizing society, see Handelman 1990.

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References Appadurai, Arjun. (1990). “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Theory, Culture, and Society 7: 295–310. Austin, J. L. (1962). How To Do Things With Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cooper, Martha, and Joseph Sciorra. (1994). R.I.P.: Memorial Wall Art. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Dubisch, Jill. (1993). “‘Foreign Chickens’ and Other Outsiders: Gender and Community in Greece.” American Ethnologist 20: 272–87. ———. (2005). “Healing ‘the Wounds That Are Not Visible’: A Vietnam Veterans Motorcycle Pilgrimage.” In Jill Dubisch and Michael Winkelman, eds., Pilgrimage and Healing. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 135–154. Everett, Holly. (2002). Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture. Denton: University of North Texas Press. Fraenkel, Béatrice. (2001). Les écrits de septembre. Paris: Textuel. Grider, Sylvia. (2001). “Spontaneous Shrines: A Modern Response to Tragedy and Disaster.” New Directions in Folklore 5 (October). http://www.temple.edu/english/isllc/ newfolk/shrines_update.html. Handelman, Don. (1990). Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hass, Kristin Ann. (1998). Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Berkeley: University of California Press. Miller, Montana. (2003). “Every Fifteen Minutes Someone Dies”: How People Play in a Staged Drunk Driving Tragedy. PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles.

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Santino, Jack. (1986). “The Folk Assemblage of Autumn: Tradition and Creativity in Halloween Folk Art.” In John Michael Vlach and Simon J. Bronner, eds., Folk Art and Art Worlds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 151–69. ———. (2000). Signs of War and Peace: Social Conflict and the Uses of Symbols in Public. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. ———, ed. (2006). Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. ———. (2009). “The Ritualesque: Festival, Politics, and Popular Culture.” Western Folklore 68(1): 9–26. ———. (2011). “The Carnivalesque and the Ritualesque.” Journal of American Folklore 124: 61–73. Senie, Harriet. (2006). “Mourning in Protest: Spontaneous Memorials and the Sacralization of Public Space.” In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 41–56. Thomas, Jeannie Banks. (2006). “Communicative Commemoration and Graveyard Shrines: Princess Diana, Jim Morrison, My ‘Bro’ Max, and Boogs the Cat.” In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 17–40. Westgaard, Hege (2006). “‘Like a Trace’: The Spontaneous Shrine as a Cultural Expression of Grief.” In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 147–76. Young, James E. (1993). The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Zeitlin, Steve. (2006). “‘Oh Did You See the Ashes Come Thickly Falling Down?’ Poems Posted in the Wake of September 11.” In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 99–118.

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Chapter 4

Memorializing Shooters with Their Victims Columbine, Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois University Sylvia Grider

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Introduction In the past twenty-five years, the custom has developed to memorialize victims of tragedy and disaster by the creation of spontaneous shrines or performative memorials at or near the site, which has today become so common that Erica Doss calls the phenomenon “memorial mania” (Doss 2008b). Because of the emotional intensity of the context in which they are created, these shrines express the immediate prevailing local worldview. Generally, they are anonymous, communal creations that conform to community standards and mores. As one researcher remarked about the Columbine shrines, “Memorials are only as powerful as the community they seek to honor allows them to be” (Delgado 2003: 58). The community in which a shrine is located has the responsibility for dismantling and disposing of the shrine, including decisions regarding archiving and preserving memorabilia. Members of that same community straighten up and otherwise tend to the upkeep of a shrine as long as the shrine is active. Anybody can place whatever they want to in a shrine; likewise, anybody can remove whatever they want to from a shrine, especially those artifacts or messages that a viewer may find offensive or inappropriate. In spontaneous shrines, appropriateness is relative, existing in the eye of the beholder. So what happens when someone decides to memorialize the murderer in the same shrine with his victims? This chapter explores some of the

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complex issues surrounding shrine ownership through the lens of who is memorialized and with what results. Case studies of three notorious American school shootings are presented: Columbine High School (20 April 1999), Virginia Tech (16 April 2007), and Northern Illinois University (14 February 2008). Following all three of these shootings, the shooters were temporarily memorialized in the same shrines as their victims, resulting in controversy and sometimes violent interaction. Before the Columbine shootings in 1999, there was no precedent in American history for memorializing murderers in spontaneous shrines, either with their victims or elsewhere. The overwhelming majority of participants in the creation of shrines following these three high-profile school shootings chose to memorialize the victims only. However, in each case one outspoken individual chose to honor the memory of the murderers in the same shrine as their victims, utilizing such semiotically charged icons as crosses. In all three of these cases, the memorials for the murderers overtly expressed the personal beliefs of three individuals, in direct opposition to the majority. Their actions did, however, result in some other participants expressing similar opinions through the artifacts and messages they subsequently placed in the shrines. The memorials for the murderers precipitated controversy and sometimes violent interactions among shrine visitors, which dramatically validates the work of Margry and Sánchez-Carretero, who have proposed that “evocative messages and drawings deposited at these sites elicit interactive responses in a dynamic process of making meaning. These often stir up strong emotions and stimulate intense debate among visitors,” and also that “citizens do not place memorabilia or offerings at memorial sites solely in memory of the deceased. Through their actions, they also send out messages asking for action” (Margry and SánchezCarretero 2007). The controversies at all three of these memorial sites were basically religious, but at Columbine the political and American constitutional issue of freedom of speech emerged and was played out against the backdrop of large crosses covered with such incongruous popular culture artifacts as teddy bears and balloons interspersed with Bibles, crucifixes, and rosaries.

Columbine High School: 20 April 1999 Prior to the Columbine massacre, America had experienced sporadic school shootings, which escalated to six episodes in 1997/1998, resulting in a total of fifteen deaths. In all of these episodes, the general re-

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sponse and political issues resulting from that response were an attempt to erase the names of the shooters from memory, to forget that they ever existed. A notable exception to such erasure was the name of Charles Whitman, who in 1966, from atop the tower at the University of Texas, shot and killed fourteen people and wounded thirty-one more before he himself was shot and killed by law enforcement personnel. This episode is frequently referred to as the “Whitman massacre” or the “Whitman murders” (Lavergne 1997). In 1999, the shootings at Columbine added the names of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to the public lexicon; in 2007 Sung-Hui Cho, or simply “Cho,” became the fourth killer whose name the American public is unlikely soon to forget. Before the shootings, Columbine High School was just another large, anonymous, suburban American high school in a pleasant and affluent housing subdivision. To outsiders, a high school named after the Colorado state flower sounded benign, even quaint. But on Tuesday, 20 April 1999, Hitler’s birthday, the name of Columbine High School was drilled into the consciousness of the whole nation. The date chosen by the murderers was no mere coincidence. The fiery climax of the siege of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, by officers of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) was 19 April 1993. To avenge the lives lost in Waco, Timothy McVeigh chose the date of 19 April 1995 to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The Columbine shooters, who were fascinated by Hitler and Nazism, chose 20 April as a composite homage to the previous carnage and to the memory of Hitler. All of that day and into the evening, viewers were mesmerized by the continuous TV coverage of mass murder and its aftermath. Horrifying footage of teenagers running for their lives, with their hands clasped over their heads, was played over and over. Students and teachers trapped in the school made desperate cell phone calls to law enforcement, emergency services, families, and friends with conflicting and sometimes unintelligible information. Gunfire, screaming, and explosions could be heard in the background of many of these calls. After the forty-five-minute shooting rampage ended, law enforcement officers spent nearly four hours searching the huge school, rescuing the wounded and tallying the dead. The final body count was twelve students and one teacher dead of gunshot wounds, twenty-four wounded, many seriously, and two students dead from self-inflicted shots to the head. These two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, both seniors at Columbine High School, were the murderers. The day after the shooting, 21 April, students and other local people began to bring school-related items, flowers, candles, notes, and other

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mementos—often in groupings of thirteen matching items, one for each murder victim—to the school and placed them at several prominent sites near the campus, including covering the cars of some of the victims with memorabilia (Griego 1999). As a murder site, the campus itself was ordered temporarily off-limits by local law enforcement officials. The lighted candles, flowers, small crosses, and hushed crowds created an aura of solemnity and reverence. As word of the shrines spread, aided by on-site newscasters who used the shrines as backdrops, people arrived by the thousands to visit the shrines and add their own offerings, which ultimately grew to the size of a football field. One eyewitness account catalogued the partial contents of the shrine: bouquets of flowers, poems, teddy bears, class photos, school jerseys, letter sweaters, footballs, cards, letters, balloons, crosses, framed religious prints, laminated Bibles, posters, bed sheets lettered with tearful comments and biblical passages, origami cranes, American flags, sneakers, soccer balls, candles, and more (Doss 2002: 68). The shrines quickly moved from being merely interview backdrops to the focus of almost constant press and broadcast media coverage describing the phenomenon. Since details about the murders were scant at first, the photogenic shrines provided the media with an alternate but related topic to feed public interest in what had happened at Columbine. The first mourners came to Columbine from the local community and from

Illustration 4.1. Memorial assemblage at Columbine High School, partly covered by tents, April 1999. Photo: Erika Doss. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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other communities within easy driving distance of the school, but soon, visitors were coming from throughout the nation, as had happened in Oklahoma City following the bombing of the federal building in 1995 (Kurtz 1999). Such massive visitation can be regarded, at least for some visitors, as a manifestation of “dark tourism,” or deliberately seeking out sites where tragedies or catastrophes have occurred (Foley and Lennon 2000). Other visitors, however, came on a sort of pilgrimage, bringing with them Christian-themed memorabilia that they placed in the shrine. The content and appearance of the Columbine shrines were generally consistent with others that have been documented at such widely divergent sites as the fatal collapse of the Texas A&M University student bonfire in 1999 (Grider 2000) and following the 1989 Hillsborough soccer disaster in England, in which nearly a hundred fans were crushed to death against a security fence (Walter 1991). The distinguishing characteristic of the Columbine shrines was the quantity of evangelical Christianthemed messages and artifacts; otherwise, they conformed to the same general pattern and structure of previous shrines, consisting primarily of candles, flowers, stuffed animals, balloons, photographs, notes and messages, and personal or idiosyncratic items, including much religious material.1 One mourner at Columbine commented to a news reporter, “What’s really sad is that we already know what to bring” (NPR 2007). Her comment indicates the existence of a mental template that guides participants whenever they suddenly and unexpectedly are faced with the creation of spontaneous shrines at disaster sites. One aspect of this mental template for the creation of the shrines at Columbine was the exclusion of any artifacts memorializing the murderers or expressions of hatred and condemnation toward them. As far as can be determined from documentation nearly a decade after the fact, the conventional shrines at Columbine at first contained no references to the shooters and no political statements regarding gun control. According to Erica Doss, then a professor at the nearby University of Colorado, “the spontaneous shrine erected at Columbine High School in 1999 served in large part to proselytize on behalf of evangelical Christianity, and to ignore the issues of teen alienation and gun violence that orchestrated its machination” (Doss 2008a: 41). Instead of serving as a forum for political discourse, the shrines functioned as a venue for expressions of grief and as so-called portals for communication with the dead through written and printed messages, a huge percentage of which expressed overtly Christian content, such as, “Heavenly Father, hear our cry.”2 Outspoken Christian evangelicalism characterized the Colorado community in which Columbine is located long before the shootings occurred. Furthermore, widespread media and Internet coverage magnified the

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story of two murder victims—Cassie Bernall (Bernall 2000) and Rachel Scott (Nimmo, Scott, and Rabey 2000)—who allegedly proclaimed their Christian belief before they were gunned down. These girls were consistently referred to as “martyrs” in the Christian press (Watson 2002). In an article entitled, “I Smell the Presence of Satan,” a journalist objectively described “the power of the evangelical Christian culture that has taken root in Littleton, and among its young people, as it has in many of the nation’s suburbs” (Cullen 1999). This evolving story of the girls’ alleged martyrdom (which since has been soundly refuted by hard evidence) served to intensify the overtly Christian quality of the shrines. According to one researcher, “The Columbine martyrs provide a way to hold together the sociological and spiritual, the political and the religious, in evangelical’s ongoing argument with contemporary American culture” (Watson 2002: 27). The local, familiar, vernacular Columbine shrines that grieving community members started creating at various points near the campus the day after the shooting were overshadowed a week later by the actions of Greg Zanis, an apparently well-meaning carpenter from a suburb of Chicago with no previous connection to Columbine. Zanis, the son of a Greek Orthodox priest, conducts a private ministry, “Crosses for Losses,” in which he goes to the sites of violent death and erects memorial crosses for each of the victims in a personal crusade to bring comfort to the friends and families of the dead and express his Christian love for them.3 Occasionally his crosses and evangelical Christianity cause hard feelings because not all of the victims he makes crosses for are Christian. A carpenter by profession, he started this personal ministry in 1996 after the murder of his father-in-law. Media accounts speculate that by 2004 Zanis may have erected as many as eight thousand of these crosses for victims, primarily in the Midwest, at sites ranging from multiple-death road accidents, high-rise fires, and structural collapses of buildings to other shootings. Although he usually drives to the crime or accident site to put up the hand-crafted crosses himself, at his own expense, he has reportedly mailed crosses to several foreign countries. He has been quoted in the media as saying that he doesn’t erect crosses at a site unless he is asked to do so. According to media accounts, one of the Columbine students and some of his friends found out about Zanis and contacted him and asked him to come to Columbine and erect fifteen crosses, one for each of the fatalities, including the shooters (Larkin 2007: 50; Zoba 2000: 45). This was apparently the first time that Zanis had been asked to erect crosses for murderers as well as their victims. Zanis erected the first set of fifteen Columbine crosses on the hilltop in Clement Park, adjacent to the school grounds, on 27 April, one week af-

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ter the shootings and after the larger shrine nearer the school that had attracted thousands of visitors began to suffer from the inclement weather.4 April is still late winter in Colorado, so the shrines were subjected to the ravages of violent weather, ranging from rain to snowstorms to high winds. At one point some of them caught fire from the candles, generating even more distress throughout the already grief-stricken community (Duran 1999a). As the shrines became increasingly bedraggled, the Foothills Park and Recreation District, which had jurisdiction over the park, decided that they should be removed. At the request of the Foothills Park and Recreation District, which lacked the personnel and facilities to do the job itself, the soggy and bedraggled objects were carefully gathered by volunteers from the local museums, including the Colorado Historical Society, and temporarily stored in a vacant federal building in Denver. Families were allowed to take away selected memorabilia, as were various museums. After consulting with the Smithsonian Institution and the Colorado Historical Society, the Littleton Historical Museum was designated as the official repository for a representative sample of the artifacts (Able 1999; Cart 1999; Duran 1999b; Simpson 2007). There was simply too much material to archive everything, and much of the remaining memorabilia was too fragile, damaged, and deteriorated to keep. Zanis created special, large, six-foot-tall crosses for Columbine instead of the smaller crosses he had erected at various sites throughout the country. It appears that he was deliberately trying to distinguish and separate his memorial from the huge conventional shrine nearer the school. The Zanis assemblage was significantly different from the other spontaneous shrines at Columbine in several aspects. First, he chose to erect the crosses in a separate, dramatic, and obvious location instead of incorporating his crosses into the already-existing shrine. The vernacular protocol is for mourners and visitors to add to existing shrines, not to create separate, distinctly different shrines of their own once other shrines have begun to attract large numbers of visitors and to accumulate memorabilia. Second, the large size of the crosses was unusual. Each cross was just over six feet tall (with an additional two feet or so of the shaft sunk into the ground). Most mourners do not bring objects of this size to place in a spontaneous shrine. Another fundamental difference was that the Zanis shrine was created by an outsider with no previous connection to Columbine, not by local community members. The usual pattern in the creation of spontaneous shrines is that local people who can get to the site quickly bring the first memorial offerings to a catastrophe site, often within hours of the event. The most glaring difference, however, was that two of the fifteen crosses clearly memorialized the shooters. There was no precedent for memorializing the murderers with their victims.

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As was widely reported in the press, Zanis drove all night from Illinois— sixteen hours—and erected the large crosses on the hill in Clement Park overlooking the campus. Curious bystanders and Zanis’s son, who accompanied him to Colorado, helped dig the holes and raise the crosses, which took most of the night. Then he turned around and drove back home. The community woke to the dramatic sight of fifteen large crosses silhouetted against the sky atop this hill. According to an interview with Zanis, the imagery was deliberate. His interviewer, Wendy Zoba, is a senior writer for Christianity Today magazine, and her analysis of events following the shootings at Columbine is heavily weighted with an evangelical tone. Nevertheless, she conducted more interviews with Zanis than any other reporter. Zanis explained to her, “We were trying to make this sort of like Mount Calvary or in the movie Spartacus, when they come out of Rome and all the crosses were there with people hung on them” (Zoba 2000: 46). Unlike the other shrine at Columbine, the Zanis crosses immediately precipitated controversy and public debate. As soon as they heard about the crosses, various anti-Christian organizations that monitor issues of separation of church and state contacted the Foothills Parks and Recreation District and threatened to file lawsuits if the crosses were not removed.5 Their objections were overshadowed by the more widespread public uproar that began as soon as people realized that there were fifteen crosses. The crosses for the shooters bracketed the other thirteen, with one placed at each end of the row of crosses, which Zanis called the “fangs,” a curiously vicious image compared to his other public statements about the crosses (Zoba 2000: 45). Zanis was clearly aware of the significance of these two additional crosses. For example, he told one reporter that his stated reason for using a different lettering style on them, a kind of ersatz Greek, was to “disassociate them from Christ. I believe they were nonbelievers in the Lord” (Follis 1999). In another rather garbled statement, Zanis told Zoba, “I just want people to know one person loves them—Greg Zanis. I don’t care where they’re at. It’s very simple: Jesus’ arms are open for you and he loves you more than I do. He cares about you. That’s the point” (Zoba 2000: 45). He has been widely quoted in the media saying that his own son at first asked him not to put up crosses for the shooters, although his son then helped him erect the assemblage of fifteen crosses. By putting up the two additional crosses anyway, the memory of the shooters was refocused in the shattered community. As Jack Santino has pointed out, “Spontaneous shrines place deceased individuals back into the fabric of society … into everyday life as it is being lived” (Santino 2006a: 13). The presence of Zanis’s large crosses on the hill intensified the Christian context of the memorialization of both the victims and their murders,

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Illustration 4.2. A woman prays below a 6 ft cross in honor of shooter Dylan Klebold. 15 identical crosses were planted on a hill overlooking Columbine High School, 1 for each victim of the massacre, including the shooters, 28 April 1999. Photo: Kevin Moloney, Getty images.

and in so doing polarized much of the community, not around the predictable issue of separation of church and state but rather over the appropriateness of memorializing the shooters and their victims at the same site, which certainly is not a constitutional issue. The voice of the antiChristian constituency was overwhelmed by the more volatile issue of memorializing the shooters. Had Zanis erected only thirteen crosses, it is unlikely that such community-wide acrimony would have erupted. The issue was clearly a difference of opinion between those who felt that the murderers deserved forgiveness and those who adamantly stated that the murderers did not deserve any type of positive public recognition. At first all of the crosses had, according to Zoba, “a healing effect on the community” (Zoba 2000: 47). Many regarded the crosses as a calming presence as they tried to reconcile themselves to the tragedy that had invaded their community, regardless of how many crosses were on the hill. Visitation to the crosses on the hill eclipsed visitation to the other shrines elsewhere, closer to the school. Many people reacted positively to the crosses by inscribing Bible verses on them, such as “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23: 34). In the manner of graffiti, some of the messages became self-referential: “How can anyone forgive you?” was followed by someone who wrote over and over, “I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you.” Other messages were conciliatory: “I’m sorry we failed you. May God have mercy on your soul,” and

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“No one is to blame.”6 Visitors also attached memorabilia to the crosses and piled artifacts around the bases of the crosses. Hate messages were more common: “Murderers burn in hell,” “Hate breeds hate,” “You died a year ago, and no one noticed.” Someone left a teddy bear smeared with ketchup that looked like blood. Others spat on the shooter crosses. According to the Washington Post, “Some put black plastic bags over the crosses for Harris and Klebold. Others took the bags down. Some placed obscene letters on the killers’ crosses. Police removed them [the letters] at night. It is as if even this patch of ground resists healing and instead germinates grief ” (Adams 1999). The Zanis crosses became the locus for the community to act out its conflicted responses to the murders. The dialogic nature of the controversy over memorializing the shooters turned this Columbine shrine on the hill into a performative memorial, distinguished by the interactions of visitors with one another and with the crosses themselves. The assemblage of crosses on the hill became a rowdy forum in which visitors could act out, or perform, their viewpoints for everybody else to see and react to. TV stations from as far away as Houston’s Christian-based KLTJ to CNN covered the visitation and, whenever possible, the conflicts that arose among the visitors, which intensified the performance aspect of the growing controversy. It is estimated that as many as 125,000 people came to the hill to see the crosses for themselves, sometimes waiting in the rain for up to two hours before they got to the crosses (Larkin 2007: 50; Zoba 2000: 46). These visitations frequently took on the dramaturgy of guerrilla theater, with pushing, shoving, and shouting among many visitors. In spite of the raging controversy, visitors brought so many artifacts that they almost obscured the crosses (Zoba 2000: 46). The issue of the fifteen crosses was further complicated, however, because some devout Christians regarded the defacing of the shooter crosses as a sacrilege, on the grounds that all crosses should be regarded as sacred and treated accordingly. Others held the view that erecting the crosses to the shooters in the first place was a sacrilege because Harris and Klebold were murderers and honoring them with a cross was an abuse of this sacred symbol. Zanis professed to be surprised and hurt by the negative reaction to his self-initiated gesture of reconciliation. The acrimony reached a peak on 30 April, three days after the crosses were erected, when the outraged father of one of the murdered students, Brian Rohrbough, and some of his friends chopped down the two offending crosses and carted them off the hill. Earlier he had posted signs on both of the crosses reading, “Murderers burn in hell” (Zoba 2000: 47). Before he tore down the two crosses, with TV cameras rolling, he was widely quoted as saying, “We don’t build a monument to Adolf

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Hitler and put it in a Holocaust museum—and it’s not going to happen here” (Zoba 2000: 49). When he heard about the destruction of the two shooter crosses, Zanis drove back to Colorado and removed the remaining thirteen crosses, taking them back home with him. This further enraged Rohrbough because he felt that the thirteen crosses for the victims should have been left in place. The controversy did not end, however, with Zanis’s removal of the remaining crosses because other members of the community besides Rohrbough continued to assert their right to express their opinions. By the following day, someone replaced Zanis’s crosses with smaller ones. A pastor at a local Episcopal church put up a single large cross where the crosses for the shooters had stood and announced plans to come and sit on the hill by the cross every day until school was out (Westword News 1999). Several people in the community (some say hundreds) contacted Zanis and asked him to bring back the thirteen crosses. Sensitive to the controversy that the shooter crosses created, he made another set of only thirteen smaller crosses and took them back to Colorado. Zanis’s original intention in erecting the fifteen crosses was not to create controversy, but rather to bring his personal version of comfort to the shocked and grieving community. However, he persisted in expressing his right to place crosses on the hill in Clement Park, switching from fifteen to thirteen crosses. The Foothills Park and Recreation District, which had jurisdiction over the park, refused to let him put the thirteen crosses back on the hill, in part to try to put an end to the disruptive controversy and also out of concern for public safety because the path up the hill had become so muddy and slippery. Then local government officials, resorting to a legal strategy, ruled that these religious symbols could not remain on public ground, and Zanis had to remove the second set of crosses from a parking lot near the school and move them to a location several miles away, on private property. On 27 May Zanis’s second set of thirteen crosses was moved to a cemetery in Littleton, where some of the Columbine victims are buried. This second set of crosses was later removed and taken to the federal warehouse in Denver, to be stored with the memorabilia from the other spontaneous shrines. They later were replaced in the cemetery by marble crosses. Many officials who had to deal with the volatile and emotional issues surrounding the mass murder at the high school regarded Zanis and his crosses as a major nuisance and distraction. They felt that the controversy took precious time and emotional energy away from their more pressing duties and responsibilities of dealing with the aftermath of the shootings, including moving the Columbine student body to other schools for the remainder of the school year and restoring Clement Park

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as a public recreational facility. Others in the community regarded Zanis as a religious zealot who was exploiting their local and personal tragedy for his own ends. The acrimony that the fifteen Zanis crosses precipitated regarding the memorialization of the shooters spilled out from the hill in Clement Park into the wider community. When a local church planted fifteen trees on church property memorializing those who died at Columbine, Rohrbough and his friends cut down the trees for Klebold and Harris (Paterniti 2004: 218; Zoba 2000: 198–99). A year after the shootings, the outspoken pastor of a local Lutheran church resigned, in part, he said, because of his congregation’s lack of support after he conducted the funeral of Dylan Klebold at a funeral home (Duran and Torkelson 2000; Paterniti 2004: 214). Zanis was outspoken in defending his constitutional rights of freedom of speech and freedom of religion to place the crosses wherever he pleased and encouraged media coverage of his actions, especially television. For the next few years, Zanis and his thirteen crosses were a dissonant presence at the annual Columbine remembrance ceremonies. In 2000, when he returned with more crosses, Foothills Park and Recreation District officials refused to let them be placed in any part of Clement Park and had to enforce their decision with sheriff’s deputies when Zanis and some of his supporters tried to erect them anyway. The following year, 2001, Zanis filed a civil suit with the federal court in Denver, claiming that restrictions on where he could put his crosses infringed on this First Amendment right to free speech. The federal judge ruled against Zanis (US District Court 2001). Undaunted, Zanis brought thirteen new crosses back for the third anniversary of the shootings in 2002. In the interim, Zanis toured some of the original thirteen crosses around the country for various memorials, religious youth rallies, and prayer services. In 2003 he brought another set of thirteen crosses back to Colorado for the last time. A permanent Columbine memorial, not far from where Zanis first erected his hilltop crosses, was dedicated in the fall of 2007. CBS News described the memorial as consisting of “a broad oval sunken into the rolling park terrain, sheltered from the breeze that usually blows down from the high mountains on the horizon. The outer wall is called the Ring of Healing. A smaller interior circle formed by a lower wall is called the Ring of Remembrance. Both are built of red stone. … Messages from the thirteen victims’ immediate families are inscribed in the inner wall” (CBS News 2007). The memorial contains no references to either of the murderers (Bingham 2008; Simpson 2007; CBS News 2007). Greg Zanis’s attempt to memorialize the shooters at Columbine with the two additional crosses was ironically superceded by the unexpected

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glorification of Klebold and Harris in popular culture (Columbine … Modern Culture 2008). Various media, from popular music to television and movies, as well as literature and video games continue to glorify the Columbine killers. Literally hundreds of books and articles as well as thousands of web sites and blogs have been published both memorializing the victims and speculating about the motives of the killers and describing their murderous rampage. Perhaps the most outspoken reference to the Columbine shootings is the award-winning movie by documentary film maker Michael Moore, Bowling for Columbine (2002), which confronts the issue of gun control and violence in America. A controversial online video game, Super Columbine RPG! enables players to role-play and reenact the Columbine murders, from the perspective of Klebold and Harris (2008). The developer of the game defends his creation because, he says, “The game functions as an example of free speech and thus invites reflections on power.” The game has created so much controversy that the developer has produced a video, Playing Columbine: A True Story of Video Game Controversy (2008). The massacre has become so ingrained in our contemporary popular culture and discourse that threats and copycat plots are frequently referred to as “pulling a Columbine.” Even though several books have been published by or about both the victims and survivors of the Columbine shootings (Bernall 2000; Brown and Merritt 2002; Lindholm 2005; Nimmo, Scott, and Rabey 2000), nearly a decade after the massacre their names are gradually dropping out of public awareness. Klebold and Harris, on the other hand, live on, glorified in thousands of blogs and web sites throughout the Internet, as well as other media, and have been emulated by other disenchanted youth who have attempted or succeeded in their own murder attempts. They are most frequently referred to on the Internet by their first names, Dylan and Eric. The story has remained active and alive, especially on the Internet, for nearly a decade. The power of the glorification of Columbine must not be underestimated. Although no one in 1999 could have imagined it, the shootings at Columbine established a standard by which subsequent episodes could be measured, and the Columbine shooters would be emulated by other angry and disaffected young men.

Virginia Tech University: 16 April 2007 April is indeed the cruelest month for American school shootings. On the morning of 16 April 2007, almost eight years to the day after Columbine, a mentally disturbed student gunman who would come to be known simply

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as “Cho” shattered the bucolic tranquility of the campus of Virginia Tech University (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) when he shot and killed thirty-two fellow students and faculty while wounding at least twenty-five. This murderous episode eclipsed the 1966 University of Texas Tower massacre as the largest school mass murder in recent American history.7 The event mesmerized the country with constant live media coverage for nearly a week, even more than was afforded to the Columbine massacre. There were ominous parallels between the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings other than their mid-April dates: both were carefully premeditated and planned by the student killers, both took place in large educational institutions, and the victims were apparently selected randomly. In a profanity-laced “multimedia manifesto” containing video and written statements mailed to NBC News on the day of the shootings, the killer, Virginia Tech student Seung-Hui Cho, compared himself to “martyrs like Eric and Dylan,” the Columbine murderers.8 In the postmodern universe of television and the Internet, where the images and deeds of the Columbine killers have found virtual immortality, the murderers at these two widely separated schools thus are bound together across time and space. Cho started his murderous rampage in the predawn stillness at West Ambler Johnson dormitory, where a freshman woman student was his first victim.9 When the dormitory resident assistant apparently heard the disturbance and came to investigate, Cho gunned him down too. Then Cho slipped unseen out of the dormitory and spent the next couple of hours preparing for his next campus destination. During this time, he mailed his multimedia manifesto to NBC in New York City. According to a Time Magazine report, the package contained an 1,800-word diatribe, much of which is incoherent and filled with obscenities, as well as twenty-nine photos, eleven of which show him aiming guns at the camera (Apuzzo 2007). Delivery of the package was delayed because Cho used an incorrect zip code in the address. He apparently intended for the package to arrive in New York City the day after the shootings, when it would have maximum shock effect. It arrived two days later, on 18 April. After mailing the package, he walked over to Norris Hall, a major laboratory and classroom building across campus. After chaining shut the exit doors on the first floor so that no one could escape, he proceeded upstairs to the second floor and methodically went from classroom to classroom, wordlessly gunning down students and faculty at random. As the noise, confusion, and panic spread throughout the building, students and faculty tried to barricade their classroom doors. Some, including at least one professor who was holding the door shut so that his students could escape out the windows, died when Cho shot through the closed doors. As police

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converged on the scene, alerted to the unfolding tragedy by calls from various campus offices and cell phone calls from the besieged students, Cho put one of his pistols to his head and blew his brains out. By early afternoon most of the sirens were no longer sounding and the all-clear alert had been announced, so faculty, students, and staff gradually began to leave the offices, classrooms, and dormitories where they had stayed for the duration of the emergency. Of course the area around Norris Hall was blocked completely, but people could still maneuver around other parts of the campus to get to their cars, bicycles, and so forth. Most people just wanted to leave campus and get home where they felt safe and could watch events unfold on TV and avoid the horde of media personalities who had begun to descend on the campus. As they began to comprehend the magnitude of the catastrophe, the members of Hokies United, a “student-driven volunteer effort organized to respond to local, national, and international tragedies,” were suddenly faced with ministering to their own campus. “Hokie” is a coined term used to designate Virginia Tech students and alumni, the school mascot, and so forth. Hokies United had responded to national disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, but dealing with their own campus and one another in time of need was something fairly new to them. Some of the stunned leaders of the organization convened in a student apartment the afternoon of 16 April and began to brainstorm about how to respond to this crisis. They knew they had to do something, but were unsure at first of what. By evening they had agreed on a design and location for a memorial, which they proceeded to construct late that night in front of the reviewing stand on the drill field, across the street from Burress Hall, the most prominent and accessible spot on campus. The students worked throughout the night, and the memorial was complete when dawn broke over the campus (Khan 2008). Their creation was an elegant semicircle of thirty-two rough blocks of limestone, called “Hokie stones” (Paper 2006). Each of these distinctive limestone blocks, from a nearby building site, weighed between fifty and seventy pounds. A solar light was driven into the ground by each stone, so that they were lit up at night. At first no names were attached to the practically identical blocks. On the morning of 17 April, mourners began leaving mementos on and around the stones, frequently in matching sets of thirty-two items (not thirty-three), one for each victim, as happened at Columbine and other sites with multiple fatalities. Flags, flowers, and candles were common, as were school-related items. To an outsider the many turkey legs left at the site were enigmatic, but to those familiar with the school and its traditions, the turkey legs clearly referred to the mythical turkey-like “Hokie Bird,” the school mascot. Later someone

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added hand-written name placards to each of the stones, placed in random order. Visiting the memorial and laying memorabilia there became the primary destination of the thousands of visitors who were flooding into town, especially since Norris Hall was cordoned off by police “do not cross” tape. The local, national, and international media set up their mobile units near the site and used the memorial as a backdrop for their

Illustration 4.3. Flowers around the Hokie stone memorial at Virginia Tech, 24 April 2007. Photo: Jinfeng Jiao / the April 16 Archive. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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on-site reports, including extensive coverage of the mourners walking slowly around the perimeter of the large crescent of stones. Then, on Thursday, 19 April, a thirty-third stone was mysteriously added. Obviously it was for Cho. On 24 April 2007 the Collegiate Times reported, “A stone representing Seung-Hui Cho at the victims’ memorial . . . has gone missing. The stone, which was placed amongst the other 32 stones on Saturday night, attracted attention from mourners who placed flowers and letters on it” (News Notes 2007). The following day, Virginia Tech senior Katelynn Johnson wrote an emotional letter to the editor of the Collegiate Times, the campus newspaper, taking full responsibility for placing the so-called “Cho stone” in the memorial (Johnson 2007). According to her letter, she added the rock on Thursday (19 April) at “about 4 a.m. … (in the dark of the night to avoid drawing attention to its addition)”; she also said she feared a campus backlash from what she had done. She went on to say, “I was not, however, the one that removed it and am saddened and outraged that it has been moved. I intend to bring another, and continue to bring them for as long as the memorial remains there.” Her rationale for adding the thirty-third stone was that Cho deserved forgiveness and mourning: We did not lose only 32 students and faculty members that day, we lost 33 lives. Yes, 32 were victims of another, but we lost 33 members of the Hokie family (say what you want about Cho not being a part of this family … but as a Hokie I choose to accept all my fellow students, faculty and alumni as Hokies no matter what I think about their current problems or their past, their criminal history or their political or religious views and especially no matter their mental health status). (Johnson 2007)

This letter and the “Cho stone” quickly became the focus of campus, local, and national news, including a web site, The 33rd Stone, dedicated to the controversy (2007). The national media continued to follow the story, which precipitated a flood of Internet blogging and invective, much of it attacking the very notion of memorializing murderers, especially at the same site with their victims. Some were more vehement than others, but a regular columnist on the staff of the Collegiate Times was more eloquent than most in his column of Friday, 27 April: While I don’t doubt that your intentions are well placed, your decision to put a stone in memory of the gunman next to his 32 victims shows a complete absence of propriety. It’s not your place to memorialize him. Forgiveness will come with time, but that time is not now. Now is the time to mourn the loss of those poor people who were ruthlessly and deliberately murdered by the gunman. To put a stone for him next to theirs is completely disrespectful. … You have no right to speak on behalf of 26,000 of us, and you do not decide when and if we choose to offer forgiveness. (Sheehan 2007)

The student journalist concluded his editorial by saying, “The gunman deserves no such tribute. If you continue to place a stone for him at the Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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memorial at 4 a.m., I’ll come at 5 a.m” (Sheehan 2007). Whether or not the student journalist was the one who subsequently removed the stone that replaced the original “Cho stone,” for the next several days the stone would disappear and then would be replaced by another. As long as the stone rested at the far left end of the semicircle, visitors to the shrine left memorabilia for Cho. When the stone was not in place, the memorabilia remained. Unlike the blogs and other media responses, many people left notes of forgiveness addressed directly to Cho, as happened at Columbine’s shooter crosses. According to one eyewitness, “Many wrote notes sending their prayers to his family. Others, on the other hand, directly addressed Cho. To my surprise, none of the notes I read expressed hatred, animosity, or condemnation. The ones I read explained how they did not understand why he chose to shoot his peers and some even said they wish they would have known him so they could have tried to help in any way. One note simply stated on an index card, ‘I forgive you’” (Lazenby 2007: 152). Unlike Columbine, there were, however, no notes reported at Virginia Tech attacking and condemning Cho. According to one newspaper article, the “appearance and disappearance of the stone reflects the community’s struggle to come to terms with the massacre” (Lindsey 2007). Nobody is sure how many times the Cho stone was removed and replaced. Hokies United remained neutral as this anonymous campus drama played itself out. When the temporary memorial was ultimately dismantled in early summer to make way for a more permanent memorial, the leaders of Hokies United sent the stones and memorabilia to the respective families, including the Cho family.10 Meanwhile, as visitation to the Hokie stone site continued to grow, Hokies United set up several white-washed, hinged plywood boards on the drill field so that mourners could write their sentiments on them. These boards became so popular that they were housed in large tents, to protect them and the visitors from the weather. People also left memorabilia at these boards. Another popular visitation site was a large cutout of the school’s famous “VT” logo near the War Memorial Chapel on campus, at the base of which candles, flowers, messages, and various mementos were carefully placed in symmetrical arrangements. Both president George W. Bush and Virginia governor Tim Kaine signed this memorial. Throughout the following days and weeks, other memorials were created elsewhere on campus, as well as throughout the community. For example, as happened following Columbine, a local church established an off-campus memorial when a company offered a set of thirty-two flagpoles to any group who wanted them. The Blacksburg Baptist Church accepted the offer, erecting thirty-two flagpoles, most flying American

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flags but others displaying national flags of other countries representing lives lost in the tragedy. There was no thirty-third flag and flagpole recognizing the Cho family, so the church put up a large sign instead that read, “While only 32 flag poles were donated to the town and ultimately to our church for this project, it is important to also remember the Cho family in their grief. Our prayer is for the healing of everyone touched by the tragedy of April 16, 2007” (Lazenby 2007: 186–87). Nobody bothered the sign at the Blacksburg Baptist Church, unlike after Columbine, when the trees planted on their own property by a church in memory of the murderers and their families were cut down. Meanwhile, people from all over the country started mailing their mementos to the school, and these were placed on tables and walls primarily in the halls of the Squires Student Center (Miller 2008). Although the displays evoked real emotional response and were viewed by a steady stream of visitors, the collected memorabilia on display in Squires and other campus buildings functioned more as an art display than as a shrine. For a time, these mementos were so numerous that they had to be delivered from the post office to Squires in large rolling bins. Large banners and posters containing hundreds of signatures and personal messages were sent to Virginia Tech from student bodies of schools, colleges, and universities throughout the country. Tech’s rival universities sent posters and messages of support and condolence; these schools also honored Tech in other ways, such as wearing ribbons of Tech orange and maroon on their uniforms for the remainder of the season. Because Cho was a Korean immigrant, the Korean community in the United States as well as in Korea sent distinctive nationally themed mementos to Virginia Tech, many of them in the Korean language and displaying the Korean flag and other national symbols. Multicolored chains of origami cranes, symbols of peace, were common. As the weeks progressed, works of art created by mourners were added to the displays. These ranged from sculptures to paintings to handcrafts, including many quilts and matching sets of thirty-two items. Several sets of hand-drawn portraits of all thirty-two of the victims were received and put on display. Religious tracts and items were also common, but these were not exclusively Christian, as was the case at Columbine. Because Virginia Tech’s programs attract students as well as faculty from around the world, there were also items representing other religions. There was no real performative element of interaction between the viewers and the artifacts on display in the Squires Student Center. The setting away from the murder site created emotional distance and a formality not found in on-site performative memorials where the viewers actively interacted with the memorabilia and each other. Messages of hate and condemnation apparently were not felt by their donors to be

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appropriate as memorial gifts and tokens to be put on display in the student center. The university sent thank you notes to all of the donors for whom they had addresses, which further removed these artifacts from shrine or performative memorial status because artifacts left at shrines are generally anonymous (except for signed letters and messages) and unacknowledged. All of these thousands and thousands of mementos were later gathered by university staff and volunteers and turned over to the university library’s special collections for processing and archiving in what has come to be known as the “Prevail Archive” (Hauser 2007; Vargas 2007). The archive was named for the key motif in the poem, “We Will Prevail,” recited by poet and Distinguished Professor Nikki Giovanni at the convocation the day following the shootings (We Remember 2007). To set up an archive for dealing with such a huge amount of disparate material, library staff at Virginia Tech were assisted by the Library of Congress and Syracuse University. Utilizing the technical expertise at Virginia Tech, at least two digital archives were also developed, one by the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture (Jesiek 2008; April 16 Archive 2008) and another by the library (Virginia Tech 2008). A brief controversy arose over what to do with the bloodied Norris Building, which was the scene of all of the fatalities but two. The call to raze the building quickly faded in the face of the reality of the expense and importance of this major laboratory building (Carlson 2007). As cultural geographer Kenneth Foote has pointed out, communities often want to obliterate the site where tragedies and atrocities occurred (Foote 1997), but this impulse is not always rational or practical. An exception to any consideration of practicality were the actions of the Amish community of Nickle Mines in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where in 2006 a gunman murdered five young Amish girls in their schoolhouse before committing suicide. The Amish, who practice forgiveness as a way of life, not only forgave the gunman, they also reached out to the murderer’s family and offered them emotional and financial support. The Amish then demolished the schoolhouse and planted the bare earth where it stood with grass seed (Amish 2007; Raffaele 2006). At Columbine, on the other hand, the library where most of the fatalities occurred was so completely remodeled that it bore no resemblance to its former use. Likewise, the decision was made to remodel Norris Hall and eliminate all classrooms so that it could be used instead as an office and laboratory building. A center for the study of peace and violence prevention also is slated to be established in the building. The weekend before classes started in August 2007, the university dedicated an enhanced memorial replacing but echoing the one which

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Hokies United had created in April with larger, finished blocks of limestone, each engraved with the name of a victim (Owczarski 2007). In the center of the memorial, an engraved limestone slab proclaimed, “We Will Prevail. We Are Virginia Tech.” A sign was added nearby, which further explained, “This memorial to those lost on April 16, 2007 was inspired by a spontaneous arrangement of 32 Hokie stones—the cornerstone of buildings throughout campus—created by grieving students following the tragedy. Today, the memorial stands both as a testimony to the Hokie spirit and sense of community that arose within all members of the Virginia Tech family, and, more importantly, in remembrance of the 32 inquiring minds and inspiring lives that will be forever treasured. Dedicated August 19th 2007.” This new memorial, with landscaping and a walkway added, retained the arrangement of stones that the students had originally created, including the order in which the names were engraved. The memorial contained only thirty-two stones. There was no “Cho stone,” nor has one been anonymously added. Neither did the university award a posthumous degree to Cho, as it did for those students who were murdered. The acrimonious debates over gun control and mental health policy that erupted following the murders throughout state and national media, Internet, and government offices were curiously absent from the shrines and memorials on the Virginia Tech campus. The only real controversy expressed, or performed, at the student-created Hokie stone memorial was whether Cho should be memorialized with his victims. This controversy was played out primarily through the anonymous taking away and replacing of the “Cho stone” in the student-created memorial on the Drill Field. Most of the notes, letters, and messages left for Cho expressed regret and forgiveness; for example, “Even though I hurt to the core; even though my eyes are tired of crying; even though campus, my home, will never be the same … I forgive you” (Lueders 2007: 133). Ten months later, gunshots shattered the tranquility of another large university campus when another mentally ill student unexpectedly opened fire on students attending class in a large auditorium. He had been fascinated by the recent shootings at Virginia Tech, and the shooter, Cho, as well as Eric and Dylan at Columbine.

Northern Illinois University: 14 February 2008 Valentine’s Day, 2008. 3:04 PM. The last thing the hundred or so students in the Introduction to Ocean Science class in Cole Hall at Northern Illinois University were thinking about was how many of them would be

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dead when the class was over. During the closing minutes of the class, a tall, slim man in an overcoat suddenly walked though the back door leading onto the stage, raised a sawed-off shotgun and without saying a word started shooting point-blank at the students in the first few rows. Students at the back of the auditorium at first thought that this was some sort of a prank, but as the shooting continued and the screams rose in intensity, the students stampeded up the aisles toward the doors at the back of the auditorium. The instructor made eye contact with the shooter and then leapt from the stage and tried to make his way to the doors. The bullets hit him before he reached safety. The expressionless gunman kept firing the 12-gauge shotgun, hitting many of the fleeing and panicked students in the back with buckshot. Then he switched to his pistols, jumped down from the stage, and started up the aisles, taking careful aim before he shot the students cowering in his path. Then he quickly turned, climbed back up on the stage, and fatally shot himself with the pistol. The whole fusillade lasted only a couple of minutes, during which the killer fired six shots from the shotgun and forty-eight times with the pistols (Vann 2008). The impassive killer was a mentally disturbed honor graduate of NIU, currently enrolled as a graduate student in the school of social work at Illinois University, twenty-seven year old Steven Kazmierczak. According to a recently published, detailed investigative report profiling Kazmierczak and the shooting (Vann 2008), his mental disturbance was diagnosed in early adolescence, and he had been on strong medication on and off for years. Before the time of the killings, however, he had quit taking his medication. After graduating from high school, he joined the US Army and excelled in marksmanship. He was discharged for failing to accurately report his complex medical history. Friends at NIU apparently told the magazine reporter that Kazmierczak, who studied sociology and social work, was fascinated by the shootings at Columbine and the meticulous planning that went into the murderous rampage, especially their plan to create confusion by first setting off a bomb (Vann 2008: 116). He was also excited about the news of the murders at Virginia Tech. One friend told the Esquire reporter, “He [Steve] was interested in what was going on in the mind of Cho, and why it was successful, and how someone could do it, how they could pull it off ” (Vann 2008: 122). Despite his interest in the shootings committed by Eric, Dylan, and Cho, Steve Kazmierczak’s name has not become part of the American popular culture lexicon, and he is quietly slipping into obscurity as “the NIU shooter.” Police were on the scene within minutes, as bloodied, dazed, and hysterical students stumbled from Cole Hall and through the snow to nearby buildings, smearing everything they touched with blood. Utilizing a plan

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developed in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, a campus-wide alert sounded and students and university personnel were contacted through the university web site, e-mail, and voicemail alerts and told to take cover and stay inside until the emergency was over. As the ambulances ferried the dead, dying, and injured students to local hospitals, officers began trying to make sense of the carnage. The final total was six dead (including the shooter) and eighteen wounded. By 4:10 PM, barely an hour after the shooting had begun, the university issued an all-clear announcement. The grim ritual of mourning sudden and violent shooting deaths was once again set in motion on an American campus.11 Later that afternoon, students began creating various memorials to their slain classmates by sticking long-stemmed Valentine’s roses, candles, and other memorabilia into the plowed snow embankments on campus. The largest memorial developed on a large mound of snow near the Martin Luther King Commons facing Cole Hall, which was cordoned off by yellow police tape. Some students threw long-stemmed roses through the cordon, where they landed in the snow near the building. Just after daybreak on 15 February, the morning after the shootings, in an eerie reprise of his role at Columbine, carpenter Greg Zanis climbed the snowbank on the MLK Commons and drove the shafts of five small

Illustration 4.4. Six small crosses erected by Greg Zanis at Northern Illinois University, 2008. Note that the sixth cross, on the right, faces away from the other five. Photo: Eloise Eilert. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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white crosses into the frozen snow. He was quoted later as saying, “You just can’t stop thinking how devastated these families are. When I saw the hill, it was calling out to me. … it was perfect” (Guerra 2008; Gurman 2008). He wrote the names of the five victims on the crosses in red paint, signifying Valentine’s Day. By each cross, he laid a red rose. A sixth cross, for the gunman, he left lying on the ground, blank, thus trying to avoid the kind of controversy his two shooter crosses had caused at Columbine. This assemblage, which quickly was nicknamed “Cross Hill,” became the focus of campus mourning, as thousands of students and community members left their mementos to the slain at the foot of these crosses, including the blank one that obviously was for Kazmierczak. Later someone erected the blank sixth cross next to the other five, but turned it facing backwards from the others. Someone else eventually moved the sixth cross to another location, apparently so that it would be completely separated from the other five. Recognizing that not all of the victims might be Christian, an art student crafted six silhouettes of Huskies, the school mascot, and stood them in the snowbank in front of the six small crosses (Tschirhart 2008a). As was the case at Columbine and especially at Virginia Tech, many of the messages expressed sympathy and forgiveness for the killer, often compassionately alluding to his mental illness. As far as can be determined from photographs and other accounts, there were no messages on Cross Hill attacking or condemning Kazmierczak for what he had done. Deep grief tempered by Christian forgiveness was the dominant sentiment expressed in the NIU shrine. Bitter feelings were, however, widely posted on various Internet blogs and interactive sites. Unlike at Columbine, this time Greg Zanis was no outsider. His home in Sugar Grove, Illinois, is about twenty miles from DeKalb, and his wife attended NIU. The small crosses he erected on the NIU campus after the Valentine’s Day shooting did not cause community-wide contention as had been the case at Columbine. One reason for this may have been that the NIU crosses were small, about twenty-four inches high, as opposed to the six-foot crosses at Columbine. The semiotic of small crosses is reminiscent of the roadside memorials that are so common practically worldwide following fatal car wrecks. Large crosses have greater visual impact and create more attention. Then another set of crosses appeared, much larger than those on Cross Hill. The day after the shooting, Friday, 15 February 2008, the pastor of the Lutheran Campus Ministry (LCM), across the street from the NIU campus, asked her husband and some students to build six large crosses, each about six feet tall, and erect them on the lawn of the LCM. The crosses were identical, with no names on them. Each crossbar was

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draped in red and purple. An interview with the school newspaper, The Northern Star, presented a garbled explanation that the idea for the six crosses came from Virginia Tech, which “had erected 33 crosses in the wake of the tragedy at that university” (Thomas 2008). This is an obvious misreading, or misunderstanding, what really happened regarding the Virginia Tech shrine with its thirty-three stones, not crosses. In response to the question, “Why six?” Pastor Diane Dardón replied in a pastoral message on the LCM web page, “For me, the answer is not difficult … six crosses, six children of God gone from us. All six were loved by God and all six were victims and all six left behind families who are hurting, confused, empty” (Dardón 2008a). She continued in her pastoral letter to describe a grieving man who had wandered into the LCM late that night, bereft and shaken from seeing the blank sixth cross on “Cross Hill” on campus because he feared that the lack of a name on the cross meant that God had turned his back on the murderer. Mourners began to visit the crosses at the Lutheran Center and write messages of love and forgiveness on them, as well as leave various memorabilia. Unlike the situation after Columbine, the crosses at first seemed to have immunity from community dissent because they were on church property. Then, sometime during the night of Sunday, 17 February, the sixth cross at the NIU Lutheran Center was dragged into the street and set on fire, burning the drape and charring the cross (Edrinn 2008). The bishop of the Northern Illinois Synod responded, “While we wish that the cross in front of the Lutheran Campus Ministry had not been destroyed, we understand the pain.” Cross burning is one of the most powerful symbolic actions in American society, associated primarily with the atrocities of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan placed burning crosses in African-American neighborhoods to terrify, intimidate, and threaten the inhabitants. In 2004, the Kentucky assistant attorney general for civil rights characterized cross burning as a “vicious symbol of hatred” (Department of Justice 2004). Whoever dragged the sixth cross from the grounds of the Lutheran Campus Ministry and set it afire was thus dissenting against memorializing the murderer in the strongest terms possible. Nevertheless, public reaction to the cross burning was muted, and media coverage was minimal, although letters to the editor, both in support of the sixth cross and condemning it, appeared in The Northern Star, the campus newspaper, for nearly a month, as well as on interactive web sites (Sparks 2008a, 2008b). The perpetrator was not apprehended. All of the memorabilia from various sites around the campus, including several large sheets of plywood on which people wrote messages and signed their names, will be archived at the Regional History Center

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and the University Archives (Ditzler 2008; Schmadeke 2008; Tschirhart 2008b). The six small crosses erected by Greg Zanis will also be archived, but the crosses from the Lutheran Campus Ministry will not. The LCM retrieved the charred cross from the street and it is now used as the chapel cross. Lumber from the other crosses is being fashioned into a new altar, baptismal font, and lectern (Dardón 2008b). Several days after the shooting, Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich called for Cole Hall to be razed and replaced with a new classroom building and memorial. Said Blagojevich, “Cole Hall will be torn down, but what happened there will never be forgotten” (Mendell and Long 2008). The campus community was not in total agreement with the governor, however. The president of NIU, John Peters, polled the campus by email; the majority did not want the building torn down. The cost of razing and replacing the building was also a major consideration. By the end of April, the Chicago Tribune reported that plans were underway to renovate Cole Hall instead of tearing it down (Kridel 2008). The killings at Northern Illinois University, although equally terrible, did not receive as much national media attention as Columbine and Virginia Tech. Reasons for the diminished media coverage are unclear; perhaps because there were only six fatalities, the story was not as compelling as the deaths of fifteen and thirty-three. Events following the shootings played themselves out in much the same way as had occurred at Columbine and Virginia Tech: campus memorials and shrines, convocations, temporary suspension of classes, talk of tearing down the building where the victims and their murderer died. Memorabilia left at the NIU shrines was overwhelmingly sympathetic to the killer, instead of expressing overt hatred and condemnation of him or taking a stance on gun control or mental health. Dissent was expressed wordlessly through a series of anonymous interactions with the small crosses on Cross Hill when the sixth, blank cross was first laid on the ground next to the others, then erected facing backwards, and finally moved to another nearby location. The six large crosses at the Lutheran Campus Ministry, although covered in messages urging forgiveness of the killer, were not immune to dissent against memorializing the murderer. Dragging the sixth cross into the street and setting it afire was a very clear and angry statement.

Conclusion In the United States, the primary function of many spontaneous shrines and memorials erected following most accidents and some murders is the expression of communal grief and despair, frequently presented in overtly

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Christian symbols, notes, and messages. For example, one researcher, Erica Doss, described how the Columbine shrine “was especially marked by an outpouring of Christian evangelical art and rituals—from crosses, pictures of Jesus and tracts from the International Bible Society, to prayer and worship services, scripture readings and candlelight vigils, some televised.” The description continued, “Visitors were encouraged to participate; more than a few placards and posters urged visitors to the shrine site to accept Christ as their personal saviour” (Doss 2002: 72). In another article dealing with Columbine and a number of other shrines, she concluded, “Spontaneous memorials at sites of violent death—at sites of school shootings for example—are largely frozen in emotional catharsis, fixated on certain religious tenets” (Doss 2006: 315). In various European countries, on the other hand, protest and political outrage are expressed overtly in shrines and memorials. For example, following the 2004 terrorist bombing of the train stations in Madrid, Spain, the shrines became “part of the political sphere developed after the attacks and cannot be understood outside the context of the general elections held three days after the train massacres” (Sánchez-Carretero 2006: 33). The artifacts and messages in the shrines contained overtly political sentiments as well as expressions of grief and despair (Burgos and Burgos 2005). The shrines in response to the assassination in the Netherlands of popular radical politician Pim Fortuyn became active venues for the expression of a wide range of political protest, criticism, and rage, in addition to more conventional expressions of sorrow, condolence, grief, and dismay (Margry 2003; Margry 2007). Although American shrines at sites of school shootings and accidents generally lack this explicitly political component, many of the shrines following 9/11 were the exception. Shrines throughout New York City and elsewhere contained messages of despair and grief, as well as anger and calls for retaliation; for example, “It’s time to fight back,” “God bless our victims; God damn the terrorists,” “The Yanks are comin’—bin Laden kiss your butt goodbye,” and simply, “Kill ’em” (Feldschuh 2002). The messages left in various shrines demonstrate the fundamental difference in the public reaction to murder and other senseless violence as opposed to terrorism such as September 11 and the Madrid bombings or assassination. Because terrorism and assassination are inherently political acts, the shrines erected at these sites are likewise political acts. Even though Americans today create shrines and memorials following car accidents as well as mass murders, the artifacts and messages left in these memorials do not overtly criticize unsafe highway driving conditions or advocate gun control and better treatment for the mentally ill. As researcher Erica Doss has pointed out, “It is important to recognize

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that temporary memorials, and the contemporary cultures of public feeling that they embody, do not always yield the results that their analysts and critics may prefer—such as cultural economy of radical social protest, or ritualized performances of civic affirmation and solidarity” (Doss 2008a: 41). Spontaneous shrines communicate a wide range of meanings to viewers, meanings not always consistent with the sentiments of those who created the shrines. As Jack Santino has pointed out, “The political nature of spontaneous shrines … personalize public and political issues, and in personalizing them, are political themselves, even in the absence of overt political sloganeering” (Santino 2006a: 12). The spontaneous shrines on campuses following school shootings thus reflect the conflicting worldviews of the community in which they are created because it is the local community that responds first in the creation of the shrines, sometimes within hours of the event. The initial tone set by the artifacts placed in these shrines exerts a kind of communal peer pressure on subsequent offerings to conform to the initial tone. The placement of the shooter crosses on the hill at Columbine, memorializing the murderers with their victims, simultaneously violated one deeply held principle and honored another: secular retribution and punishment versus Christian forgiveness. The American justice system holds that first-degree murder is among the most serious crimes that can be committed, crimes that are punishable by execution or life imprisonment. This of course contradicts the Christian doctrine of forgiveness. The cross is among the most powerful symbols in America, and this symbolism heightened the confusing conundrum on the hill at Columbine, as well as later in the cross shrines at Northern Illinois. The Thirty-Third Stone at Virginia Tech was less semiotically charged but, nevertheless, materially expressed the contradiction. Following the three case studies presented above—Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Northern Illinois—the troubling issues of youth alienation, gun control, and mental illness were in the forefront of public and governmental discourse but were not expressed explicitly in the shrines erected at the respective murder sites. Instead, the shrines became performative memorials in which the issue of forgiveness of the murderers was played out in a public forum. Some Christian mourners interacted with the performative memorials at these three mass murder sites by adding iconic items to acknowledge the shooters and/or their families—a chunk of limestone at Virginia Tech, additional crosses at Columbine and Northern Illinois. Public reactions to these additional artifacts for the murderers, especially at Columbine, ranged from those who were comforted by the presence of the items and added conciliatory and pious memorabilia to them, to those who were so outraged by the very notion

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of memorializing the shooters that they not only attached vicious and hateful notes but also attacked the distinctive added icons by destroying them or moving them to another location. The interaction with the iconic artifacts at these three murder scenes confirms the point that spontaneous shrines invite interpretation. According to folklorist Jack Santino, “Once set out before an undifferentiated public, the polysemy inherent in these assemblages allows for a broad range of readings and associations by passersby, regardless of the initial intentions of the originators” (Santino 2006a: 11). At all three locations, there was no question about who had added the memorial icons representing the shooters. Greg Zanis, founder of the Crosses for Losses ministry, erected the crosses at both Columbine and Northern Illinois. At Virginia Tech, after it was anonymously removed, an undergraduate, Katelynn Johnson, indignantly explained in a letter to the editor of the school paper why she had added a thirty-third stone to the memorial. A material culture dialog ensued for several days at Virginia Tech as the stone continued to be removed and replaced. This nonverbal communication through the rocks expressed viewpoints perhaps too strong for words. At Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Northern Illinois, as long as the memorabilia placed in the spontaneous shrines was consistent with an overall tone of grieving and understated reconciliation, there was no question of ownership or authority. It was only when individuals broke the norm by adding iconic artifacts memorializing the murderers that there was any community dissension concerning the shrines, and the shrines themselves provided a venue for acting out these dissenting opinions and worldviews. The political and religious controversies regarding memorializing the shooters at the three shrines ultimately were resolved by the physical manipulation of the offending artifacts, ranging from public destruction to quiet, repeated removal and replacement. All three shrines withstood the controversy and remained in place and relatively intact until community officials finally had them removed and the sites either returned to their undifferentiated state or, in the case of Virginia Tech, replaced by a more permanent memorial.

Notes I am indebted to the following for information given in interviews and personal communications: Mr. Bob Easton, director, Foothills Park and Recreation District; Ms. Edie Hylton, former assistant director of Leisure Services, Foothills Park and Recreation District; Mr. Paul Ruffien, Foothills District counsel; the staff of the Virginia Tech Office of Recovery & Support, especially Megan Armbruster, Lisa Leslie, and

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Ellen Plummer; Virginia Tech University archivist, Tamara Kennelly; the members of Hokies United, including Scott Cheatham, Adeel Khan, and Greg Sagstetter; Diane Dardón, pastor of the Lutheran Campus Ministry, Northern Illinois University; Cindy Ditzler, archivist, Northern Illinois University; and my doctoral student Eloise Eilert, an alumna of Northern Illinois University. An earlier, much shorter version of parts of this chapter was published as “Contesting the Memory of ‘The Shooters’ at Columbine High School,” Anthropology Today, 23 no. 3 (2007): 3–7. 1. Analysis of the artifacts from various shrines reveals a consistent overall repertoire of artifacts; however, shrines are personalized or individualized by the presence of event-specific items. For example, a content analysis of the artifacts from the bonfire shrine following the fatal collapse of the Texas A&M student bonfire revealed, on the basis of the artifacts, that there were three distinct groups represented by the artifacts: children, Aggie supporters, and Christians (cf. Grider 2006). 2. For a fuller discussion of the concept of shrines as “portals” for communication with the dead see Zeitlin (2006: 107–9). 3. Zanis declined the author’s request for information, so the only sources regarding his actions are previous publications, media, and Internet accounts. 4. The most complete discussion of Zanis’s crosses at Columbine, based in part on her interviews with him, is Zoba (2000), chapter 3, “Scandal of the Crosses.” 5. In the years since the Columbine shootings, the controversy that arose there around the crosses memorializing the shooters has become yet another example of a general American trend. The heart of this controversy is the interpretation of two intertwined principles of the US Constitution: freedom of religion (aka “separation of church and state”) and freedom of speech. The most common focus of this controversy is the roadside crosses marking the sites of fatal road accidents, rather than the presence of crosses in spontaneous shrines. Crosses have also caused controversy in the United States when they have been erected to protest against abortion, deaths of illegal immigrants, serial murders of women, and the war in Iraq. 6. Messages and notes, both handwritten and computer generated, are a consistent component of spontaneous shrines. Béatrice Fraenkel (2002) offers a detailed, book-length study of the “writings” following September 11. 7. On 18 May 1927 a school board member dynamited the school in Bath Township, Michigan, killing forty-eight and injuring fifty-eight, before killing himself. He reportedly was upset by a recently enacted property tax that led to financial difficulties for him (Bath 2007). 8. Multiple versions of the tirade, originally aired on CBS, are available on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/). YouTube also contains interviews with Cho’s roommate and suitemates, as well as others who knew him. 9. At least four books and two special issues of online journals have already been published detailing the murders: Agger and Luke (2008); Fast Capitalism (2008); Lazenby (2007); Leuders (2007); Traumatology (2008); Worth (2008). 10. Not all families wanted the memorabilia given to them, although they appreciated the gesture. Many families reportedly felt overwhelmed by the constant reminders of their loss and the responsibility to store and preserve this outpouring of memorabilia to their loved ones. There was no response from the Cho family because they are in seclusion at an undisclosed place; the university cannot communicate with them directly, but only through an official intermediary. 11. A recent study of so-called disaster ritual (Post et al. 2003), based on a series of international case studies, reports that a consistent repertoire of ritual behaviors

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has developed in the last decade or so to mark the public response to disaster, mass murder, and other catastrophes. The “four fixed pillars” of disaster ritual so far delineated are 1) silent procession, 2) remembrance service, 3) monument, and 4) annual commemorative, augmented by “separate, variable factors,” including spontaneous shrines or memorials (246–47).

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References Able, Charley. (1999). “Society, Park District Saving Items from Columbine Shrines.” Rocky Mountain News. 29 April. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1–67480538. html. Accessed 2 September 2008. Adams, Lorraine. (1999). “Columbine Crosses Can’t Bear Weight of Discord.” Washington Post, 3 May. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/juvmurders /stories/memorial03.htm. Accessed 2 September 2008. Agger, Ben, and Timothy Luke, eds. (2008). Tragedy and Terror at Virginia Tech: There Is a Gunman on Campus. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Amish School Shooting (2007). Wikipedia. http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_school_ shooting. Accessed 27 April 2007. April 16 Archive. (2008). http://www.april16archive.org. Accessed 30 August 2008. Apuzzo, Matt. (2007). “Gunman Sends NBC Final Message.” Time, 18 April. http://www .time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1612322,00.html. Accessed 30 August 2008. Bath School Disaster. (2007). http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~bauerle/ disaster.htm. Accessed 30 August 2008. Bernall, Misty. (2000). She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall. New York: Pocket. Bingham, Rebecka D. (2008). “Planning School Memorials: Feedback from the Columbine Memorial Planning Committee.” Master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, UT. Bowling for Columbine. (2002). Film, directed by Michael Moore. Brown, Brooks, and Rob Merritt. (2002). No Easy Answers: The Truth Behind Death at Columbine. Brooklyn, NY: Lantern Books. Burgos, Adán, and David R. Burgos. (2005). Madrid in Memoriam. Madrid: B & B Editiones. Carlson, Scott. (2007). “The Aftermath: Mortar and Memory. Virginia Tech Ponders a Building’s Future.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 4 May. http://chronicle.com/ weekly/v53/i35/35a01201.htm. Accessed 7 May 2007. Cart, Julie. (1999). Shrine and Its Removal are Balms to Columbine. Los Angeles Times, May 6. http://articles.latimes.com/1999/may/06/news/mn-34535. Accessed September 2, 2008. CBS News. (2007). Hundreds Gather to Open Columbine Memorial, 22 September. http:// www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/09/22/national/main3287814.shtml. Accessed 9 July 2008. Columbine High School Massacre. (2008). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_ School_massacre. Accessed 19 July 2008. Columbine High School Massacre in Modern Culture. (2008). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Columbine_High_School_massacre_in_modern_culture. Accessed 27 July 2008. Cullen, Dave. (1999) “‘I Smell the Presence of Satan’: Is Littleton’s Evangelical Subculture a Solution to the Youth Alienation that Played a Role in the Columbine

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Killings, or a Reflection of it?” Salon.com, 15 May. http://www.salon.com/news/ feature/1999/05/15/evangelicals/index3.html. Accessed 28 July 2008. Dardón, Diane. (2008a). “Message from Pr. Diane Dardón.” Northern Illinois Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. http://www.nisynod.org/lcm.tragdy/ prdiane.htm. Accessed 13 March 2008. ———. (2008b). Personal communication. 1 August. Delgado, Melvin. (2003). Death at an Early Age and the Urban Scene: The Case for Memorial Murals and Community Healing. New York: Praeger. Department of Justice. (2004). “Two men plead guilty in Kentucky cross burning case” http://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/two-men-plead-guilty-in-kentuckycross-burning-case. Accessed August 30, 2008. Ditzler, Cindy. (2008). Personal communication, 29 July. Doss, Erica. (2002). “Death, Art and Memory in the Public Sphere: The Visual and Material Culture of Grief in Contemporary America.” Mortality 7(1): 63–82. ———. (2006). “Spontaneous Memorials and Contemporary Modes of Mourning in America.” Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief 2(3): 294–319. ———. (2008a) The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials: Towards a Theory of Temporary Memorials. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ———. (2008b). “Memorial Mania.” Museum (March/April). http://www.aam-us.org/ pubs/mn/memorialmania.cfm. Accessed 5 July 2008. Duran, Marlys. (1999a). “Candles Damage Columbine Shrine Mementos in Park Blackened by Fire.” Denver Rocky Mountain News, 10 May. http://denver.rockymountainnews .com/shooting/0510scho1.shtml. Accessed 2 September 2008. ———. (1999b). “Columbine Mementos Await Decision on Fate.” Rocky Mountain News, 19 May. http://denver.rockymountainnews.com/shooting/0519tour3.shtml. Accessed 2 September 2008. Duran, Marlys, and Jean Torkelson. (2000). “Cleric Cites Columbine in Resignation.” Rocky Mountain News.com. http://denver.rockymountainnews.com/shooting/0811resi5 .shtml. Accessed 17 July 2007. Edrinn, Alan. (2008). “Cross from LCM Memorial Site Burned.” Northern Star, 19 March. http://www.northernstar.info/article/2680. Accessed 30 June 2008. Fast Capitalism. (2008). Special Issue on Virginia Tech, 3(1). http://www.fastcapitalism. com. Accessed 20 February 2008. Fast, Jonathan. (2003). “After Columbine: How People Mourn Sudden Death.” Social Work 48(4): 484–92. Feldschuh, Michael, ed. (2002). The September 11 Photo Project. New York: HarperCollins. Fleming, Caleb. (2008). “Survivors Try to Move Forward.” Collegiate Times, 14 April. http:// www.collegiatetimes.com/stories/2008/04/16/survivors_try_to_move_forward. Accessed 12 July 2008. Foley, Malcolm, and John Lennon. (2000). Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster. Clifton Park, NY: Cengage Learning Business Press. Follis, Dan. (1999). “The Cross Causes Controversy at Columbine.” Peoria Online Trader, 8 October. http://www.peoriatrader. com/follis/100899.html. Accessed 1 May 2007. Foote, Kenneth. (1997). Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy. Austin: University of Texas Press. Fraenkel, Béatrice. (2002). Les écrits de septembre, New York 2001. Paris: Textuel. Grider, Sylvia. (2000). “The Archaeology of Grief: Texas A&M’s Bonfire Tragedy Is a Sad Study in Modern Mourning.” Discovering Archaeology 2, no. 3 (July/August): 68–74.

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———. (2006). “Content Analysis of the Spontaneous Shrines Following the 1999 Bonfire Collapse at Texas A&M University.” In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 215–31. Griego, Tina. (1999). “Shrine of Memories at Columbine High, Impromptu Memorial Gives Expression to Community’s Grief.” Rocky Mountain News, 25 April. http://www .bookrags.com/highbeam/shrine-of-memories-at-columbine-high-19990425–1hb. Accessed 2 September 2008. Guerra, Danielle. (2008). “Personal Ministry: Sugar Grove Man Makes Crosses for Memorials Near and Far.” Kane Country Chronicle, 28 February. http://www .kcchronicle.com/articles/2008/02/28/news/local/doc47c6549e4d7ed005547360 .txt. Accessed 1 July 2008. Gurman, Sadie. (2008). “Memorial Crosses Spawned from Personal Tragedy.” Rockford Register Star, 21 February. http://www.rrstar.com/niu/x1529758771. Accessed 1 July 2008. Hauser, Christine. (2007). “Virginia Tech Sets Out to Preserve Objects of Grief, Love, and Forgiveness.” New York Times, 25 April. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/25/ us/25virginia.html?_r=1&oref=slogin. Accessed 30 April 2007. Jesiek, Brent, and Jeremy Hunsinger. (2008). “The April 16 Archive: Collecting and Preserving Memories of the Virginia Tech Tragedy.” In Agger and Luke, Tragedy and Terror, 185–206. Johnson, Katelynn. (2007). “Remembering Everyone Who Died in the VT Tragedy.” Collegiate Times, 25 April, 5. Khan, Adeel. (2008). Personal Communication, 2 July. Kridel, Kristen. (2008). “Site of NIU Killings to Be Renovated, Not Demolished, University President Says.” Chicago Tribune, 29 April. http://www.chicagotribune .com/news/local/chi-niu-cole-hall-fate-web-apr30,0,4749947.story. Accessed 21 July 2008. Kurtz, Holly. (1999). “School Becomes a Stop on Tourist Trail: Visitors to Colorado Are Taking Time for a Peek at the Site of so Many National Headlines.” Rocky Mountain News, http://www.rockypreps.com/shooting/0705tour2.shtml. Accessed 23 August 2006. Larkin, Ralph. (2007). Comprehending Columbine. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lavergne, Gary M. (1997). A Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders. Denton: University of North Texas Press. Lazenby, Roland, ed. (2007). April 16th: Virginia Tech Remembers. New York: Plume Books. Lueders, Beth. (2007). Lifting Our Eyes: Finding God’s Grace Through the Virginia Tech Tragedy. The Lauren McCain Story. New York: Berkley Books. Lindsey, Sue. (2007). “On Campus, Little Anger at Gunman.” Oakland Tribune, 27 April. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4176/is_20070427/ai_n19063640. Accessed 2 September 2008. Lindholm, Marjorie. (2005). A Columbine Survivor’s Story. Littleton, CO: Regenold Publishing. Margry, Peter Jan. (2003). “The Murder of Pim Fortuyn and Collective Emotions. Hype, Hysteria and Holiness in the Netherlands.” Etnofoor 16(2): 106–31. ———. (2007). “Performative Memorials: Arenas of Political Resentment in Dutch Society.” In Peter Jan Margry and Herman Roodenberg, eds., Reframing Dutch Culture: Between Otherness and Authenticity. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 109–33. Margry, Peter Jan, and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero. (2007). “Memorializing Traumatic Death.” Anthropology Today 23(3): 1–2

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Mendell, David, and Ray Long. (2008). “Razing of Cole Hall Sought. Governor’s Request to Replace NIU Site Draws Mixed Reaction.” February 28. Chicago Tribune, 28 February. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-blagojevich-niu_ 28feb28,1,5590383.story. Accessed 15 July 2008. Miller, Meg. (2008). “Archives House Symbols of Outreach.” Collegiate Times, 16 April. http://www.collegiatetimes.com/stories/2008/04/16/archives_house_symbols_of_ outreach. Accessed 12 July 2008. Moore, Lauren. (2008). “Tech Creates Digital Memory Bank for April 16.” Collegiate Times, 14 February. http://www.collegiatetimes.com/stories/2008/02/14/tech_ creates_digital_memory_bank_for_april_16. Accessed 12 July 2008. National Public Radio (NPR). (2007). “Reflections on Columbine and Blacksburg.” Morning Edition, 17 April. News Notes. (2007). Collegiate Times (Virginia Tech). 24 April. Nimmo, Beth, Darrell Scott, and Steve Rabey. (2000). Rachel’s Tears: The Spiritual Journey of Columbine Martyr Rachel Scott. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson. Northern Illinois University Shooting. (2008). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_ Illinois_University_Shooting. Accessed 19 July 2008. Owczarski, Mark. (2007). “Virginia Tech to Dedicate April 16 Memorial on Sunday, August 19.” http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/story.php?relyear=2007&itemno=415. Accessed 21 August 2007. Paper, Jodi. (2006). “A Hokie Stone by Any Other Name Is Not a Hokie Stone.” Building Stone Magazine (Summer). http://buildingstonemagazine.com/summer-06/ hokiestone.html. Accessed 1 May 2007. Paterniti, Michael. (2004). “Columbine Never Sleeps.” Gentleman’s Quarterly (April): 206–14, 217–20. Playing Columbine: A True Story of Video Game Controversy (2008). Film. Produced by Danny LeDonne. http://www.playingcolumbine.com/about.htm. Accessed August 30, 2008. Post, Paul, Ronald L. Grimes, A. Nugteren, P. Pettersson, and Hessel Zondag. (2003). Disaster Ritual: Explorations of an Emerging Ritual Repertoire. Leuven: Peeters. Raffaele, Martha. (2006). “Men Begin to Raze Pa. Amish School.” Kilgore News Herald, 12 October. http://www.kilgorenewsherald.com/news/2006/1012/world/021.html. Accessed 24 July 2008. Sánchez-Carretero, Cristina. (2006). “Trains of Workers, Trains of Death: Some Reflections After the March 11 Attacks in Madrid.” In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 333–47. Santino, Jack. (2006a). “Performative Commemoratives: Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death.” In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 5–15. ———, ed. (2006b). Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death. New York: Palgrave. Schmadeke, Steve. (2008). “NIU Archiving Its Darkest Hour.” Chicago Tribune, 12 April. http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:Hf3mDeUOg8sJ:www.chicagotribune .com/news/nationworld/nation/chi-niu-archivesapr12,0,7615273.story+niu+camp us+shrine+mementos&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us. Accessed 14 April 2008. Sheehan, Dan. (2007). “Commemorating Only the Victims of Tragedy.” Collegiate Times, 27 April, 5. Simpson, Kevin. (2007). “A Tribute Etched in Stone.” Denver Post, 21 September, A-01. http://www.denverpost.com/coloradocorporatestatements/ci_6953473. Accessed 14 May 2008.

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Sparks, Alicia. (2008a). “Northern Illinois University Gunman’s Name Deserves to Be on a Cross.” Mental Health Notes, 16 February. http://www.Mentalhealthnotes .com/2008/02/16/northern-illinois-university-gunmans-name-deserves-to-be-ona-cross. Accessed 15 July 2008. ———. (2008b). “Northern Illinois University Lutheran Campus Pastor Contacts Mental Health Notes.” Mental Health Notes, 20 February. http://www.mentalhealthnotes .com/2008/02/20/northern-illinois-university-lutheran-campus-pastor-contactsmental-health-notes. Accessed 15 July 2008. Super Columbine Massacre RPG! (2008). http://www.columbinegame.com. Accessed 23 April 2007. The 33rd Stone. (2007). http://www.the33rdstone.com. Accessed 13 July 2008. Thomas, David. (2008). “Message Walls, Crosses to Be Saved in Archives.” Northern Star, 6 March. http://www.northernstar.info/article/2613. Accessed 30 June 2008. Traumatology. (2008). Special Issue on The 2007 Virginia Tech Shooting: Identification and Application of Lessons Learned. 14, no. 1 (March). http://tmt.sagepub.com. Accessed 19 July 2008. Tschirhart, James. (2008a). “Artist Created Huskie Cutouts as Communal Memorials.” Northern Star, 25 March. http://www.northernstar.info/article.php?id=2798. Accessed 7 August 2008. ———. (2008b). “Library Seeks to Archive Impromptu Memorials.” Northern Star, 6 March. http://wwwnorthernstar.info/article/2608. Accessed 20 July 2008. US District Court, District of Colorado (2001). Case# 1:01-cv-00708-RPM, Zanis et al v. Foothills Park and Recreation District, et al. Vann, David. (2008). “Portrait of the School Shooter as a Young Man.” Esquire, August, 114–26. Vargas, Theresa. (2007). “Preserving the Outpouring of Grief.” Washington Post, 19 August, 10. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/18/ AR2007081800588_pf.html. Accessed 21 August 2007. Virginia Tech April 16, 2007 Memorial Archive. (2008). http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/416_ archive. Accessed 30 August 2008. Virginia Tech Massacre. (2007). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_tech_shooting. Accessed 19 July 2008. Walter, Tony. (1991). “The Mourning after Hillsborough.” Sociological Review 39(3): 599–625. Watson, Justin. (2002). The Martyrs of Columbine: Faith and the Politics of Tragedy. New York: Palgrave. We Remember. (2007). http://www.vt.edu/remember/archive/giovanni_transcript.html. Accessed 19 July 2008. Westword News. (1999). “Crossing the Line on Rebel Hill,” 19 August. http://www.westword .com/1999–08–19/news/off-limits. Accessed 24 July 2008. Worth, Richard. (2008). Massacre at Virginia Tech: Disaster and Survival. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow Publishers. Zeitlin, Steve. (2006). “‘Oh Did You See the Ashes Come Thickly Falling Down?’ Poems Posted in the Wake of September 11.” In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 99–117. Zoba, Wendy Murray. (2000). Columbine and the Search for America’s Soul. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press.

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Part II

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Contesting Objectionable Death

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Chapter 5

Marking Death Grief, Protest, and Politics after a Fatal Traffic Accident

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Monika Rulfs

In August 1991, nine-year-old Nicola Seher was run over and killed in Hamburg by a truck whose driver had failed to spot a set of red traffic lights. What could have been an inconspicuous accident developed into a two-week protest against traffic policy. People gathered at the site of the accident, most of them silent, some crying, some talking to each other. They laid such objects as candles and flowers on the road, and some expressed their determination to stay there, or to return the following day, to demand political change. They were both mourning the deceased and protesting; this attracted city-wide public attention and led to the political decision to increase traffic safety on this road. During the last twenty years, “the marking of the place of a shocking death … has become part of the global expressive repertoire” (Santino 2006b: 9; cf. Margry and Sánchez-Carretero 2007). People gathering at the site of death, crosses, piles of flowers, burning candles, and pieces of paper provisionally attached to something are no longer unusual sights— we all remember seeing them after the death of Lady Diana in 1997, following the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York in 2001, and in many other cases covered by the international media.1 But there are also less spectacular cases where people gather at the site of death to express grief or to mourn in protest, criticizing a deplorable state of political affairs (Senie 1999; Santino 2006b). Expressing grief, mourning in protest, and criticizing traffic policy was the reaction to the fatal accident in Hamburg. Political protest as a reaction to a traffic accident is rather unusual: Traffic accidents often pass unnoticed, but they may also lead to mourn-

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ing by relatives and friends and to the erection of roadside memorials—a mourning practice that is being developed in many places (Clark 2007; Owens 2006; Stengs 2004;2 Everett 2002; Doss 2002; Löwer 1999; Köstlin 1992; Rajkovic´ 1988). Although these roadside memorials may imply a warning—for example, against drinking or driving too fast—they rarely mobilize the public or lead to political protest. In this article, however, I deal not with roadside memorials, but with people’s emotional and political reactions after the death of a child in a traffic accident. I undertook my fieldwork between 1992 and 1994, starting a few months after the accident. I participated in numerous meetings, protests, actions, and conferences that focused on traffic policy for Stresemannstraße3 (the road on which the girl was killed), and for Hamburg in general; interviewed about forty people who had some sort of relation to the accident and the protests; and analyzed written material, for instance, newspaper articles, parliamentary proceedings, political speeches, sermons, and police documents. My key question was why people took to the street in the way they did after this traffic accident (Rulfs 2002: 9).4 The unexpected and unusual events following the accident showed me that it was insufficient to compare this accident to other accidents; certain features connected this case to reactions in public after traumatic deaths, as mentioned above and discussed in this volume. I start this essay with a brief description of the accident, what happened after it, and the background to the events in Stresemannstraße. After that, I deal with the objects produced at, or brought to and then arranged at, the death site, which show many strong parallels to those at other death sites, and look at the texts produced, the actual “marking of the death site.” I then describe what happened after Nicola’s death, which was perceived as a “spontaneous reaction.” In order to do so, I look at the reasons people gave for going to the site of the accident and at more general interpretations. Connected to this are people’s recollections of the emotions they felt and expressed after Nicola’s death. These seem to represent certain emotional states, and I ask why in this case these emotional states were created. Finally, I look at how people conceptualized this accident, as this might help to explain why the accident triggered a people’s protest.

The Accident Nicola Seher was nine years old. She lived with her grandparents in St. Pauli, a relatively poor part of Hamburg that is known for its red light district. They lived in a small apartment in a quiet side street near Strese-

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mannstraße, a four-lane main thoroughfare. In an interview, her mother told me what had happened.5 On the afternoon of 27 August 1991, Nicola was supposed to visit her mother, who lived in another part of the city. As usual, she set off on her bicycle to ride the two kilometers through the city, cycling on the footpath along both small and larger streets. Her mother and grandparents trusted the girl to get there on her own. Shortly before Nicola set off, she talked on the phone to her mother, who was awaiting her. Nicola then left her grandparents’ home and cycled along Bernstorffstraße, where they lived. A neighbor, a woman from Honduras, saw her passing and exchanged a few words with her. She watched Nicola cycle on and wait for the lights at the crossing with Stresemannstraße. When the lights turned green, Nicola remounted her bike and set off. Almost immediately, she was run over and killed by a truck.6 The truck driver later said that he had not realized that there were traffic lights there; he had seen the red light only when he had actually arrived at the crossing. He had thought of either braking or speeding up (Tageszeitung, April 16, 1992), but had been too late: The metal part above the truck’s twin front tires had already smashed into Nicola (Hamburger

Illustration 5.1. Newspaper cutting from Hamburger Morgenpost, 28 August 1991: “Truck killed child,” showing the site of accident with the girl’s bicycle and the big truck. Collection Monika Rulfs. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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Morgenpost, 28 August 1991). Fifteen minutes later, her mother called her grandfather because Nicola had not arrived. He told her that he could hear helicopters and police sirens; alarmed, the mother called the police. They asked her what Nicola looked like and whether she had a pink bicycle. When she answered in the affirmative, they told her that her child was dead.7

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After the Accident Several people saw or heard the accident. Passers-by loitered, watching the police chalk the outline of the body where it had fallen, scatter wood shavings to soak up the blood, divert the traffic onto the two clear lanes, and tidy up the place.8 People living nearby, and the first of the journalists, went to see what had happened. Some saw the body under a blanket, while others saw the bicycle and parts of a Walkman lying on the asphalt; some remembered the wood shavings, others talked about the chalk markings.9 Pictures were taken, and the next day’s papers showed the girl’s bicycle and the truck in the middle of the street (Hamburger Morgenpost, 28 August 1991). People assembled in Stresemannstraße soon after the accident. Some had been alerted by the helicopters,10 while others had heard what had happened from acquaintances. More and more people gathered and moved onto the road; some were phoned by friends and asked to come, while others had decided to go to the site when they heard about the accident and the gathering of people.11 For nearly two weeks, until 11 September, people stood in Stresemannstraße every day, from 4:00 PM—the time of the accident—until nightfall. Up to 1,000 people went there on the day of the accident (27 August); about 500 on 28 August; about 300 on 29 August; about 200 on 30 August, 31 August, and 1 September; and about 100 on 2, 3, and 4 September. A debate about Stresemannstraße in the Hamburg parliament on 4 September ended with the announcement by the senator of the interior that the speed limit on this road would be reduced. On the day of the funeral (5 September), around 700 people gathered in Stresemannstraße. The blockade continued the following day, with 100–200 people gathering each day until 11 September;12 during this time the blockade was started in the afternoon and kept up until the late evening or night. On 10 September, the Hamburg senate decided to reduce the speed limit on Stresemannstraße to thirty kilometers per hour, to change the sequence of traffic lights, to use the outside lanes as separate bus lanes, and to install an additional bus stop. On 11 September,

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a representative of the senate came to Stresemannstraße, where again about 100 people had gathered, and read the text of the decision to the people. After this, the protest came to an end.

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Background to the Events To understand what made people go to the site of the accident, I looked into the whole setting related to the accident, tracing any details that might have been responsible for this special reaction. There was already awareness in Hamburg among those who read newspapers, whether broadsheets or tabloids, that it was unhealthy to live on Stresemannstraße. In December 1990 and in the spring and summer of 1991, the street had been reported as being especially dangerous, noisy, and polluted (it failed to meet EU air pollution standards). The part of Stresemannstraße where the accident occurred is a narrow, four-lane street lined with late-nineteenth-century, four- or five-story rental apartment buildings. The street forms an important east–west route: 42,000 vehicles, including 4,700 trucks, passed along it every day between the city and a highway (Ingenieurgemeinschaft 1993: 8). An article that appeared three days before the accident is typical of what was written about Stresemannstraße at that time: “One can hardly expect human life in this street. But there are still residents living here. From time to time they lament in interviews that they can no longer air their rooms, because it would make them cough without end.”13 The tabloid Bild had called Stresemannstraße the “most dangerous street in Hamburg”14 and the “most poisoned street in Germany,”15 while the newspaper Die Welt had written that it was “polluted beyond all limits.”16 Members of the Green Party and a small group of activists living on Stresemannstraße or nearby had reacted to these reports and made a few futile attempts to mobilize residents to protest against the amount, speed, and effects of the traffic.17 Only short articles about their activities had appeared in the local papers.18 There was a general feeling that a lot of accidents involving children had happened in Stresemannstraße. Police statistics for the whole street, which runs for three kilometers, indicated that nineteen people had been killed in the years between 1979 and 1998 (Rulfs 2002: 56). Among these dead were Nicola and another child. I return later to the contradiction between people’s perception of the number of children killed and the actual number. Although Stresemannstraße was dominated by traffic, the surrounding area was a lively urban area, full of people, shops, cafes, and bars, and its

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inhabitants were no strangers to political actions of various sorts. They had experienced, or been involved in, several political conflicts that had been played out in Stresemannstraße, for example, resistance against the eviction of squatters, the census, atomic energy, the building of a huge musical theater (which was opposed because of an expected increase in vehicle traffic), and political repression in various parts of the world. A police officer working in the area told me: In other areas when you search for life, you have to dig deep and through a strong layer of money; but here, if you simply scratch the surface, blood will flow immediately—that is the difference. … Yes, I think the people here are more political, willing to be mobilized, and they are better organized.19

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Although at the time problems caused by traffic were not high on Hamburg’s political agenda (Hamburg’s parliament was dominated by Social Democrats), a new female senator for urban development (and women’s affairs) had just been designated. She was supposed to concentrate the widely dispersed traffic responsibilities in her office; her predecessor, the senator for construction, had been known for his strong support of motorized traffic. All these details may be regarded as contributing to greater public attention to events related to Stresemannstraße, especially those associated with serious accidents, pollution, congestion, and general traffic problems.

Marking the Death Site The neighbor who had witnessed the accident talked to her friends immediately afterwards, and they decided to take candles and put them on the asphalt. She told me that she had said to her friends: “Let’s go there and light candles, and every candle that gets run over by cars, we will light again.” She explained why she wanted to take a candle: “Candles mean somebody has died and somebody is sad. I was hoping people would stop and get out of their cars and ask, what happened here?”20 People living nearby, neighbors, and especially children who had heard about the accident, also brought candles of all sorts, small night-lights, cut flowers of all colors, and flowers in flowerpots. They put them on the spot where police had marked the outline of the body and on the central traffic island. In the evening, someone went over the chalk outline with white paint. Residents fixed a small wooden cross to the lamppost in the middle of the street. One resident said that she felt it was wrong to let the police tidy up the place and divert the traffic; it seemed that the police wanted to remove all traces of death and the accident, as though it had

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not happened.21 Another resident said she had the impression that emotion, especially grief, was not allowed.22 On the first evening, children painted a big white cross on the asphalt, along with the words: “Nicola 27.8.91, 10 Jahre [10 years].” Attached to one of the balconies that faced the crossroads was a long white banner painted with a gigantic black cross and the words: “Nicola 10 J. 27.8.91.” In the middle of Stresemannstraße was a small traffic island, with two lanes on each side of it. The island had a pedestrian crossing, traffic lights, a signpost, a lamp post, and a small area covered with weeds. On this island, people put candles, flowers, and newspaper cuttings bearing a picture of Nicola, which journalists had collected from her grandparents immediately after the accident. This picture showed Nicola, her face fringed with blonde curls, smiling and wearing a dress or a blouse. It symbolized a girl who was no longer a sweet little girl; an ideal daughter; a beloved and happy child;23 a child from a fragmented family;24 a child to be mothered; an innocent, unprotected, and vulnerable child; a weak pedestrian and cyclist; a girl from the neighborhood; a best friend.25 Together with flowers, candles, newspaper cuttings, and two or three teddy bears, there were written messages of various sorts—personal ones

Illustration 5.2. Girls standing at the site of the accident in front of Frauenkneipe (Women’s Pub) in Hamburg showing the poster they made: “Nicola was my best friend! Am I the next child? Pacify the streets!” Photo: Marily Stroux. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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focusing on grief and love, personal-political texts focusing on Nicola’s death in the road, and texts with a clear political message.26 The personal texts were mostly handwritten, some in the form of letters, some decorated with self-drawn pictures, some written on small pieces of paper. They emphasized death, loss, sadness, fear of death, love for the dead girl, references to God, questions about the meaning of death, and attempts to make sense of Nicola’s death. The following examples (translated into English) illustrate this: “We loved you. Jenny and Manuela”—a painted picture of two girls had been added. “Why so early? Nicola, nine, was run over by a truck when she tried to cross Stresemannstraße. The traffic lights showed ‘green’ for the pedestrians. We will never forget you and express our sympathy with your parents, grandparents & relatives.” “Dear dear dear Nicola! I will never forget your last smile with which you said goodbye to the world. I think of you every day and I dream of you at night. And always when one of my three children comes back from school, alive and healthy, I thank God. You have not reached your destination, but your death should not be meaningless. This is what we will fight for. In grief, family ….” This letter was written by the neighbor from Honduras. “Sincere sympathy. I am very sorry for you, Nicola. Long-distance truck driver from Koblenz.” “Nicola, your death should not be meaningless!” “A child is dead and a thousand people are weeping”—a cutting from a tabloid glued to a piece of paper and decorated with adhesive flowers. The texts connecting the personal to the political were generally bigger messages on posters or banners; some were hand-written or handpainted and voiced indignation, anger, or rage that the traffic conditions had caused Nicola’s death. They said: “Here died Nicola!” “Nicola 10 y[ears] 27–9-91. How many to come?”—a painted cross had been added. “Nicola! It is enough! Tempo 30!”27—a painted cross had been added. “We have not yet said ‘No!’ to death on our roads!” “God created human beings so that they should live!” “Nicola was my best friend!!!! Am I the next child? Pacify the streets!!!” The messages that focused on political demands appeared from the second day onward; most were written or painted in very big letters on banners, signposts, or walls, or across the street, in order to be read from a distance. They were directed against car and truck traffic and its effects: “Autod” (a combination of Auto [car] and Tod [death]) was a graffito painted on a wall. “Car drivers are stupid” was painted in huge letters across the street. “Stop cars’ terror!” “Stop the automobile mania!” “Noise, stench, traffic accidents, congestion, showing off, racing, destruction of environment. Pissed off with cars. Militant cyclists.” “Stop trucks now!” “For a road without cars!”

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This category of political message also included imitation road signs and road markings directed against motorized traffic and those who were politically responsible for it. People covered the crossing with painted zebras to indicate that they wanted a zebra or a safe crossing for their children and other pedestrians. Huge red circles with “30” in the middle (imitations of the road sign that tells drivers to keep to the speed limit of thirty kilometers per hour) were painted on the road surface; smaller ones were painted on cardboard and held up by children whenever there were TV cameras around. The protesters utilized the authority attributed to signposts for their political messages. This implied the idea that if the authorities were not able to guarantee safety, they themselves had to take over and introduce the rules they considered necessary. Among the banners and signposts, there were some that had obviously been produced before the accident, probably in order to be used during a protest of some sort. This showed that members of several political groups had joined in the protest and appropriated the case for their own means. For example, a huge colorful banner demanding “Federal railway instead of highway!” was carried around by members of a small political group of the same name. The day after the accident, several “30” signposts were distributed among the children by a local politician from the Green Party, who had been ordered to do so by a party member who was higher up the hierarchy.28 Members of a local Greenpeace group hung a Greenpeace banner (against cars) above the road that crosses Stresemannstraße, but only a few people seemed to have noticed,29 as no picture of the banner appeared in the papers. On the day of the funeral, after the mourning ritual in Stresemannstraße, a group of “Robin Wood” supporters laid large concrete drainage pipes on the road surface and filled them with small trees and earth. Some residents participated in this action as they liked the idea of transforming the road;30 others disliked it because of its professional political activism.31 New objects and texts were continuously added to the existing assemblage at the death site, especially at the beginning of the protest. This collective but unplanned activity provided the background to the general visualization of the protest. Although the above shows that the messages and objects were personal or political, or both, in the visualization of the protest, especially in the papers, the more personal and death-related pictures dominated. Rather than political slogans on the street, walls, and banners, the media showed personal messages, flowers, crosses, and candles. People were not portrayed debating or talking to each other, but looking serious and keeping silent; children were not shown playing or running around, but fixing candles, watering flowers, standing still, or looking down.

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Residents united in a local action group planned to erect a permanent memorial in the form of a large cross, but neither Nicola’s mother nor her grandparents approved of it. Nicola’s mother stated that it was very hard for her to pass the site even without a memorial cross or stone; the grandmother also disliked the idea.32 When, in addition to that, the local administration rejected the plan—because the cross was too big and would distract drivers’ attention—the residents gave up on the idea.33 For several years, residents tried to plant flowers on the traffic island, but the plants were regularly smothered by weeds; and small groups of people gathered at the site on the day of Nicola’s death, sometimes combining the gathering in memory of Nicola with some sort of protest against traffic conditions in Stresemannstraße. All this ended after about seven years.34

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Spontaneous Reaction Much has been written about “spontaneous shrines” or people “spontaneously” gathering at the site of death to express grief or to mourn in protest (cf. Santino 2006a; 2006b; Margry 2003: 127; Walter 1991: 620), but the term spontaneous in connection with these reactions to death has been questioned (cf. Stengs 2003: 38). Greenhalgh wrote in relation to the reactions to Lady Diana’s death that the reactions were chosen from a “repertoire of properties from many cultures and political and religious events,” giving events “a conventionality that makes the descriptive term ‘spontaneous’ less appropriate” (1999: 43). I therefore reflect here also on the perceived spontaneity of the protest. It was perceived as a natural reaction; unreflected, spontaneous, emotionally intense. These features were often repeated in the media, and they lent legitimacy to the protest (Rulfs 2002: 163). It was the people who were seen to have reacted spontaneously.35 Interviews with political activists who participated in the protest showed that they were aware of the political advantage of the perceived spontaneity. They tried to remain in the background in order not to spoil this image. They knew that the opposite of a spontaneous reaction is a planned political action—which lacks the positive connotations connected to spontaneity.36 When I asked interviewees why they went to the site of the accident, they said, for example: “I never thought about it; it was completely natural;” “I suddenly realized it can’t go on like this. It has to come to an end;” “We went to the street, shocked by the accident. This is the only way we can defend ourselves;” and:

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When my neighbor told me that a ten-year-old blonde girl had been killed, I panicked, because my daughter is also ten years old and blonde and she likes to go to the Pro [a supermarket; to get there she had to cross Stresemannstraße at the same spot as Nicola]. I said, this is terrible, what happened here! So we went to blockade the road, already on the first day. I have seen several children killed on that corner.37

It is difficult to tell who had been aware of all the details of the past history I mentioned above—the traffic situation with its pollution, noise, and vibrations caused by big trucks, the number of people killed in accidents, and changes in responsibility for traffic policy. Some people probably felt that the street was dangerous. But as the accident happened after so much had been written and read about Stresemannstraße, knowledge (or perceived knowledge) about the situation triggered some people’s reactions, and fed the perceived spontaneity and strong emotionality. Not only those who took part in the marking of death, but also professionals who watched what happened from a distance—politicians, policemen, a pediatrician, a pastor—shared the idea of what Don Handelman (1990: 20) calls a “happening that happened.” It was generally acknowledged that the people involved were acting without thinking much or asking questions, and that they went to Stresemannstraße because they thought that it was the right thing to do. For example, a young Green Party politician said: “I think the theme was very much in the air.”38 The new female senator for urban development talked to the people in Stresemannstraße on the night of the accident and said: “I spontaneously decided to drive to Stresemannstraße that very night. It was the right decision. It was obvious something had to change.”39 A police officer from the corner police station said: There was the general feeling something had to be changed. First thing, when I heard something had happened, I went out—which I don’t usually do, I don’t go out to every accident, it doesn’t help anybody, and anyway, I can always read the report—but in this case I went out, because I had the feeling something might happen. I expected something to happen. And when the first people stood in the street, we let them stand there. We closed the street, took the traffic out.40

A pediatrician talking about traffic congestion and how dangerous it was for children to live in this area said, “It was so awful here, everybody was prepared to struggle against it, even the ordinary people; they couldn’t stand it any longer.”41 A pastor from the nearby church said, “They were people with rage in their stomach, who wanted to do something, and there was this point, this trigger, and they said, ‘up to this point and no further.’”42 Other expressions that were used included: “Die Leute hatten die Schnauze gestrichen voll ” (People were fed up to the back teeth) and “Das brachte das Fass zum Überlaufen” (That put the lid on it). The image mediated with these expressions was that so many things—deaths,

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accidents, dangerous situations, restrictions—had happened, that it was no surprise that people took to the street, and that it only needed a tiny further thing (the accident) to trigger a reaction. The reaction that appeared to flow out spontaneously was one constructed by all in response to a shared experience. It was a collective act of expression, utilizing expressive means from an easily accessible repertoire of grief and protest. Flowers, flowerpots, candles, pictures, and wreaths are usually put on graves, while flowers and personal items like letters or pictures are thrown into graves at funerals (Köstlin 1992: 314). In 1992, Köstlin observed a rapid increase in the practice of placing marks of death (crosses or stones) at the site of traffic accidents; in his view, this behavior had started in the 1970s. A cross may be regarded as a religious symbol and as a secularized symbol of death, marking sudden death through accident or violence (Köstlin 1992: 308; Löwer 1999: 184). The repertoire was also fed by pictures of funerals or vigils held at the sites of spectacular deaths related to political protest. For example, after the death of Benno Ohnesorg in 1967, some fifteen thousand people participated in the funeral procession through Berlin;43 after the death of Klaus-Jürgen Rattay in 1981 in Frankfurt, numerous bills, posters, writings, and pieces of paper made the wall at the death site into a wall news-sheet, and the road was covered with flowers;44 after the death of Günter Sare in 1985 in Frankfurt, flowers covered the death site and fifty people held a vigil;45 and at the Berlin Wall, wreaths are laid every year in remembrance of those who were killed trying to escape the German Democratic Republic (Löwer 1999: 121). And, of course, the repertoire was also fed by the processions for and funerals of internationally prominent people, like John F. Kennedy (1963), Martin Luther King Jr. (1974), John Lennon (1980), or Olof Palme (1986).

Emotional States Dominating the Scene Talking to the protest participants about why they had taken to the street, I was told different stories. This was related to their own personal histories. Their very diverse stories imply very diverse motivations, for example, the fear that their own children could be killed, the terrible memory of a brother’s accident, the conviction that Nicola’s death had to be utilized politically, the wish to be part of a community, the fear that one might hurt the mother’s feelings, the hope of getting to know people, the repulsion at people showing indifference, or the expectation that they would experience something exciting (Rulfs 2002: 164). But when I asked them how they would describe the atmosphere in the

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street, they did not refer to their personal histories or expectations, but mentioned certain emotional states that for them obviously belonged to the particular setting in the street. They talked about Trauer (sadness or grief) and Wut (anger or rage); many said that they had first felt grief, but that anger had then taken over. People were talking about the need to do something and about these feelings, and the papers followed them. For example, the Tageszeitung wrote that “Anger and grief turned into action” (29 August 1991), while the Hamburger Morgenpost wrote that “residents felt pain and grief about the accidental death of nine-year-old Nicola, and despair and rage about the daily traffic chaos in front of their doors” (29 August 1991). People’s actions were seldom called “political protest.” In a speech that the mother of a child gave in the street, she said: “We are not demonstrating, but admonishing and grieving. I might not know much about laws, but enough to know that they have to be changed now” (Tageszeitung, 6 September 1991). Grief was generally accepted as being the appropriate reaction to this tragic death. The people in Stresemannstraße were able to present themselves as truly grieving. Their way of grieving was generally accepted in Hamburg as an authentic reaction. Others who were not directly involved in the events in Stresemannstraße but had to deal with the situation from the government side (like administrators and politicians), had to tune in. During the first week of protest, nobody spoke in public without first demonstrating his or her intense compassion, grief, or commitment to care. This was especially so for politicians, who often mentioned that they themselves had children.46 Most pictures in the papers represented the site as a place of loss and sadness, showing people with serious faces and bowed heads, or children lighting candles or arranging flowers. There were confrontations between protesters and drivers, who shouted at each other, and between children, aged eight to twelve, and the police. These children played football, skated wildly, lit small fires, and during the first four days built barricades using dustbins and pallets until adults stopped them from doing do so. The children ran around, singing, “Autos weg, hat kein Zweck!” (Away with cars, they’re of no use!). The police were helpless, because the children were so young. A police officer said in an interview: “I refused to clear the street, to act against the children. For me, that was out of the question; other solutions had to be found” (Tageszeitung, 31 August 1991). People in the street knew that pictures of the wild children spoiled the image of grief, and that their anger was regarded legitimate only in connection to their grief. This was mirrored to them when politicians said that they could understand people’s anger, but in the long term they only accepted their grief.47 The pictures in the papers only occasionally visualized anger.

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It was the combination of sadness and anger that was stereotypically repeated in the papers’ reporting on Stresemannstraße, and it could be found everywhere, in written statements, and in speeches given in the street and in the Hamburg parliament. This combination of feelings was obviously the emotional state that was appropriate to the situation.48 These emotions were chosen from a huge reservoir of emotions, because people participating in the gathering in Stresemannstraße associated them with the sudden death of a child in a traffic accident, which happened because politicians allowed heavy traffic to pass through where people lived. This was well expressed by a TV commentator, who said on the night of the funeral:

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This time parents have not given in quietly after the death of their child—they have clenched their fists in public and not modestly at their kitchen tables. They have not left the bloody asphalt, but have remained at the scene of the crime—silent, full of rage, breaking road traffic regulations, they were victorious … against the brains behind the scenes, located in town halls and ministries.49

On 5 September, about fifty people—family, neighbors, teachers, friends, and a few classmates—took part in the funeral service at the cemetery where Nicola was buried. Although the family had wanted the funeral to be private, journalists came to report on the event; photographers even climbed the cemetery fence to take pictures. When the flashes at the grave became too intrusive, the mourners fled to the cemetery chapel.50 At the same time, over seven hundred people met in the street for a public ritual of mourning. This gathering in the street was much more formalized than the previous ones: The place and time had been publicly announced in a press statement issued by the local action group and had been printed on leaflets, and several newspaper articles provided information about the public mourning.51 People had been asked to bring flowers; more people than before were dressed in dark clothing or appeared to be better dressed; politicians and functionaries participated; speeches had been planned and food prepared. The following day, the papers made these two rituals—the funeral service and the mourning ritual in the street—merge into one. Pictures of the two events were printed next to each other, so that one could not really tell who was grieving where. For example, a picture of a group of children and adults looking down at a huge pile of flowers in the street, made it look as though they were actually looking at the grave. The papers also reported many details of the funeral service, for example, how the relatives looked, what they did, and when they cried, and they described the small white coffin covered with white and pink roses, and the music that was played. They also cited parts of the female Protestant pastor’s speech at the funeral service; in addition, they reported details of what

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happened in the street, and cited parts of the speeches given there by two mothers and a pastor. It was not only the papers that made these events merge into one: When one compares the four speeches, it is striking that the speech at the cemetery was partly highly political—imagining listeners protesting in the street—while the speeches given in the street were rather contemplative and personal, composed as though they were meant to be given at the graveside.52 The people in the street tried to extend their moral legitimacy to the period after the funeral. They profited from the moral strength they had built up, and demanded to be recognized not only in their grief but also in their demands. Most people who were in the street were ordinary people from the area; among the participants were a lot of women, children, and migrants.53 The strength of the gathering depended on the presence of these people—mothers, parents, women, residents, and children. They were shown in photographs, their worries were written about in the papers, and they were interviewed as people who knew what it meant to live there, to have small children move about the streets, and to experience the fear that something might happen to their own children. For example, immediately after the accident, the Hamburger Rundschau wrote: “That parents and children suffer every day and sometimes experience unimaginable effects caused by automobile traffic has been neglected for a long

Illustration 5.3. Newspaper cutting from Hamburger Abendblatt, 6 September 1991: “The Street of Grief,” showing youngsters looking at a pile of flowers in the street on the day of Nicola’s funeral. Photo: BAUM/DPA. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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time. Politicians without children cannot understand that” (29 August 1991). The people who gathered in the street showed their strong conviction that it was existentially dangerous to live on Stresemannstraße, and that they were talking about life and death. Those who spoke in public justified their demands and emotions with this reference to existential questions. For example, the pastor at the funeral said: “We are suffering without defending ourselves. Until one day tragedy shows us how fragile life is.” And she appealed to the parents: “Go on putting up barricades against deathly powers. Choose life!”54 Although the police wanted the street blockade to be lifted after the funeral, they had to face the fact that people wanted to continue to be present in the street until they had achieved something. When looked at as a social drama, it is clear that people chose their way of performing from a repertoire of verbal, gesticulatory, mimical, visual, audible, and emotional expressions to react to Nicola’s death. This was not only a locally developed repertoire; globalization, through the media and migration, had broadened this repertoire. It was fed by death symbols, funeral rituals, and Christian symbols, and by TV clips of public celebrations of death, especially those of famous people (Scharfe 1989: 46–47; cf. Senie 2006: 43). It was also inspired by traditions of political demonstration and protest, and by TV representations of protest, for example, of the people’s protest in the German Democratic Republic before the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989,55 and by a general understanding of how to behave appropriately. However people were involved and whoever they were—neighbors, friends, teachers, shopkeepers, pastors, policemen, politicians, or journalists—they acted according to what they felt and thought was morally and politically appropriate, such as how to behave, what to say, when to buy flowers, when to lower one’s head, when to be quiet, and when to tell the children to stop building barricades.

Conceptualization of the Accident The conceptualization of the fatal traffic accident in Stresemannstraße differed from that of other traffic accidents, and at the same time resembled the reaction after certain other traumatic deaths. Experts on accidents—policemen, first aid people, insurance company representatives, traffic sociologists, psychologists, etc.—would call it a “typical accident” or a “normal accident,” as nothing about the setting was exceptional compared to other accidents (as shown in Rulfs 2002: 52–58). One characteristic of a traffic accident in the Western world is that it remains almost invisible and usually passes unnoticed (cf. Böhm et al. 2006: 10).

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In this case, however, the accident did not pass unnoticed, despite and because of its normalcy; “despite” its normalcy because, as many participants had known Nicola, her death was experienced as a personal loss, was performed as such in the street, and was represented as such in the papers. This intense experience was transmitted to others, first to those who lived there but had not known Nicola, and then to those who did not even live there. The fact that “one of our children,” as a policeman put it,56 had died, made the normal accident exceptional. The accident also did not pass unnoticed “because” it was a normal accident. When writing about “normal accidents,” Charles Perrow’s book with the same title comes to mind. Perrow argues that technical and economic systems carry such a high risk that there will always be failures; therefore, operational staff cannot be blamed for these inevitable or “normal” system accidents (1999: 330). The people in the street seemed to have a similar perception with regard to the automobile system. They interpreted the situation—a truck smashing into a child—not as something that happened accidentally (cf. Bickenbach and Stolzke 1996), but as something that was to be expected. This became obvious in interviews and in the written messages left in the street. The protest participants were not content with looking for “pigeonholes,” as John Law writes (2003: 3), blaming people like the driver, the driver’s boss, the mother, the grandparents, or even the child herself, or looking for causes, like the coordination or timing of traffic lights, the speed limit, the narrowness of the street, or the fact that the street connected the city to a highway. They and many others—such as journalists, politicians, and people who professionally deal with traffic—went for the complexity of the whole. A journalist said, “For a short moment, there was this flash and one could see all the madness, and it went directly into the brain, at least into the brains of us journalists; that is something very unusual.”57 The things and conditions that were generally blamed by these people were car drivers, the terror of cars, the automobile mania, and traffic policy in general, with its focus on private rather than public transport. The word Autod (car death) connected the car directly with death, and showed an interpretation of traffic as a system in which the automobile necessarily creates accidents.58 While Perrow in his critique of capitalism blames the “elites,” the people in Stresemannstraße were blaming those who in their view were responsible for the overall traffic conditions: the leading politicians. Blaming politicians was directly connected to the idea that during the previous seven years, six children had died at this spot. One man said he had seen several children die on that very corner; a woman said she had seen ten children involved in accidents; another said that she remem-

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bered the death of a Turkish twin. The idea of a series of deaths was repeated again and again, and the papers printed it.59 The police—who kept the statistics—contradicted the figures, but to no avail.60 Nobody took any notice, not the people in the street, not the Hamburg journalists, not the Hamburg politicians. A member of the Christian Democratic Party even repeated the assertion in parliament.61 He was obviously repeating what he had heard or read without checking the figures. But what would have happened had he said in public: “No, it’s wrong: six children did not die at this spot during the last seven years; none did: Only a sixtyseven-year-old woman was killed”? The result would have been a wave of indignation directed against him, accusing him of either lying or playing down what had happened—and this in a situation where the death of one child had been enough to draw hundreds of people onto the street. What counted at the moment of death, and a few days later, was the moral standing of people expressed in their ability to show that they were grieving. Those who repeated that six children had been killed were convinced that the overall picture they painted was right. When I mentioned the police statistics in an interview with one resident, the reaction was: “Oh, really? I didn’t know. But it doesn’t make much difference.”62 The people who were in danger of being blamed, or who felt they could somehow be held responsible, were among those who were looking for single causes, blaming the directly involved individuals, or declaring the whole situation to be unchangeable. Here are three examples: The senator of domestic affairs demanded a nationwide law against people jumping red lights63 (a newspaper commented, ironically, that the senator’s idea seemed to suggest that jumped traffic lights were the problem, not run-over children);64 a traffic engineer suggested that the child should have paid attention to the traffic, even though she had a green light;65 and the child’s mother blamed the truck driver and was satisfied when he was convicted of culpable homicide and sentenced to ten months’ probation and disqualification from driving for four months.66

Conclusion The reaction to the fatal accident was a gathering of people mourning in protest against what they conceived as extreme traffic conditions. The accident made them question why they were expected to accept conditions that could easily lead to another death like the one they had experienced. Their protest was a grassroots fight for the right to express the emotions this death had evoked, and for the recognition of the danger faced by them, their children, the weak, and the less mobile. Many of their po-

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litical demands were actually fulfilled: The speed limit was reduced to thirty kilometers an hour, bus lanes were introduced, a new bus stop was installed, and the traffic light intervals were changed to the advantage of pedestrians. But the people were also successful in what they did and how they did it, and in creating an emotional atmosphere and communicating it to the wider public. This forced politicians to act and gave them the support of the majority of people in Hamburg who, at least for a week or two, were convinced that the protesters’ attitude was morally right.

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Notes 1. For example: the murder of Pim Fortuyn in Holland in 2002 (Margry 2003), the Hillsborough football stadium disaster in England in 1989 (Walter 1991), the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the shooting at Columbine High in 1999 (Grider 2007), the plane crash at Ramstein in Germany in 1988, the train accident at Eschede in Germany in 1998, the Concorde catastrophe in France in 2000, the murder of Olof Palme in Sweden in 1986 (Scharfe 1989), the bomb explosions in four Madrid commuter trains in 2004 (Sánchez-Carretero 2006). 2. The roadside memorial that Irene Stengs deals with in an unpublished paper focuses on remembrance and warning (Stengs 2004). 3. “Straße” is German for street; the street is named after the German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929). 4. This question had also been raised and analyzed in an excellent newspaper article by Kai Fabian, “Wann wird Widerstand nicht nur zur Pflicht?” Tageszeitung, 5 September 1991. 5. Notes of an unrecorded interview on 28 May 1993. 6. Interview on 14 December 1993. 7. Notes of an unrecorded interview on 28 May 1993. 8. Interviews on 14 December 1993, 2 February 1994, and 9 November 1993. 9. Hamburger Morgenpost, 29 August 1991; and Christian Arndt (1992), Erklärung im Prozess, 28 January 1992 (unpublished manuscript of personal statement in court): 5. 10. Interview on 9 November 1993. 11. Notes taken on 28 September 1992; Friedrichs 1994: 361; Andrée 1992: 5. 12. These figures are based on those given in several interviews with participants and members of the police force, and on those mentioned in newspapers, in Andrée 1992 and in Friedrichs 1994: 361. 13. “Stresemannstraße—über alle Grenzen belastet. Tristesse und Abgaspest,” Die Welt, 24 August 1991. 14. “Gefährliche Stresemannstraße: Dauerstau, Unfälle und Tote” Bild, 14 December 1990. 15. “In Altona: Die giftigste Straße ganz Deutschlands,” Bild, 2 August 1991. 16. “Stresemannstraße—über alle Grenzen belastet.” 17. Interview on 20 April 1994. 18. For example “Mehr Laster als am Brenner-Pass,” Hamburger Morgenpost, 13 July 1991.

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19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

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28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

Monika Rulfs

Interview on, 7 June 1993. Interview on, 20 April 1994. Interview on, 20 April 1994. Recordings of a press conference, 15 June 1993. As the grandmother was cited, for example, in the article “LKW fuhr Kind tot— Trauer und Protest,” Hamburger Morgenpost, 28 August 1991. The problems this fragmented family had were adumbrated in the papers and talked about in the street (Interview on 9 December 1993). See Marita Sturken (1999: 194) about personal photographs changing their meaning in public, and Douglas Davies (1999: 17) for a long list of what Lady Diana symbolized for the people. The whole setting—people, objects, and texts—had been photographed for private and professional use. For the following description I mainly used two private photograph albums of the protest participants Margarete Arndt and Leonidas Avaria Munez, the photo archives of two professional photographers, Günther Zint and Marily Stroux, and photographs published in newspapers. “Tempo 30” is the demand for a speed limit of thirty kilometers per hour; the usual speed limit in German towns is fifty kilometers per hour. Interview on 9 December 1993. Interview on 26 January 1994. Interview on 26 January 1994. Interview on 21 February 1994. Notes of an unrecorded interview on 28 May 1993; interview on 14 December 1993. Cf. Stengs 2004: 11–12. On 27 August 1992, about 130 people gathered. On the same date in 1993, 250 gathered; in 1994 no-one turned up (because of the summer holidays); in 1995, 30 gathered; in 1996, 10; in 1997, 50; and in 1998, fewer than 10 gathered (own observation). In 2001, a new wave of political protest started, because the newly elected government of Christian Democrats wanted to reorganize the traffic regulations for Stresemannstraße. But this will not be dealt with here. Much of what Bendix writes about authenticity, e.g., “the expressive culture of the ‘folk’” (Bendix 1997: 26), could also be applied to spontaneity. Interviews on 3 May 1993, 9 November 1993, and 26 January 1994. Interviews on 8 March 1994, and 9 September 1992; see also interviews on 9 December 1993; “Verengung auf eine Fahrspur pro Seite,” Hamburger Morgenpost, 3 September 1992. Interview on 21 June 1993. Traute Müller cited in Hamburger Morgenpost, 27 August 1992 “Nicola (9)—ein Opfer der Politik?” Interview on 7 June 1993. Interview on 14 October 1993. Interview on 9 November 1993. http://web.fu-berlin.de/chronik/b-picts/1961–1969/trauerkondukt.html. Accessed 14 February 2009. http://www.taz.de/index.php?id=archivseite&dig=2006/09/22/a0254. Accessed 14 February 2009. http://www.dradio.de/dlf/sendungen/kalenderblatt/421999. Accessed 14 February 2009. See Bailey 1983 for the display of emotion as a way of eliciting trust in order to govern people.

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47. Interviews on 18 May 1993 and 13 September 1993. 48. Marita Eastmond, describing the funeral of a Chilean in exile, writes, “It seems that, as politics took over, a monolithic meaning was developed which allowed emotions only of a certain kind” (Eastmond 1988: 89). Hochschild writes about specific feeling rules (Hochschild 2003), while Sarbin writes that people are following a certain script (Sarbin 1986: 89). 49. TV commentary “Kinder im Straßenverkehr,” Georg M. Hafner, Tagesthemen, 5 September 1991. 50. Interview on 25 May 1993. 51. For example “Morgen Gedenkstunde auf der Straßenkreuzung,” Hamburger Morgenpost, 4 September 1991; one has to keep in mind that these were the times before the Internet. 52. Unpublished manuscripts of two of the three speeches given in the street by Christian Arndt (Protestant priest) and Katrin Jürgens (mother), and of the speech given at the cemetery by Anne Rahe (Protestant pastor). 53. A woman from Honduras lit the first candle in the street and was one of three speakers in the street on the day of the funeral. Many Turkish boys were among the youths who gathered in the street, building barricades. In the newspaper the picture of a small, serious-looking Indian girl in a white dress served as a symbol of a sad child. A Chilean man was among those who cleaned the site every night. Members of a Roma family living in a house next to the crossroads were regularly among the people protesting in the street. 54. Unpublished manuscript of the speech given at the cemetery by Anne Rahe (Protestant pastor). 55. One day when the police tried to clear the street, people started shouting “Wir sind das Volk!” (“We are the people!”), a slogan well known from the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig and other towns in 1989 against the government of the German Democratic Republic. 56. Interview on 12 May 1993. 57. Interview on 21 February 1994. 58. This idea can already be found in Ehrenburg (1930: 235). Bickenbach and Stolzke 1996, Scheppele 1991, Faith 1997, Brottman 2001 and Beckmann 2004 also directly connect traffic accidents to automobility; while Urry 2004 speaks of a system of automobility, Böhm et al. prefer the expression “regime of automobility,” which for them, “cannot be disconnected from the mass ‘accident,’” Böhm et al. 2006: 10. 59. “Autowahn stoppen—sofort Tempo 30!,” Hamburger Morgenpost, two days after the accident, 29 August 1991. 60. The contradiction of the police was cited in the broadsheet Frankfurter Allgemeine, “Straßenblockade nach dem Tod eines Kindes,” 31 August 1991. The police said the girl had been the first child to be killed since 1981. Police statistics show that in 1979, a seven-year-old Turkish boy and in 1987 a eighty-seven-year-old woman were killed at the crossroads where Nicola was killed in 1991 (Rulfs 2002: 55). 61. Bürgerschaft der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg, 14. Wahlperiode, 3. Sitzung, 4 September 1991. 62. Interview on 14 December 1993. 63. People jumping the red light are called “Rotlichtsünder”—sinners against the red light. 64. “Ein weißes Kreuz auf dem Asphalt,” Die Zeit, 6 September 1991.

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65. This engineer told me in an interview (19 August 1993) that he would advise all pedestrians, even at a green traffic light, to look to the left and to the right, because there was the possibility of a car driver dreaming. “Defensive driving” is a strategy recommended to car drivers. In his opinion, the same should be valid for pedestrians. 66. As she told me in an interview on 28 May 1993.

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References Ahmed, Sara. (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Andrée, Margot et al. (1992). Stresemannstraße ist überall. Die Entdeckung der neuen Langsamkeit. Hamburg: Anwohnerinneninitiative. Bailey, Frederick G. (1983). The Tactical Uses of Passion: An Essay on Power, Reason and Reality. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Beckmann, Jörg. (2004). “Mobility and Safety.” Theory, Culture and Society 21(4/5): 81–100. Bendix, Regina. (1997). In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bickenbach, Matthias, and Michael Stolzke. (1996). Schrott. Bilder aus der Geschwindigkeitsfabrik. Eine fragmentarische Kulturgeschichte des Autounfalls. http://www .textur/schrott. Accessed 19 March 2007. Böhm, Steffen, Campbell Jones, Chris Land, and Mat Paterson. (2006). “Introduction: Impossibilities of Automobility.” In Steffen Böhm, Campbell Jones, Chris Land, and Mat Paterson, eds., Against Automobility. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Brottman, Mikita. (2001). “Introduction.” In Mikita Brottman, ed., Car Crash Culture. New York: Palgrave, xi–xliii. Clark, Jennifer, ed. (2007) Roadside Memorials: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Armidale, NSW: EMU Press. Davies, Douglas. (1999). “The Week of Mourning.” In Tony Walter, ed., The Mourning for Diana. Oxford: Berg, 3–18. Doss, Erika. (2002). “Death, Art and Memory in the Public Sphere: The Visual and Material Culture of Grief in Contemporary America.” Mortality 7(1): 63–83. Eastmond, Marita. (1988). “The Politics of Death. Rituals of Protest in a Chilean Exile Community.” In Sven Cederroth, Claes Corlin, and Jan Lindström, eds., On the Meaning of Death. Essays on Mortuary Rituals and Eschatological Belief. Uppsala: Coronet Books, 77–94. Ehrenburg, Ilja. (1930). Das Leben der Autos. Berlin: Malik-Verlag. Everett, Holly. (2002). Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture, Denton: University of North Texas Press. Faith, Nicholas. (1997). Crash. The Limits of Car Safety. London: Boxtree. Friedrichs, Jürgen. (1994). “Stresemannstraße. Eine Fallstudie zur Dynamik sozialen Protests.” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 34: 359–74. Greenhalgh, Susanne. (1999). “Our Lady of Flowers. The Ambiguous Politics of Diana’s Floral Revolution.” In Adrian Kear and Deborah Lynn Steinberg, eds., Mourning Diana. Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief. London: Routledge, 40–59.

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Grider, Sylvia. (2007). “Public Grief and the Politics of Memorial—Contesting the Memory of ‘The Shooters’ at Columbine High School.” Anthropology Today 23(3): 3–7. Handelman, Don. (1990). Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hochschild, Arlie R. (2003 [1983]). The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ingenieurgemeinschaft Stolz. (1993). Verkehrskonzept Stresemannstraße. Hamburg: Kaarst. Kear, Adrian. (1999). “Diana Between Two Deaths: Spectral Ethics and the Time of Mourning.” In Adrian Kear and Deborah Lynn Steinberg, eds., Mourning Diana. Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief. London: Routledge, 169–86. Köstlin, Konrad. (1992). “Totengedenken am Straßenrand. Projektstrategie und Forschungsdesign.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 46(95): 305–20. Law, John. (2003). Ladbroke Grove, or How to Think about Failing Systems. Lancaster: Centre of Science Studies, Lancaster University. http://lancs.ac.uk/fss/sociology/ papers/law-ladbroke-grove-failing-systems.pdf. Accessed 25 June, 2007. Löwer, Andrea. (1999). Kreuze am Straßenrand. Verkehrstod und Erinnerungskultur. Frankfurt: Institut für Kulturanthropologie und Europäische Ethnologie. Margry, Peter Jan. (2003). “The Murder of Pim Fortuyn and Collective Emotions. Hype, Hysteria and Holiness in the Netherlands?” Etnofoor, antropologisch tijdschrift 16(2): 106–31. Margry, Peter Jan, and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero. (2007). “Memorializing Traumatic Death.” Anthropology Today 23(3): 1–2. Owens, Maida. (2006). “Louisiana Roadside Memorials: Negotiating an Emerging Tradition.” In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 119–45. Perrow, Charles. (1999). Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. New York: Basic Books. Radjkovic´, Zorica. (1988). “Roadside Memorial Signs for Traffic Accident Victims.” Special Issue Narodna umjetnost 2: 167–78. Rulfs, Monika. (2002). Stresemannstraße. Protest und Verkehrspolitik nach einem Unfall– ethnologische Untersuchungen im Stadtteil. Hamburg: VSA. Sánchez-Carretero, Cristina. (2006). “Trains of Workers, Trains of Death: Some Reflections after the March 11 Attacks in Madrid.” In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 333–47. Santino, Jack, ed. (2006a). Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Santino, Jack. (2006b). “Performative Commemoratives: Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death.” In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 5–15. Sarbin, Theodore R. (1986). “Emotion and Act: Roles and Rhetoric.” In Rom Harré, ed., The Social Construction of Emotions. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 83–97. Scharfe, Martin. (1989). “Totengedenken. Zur Historizität von Brauchtraditionen. Das Beispiel Olof Palme 1986.” Ethnologia Scandinavica 19: 142–53. Scheppele, Kim Lane. (1991). “Law without Accidents.” In Pierre Bourdieu and James S. Coleman, eds., Social Theory for a Changing Society. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 267–93. Senie, Harriet F. (1999). “Mourning in Protest. Spontaneous Memorials and the Sacralization of Public Space.” Harvard Design Magazine (Fall): 23–27. ———. (2006). “Mourning in Protest: Spontaneous Memorials and the Sacralization of Public Space.” In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 41–56. Stengs, Irene. (2003). “Ephemeral Memorials Against ‘Senseless Violence’: Materialisations of Public Outcry.” Etnofoor, antropologisch tijdschrift 16(2): 26–40.

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———. (2004). “Roadside Mourning: Material Manifestations, Private Messages and Public Debate in the Netherlands.” Unpublished paper presented at the EASA workshop “Private Monuments in Public Domains,” Vienna, September. Sturken, Marita. (1999). “The Image as Memorial: Personal Photographs in Cultural Memory.” In Marianne Hirsch, ed., The Familial Gaze. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 178–95. Urry, John. (2004). “The ‘System’ of Automobility.” Theory, Culture and Society 21(4/5): 25–39. Walter, Tony. (1991). “The Mourning after Hillsborough.” Sociological Review 39(3): 599–625. Walter, Tony, Jane Littlewood, and Michael Pickering. (1995). “Death in the News: The Public Invigilation of Private Emotion.” Sociology 29(4): 579–96. Zeitlin, Steve. (2006). “‘Oh Did You See the Ashes Come Thickly Falling Down?’ Poems Posted in the Wake of September 11.” In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 99–117.

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Chapter 6

Ghost Bikes Memorialization and Protest on City Streets

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Robert Thomas Dobler

In October 2003, the first “ghost bike” appeared in St. Louis, Missouri, to memorialize the death of a cyclist who had been hit by a car. A local bicycle shop owner witnessed the accident and placed a mangled bike, painted stark white, on the scene, with a sign proclaiming “Cyclist struck here.” The movement quickly spread beyond St. Louis, and similar memorials have since appeared in thirty other cities across North and South America, Europe, and Australia, creating a network of mourners and activists who are working to increase vehicular awareness of bicyclists. The sudden popularity of ghost bike memorials raises questions of meaning and intent: What exactly do these memorials say and to whom? How do they function in relation to other temporary memorial forms? With a special emphasis on ghost bikes in Eugene and Portland, Oregon, this paper explores the dynamics of vernacular expressions of grief and folk art as forms of resistance to mainstream American automobile culture.1 As expressions of mourning performed in the public sphere, ghost bikes, like other temporary memorials, redefine public spaces as significant and contested. Similar to roadside crosses commemorating automobile fatalities, these bicycles seem to both memorialize individual deaths and serve as warnings to drivers. This cautionary aspect may be a motivating force in the spread of the ghost bike movement; its proponents often view the creation of these sites as a form of resistance to modern automobile-dominated society. Various social activists—including politically minded artist co-ops, environmental groups, and advocates of pedestrian and bicycle safety—have found expression through the creation of these memorials. Candles, pictures, notes, and other items accumulate

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at these sites, as individual mourners offer personal expressions of grief, often anonymously, in the material culture forms that are traditionally associated with roadside memorials. Existing at the site of death, separate from the “official” means of memorialization in cemeteries and urns, ghost bikes operate on the vernacular religious level, offering a means of personalized mourning beyond the institutionalized avenues of expression.2 Primarily an urban phenomenon, the ghost bike movement is locally autonomous, with various groups operating more or less independently of one another in major metropolitan areas. Yet the various city groups are connected through several web sites that catalog the creation of ghost bikes with uploaded pictures, offer online maps to the memorial sites, encourage perpetuation of the practice through recruitment, and provide links to other ghost bike-related web sites. The underground, politically motivated character of the ghost bike movement converts the site of memorialization into a rallying point for the cyclist subculture, transforming the emotional energy of mourning into a force of protest. As ecological concerns continue to attract attention, growing interest in alternative forms of transportation may seem to threaten the traditional dominance of mainstream car culture in American society. Could these ghost bike memorials be markers of a larger culture war that is being waged along political lines, dividing cyclists and car drivers into the traditionally opposing camps of the more ecologically minded left and the conservative right?

The Appearance of Ghost Bikes In the first week of June 2008, a ghost bike was placed on the corner at the intersection of 13th Street and Willamette Street in downtown Eugene, Oregon, to commemorate the life of David Minor—a twentyseven-year-old who was killed when a car hit him as he was riding his bike through the intersection at 3:45 PM on 2 June. A few days after the accident, a bicycle was chained to a street light on the corner; the bike, its chain, and its lock were painted white. A sign was set above the bike stating Minor’s name and the date of his death, and soon the site was adorned with a wide variety of freshly bundled flowers, potted flowers, photographs, poems, articles of clothing, and various other, presumably meaningful, material items. Typical of the kind of assemblage that is frequently built around a temporary memorial, the grouped artifacts seem to be both offerings to the departed and a sort of narrative in bricolage form to reconstruct the

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Illustration 6.1. The ghost bike for David Minor placed near the accident site in downtown Eugene, Oregon, 2008. Photo: Robert Dobler.

identity of the deceased for a public audience. Messages written directly to Minor abound, and are usually some variation of “We love you” or “We miss you.” Graffiti has been incorporated into the shrine; some of the messages are spray-painted onto a utility box that is attached to the lamppost, while others are written on the sidewalk.3 Most of the photographs left at Minor’s memorial are of the deceased himself at various ages, some with friends and family. A poem left at the memorial was written by Minor in the fifth grade; it is now laminated and accompanied by a handwritten message from a mourner. An empty whiskey bottle lies near a cymbal; a little farther away an old shoe has been placed among the flowers. These items taken together provide a glimpse of the life that has been lost, piecing the identity of the deceased back together in the wake of sudden tragedy. But of course the most striking component of the memorial is the bicycle itself. There is something fundamentally eerie and solemn about the image of the ghost bike, even before it is known what the bike represents. It is a bicycle, a symbol of motion frozen in stillness, painted as white as a skeleton, glowing and distinctly separate from the familiar cityscape that surrounds it. There is an uncanny quality to ghost bike memorials that demands notice. Literary theorist Nicholas Royle defines the

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uncanny as a “peculiar commingling of the familiar and the unfamiliar. It can take the form of something familiar unexpectedly arising in a strange and unfamiliar context or of something strange and unfamiliar unexpectedly arising in a familiar context” (Royle 2003: 1).4 In the case of ghost bikes, we find a familiar object—the bicycle—in a familiar setting, the city. Yet the effect is unsettling from the first glimpse, and all because of the strangeness of the white paint. Approaching the Eugene ghost bike, which is located on a busy sidewalk in front of a copy shop, one is struck by the incongruity of the stillness and solemnity that hangs about the memorial, placed as it is in a center of bustle and commerce. This incongruity of appearance, the uncanny quality, imparts an authoritative aura to the memorial, which makes the public take heed. Bertolt Brecht’s “alienation effect” (A-effect) describes a similar process of making the familiar suddenly strange. Brecht writes, “The Aeffect consists in turning the object of which one is to be made aware, to which one’s attention is to be drawn, from something ordinary, familiar, immediately accessible, into something peculiar, striking and unexpected” (Willett 1964: 143). To Brecht, the A-effect has a potential political application, a “combative character” (Willett 1964: 270). When the familiar is made strange, it demands special attention from an audi-

Illustration 6.2. Messages, flowers, and various items surround the ghost bike. Even the lamppost has been written on and incorporated into the memorial. Eugene, Oregon, 2008. Photo: Robert Dobler. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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ence that is forced to reconsider what it thought it knew, what it thought was natural. Once the familiar, the previously hidden, is brought to light, we can question its naturalness, and by extension the naturalness of many of our suppositions. A bicycle that is painted white and is symbolic of a particular style of human death (bicycle-car collision), invites a reconsideration of the place of the bicycle and the bicycle operator in the urban landscape. At this point, a political agenda of increased awareness among both cyclists and motorists of the issues concerning bicycle safety can be introduced to the audience.

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The Message: Cyclist vs. Motorist, Intention vs. Reception But what exactly does a ghost bike say, politically speaking? One of the primary intentions of the original ghost bike in St. Louis in 2003 was to express outrage at the carelessness of auto drivers and to give voice to the cyclists whose safety was being daily jeopardized by a general lack of awareness. The man behind the original bike is Patrick Van Der Tuin, who worked in a St. Louis bicycle shop. After witnessing a car swerve into a bike lane, severely wounding a local cyclist, Van Der Tuin took a junk bike, painted it white, and smashed the front of it with a sledgehammer. “I wanted it to be as shocking as possible,” Van Der Tuin says of his creation. “I had no problem completely wrecking the front end of the bike to get the point across” (Mitchum 2008). He was not alone in his concern. Largely spread through word of mouth via Internet message boards, the ghost bike phenomenon exploded: Ghost bikes have now been found in more than thirty-five cities around the world, from Los Angeles and New York City to Sao Paulo, Prague, and Hobart.5 Yet the same message boards that transformed one man’s outrage into a widespread symbol of growing unrest in the cycling community show conflicting takes on where the attention is drawn. The specter of blame hovers over every ghost bike memorial, and increasing tension between cyclists and motorists is heightening the issue of personal responsibility. Nearly every message board posting that mentions a ghost bike leads to often heated, online debates over whether the fatality was caused by the recklessness of the cyclist (not wearing a helmet, riding against traffic, failing to obey traffic signals) or by the recklessness of the motorist (failing to recognize marked bicycle lanes, not heeding pedestrian signals, driving under the influence). A recent article in the New York Times titled “Moving Targets” refers to relations between cyclists and motorists as being on the mutually antagonistic level of “Hatfield–McCoy hostility,” and proceeds to list a number of violent clashes between individual cy-

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clists and motorists that had occurred over the previous year (Hoffman 2008). The sighting of a ghost bike evokes strong, though varying, reactions from both camps, although all seem to agree that they are distinctly unsettling. One blogger posted the following on his LiveJournal page: “They choke me up when I see em. I saw a little girl’s one once. I couldn’t deal when I read the story. I think people need to obviously wear their helmets.”6 Another commenter, calling himself “varro,” posted on the same page:

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We should put a “Wear your helmet, or this might be you” by the Ghost Bikes. There are some blameless bike riders, but there are way too many bike riders who ride without lights or a helmet, wearing dark clothing at night, drunk, and who disobey traffic laws. Hopefully, the ghost bikes will disabuse them of the notion that wearing a cap or hoodie will protect their head if they collide with a car or object.7

The opinion shared by many on this page is that ghost bikes are intended to raise awareness among cyclists of the dangers of not wearing a helmet. In comments such as this one, cyclists are villainized as willfully ignorant of traffic laws and common safety precautions. Blame is shifted off automobile drivers, who face the danger of becoming entangled in tragedies caused by the self-destructive behaviors of egocentric cyclists. As opposing sides of the culture war line up, charges of a dangerous lack of personal responsibility are tossed back and forth between cyclists and motorists, with both sides sharing a partial claim on the truth. This is different from the stated intention of some of the groups that are responsible for spreading the ghost bike movement, as expressed on their official websites. Ghostbikes.org offers the following explanation: “We hope to create a space where those lost on dangerous streets can be remembered by their loved ones, members of their local communities, and others from around the world. We also hope to inspire more people to start installing ghost bikes in their communities and to initiate changes that will make us all safer on the streets.”8 Here, the twin goals of commemoration and bike safety activism are in the forefront. Susan Minor—the mother of the young man for whom the Eugene ghost bike was created—likewise sees the potential for multiple meanings: “I think that the bike memorial serves many purposes and has different meanings for different people. I don’t feel a need to balance the individual commemorative meaning with the political messages. Instead, I think that they simply coexist.”9 Minor has also worked to protect her son’s memory from reductive generalizations on the importance of bicycle safety. After the accident, the woman driving the car involved in the collision worked to get legislation enacted that would require all cyclists to wear helmets. While David Minor had not been wearing a helmet at the time

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of the accident, his family was informed that a helmet would not have prevented his death. In subsequent debates about the helmet laws, Mrs. Minor and her husband were dismayed to see their son’s name and memorial invoked as proof of such a law’s necessity. In a letter published in local paper, Eugene Weekly, the Minors wrote:

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Certainly, we support the use of bike helmets, and wish he had worn one every time he rode his bike, but implying that it would have saved his life is not only inaccurate, it is painful for us to continue to read about our son in this way. He was so much more than “the young man who didn’t wear his helmet.” He was a passionate believer in the environment, sustainability, and social justice, and we feel it is much more appropriate that he be remembered for these things.10

Shannon Sprouse, who created the bike for Minor, shares these feelings: “I think the main thing the bike is supposed to do is just make people notice … make them pay attention to all their little daily things and how they’re affecting people around them.” She would like the bike to promote awareness of social concerns, bicycle safety, and, in a general sense, of each other, “because that accident was a moment of two people not really paying attention, which sort of goes against a lot of the stuff that Dave was working towards in his life. It’s just like, ‘Come on, people! Wake up! Pay attention!’”11 This, however, is not a universal sentiment. There are many who view ghost bikes in a less favorable light. Another LiveJournal commenter posted: “What you don’t see is an explanation of whether the biker killed himself by being a dumbass, or the car killed him by inattention or something. I disagree with making someone a martyr for your cause just because they died on a bike.”12 The issue of responsibility for the death of a cyclist is called into question, contesting the sanctimony of the ghost bike memorial. From the Portland blog “Yamabushi Mon Amour”: It just drives me crazy to beatify these people who were essentially victims of their own carelessness. They are not really memorials to the dead, like those crosses you see along the interstate, as much as self-serving efforts to portray the deceased cyclist—and by extension any cyclist—as a helpless victim, free of any responsibility. They should be called “Saint Bikes,” since I believe what they are really intended to do is make the dead kids into guiltless objects of veneration in order to transfer blame from those (and all) cyclists to (all) cars and drivers.13

Here again is evidence of a cultural divide and of resistance to bicycle culture. Ghost bikes are viewed by this blogger as a singular and concentrated attack on motorists. In the view of this poster, the assumed political motivation behind the creation of these memorials overwhelms any claims of individual commemoration. In these comments, it appears that ghost bikes are having an effect that is opposite to that intended by the creators.

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And who are the creators? While often placed anonymously at accident sites, ghost bikes appear to be created both by mourners who are intimately acquainted with the deceased, and by activist groups. The ghost bike memorial for David Minor in Eugene was created by his friend Shannon Sprouse, who heard about ghost bikes from a friend in Portland, Oregon.14 Yet on 6 June, four days after the accident, someone posted the following to a local Internet forum: “A cyclist was killed in downtown Eugene on Mon. 6/2. Would anyone locally be interested in trying to set up a ‘Ghost Bike?’ The preliminary evidence suggests that it was probably the cyclist’s fault, but it would be a good reminder for drivers and cyclists.”15 A few posts down someone responded, “I went by the intersection of 13th and Willamette today (Monday), there is a ghost bike in place.”16 The original poster wrote back, “Well, it’s good to see someone’s on the ball here in Bluegene [Eugene]. I wonder who installed it?”17 These comments provide further confirmation that not all ghost bike memorials are necessarily created by mourners close to the deceased; rather, as in the case of the first ghost bike in St. Louis, they are also created by a member (or members) of the community who is (are) drawn to the tragedy through a sense of shared community. This sense of community is a motivating force behind the formation of The Street Memorial Project, a New York City activist group for the rights of cyclists and pedestrians that has been responsible for the creation of forty-six ghost bikes around the city since June 2005.18 The project was formed in 2007 to continue the work of the Visual Resistance arts collective, which began making and placing ghost bikes in 2005, and to expand the work to include memorials to pedestrian casualties. Their goal is expressly political, as they seek to “cultivate a compassionate and supportive community for survivors and friends of those lost and to initiate a change in culture that fosters mutual respect among all people who share the streets.” Michael Jones—one of the creators of the Ghost Bike Project, which is a grassroots group of concerned cyclists in Portland, Oregon—also points to the importance of community in these memorials: When you’re in a car you don’t feel connected to other drivers. … [As a cyclist] you feel a common bond with other people on bikes. When you’re a cyclist you feel it a lot more when a cyclist dies. When you do something you love, you feel a bond with other people who do it.19

For the cycling community, a ghost bike memorial can function as a reminder of a shared vulnerability on city streets. Leah Todd, who works with the Street Memorial Project, describes this shared vulnerability as “recognition that it could as easily have been any of us. Often these Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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crashes are termed accidents and treated as anomalies; we want to remember and recognize the individual lost and the tragic consequences to their family, community, and the city, to recognize the epidemic nature of the problem.”20 Todd’s words highlight the overlapping of the cycling community with the friends and family of the deceased in respect to the ghost bike’s commemorative function. The memorials that show evidence of frequent visitation, often seem to combine the deceased’s identity as a cyclist with more individual aspects of his or her personality. Pictures on ghostbike.org of various ghost bike memorials show that some have accrued assemblages similar to the Eugene ghost bike, while others have remained bare. It is unclear exactly why this is, though it most likely has to do with the lack of the immediate involvement of the friends and family of the deceased, relegating the memorials in these cases to the ranks of more “official” commemoratives, such as gravestones, statues, and war memorials. And the relative distance from the deceased in terms of friends or family members likely further affects the function of the memorial in the lives of the various mourners. For instance, the Eugene ghost bike was created by a friend of David Minor, while his parents were initially hesitant even to visit it. Minor’s mother expressed this sentiment in a letter to the local radio station, KLCC, which was read on the air by a staff member: Originally, I thought that I would never go near 13th and Willamette again, but I woke up one morning not too long after the accident and felt that I needed to see it. We went as a family and while it was understandably terribly sad, it was also a comfort to us. The flowers were beautiful, and the ghost bike was a somber and noble tribute to our son. We cry every time we are there, but we have read every note and poem, looked at everything that has been placed there, and been so grateful for those who have chosen to honor our son in this way.21

The creation and initial maintenance of a grassroots memorial by friends of the deceased, followed by the greater involvement of the immediate family of the deceased, is similar to observations made by folklorist Holly Everett in her work with roadside memorials in Texas (2002).

Roadside Memorials and Spontaneous Shrines Roadside memorials have long dotted the American landscape, most often in the form of small wooden crosses erected at the sites of automobile fatalities. The practice has been traced back to at least the eighteenth century in the American Southwest in the form of descansos—makeshift wooden crosses that were left to mark the graves of travelers who died en route to their destinations.22 While certainly prevalent in the Southwest,

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roadside crosses can now be found all over the country, and all over the world, marking scenes of unexpected, and often violent, death. Folklorist Jack Santino coined the term spontaneous shrines to describe the often anonymous and multiply motivated public memorials, noting by this terminology both the sense of immediacy and ephemerality that surrounds such creations, which often spring up overnight after an accident, and the sense that these memorials function as a connection between the living and the dead (Santino 2006b). By using the word shrine, he is highlighting the memorial as a place of spiritual communion, a bridge between the living and the dead. Several folklorists have noted the hierophantic quality of spontaneous shrines—the sense that the place of death maintains some connection to the life force of the departed spirit. Holly Everett writes of the importance of roadside memorials in contemporary traditions of mourning, where they act as altars, sites of “an ongoing dialogue with the deceased,” as evidenced by the assemblages of items left at the memorials by mourners (Everett 2002: 80). Others have written on the importance of these memorials in the lives of the bereft, providing sites of spiritual pilgrimage where the performance of ritualized mourning can aid in grief management (Grider 2001; Everett 2002; Doka 2003; Santino 2006b; Margry and Sánchez-Carretero 2007; Wojcik 2007). The relationship between the work of grief and mourning and the emotionally charged accumulation of material “things” has likewise been observed (Doss 2006). Far from being “makeshift,” as these memorials are described in most media reportage, the reality is that these “sacred folk art assemblages” (Grider 2001) are richly constructed, informed by ritualized behavior, and complexly functional on a variety of levels. The bricolage style of temporary memorials allows mourners to reconstruct the identity of the deceased in a public setting. Participation in the creation of a memorial assemblage imparts to mourners a sense of regained control in response to feelings of powerlessness in the face of unexpected traumatic death. The issue of control has been a fundamental part of studies on roadside memorials, as most writers link the relatively recent increase in the number of these memorials to the much-discussed distancing of death in modern American culture. The funerary industry and advances in medical care have effectively removed death from our direct experience, while perpetuating the notion that the time of death can be controlled, or at least predicted with some degree of accuracy (Haney, Leimer, and Lowery 1997; Grider 2001; Everett 2002; Santino 2006b). The construction of roadside memorials and spontaneous shrines returns a level of agency and emotional involvement to the bereaved that modern society is perceived as having taken away.

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Kenneth Doka, in his study of contemporary public mourning practices, understands the creation of temporary memorials as a modern ritual, working on both the conscious and the unconscious level to “reaffirm community” and to permit “meaningful action at a disorganized time” (Doka 2003: 180). This function of temporary memorials has been described as “narrative,” allowing a community of mourners to place the departed into a larger story, often verging on the status of folk hero (Goldstein and Tye 2006; Wojcik 2007).23 The fallen cyclists commemorated by ghost bikes may not fit the typography of the folk hero, but the contextualization of their deaths in the frame of a struggle for cyclists’ rights certainly helps to fit the tragedy into a comprehensible narrative, and online debates over the appropriation or martyrdom of dead cyclists for the cause indicate that the cyclists may share some attributes of the folk hero. The function of artistic creation as a way of reinstating a sense of control in the aftermath of traumatic events echoes the observation of folklorist Michael Owen Jones (1989: 192) that

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the [artistic] expression … helps the person find and express order and meaning. Incapacitation, incarceration, or the loss of a friend, a relative, or one’s own health fosters introspection, which in turn may promote the production of a song, a story, or other work. Such expressive activity helps the individual readjust to life and its vicissitudes.

These ideas are intriguing and may have some bearing on the meaning of ghost bikes, especially in the case of Van Der Tuin’s creation of the first bike. Shannon Sprouse, creator of the ghost bike for David Minor, describes the experience of building the memorial in similar terms: It was really so shocking for all of us, you know, because it was just so all of a sudden. It was really surreal, like an ‘I just saw him yesterday’ kind of thing. It was so … it was relieving when I found out about ghost bikes and that there was something that I could physically do that would be positive, instead of just feeling like so depressed and upset about it all, that I could do something that would have more of a positive spin, and sort of enlighten other people.24

While the physical creation of a ghost bike may be therapeutic to a mourner, the very existence of the bike, as has been written of other spontaneous memorials, “symbolically ‘cleanses’” the site of tragedy, transforming it into “a consecrated place of remembrance, love, and communion” (Wojcik 2007: 216).

Performativity As Jack Santino notes, spontaneous shrines may be considered “performative commemoratives,” because of the interactional aspect of these Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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shrines (2006b: 9).25 According to Santino (2006b: 11), spontaneous shrines are performative commemoratives because they invite participation and interpretation from an “undifferentiated public.” The very existence of these memorials often calls attention to social issues, stirring up the debate to such a level that change may be enacted (Santino 2006b; Margry and Sánchez-Carretero 2007). An obvious example of this can be found in the roadside crosses placed by MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) to commemorate the victims of drunk driving. These crosses commemorate lives lost while simultaneously drawing attention to the social evil of drunk driving. Santino describes this dual function of spontaneous shrines as “the conjunction of the memorializing of personal deaths within the framework of the social conditions that caused those deaths, the performative with the commemorative” (Santino 2006b: 5). Cristina Sánchez-Carretero refers to the grassroots memorials that emerged in Madrid in the wake of the March 11 terrorist bombings there as “mechanisms of agency,” used as “a means for performing and initiating changes” (Sánchez-Carretero 2006: 338). The Madrid shrines created a forum for the vernacular expression of dissatisfaction with the government’s handling of the tragedy. Similarly, the ghost bike memorials signify attempts to raise awareness of the safety concerns of the cycling subculture. Several factors have been credited with the seemingly recent ubiquity of the roadside memorial, namely, the increasing hiding-away of death by the funeral industry, a growing sense of the medical profession’s ability to control the time of death, and the public’s heightened awareness of the dangers of automobile travel (especially the dangers posed by drivers who are under the influence of alcohol) due to more thorough media coverage and programs like MADD (Haney, Leimer, and Lowery 1997; Doss 2006; Owens 2006). So what factors have led to the inclusion of bicycles in these roadside shrines? In today’s environmentally aware climate, bicycle use has been on the rise as a way of conserving energy, cutting down on pollutants, and saving on the cost of filling up the gas tank. The emergence of the ghost bike phenomenon in the past six years may be tied to this increase in environmental conscientiousness. The League of American Bicyclists advocacy group reports a 78 percent rise over the past fifteen years in the number of New Yorkers who commute to work.26 The Pacific Northwest is the scene of the most drastic rises in bicycle use: In 2007, a record 6 percent of Portland, Oregon, residents identified the bicycle as their “primary commute vehicle.” A survey from 2005 cited by the League of American Bicyclists shows a 144 percent increase in the number of bicycle commuters in Portland compared to the number reported in 2000. Rising oil prices and a greater focus in politics and the

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media on environmental preservation have affected the material culture of spontaneous shrines. Ghost bikes are thus a product of our specific current cultural context. Environmental concerns are evident in the construction of the Eugene ghost bike. Sprouse says of creating the bike: [David Minor] was so into sustainability and the environment, and making the world a better place, and it seemed fitting to raise awareness. … The bike was a friend’s bike that he wasn’t using anymore, and somebody else gave us a chain to lock it up with, and somebody else gave us a lock. So there were a lot of people involved in getting the supplies together. I didn’t buy anything for that, which I also thought was fitting for Dave, being a recycling and sustainability thing—it was nice to not use anything new, have it be a sort of recycled project.27

Susan Minor (David’s mother) says: “He loved a good discussion and he would appreciate how the ghost bike has inspired debate about biking as an environmental choice, and how the city government says it supports that concept, yet doesn’t provide enough clearly marked and separate bike lanes or roads for people to commute safely.”28 Ghost bike memorials seem particularly suited to the merging of current social concerns and personal commemoration—emergent forms to voice emergent concerns.

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Conclusion Ghost bikes haunt the urban landscape; they are the vehicles of the restless dead, the wrongfully killed. Baudrillard writes of Western civilization’s changing relationship with death, which Benjamin Noys characterizes as describing our attempt at excluding the dead from our daily lives (Noys 2005: 24), so that “little by little, the dead cease to exist” (Baudrillard 1993: 126). Only the more we push them away, removing them from our town centers to out-of-town hilltop cemeteries, the more they push themselves back into our consciousness “in traumatic forms” (Noys 2005: 25). Folklorist Harriet Senie echoes the idea of the return of the dead: “Although the bodies are buried elsewhere, almost every detail of spontaneous memorial practice revives the role cemeteries historically played in public life. The dead were once buried in the center of town, where they served as a daily reminder of the fate awaiting us all” (Senie 2006: 44). Santino likewise expresses this opinion: “Spontaneous shrines place deceased individuals back into the fabric of society, into the middle of areas of commerce and travel, into everyday life as it is being lived” (Santino 2006b: 13). Ghost bikes can be seen in this light as the reemergence of the dead-who-won’t-be-denied in the heart of our modern cities.

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Like the deaths they are meant to commemorate, ghost bike memorials resist neat comprehension. They exist in a matrix of social and political ambiguity, generating multiple meanings from instances of overlap in the often-conflicting spheres of personal expression and anonymous commemoration, private and public grief, and official and unofficial modes of mourning. Ghost bikes are often created by those who are directly connected to the deceased—family, friends, co-workers, etc.—as was the case with the ghost bike for David Minor. Many, however, are created by those who did not know the deceased in life, but felt some connection to him or her in death, whether through empathetic concerns over the manner of death, or a more general sense of belonging to a shared community of interests. These communal feelings can be galvanized by a perceived marginalization at the hands of mainstream society, as may be the case with many members of the cycling community. The fact that the very first ghost bike was an expression of outrage and of political solidarity with a maligned and/or ignored culture of bicycle enthusiasts set a precedent from the very beginning of indirect connection with the deceased, making the creation of a ghost bike a way of giving voice to the voiceless in a manner that is perhaps more often associated with more explicitly political grassroots memorials. It is difficult to establish the degree of officiality that plays into the construction of a ghost bike. The practice seems to have been spread largely by word of mouth, with interested parties banding together to perpetuate the creation of these memorials after the first couple of memorials began to gather media attention. Leah Todd, of the Street Memorial Project in New York City, says of the web site ghostbikes.org: I think the site has been helpful to spread the idea and explain the purpose of ghost bikes, but I would note that they have existed since 2003, while the site only went live in December 2007. In that time, they had already appeared in many cities across the USA, several in the UK, and a couple across Europe. There were even bikes in Sao Paolo and Hobart, Tasmania.

The intention of each memorial can obviously only be explained by each creator on an individual basis, but the presence on the Internet of groups like the Street Memorial Project and Visual Resistance (from which the Street Memorial Project evolved) has undoubtedly influenced the continued presence of ghost bike memorials. Todd says: While the Internet is helpful for sharing information, the ghost bikes would still exist without it. However, they may have been more localized without the site [ghostbikes.org]: We now have contacts around the world and the idea of a worldwide hub helps us connect, share ideas, organize, and get more of a global perspective on why we do this. … Each city has their own autonomous project with its own intentions, mission, and goals, but we are connected by a common purpose.29

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The organized groups that spring up around ghost bikes seem to share a conception of cyclists as a subculture, sharing a more or less homogenous core of principles, concerns, and interests that must be protected and preserved from encroachment by an oppressive mainstream car culture. In general, however, these groups have tried to be respectful of the wishes of those most closely and personally affected by the tragedies, namely, the family and friends of the deceased. Michael Jones, creator of the Ghost Bike Project in Portland, Oregon, described an instance where his group contacted the family of a young cyclist killed in a collision with an automobile about putting up a ghost bike, and was told that the family did not want the memorial created. In deference to the family’s wishes, plans to erect the bike were abandoned.30 The bikes definitely bear the marks of a connection to a politically motivated subculture and, insofar as they are visually striking and generally located in places that maximize general viewership (busy urban intersections), lend themselves easily as symbols of a cause and as rallying points for those who feel themselves marginalized. Yet, there is something in a ghost bike that reaches toward the universal, something inclusive and inviting, while simultaneously frightening and grim. It is the uncanny quality of the memento mori, the stark and unrelenting embrace of that most universal of human truths—the inevitability and unpredictability of death—that, when faced with a ghost bike, speaks most loudly to the viewer. The cyclist may see in it the particular manner of his or her own eventual demise, but the obviousness of mortality is visible to all. The ghost bike speaks in contradictions—it is uncanny in its commingling of the unfathomable strangeness of death with the abject familiarity of death’s certainty. And yet, as a temporary memorial, the longevity of any particular memorial is never assured. As with many spontaneous shrines, questions of ephemerality surround the ghost bike memorials. Some have been removed by city officials, while others have survived for several years.31 As ghost bikes are most often placed on city-owned sidewalks, they are subject to removal by city maintenance workers; however, the memorials are generally left untouched while they show signs of use. In an interview with The Brooklyn Paper, Visual Resistance member Ryan Knuckle said: “The city’s been pretty good. They understand that they’re respectful memorials so they’re not treating them like graffiti or visual pollution” (Corbett 2007). At least one case of vandalism to a ghost bike memorial has been reported: A Portland ghost bike for Brett Jarolimek was stolen from its post in February 2008. The bike was returned the very next day, however, along with a note of apology.32 An aura of sanctity seems to surround these memorials, rendering them, at least temporarily, inviolable to the realities of the outside world.

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Ghost bike memorials are an innovation on the material culture of mourning. They exist on a vernacular level, spreading across the country, then across the world, largely by word of mouth, taking hold in urban areas because of something they express to mourners and cyclists that they have been unable to express otherwise, at least in the same powerful symbolism. By transforming sites of tragedy into sites of protest, they demand attention, calling for political action and increased awareness by amplifying the missing human element. Overlapping communities of bicycle enthusiasts and mourners are joined at these often anonymously created rallying points at city intersections—new memorial forms that reflect the changing concerns of the modern cultural climate.

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Notes I would like to thank Susan Minor and Shannon Sprouse for their graciousness in sharing their thoughts and opinions with me on such a difficult subject. I would also like to thank Mariel Yuhas for her constant support and advice during my research of this topic, and Dr. Daniel Wojcik for his encouragement and feedback on this paper. 1. In the course of my research for this paper, I visited many web sites devoted to the phenomenon of ghost bikes, reading message boards of personal blogs and official statements made by groups devoted to the creation of these memorials. I conducted interviews over the phone and via e-mail with several people involved in the creation and maintenance of these sites, specifically with ghostbikes.org. In researching the ghost bike for David Minor, I first contacted Shannon Sprouse based on her involvement with local media stories on the memorial. After interviewing Sprouse in person, I was put in touch with Susan Minor, who discussed the bike with me via e-mailed correspondence. 2. Leonard Primiano’s conception of “vernacular religion,” or “religion as it is lived: as humans beings encounter, understand, interpret, and practice it” (Primiano 1995), expands upon more traditional notions of religious folklife, emphasizing the often negotiated and innovative everyday experience of religious belief. Primiano argues for the necessity of a reflexive update of the terminology typically used to describe religious folklife, calling for an end to the misleading dichotomy of “official” and “unofficial” religious practice. I am following the contention of folklorists Sylvia Grider (2001), Jeannie Thomas (1996), Jack Santino (2006b), and Daniel Wojcik (2007) that spontaneous shrines and roadside memorials exhibit elements of vernacular spirituality in addition to their function as commemorative materials. 3. Graffiti has been used to similar effect in ghost bike memorials around Portland. Messages to the deceased are frequently written on stickers that are then applied to lampposts at the memorials. 4. The association with death, which is inherent in the skeleton whiteness of the ghost bike, as well as manifestly expressed in the assemblage that accrues, is, of course, a large part of recontextualizing the bicycle as strange. Freud writes of the uncanny, “Many people experience the feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts” (Freud

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

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1919: 364). Death renders the body strange, emphasizing its role as a vessel for life, haunted by the personality, or the spirit. http://www.ghostbikes.net. Accessed 11 August 2008. Posted to http://community.livejournal.com/damnportlanders/9997526.html?style =mine on 3 July 2007 at 6:46 PM by user “yourdannyboy.” Accessed 11 August 2008. Posted to http://community.livejournal.com/damnportlanders/9997526.html?style =mine on 3 July 2007 at 8:53 PM by user “varro.” Accessed 11 August 2008. From http://www.ghostbikes.org. Accessed 11 August 2008. E-mail correspondence, 13 March 2009. Letter published in Eugene Weekly, 19 February 2009. Interview conducted 17 February 2009. Posted to http://community.livejournal.com/damnportlanders/9997526.html?style =mine on 4 July 2007 at 5:05 PM by user “frostnoris.” Accessed 11 August 2008. From “Ghost Bikes,” posted to http://yamabushi.wordpress.com/2007/02/09/ ghost-bikes on 9 February 2007. Accessed 11 August 2008. From a radio interview on local Eugene, Oregon, station KLCC aired on 31 July 2008 and posted online at http://www.klcc.org/Feature.asp?FeatureID=665. Accessed 11 August 2008. Posted to http://www.bikeforums.net/archive/index.php/t-426869.html on 6 June 2008 at 9:07 PM by user “Highcyclist.” Accessed 12 August 2008. Posted to http://www.bikeforums.net/archive/index.php/t-426869.html on 9 June 2008 at 7:41 PM by user “Shifty.” Accessed 12 August 2008. Posted to http://www.bikeforums.net/archive/index.php/t-426869.html on 9 June 2008 at 7:46 PM by user “Highcyclist.” Accessed 12 August 2008. Information taken from the site’s main page at http://www.ghostbikes.org. Accessed 10 August 2008. From a phone interview conducted 27 January 2009. E-mail correspondence, 2 February 2009. From a radio interview on local Eugene, Oregon, station KLCC aired on 31 July 2008 and posted online at http://www.klcc.org/Feature.asp?FeatureID=665. Accessed 11 August 2008. The Spanish word descanso translates as “resting place,” and originally referred to the spot where pall-bearers would pause for rest while carrying the coffin from the church to the cemetery. It has since been used in reference to the wooden crosses left along trails in the southwestern United States and Mexico marking spots where Catholic travelers died along the way and were by necessity interred in unhallowed ground. The crosses were erected in the hope that future travelers would stop to pray for the souls buried there. For more, see Anaya, Chavez and Arellano (1995), Doss (2006), Everett (2002: 27–29) and Griffith (1992). Goldstein and Tye (2006) examine the “heroic reconstruction” of the lives of several boys in a small Newfoundland fishing community through the creation of spontaneous shrines. The creation of the shrines is presented as an act of resistance by which the community attempts to reclaim the lives of the boys from the “official” media representations of the tragedy. Wojcik (2007) describes the vernacular beatification of Oregon track star Steve Prefontaine, whose death site has been repurposed as a spiritual pilgrimage site for runners around the world, many of whom seek supernatural inspiration, aid, and intercession from the deceased athlete. Wojcik compares the narrative of Prefontaine’s life that emerges from the

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Robert Thomas Dobler

tales of visitors to the memorial to the structuralist pattern of the folk hero narrative described by Lord Ragland. Interview conducted 17 February 2009. Santino draws on the work of linguist J. L. Austin, whose work with “performative utterances”—statements that enact a social change through their very utterance (such as “I do,” or “I now pronounce you man and wife”)—informs Santino’s conception of the spontaneous shrine as inviting interpretation (2006b: 11). Figures reported on the web site http://www.bikeleague.org/media/facts are taken from US Census findings and several individual city-sponsored surveys of bicycle use. Accessed on 12 August 2008. Interview conducted 17 February 2009. Email correspondence, 13 March 2009. Email correspondence, 2 February 2009. From a telephone interview conducted on 27 January 2009. Nat Meysenburg, who helps maintain ghostbikes.org, stated in a radio interview that the first ghost bike documented by his organization is still installed on the New York City street corner where it was placed in 2005. The interview was conducted by Eugene station KLCC; it was aired on 31 July 2008 and posted online at http://www.klcc.org/Feature.asp?FeatureID=665. Accessed 11 August 2008. A report on the theft, along with a link to a report on its subsequent return, can be found at http://bikeportland.org/2008/02/14/ghost-bike-gone-missing-theftlikely. Interestingly, the thief claimed that as soon as he realized what the bike represented, he wanted to return it, along with an item of personal value to him (possibly a blue bandanna). The note of apology that he affixed to the returned bike refers to the “war” between cyclists and motorists. The full text, posted to the above-mentioned web site reads: “I sincerely apologize for what I have done—I did not realize what it was until after fact. I know that there is a war between pedestrians/bicyclists and automobiles, and what I did constitutes high [t]reason, and for this I am truly sorry. I return this bike, along with one of my most cherished possessions, in respect to your memorial, and as a guarantee that your efforts have impacted at least one life; mine.—Bradford (The one who stole this bike).” Accessed 12 August 2008.

References Anaya, Rudolfo, Denise Chavez, and Juan Estevan Arellano. (1995). Descansos: An Interrupted Journey. Albuquerque: El Norte Publications. Baudrillard, Jean. (1993). Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. I. H. Grant. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Corbett, Rachel. (2007). “Ghost Bike Gone from Williamsburg Street.” The Brooklyn Paper, 28 July 2007. http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/30/29/30_29ghostbike .html. Accessed 13 August 2008. Doka, Kenneth J. (2003). “Memorialization, Ritual, and Public Tragedy.” In Kenneth Doka, ed., Coping with Public Tragedy. New York: Brunner-Routledge, 179–90. Doss, Erika. (2002). “Death, Art, and Memory in the Public Sphere: The Visual and Material Culture of Grief in Contemporary America.” Mortality 7(1): 63–82. ———. (2006). “Spontaneous Memorials and Contemporary Modes of Mourning in America.” Material Religion 2(3): 294–318.

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Everett, Holly. (2002). Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture. Denton: University of North Texas Press. Freud, Sigmund. (1985[1919]). The Uncanny, trans. James Strachey. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Goldstein, Diane E., and Diane Tye. (2006). “The Call of the Ice: Tragedy and Vernacular Responses of Resistance, Heroic Reconstruction, and Reclamation.” In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 233–54. Grider, Sylvia. (2001). “Spontaneous Shrines: A Modern Response to Tragedy and Disaster.” New Directions in Folklore 5 (October). http://www.temple.edu/english/isllc/ newfolk/shrines_update.html. Accessed August 13 2008. ———. (2006). “Twelve Aggie Angels: Content Analysis of the Spontaneous Shrines Following the 1999 Bonfire Collapse at Texas A&M University.” In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 215–32. Griffith, James S. (1992). Beliefs and Holy Places: A Spiritual Geography of the Primería Alta. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Haney, Allen C., Christina Leimer, and Juliann Lowery. (1997). “Spontaneous Memorialization: Violent Death and Emerging Mourning Ritual.” Omega: Journal of Death and Dying 35 (2): 159–71. Hoffman, Jan (2008). “Moving Targets.” New York Times, 8 August 2008. Accessed 14 August 2008. Jones, Michael Owen. (1989). Craftsman of the Cumberlands: Tradition & Creativity. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Margry, Peter Jan, and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero. (2007). “Memorializing Traumatic Death.” Anthropology Today 23(3): 1–2. Mitchum, Robert. (2008). “Ethereal Reminders of Road’s Risks.” Chicago Tribune http:// www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/green/chi-ghost-bikes-22-may22,0 ,5550148.story. Accessed August 13, 2008. Noys, Benjamin. (2005). The Culture of Death. Oxford: Berg. Owens, Maida. (2006). “Louisiana Roadside Memorials: Negotiating an Emerging Tradition.” In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 119–45. Primiano, Leonard Norman. (1995). “Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife.” Western Folklore 54(1): 37–56. Royle, Nicholas. (2003). The Uncanny. New York: Routledge. Sánchez-Carretero, Cristina. (2006). “Trains of Workers, Trains of Death: Some Reflections after the March 11 Attacks in Madrid.” In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 333–47. Santino, Jack, ed. (2006a). Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. (2006b). “Performative Commemoratives: Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death.” In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 5–15. Senie, Harriet F. (2006). “Mourning in Protest: Spontaneous Memorials and the Sacralization of Public Space.” In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 41–56. Thomas, Jeannie Banks (2006). “Communicative Commemoration and Graveside Shrines: Princess Diana, Jim Morrison, My ‘Bro’ Max, and Boogs the Cat.” In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 17–40. Willett, John, ed. (1964). Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. New York: Hill and Wang. Wojcik, Daniel (2007). “Pre’s Rock: Pilgrimage, Ritual, and Runners’ Traditions at the Roadside Shrine to Steve Prefontaine.” In Peter Jan Margry, ed., Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World: New Itineraries into the Sacred. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 201–37.

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Chapter 7

Mourning the Polish Pope in Polish Cities Ewa Klekot

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Pope John Paul II died on 2 April 2005. Two days later, the largest Polish newspaper—Gazeta Wyborcza—published a commemorative text written by Father Tadeusz Bartos´, a Dominican theologian of the younger generation who is known for his open approach to the questions that are usually silenced in the conservative Polish church.1 In his article of 4 April 2005, titled “The Last Great Romantic,” Bartos´ writes: This Pope is an icon of our recent history. He was an outstanding example in the age of spiritual battle. He was our voice when the Poles were condemned to silence; he was our ambassador when we were closed in our own country as in a prison. … He was a great son of the nation, one of those that bore in their hearts and passed to future generations the heritage of Polish spirit. … With the pope’s death passed away the last of our national bards, Romantic prophets of salvation, hope, freedom, and spiritual renovation. Truly was he our national myth.

The above text was written by a critical, inquisitive author. Notwithstanding its apologetic overtones, it was an attempt to analyze the phenomenon of John Paul II within the framework of Polish national mythology, instead of writing in a pompous, bombastic, and exalted way, very much in the operatic post-Romantic style, as most of the Polish media did. Therefore, the pope as a Polish national myth should be generally explained if we want to understand why, already during his lifetime, statues of John Paul II were erected in Poland; why streets and squares in cities, towns, and villages were named after him; and why his death elicited such a strong emotive response all over the country—a response that was visible not only in the media but also directly in the form of grassroots

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material expressions of people’s grief in public places in various Polish towns and cities. I therefore first present an outline of an interpretation that could be made of the place of John Paul II in Polish national mythology and his symbolic status. I subsequently provide an ethnographic description of the performative commemorations in Warsaw during the “Week of Vigil” (1–6 April), suggesting that it is only from this perspective that we can approach the meaning of the material forms that were directly related to the pope’s death and appeared in various public spaces all over Poland. However, before providing a description of these emotional responses to the death of the pope, I briefly discuss some terminological issues related to the question of the performativity and materiality of what I call “ephemeral sites of commemoration.” Having done so, I attempt to trace their formal origin and to outline the symbolic field within which they may fit. I subsequently suggest a possible anthropological interpretation of the phenomena that occurred during the Week of Vigil and of the performative commemorations of John Paul II in the streets of Warsaw. One reservation should be made: This article is based on ethnography and, therefore, I focus only on my home city—Poland’s capital, Warsaw—where I conducted my fieldwork. However, similar performative commemorations took place all over Poland, not only in the cities but also in the countryside. Apart from personal communication by telephone and via the Internet, the Polish population kept informed about new commemorative initiatives all over the country via the media, and this influenced people’s performative behavior, further encouraging commemorative practices. Although my observations are based only on the data that I systematically collected in Warsaw, I believe that my general observations are also valid for other Polish cities.

“Truly was he our national myth” In her article on Polish national mythology, historian Ewa Doman´ska presents the main myths that have contributed to the Polish identity: There are two epochs in Poland’s past during which the “essence” of Polishness is supposed to have been manifested. These periods are referred to in terms of the pleasure and pain principle. The first epoch, characterized by the pleasure principle, was the 16th and 17th centuries, and was considered the Golden Age of Polish culture. … The second epoch that supposedly manifested the essence of Polishness (this time characterized by the pain principle) was the period of Romanticism in the 19th century. This was the period of humiliation, rebellion and uprising, conspiracy, dreams of independence and of the rebirth of the Polish State. (Doman´ska 2000: 253–54)

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As a schematic illustration of her argument, Doman´ska provides a very informative listing of Polish myths in the form of a table divided into two main columns, one headed “The Golden Age,” the other “Romanticism myths.” Under particular myths—such as messianism or the myth of continuity between the Roman Empire and the Polish Commonwealth—she also lists respective role models, slogans, particularly cherished social institutions embodying the myth, images, etc. It is worth mentioning that one of the symbolic complexes that we find under “Romanticism myths” is “grave–cross–death–resurrection” (Doman´ska 2000: 260). According to Doman´ska, Polish national identity is founded on the trauma of partitions and is “burdened by Romanticism,” which led to the development of one of its fundamental myths: Polish messianism. According to the most important Romantic poets, who in the Polish national pantheon enjoy the status of prophets,2 Poland—the nation without a state—was “the Christ of Nations.” “Poles would sacrifice themselves … not just for their own freedom, but,” writes Doman´ska, “for your freedom and ours.” Poland’s destiny was to be the leader of oppressed Slavic nations, while protecting Europe from despotism, materialism, and atheism. In her description of the Romantic roots of Polish national myths, Doman´ska recapitulates with the following statement: “I consider that Polish messianism is one of the deepest convictions governing the way Poles think about themselves, their country, and their sense of meaningful existence” (Doman´ska 2000: 255). This takes us directly to the myth of the pope. One of the Romantic poet-prophets of the nation, Juliusz Słowacki, wrote in 1848 in his visionary poem Pos´ród niesnasków Pan Bóg uderza about the Slavic pope who was supposed to come to the world “among disagreements” and “bring health, kindle love, save the world.” The poem was brought up again in the context of John Paul II’s election, and then repeated countless times by both commentators and the pope himself. Romantic messianism seems to imply, at least to some extent, “a sense of meaningful existence” also for John Paul II. Tadeusz Bartos´ wrote in his book John Paul II: A Critical Analysis (Bartos´ 2007: 11) that “John Paul II is perceived in our country as a saintly figure, God’s messenger: a great prophet of the turn of the second millennium.” This author, who in various places has associated the pope with Romanticism and its myths, especially messianism, mainly uses historical reasons to explain the pope’s particular position within the national mythology: “John Paul II boosted the enfeebled self-esteem of Poles, he was a kind of salvation from the slavery of inferiority. When in the Communist age the national identity used to be systematically weak-

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ened by indoctrination, then he did appear—an answer to all these needs, maladies, complexes” (Bartos´ 2007: 12). John Paul II’s first visit (or “pilgrimage,” as it was dubbed by the media and known in the vernacular) to Poland in May 1979 was called the “Second Baptism of Poland” (Kubik 1994). The prophetic-Romantic message was clearly present in the frequently quoted phrase the pope pronounced on that occasion: “Let Thy Spirit come, and renew the Earth—this earth [Poland].” It was during this first visit that the transformation of the pope into a powerful symbol of the struggle against the Communist regime started (cf. Kubik 1994: 129–52). This process was reinforced by his second visit in 1983, when the country was still under martial law and he had a private meeting with General Jaruzelski. Kubik interpreted John Paul II’s visit to Poland as “a symbolic tour de force that redefined the rules of social game in the country” (1994: 140). Several authors writing on the subject point out how the pope’s first visit reinvigorated the use of religious (i.e., Catholic) symbolism in the context of public ceremonies, and reinforced its relationship with patriotic discourse. This made possible a symbolic separation between nation and state: [The] realization that national community can be defined outside the Communist state reached all sectors of society, including the workers. Only under the impact of the pope’s visit did Polish workers (or at least significant segments of this class) achieve a considerable degree of self-identification as members of a wider “imagined community” organized around such readily acceptable symbols as the pope, the Black Madonna [of Czestochowa], [and] the Catholic Church. (Kubik 1994: 145; italics EK)

During the 1980 strikes, a portrait of John Paul II was hung at Gate Two of the Gdansk shipyard, and Lech Wałe˛sa signed the historic agreement with the government with a huge ballpoint pen that bore a picture of the pope. Since 1979, John Paul II had become part of a powerful set of struggle symbols, and had become a symbol himself. The struggle phrased within one Polish foundational myth originated in the period of Romanticism. It is also worth noting, again following Jan Kubik’s insightful study, that the “Polish [Catholic] Church acts as a creator, repository, and propagator of national, civic, and ethical values to a degree rarely found in other national churches” (1994: 119). A peculiar relationship between the patriotic and the religious is reflected in the observation made by an outstanding Polish literary critic—Michał Głowin´ski, the author of an important analysis of the Polish newspeak of the Communist era—who in his essay on Polish patriotic discourse writes that “the Communist ideology demanded all the religious motives to be eliminated, and without

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them Polish patriotic discourse is mutilated” (Głowin´ski 2004: 26). The figure of the Polish pope put this strongly into relief, by making national symbols in a religious context appear openly in public places. Since his visit, this religious contextualization of national symbols had become a widely used practice of the opposition. As in the text written in 1987 (still before the Round Table agreements of 1989) by the Polish sociologist Zbigniew Mach, “In the hands of the opposition, national symbols indicate the contradiction between the Nation and the State, and give a picture of the power elite as representing the interests of an alien power and thus violating nationalistic principles” (Mach 1989: 144). Immediately after the 1989 changes, John Paul II’s position within the national symbolic field found new expressions in monuments and commemorative plates dedicated to him, and in the renaming after him of streets and squares in Polish towns while he was still alive. On many occasions, the pope even replaced Communist heroes. However, the point should be made that by 2005, Poland’s struggle was fifteen years in the past, and the Poles were building a state that they called the Third Republic, referring directly to the Second Republic (1918–1939) and thus excluding the (actual third) Communist People’s Republic from the history of the independent Polish state. Therefore, to again cite Głowin´ski: The question could be asked whether the fact that a new national hero [John Paul II] appeared, and such a great hero, has resulted in any changes in contemporary patriotic discourse. One thing is certain: a symbol constantly present in current public life has been shaped; the symbol that certainly is something else than an ephemeral sign of community identification. However, it has not influenced any new form of patriotic discourse, at least not the one that dominates the mass media, especially TV. Its conventionalism and banality are striking, and these negative characteristics seem to have been reinforced during the latest papal visit to the country, in the summer of 2002. The crisis of patriotic discourse has not been overcome in this context either. (2004: 34)

As Ewa Doman´ska observed in 2000: At present, the basic problem of the Polish approach to Poland’s past is the myth of lost Polishness. Poles turn back and look for an archetypal Eden in which Poland had existed in its “original state” before being expelled from this garden by the tragedy of war and the sin of Communism. (Doman´ska 2000: 261)

The Romantic myth of what Doman´ska calls “humiliation, rebellion and uprising, conspiracy, dreams of independence and of the rebirth of the Polish State,” which proved to be extremely vital in the 1980s especially under martial law, was no longer valid in a free country, and symbols of national struggle were no longer attractive. However, the force of the myth seems to be so strong that losing it was understood as the loss of Polishness. Both Doman´ska and Głowin´ski point to the symbolic crisis

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in Poland on the eve of the demise of John Paul II; the crisis was obviously directly related to his figure understood as a symbol. It is also in this context that we should place both the Week of the Vigil and the controversial artistic action “T-shirts for Freedom,” which is described at the end of this essay. However, there was one component of the Romantic myth that did remain valid after 1989: the so-called black myth of the West. According to this myth, the West was uprooted and bereft of values, while the Poles were supposed to protect Europe from materialism and atheism (cf. Doman´ska 2000: 260). The Slavic pope in the poem by Słowacki was also supposed to “Clean all the rot out of the wounds of the world; all vermin and reptiles.” This component was then associated with the preaching of John Paul II on “the civilization of death” in the West, and let the Romantic myth of Poland’s mission survive with him until his death, at least among those who believed in the need to “protect Europe from despotism, materialism, and atheism.”

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Ephemeral Sites of Commemoration Erected During the Week of Vigil Just as John Paul II’s first visit to Poland in 1979 was called the “Second Baptism of Poland,” the week between his death and his funeral was nicknamed the “Second Easter”3 or the Week of Vigil.4 These names refer to the set of symbols that had been developed in Poland over many decades: The Romantic myths described above and the symbols of national struggle in Poland under oppression, intertwining the Polish with the Catholic. The pope himself became part and parcel of this symbolic set, as he was transformed by popular imagination into a hero of contemporary Polish folklore, as shown by research on oral traditions in rural Poland (cf. Prosin´ska 1999; Zowczak 1991: 126–35). Terminology The public memorialization of death has been a particular focus point for anthropologists since the demise of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997 (Walter 1999). The fact that, in Diana’s case, death was violent and sudden is one of the reasons the commemoration developed in the way it did, but, as Margry and Sánchez-Carretero observed, “similar behavior was displayed in reaction to the untimely death of other beloved personalities—for instance Elvis Presley in 1977, and Olof Palme in 1986, for whom large improvised memorial were also spontaneously created”

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(2007: 1). Although the death of John Paul II cannot be called “untimely” or “violent,” it did elicit a public response in the form of improvised memorial sites, similar to the cases mentioned above. According to Margry and Sánchez-Carretero (2007: 2), “His death sparked a collective reaction, which is why we prefer the expression ‘traumatic death.’ In all cases, however, such traumatic deaths often trigger political (re)actions that may subsequently be remembered as marking a change of direction in history.” The first terminological point to be made is the observation that the important feature of the commemorated death is its traumatic character, and in the case of John Paul II it is the emotional bond with the departed that provoked the trauma. He was one of these beloved personalities, but was clearly beloved as a part of the symbolic complex he belonged to, or the myth he embodied. Although the material form of commemoration used to be called “improvised memorial sites” or “spontaneous shrines,” different terminology is also used, and the discussion of it is presented in the quoted article by Margry and Sánchez-Carretero. For this essay, I decided to use memorial site rather than shrine, because shrines, replete with various sacred images, have been one of the main expressions of vernacular Catholic piety at least since the Counter-Reformation, and they still abound in the Polish landscape. However, they originally bore a relationship to some event that connotated contact with the supernatural, be it a vision, a miracle, a vow, a plea for protection, thanksgiving for grace received, or a sudden death. The “shrines” erected to mourn the pope had a similar commemorative function, but their construction was not related to traditional religious reasons, nor did they remain after the end of the mourning week. In terms of form, these shrines also have other, more transitory roots, such as the candle offerings for All Saints’ Day, the ephemeral altars built each year for the Corpus Christi procession, and the flower crosses that appeared in Warsaw in the 1980s when the country was still under martial law (cf. Klekot 2007). Spontaneity, or their improvised character, is another terminological issue discussed by the editors of this book. I chose to use the neutral term ephemeral, which does not bear any relationship to the intentionality of the site makers. However, if I had to relate them to the agents in terms of spontaneity or improvisation, I would probably use spontaneous in the sense given to the term by Jack Santino (2006), and understand it as an indication of their unofficial character. In the case of a post-Communist country, the term spontaneous, meaning “unofficial,” seems to be particularly important to the site makers to whom I refer later in this essay, and who contrast their work and behavior with the “official,” “state-

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elicited” commemorations of the Communist past. The grievers were not told by anyone how to organize the sites, what to do, or what to place at the sites. They used symbolic language that they found readily available and appropriate for the occasion, talking explicitly about the spontaneity of people’s actions. I therefore prefer to reserve spontaneity as the emic term used by my informants, and to use ephemeral memorial sites instead. Another important feature of the phenomena I describe is their performativity, which was pointed out by Jack Santino (2006) and Margry and Sánchez-Carretero (2007). In the case of commemorating John Paul II, the temporal, performative aspects of the sites seem to be very important. The mourning was materially expressed not only in the form of “shrines” constructed in several public places, but also by the action of the people: visiting these places, praying, placing candles, walking from one “shrine” to another, explaining them to their children, etc. During the Week of the Vigil, the whole city seemed to be on the slow move of a pilgrimage, and this performative action of Warsaw inhabitants contributed to the particular atmosphere in the city that I try to describe and interpret in this chapter.

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Description The Week of Vigil started on the evening of Friday, 1 April, with people congregating mostly in front of churches and placing candles under the plaques commemorating the pope’s visits or in front of statues of him. John Paul II died on the Saturday evening, and until his funeral the following Friday the streets of Warsaw, Kraków, and other Polish cities were converted into a stage for both official national mourning and grassroots initiatives of commemoration. The unofficial initiatives materialized in the placing of candles and flowers, sometimes arranged in the form of crosses, hearts, or the pope’s initials; the sites of commemoration were complemented by portraits, national and papal flags, handwritten letters and messages, sometimes with an image of the pope, and occasionally by more elaborated forms of “homage boards” bedecked with messages and photographs of their authors. All the messages were addressed to the departed pope, as though their authors believed that they could reach or communicate with him more easily by placing the texts at a “site of commemoration.” The ephemeral memorial sites mainly appeared in places that were related in one way or another to the late pope. All were sites that he had visited in the course of his life or on his travels, or where he had lived, worked, stayed, or celebrated mass during his pilgrimage visits. Commemorations also took place where there were images or statues of John

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Paul II, where his portraits hung in public places, where his name appeared on commemorative plaques, and in the streets and squares that bear his name (including one of the biggest avenues in the center of Warsaw). These memorial sites were not limited to places that were directly related to the pope, but could also be found in the surrounding areas; for example, two parks in Warsaw and Kraków were lit by the feeble flames of burning candles that had been placed on the grass around the trees. Saski Park (Warsaw) is located near Piłsudski Square—a patriotically charged place in the historic city center—and flanked by the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The pope had appeared there when he made his first “pilgrimage” to Poland in 1979. The event was subsequently commemorated by the flower crosses that used to be arranged on the spot as a grassroots initiative, a practice that was eventually stopped by the Communist authorities. In 2005, again a huge flower cross and hundreds of candles appeared at the same place. Planty Park surrounds the historic part of Kraków; it was laid out in the nineteenth century on the site of the old ramparts and the medieval city walls. The candle placing in Planty began in front of the Bishop’s Palace, the former residence of Cardinal Wojtyła and the temporary residence of the pope during his visits to Kraków.5 For a couple of days, John Paul II Avenue in Warsaw was lit by long lines of candles put there by the city’s inhabitants. The street, which had been traced anew following Warsaw’s destruction during World War II, runs north–south in the western part of the city center. It runs through the districts that had comprised the Warsaw ghetto created by the Nazis in 1940, and where in 1943 the Jewish population of the city had been annihilated. After the political changes of 1989, the street was renamed John Paul II Avenue, and during the Week of Vigil, memorial sites decorated with his portraits, Polish and papal flags, and flowers were erected by local residents and traders where the street signs bear his name. Candles were placed on the edge of the pavement or on the grass alongside the tram rails in the middle of the street. On the second day of the vigil, there was no longer any need to bring one’s own candles, as they could be bought on the spot. Along the street a human chain of people was formed, holding hands, while information on this new action spread by the Internet and text messages. During the Week of Vigil, life on John Paul II Avenue and in other places in Polish cities was widely regarded as being subject to a “special time.” Some Warsaw citizens I interviewed about their recollections some time after the Week of Vigil emphasized the fact that at night Warsaw had turned into a “living town,” which in their opinion did not happen on regular days. They spoke about “feeling safe,” as opposed to the

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Mourning the Polish Pope in Polish Cities

Illustration 7.1. People “dressing up” a lamppost on John Paul II Avenue with a portrait, the papal flag, and the Polish flag, April 2005. Photo: Waldemar Kompała.

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“normal” feeling they experience in the streets of Warsaw after dark; some were convinced that the drivers passing along John Paul II Avenue were more polite and careful, to both pedestrians and cyclists, and refrained from sounding their horns. Some people recalled a time marked by silence despite unusually large numbers of passers-by in the streets; they even spoke of “the silent crowd.” Another impression shared by many informants was a general lack of drunk people in the streets late at night, which was noted as quite unusual.6 During the pope’s first visit to Poland, the writer Andrzej Szczypiorski noted in his diary: “This is incredible, not a single drunkard to be seen in this country of drunks! Not a single quarrel amongst these vast crowds that on any other day would display roughness, egotism, selfishness” (quoted in Kubik 1994: 139). In 2005, many people compared the Week of Vigil to remembered moments of national unity in history, such as the Solidarity strikes of 1980. The whole period was mythologized in people’s accounts as a time of moral miracles. During the Week of Vigils, I heard stories about thieves returning stolen cars, and about how the fans of two rival soccer clubs in Kraków had made peace with each other. This latter story was covered by the media and influenced other soccer fans, to the extent that during the Week of Vigil the fans of two competing clubs from Kielce went on a pilgrimage to the local sanctuary on Holy Cross Mountain. In this case, an institutional element was an actor in the event, as the fans, wearing their club paraphernalia, were led by priests. However, in 2005, activities centered on the Catholic church were still widely experienced in Poland as “natural,” and as spontaneous and self-originated, so that state-organized church ritual on the day of the pope’s funeral had little influence on what people were already inclined to do. The perception of the Week of Vigil as a “special time” was supported by the media and by official celebrations. Both private and public media in Poland in that period covered virtually nothing but the national mourning and the news from Rome. According to anthropologist Magdalena Zowczak: All political affairs became unimportant, to the extent that normal news services completely disappeared, at both the home and the international level. For some time it was not even known if the Philippines had been hit by another tsunami, which had been anticipated earlier. At the same time, in the media clergymen and philosophers started to appear, representatives of different creeds and world views, discussing with greater skill [than the media people] so-called liminal experiences, or the main concerns of human existence. (2007: 34)

Zowczak also suggests in her article that the whole Week of Vigil could be seen as a time of communitas, in Victor Turner’s terms. Focusing on Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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the Polish media performance and the content of the mediatic message, she says that “a sort of redefinition of the media took place and the distinction between speaker and listener disappeared in the spheres of both object and language. Subsequently, the same happened to the distinction between creator and consumer, active and passive” (2007: 33).

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Origin of Sites and Practices By offering flowers and lighting candles (and by burning lamps in apartment block windows), people of various ages and social origins created ephemeral sites of commemoration for “Polish Pope” John Paul II. When I discussed terminological questions, I suggested that small shrines, Corpus Christi procession altars, flower crosses from the 1980s, and candle offerings at graveyards for All Saints’ Day served as an inspirational source for these ephemeral memorial sites. Here, by pointing at the previous uses of these forms of materiality, and at the gestures and performances, I indicate the associations that seem to be relevant for shaping their emotional impact. The tradition of arranging flower offerings in the form of crosses was very vivid in Warsaw under the martial law imposed by General Jaruzelski between December 1981 and July 1983. At that time, flowers and candles were also placed at the entrance of the Gdansk shipyards to commemorate the fallen workers of 1970, as well those who fell during the struggle waged by the underground movement Solidarity. In Warsaw, flower crosses started to appear in Victory Square (now Piłsudski Square), where John Paul II first celebrated mass during his 1979 visit to Poland, and where the funeral mass for Cardinal Stefan Wyszyn´ski was held in June 1981. The cardinal’s flower arrangements were continually removed by the Communist authorities, and the square was finally closed for some years under the pretext of renovation. The flower cross resurfaced some one hundred meters from the square, in front of the Visitation Nuns’ church. Another cross appeared in front of St. Anne’s church in the old town, some five hundred meters from the square. The struggle over the placing and removal of such tributes lasted almost until the collapse of the Communist regime in 1989. From August 1983 onwards, it was only the cross at the Visitation Nuns’ church that was continually being arranged, dismantled by the authorities, and then rearranged. Therefore, the gesture of placing candles and flowers in public spaces can, in the Polish context, be more than an expression of grief provoked by the death of someone as important to Poland as the late pope. It has also historically been a way of conveying popularly shared feelings and values, and even of asserting a degree of autonomy from the government.

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In fact, during the 1980s the commonly found unofficial arrangements of flowers and candles in public places expressed opposition to the authorities. They, on their part, used to organize solemn flower-offering ceremonies at state-authorized “proper places” and on “proper occasions.” These were invariably dominated by wreaths of red carnations, while the popular flower crosses were always made from flowers other than red carnations (e.g., tulips, roses, daffodils). The gesture of arranging and caring for these crosses conveyed symbolic solidarity with the “values of the oppressed,” and by this very fact became a subversive action.7 Similarly, the placing of candles on All Saints’ Day not only expresses private grief but is also part of an important community-building ritual, which includes visiting, in the company of family members of all ages, the graves of one’s departed biological and spiritual kin. By placing flowers and candles jointly with friends and family, the dead are reintegrated into one’s community and heritage. This is all part of a process of constructing and affirming social relationships among the living, and between the living and the dead. Therefore, the shared gesture of lighting candles in a public place can be associated not only with mourning the dead, but also with acknowledging the commemorated person as one’s spiritual, if not natural, kin, as well as including him or her in the community defined by the living. The previous uses of the forms and gestures employed for the commemoration of Pope John Paul II had charged these elements with strong

Illustration 7.2. Memorialization on Piłsudski Square in Warsaw, April 2005. Photo: Waldemar Kompała. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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associations of subversion, solidarity, and community building. They also belong to one of the symbolic complexes that Ewa Doman´ska lists as the Romantic source of Polish national mythology, namely, the “grave– cross–death–resurrection” complex. The position of John Paul II in the Polish national mythology of messianism and the struggle with the Communist state—phrased in the same terms as the Romantic myth—seem to explain the use of particular symbolic forms and the performative idiom of his commemoration.

Commemorating John Paul II in the Streets of Warsaw The places in Warsaw where the ephemeral commemoration sites appeared during the Week of Vigil were charged with meaning acquired during the symbolic struggle with the Communist universe. The fact that John Paul II celebrated mass in the middle of Victory Square (now Piłsudski Square) in Warsaw meant that, as Jan Kubik puts it:

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One of the most revered spaces of the official Communist ritual was transformed into the sacred space of the Catholic ceremonial. … This, perhaps not entirely conscious, realization of a successful symbolic reclaiming of public space might have well been the basic sentiment of the day. (1994: 139)

The case of John Paul II Avenue in Warsaw is even more clear: The street that was traced anew after World War II was named after a Communist hero (Julian Marchlewski), and soon after the 1989 changes was acquired by another symbolic order. Both the lines of candles on John Paul II Avenue and the flower crosses on Piłsudski Square resulted from grassroots, unofficial actions. However, once these appeared, they received media coverage (all kinds of media were reporting on them, and some were encouraging people to join in). The ephemeral memorial sites, which had already been charged with strong meanings, were thus given further meaning. Placing candles, as I noted above, is a well-established gesture of commemoration and an expression of a community of values. Long lines of candles along the street were a new phenomenon that could be interpreted within the framework of traditional candle-placing customs in Poland. The candles in the streets and parks can also be seen as the candles of vigil, and related more directly to the rituals surrounding death. The fact that the candles appeared in the streets meant to many of my informants that people wanted to express their emotions in a visible form that could be shared with others. Those who visited John Paul II Avenue did not limit their activity to placing candles: they also strolled along the street, stopped, chatted, or si-

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Illustration 7.3. Line of memorial candles along John Paul II Avenue in Warsaw, April 2005. Photo: Waldemar Kompała. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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lently looked at the burning candles. As a thirty-three-year-old, Warsawborn journalist told me: “For the first time in my life, the city looked inhabited.” People felt entitled to live the material expression of their feelings in the public areas of the city. The fact that the gesture was familiar and was usually performed in public in cemeteries at least once a year made it easier to perform it now in the unusual setting of streets, parks, and squares, in similar emotional contexts of grief and commemoration. Another reason why the practice was so easily transferable is its association with the flower crosses of the 1980s. Placing flowers and candles outside the setting of cemetery or monument was, as I have noted, a subversive practice performed by Warsaw residents who were trying to keep their symbols and memories alive under the oppression of a totalitarian regime, which also involved different regimes of truth. Here, the question of spontaneity returns, complemented by the question of its relationship to resistance, namely, the resistance to the power of various political, symbolic, or existential regimes, and to the power of death. Placing candles, flowers, and other paraphernalia at commemoration sites was thus a gesture charged with strong symbolic meaning. It bore a resemblance to candle and flower offerings at graves on All Saints’ Day, and to gestures of resistance to the state in solidarity with the oppressed of the 1980s. The late pope was strongly associated with both the Catholic religion and the Polish nationality. What could be perceived in the streets and in the media, as well as in my own private communications with informants, was the strong symbolic power exercised by all activities related to John Paul II, which called forth these spontaneous actions; engaging in these activities became symbolic in and of itself, shared on many different levels, and inevitably politicized, also because of the symbolic content of the figure of the departed pope described above. In their recollections of the Week of the Vigil, my informants mostly underscored the spontaneity and authenticity of people’s actions, and were very positive about them. “People went there spontaneously, just because they wanted to,” said a thirty-year-old female librarian, “but some out of curiosity, I guess.” My informants first heard about the placing of candles along John Paul II Avenue from their neighbors, families, friends, or colleagues, or from the media, mostly the radio. I met an elderly Communist and atheist who had been a party member since his youth and was living the modest life of a pensioner not far from the avenue, which he had gone to see on the Sunday evening. He told me: Well, he was a great Pole. Yes, I did come to see it. It was on the radio. They didn’t encourage people to come, no. They just said something like “On John Paul II Avenue thousands of candles are burning. This is the way the Warsaw inhabitants commemorate the pope.” … No, I didn’t place a candle; she [his female friend] did.

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And a twenty-three-year-old man told me: “I read about it on the Internet, plus I got an e-mail from a friend. I thought it was a great idea, and spontaneously thought I’d like to join.” As we can see, “spontaneity” in these descriptions is charged mostly with a positive “unofficial” value and in the Polish (and generally postsocialist) context. This idea refers essentially to an alternative to the allencompassing government directives of the Communist era, and also bears a reference to strikes and other forms of struggle that are perceived as voluntary. People highly evaluated being subjects of their actions, and not objects, as in the case of compulsory Communist public rituals in former times. The spontaneity also seems to be charged with the meaning that refers to the play of political order versus moral order, corresponding to state ritual versus religious ritual during Communism (Mach 1989: 148). The nonofficial being associated with the moral under previous political circumstances still keeps its positive moral value. In this way, the nonofficial offering of candles could be associated with expressing (positive) national values as opposed to the (negative) state values, as the state had been conceived most of the time as oppressor or representative of foreign interests, while this time the state was non-Communist (or liberal).

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The Symbol Contested Ewa Doman´ska writes in her article that, after 1989: Living in a democratic, liberal and tolerant country, we have suddenly discovered that not all Poles are Catholic … and that the stereotype of the “Polish mother” is now being undermined by a vigorous feminist movement. Faced with these changes, one may say that the fundamental Polish myths are constructs or concepts that … were embodied in a historiographical discourse that allowed them to be manipulated for different political agendas. It suddenly seems that all the constructs that made up the skeleton of the way the Poles thought about the past (nation, state, history, gender, race etc.), as well as the myths that supported them, have become “dead metaphors.” (2000: 261)

John Paul II belonged to what was an extremely powerful nationalistCatholic-opposition complex of symbols of Romantic origin, symbols that were capable of standing up to those of Communist power.8 However, the mourning of John Paul II’s death was symbolically contested through the T-shirts for Freedom action, when a T-shirt bearing the slogan “I didn’t mourn the pope” was released. I would therefore like to finish this article by observing that by contesting the mourning of John Paul II, the young Polish artists also contested the set of symbols that in the interim had become the new symbols of power.

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Some months after the death of John Paul II, both parliamentary and presidential elections were held in Poland. Although the participation rate was low (40 percent), these elections changed the Polish political scene in such a way that it became dominated by the right-wing national–Catholic parties. On 22 February 2006, the rector of Lublin University canceled the opening at a university student club of an exhibition that had been organized by a local student organization in cooperation with the Polish Helsinki Committee. The exhibition was called T-shirts for Freedom and consisted of photographs of Polish celebrities wearing T-shirts; it was part of an Internet-originated artistic campaign against social exclusion. The T-shirts were plain black or white and bore prominent slogans. Among those that stated, for example, “I’m a lesbian,” “I was in jail,” “I’m a Jew,” or “I’ve aborted,” was a new one: “I didn’t mourn the pope.” The rector’s decision provoked official protests from many intellectual, artistic, and left-wing groups, which demanded that the exhibition go ahead. However, the protests were ignored, and the exhibition never opened. Thus, Pope John Paul II—having become part of a complex of symbols charged with subversive meanings in the Poland of the 1980s—had committed the “sin” of becoming part of the new “symbolic establishment,” namely the Romantic-national-Catholic set of symbols that by 2006 had already become the new contested symbols of power.

Conclusion The T-shirt project was a conscious, provocative stance in making political meaning of the Week of Vigil and pope-related symbolism, as well as a reaction to their appropriation by the right-wing national–Catholic propaganda. However, the 2005 grassroots commemoration initiatives had been part and parcel of both the religious and the political sphere. Even if we agree with Zowczak that the Week of Vigil can be seen as a “time of communitas,” the question about the characteristics of the religion that was behind this experience remains open. As we saw, in Polish national mythology, religious symbolism and national symbolism are inseparable, especially in their Romantic component, of which John Paul II became an embodiment. Therefore, Benedict Anderson’s argument on the religious character of national ideologies (Anderson 1991) seems to be justly applicable in this case: The communitas that was lived during the Week of Vigil was the “national communitas,” and the message carried out by the grassroots public acts of performative commemoration of death was a cry for the restitution of the language of vivid political

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metaphors that could help to make sense of the country’s new social and political reality.

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Notes 1. In 2007, Father Bartos´ decided to leave the order. 2. Two of them—Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) and Juliusz Slowacki (1809– 1849)—are buried among the Polish kings in the crypts of Wawel cathedral in Kraków. 3. The pope died on Saturday, 2 April 2005. That year, Easter Sunday—which commemorates the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ—fell on 27 March. 4. In this context, “vigil” has the meaning of staying awake and also has religious associations both with a night vigil that precedes an important occasion (such as a great feast) and with a traditional vigil around a corpse before a funeral. 5. The grassroots homage to John Paul II took an unusual and spectacular form in the student housing blocks of Kraków: Crosses and the pope’s initials were created by switching on lights in certain windows of the huge blocks and not in others. 6. The official prohibition was enforced only on the day of the pope’s funeral. In Poland, prohibitions have been widely used by the authorities to emphasize the exceptional nature of an event, such as the 1980 Solidarity strikes or the pope’s visits to Poland, including Benedict XVI’s visit in 2006. 7. Here, I draw both on my own memories and on an MA dissertation by Magdalena Michalska-Ciarka (1984). 8. See the evocative title of Jan Kubik’s book The Power of Symbols Against the Symbols of Power, which deals with the Solidarity movement and the collapse of state socialism in Poland (1994).

References Anderson, Benedict. (1991). Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Bartos´, Tadeusz. (2005). “Ostatni Wielki Romantyk.” Gazeta Wyborcza 78 (April 4): 17. ———. (2007). Jan Paweł II: Analiza krytyczna. Warsaw: Sic!. Doman´ska, Ewa. (2000). “(Re)creative Myths and Constructed History. The Case of Poland.” In Bo Strath, ed., Myth and Memory in the Construction of Community. Historical Patterns In Europe And Beyond. Brussels: PIE Lang, 249–62. Głowin´ski, Michał. (2004). “Kryzys dyskursu patriotycznego.” In Michał Głowin´ski, Skrzydła i pie˛ta. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 21–42. Klekot, Ewa. (2007). “Mourning John Paul II in the streets of Warsaw.” Anthropology Today 23(4): 3–6. Kubik, Jan. (1994). The Power of Symbols and the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press. Mach, Zbigniew. (1989). Symbols, Conflict and Identity. Kraków: Wydawnictwo UJ.

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Margry, Peter Jan, and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero. (2007). “Memorializing Traumatic Death.” Anthropology Today 23(3): 1–2. Michalska-Ciarka, Magdalena. (1984). “Warszawski krzyz˙ z kwiatów: 1981–1983.” MA diss., Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw. Prosin´ska, Magdalena. (1999). “Papiez˙ chodzi po Podhalu.” MA diss., Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw. Santino, Jack. (2006). “Performative Commemoratives: Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death.” In Jack Santino, ed., Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death. New York: Palgrave, 5–15. Walter, Tony, ed. (1999). The Mourning for Diana. Oxford: Berg. Zowczak, Magdalena. (1991). Bohater wsi–mit i stereotypy. Wrocław: Wiedza o Kulturze. ———. (2007). “Zbiorowe dos´wiadczenie religijne a współczesne praktyki kulturowe. Tydzien´ czuwania (1–8 IV 2005 r.).” In Tadeusz Doktór, ed., Dos´wiadczenie religijne. Warsaw: Verbinum, 19–40.

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Chapter 8

Remembering La Tragedia Commemorations of the 1999 Floods in Venezuela1

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Sandrine Revet

In societies that experience catastrophic events, numerous practices are aimed at endowing those events with meaning. The contingent nature of a catastrophe and the disorder it creates are inconsistent with the human sense of reason and provoke anxiety. To overcome the anxiety and limit the disorder, societies generally seek to reestablish order by explaining the catastrophe and by evaluating it, narrating it, commemorating it, and trying to prevent its repetition. All of these processes enable people to deal actively with the disorienting event and to convert disorder into order (Balandier 1988). This logic fully applies to “natural” disasters. In contemporary societies, this type of disaster is experienced as “scandalous” because it seems to call into question the foundations of a thought system that is inherited from modern rationality and dominated by notions of scientific progress and control over nature (Baudrillard 1976: 245). To adequately respond to the violence and apparent absurdity of natural disasters, people turn to narrative, ritual, and a variety of other practices. Commemorative acts are particularly significant, as they operate at several levels. First, and most importantly, they allow a collective identification of the nature of the event (“This was indeed a catastrophe”) and the construction of a social memory of it. By providing an occasion to produce one or more accounts of the disaster, commemorative acts also designate victims and guilty parties. In doing so, they situate the “natural” event within a fully social and political framework. Although “natural” disasters raise the question of responsibility in a different way than do other traumatic events (terrorists acts, industrial calamities, massacres), commemorating them

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nonetheless implies inscribing them in the same “economy of reparation” that is operative in the entire set of acts aimed at restoring the equilibrium after a violent event (Dodier 2008). From this angle, and because acts to commemorate natural disasters are both a means of collective mourning and social critique, those acts have certain characteristics of what Jack Santino has called “spontaneous shrines”—especially the fact that they are performative (Santino 1992, 2004). Nonetheless, I am particularly concerned to show here that the degree to which these characteristics are operative varies according to the type of memorialization. They are, in this case, more likely to be significant in institutionally framed commemorative acts; namely, those not initiated from the grassroots, by “the people.” My study bears on the 1999 mudslides in Venezuela.2 I started it on the fourth anniversary of the disaster, rather than in the days or weeks immediately following the event; I therefore could not observe whether there were any spontaneous forms of memorialization of the sort that came into being after the terrorist attacks in New York and Madrid, which were intensively covered by the international media (Margry and SanchezCarretero 2007). What I can say is that I found no mention or trace of such practices in my after-the-fact investigation. Was it the geographical scope of the disaster, which devastated the entire region and forced survivors to move from the site immediately, that prevented any spontaneous acts from taking place? Can we explain the absence of spontaneous manifestations by the fact that the event was natural, in contrast to violent situations caused by human beings, such as wars or terrorist attacks? Is it that the main activities in the days and weeks following the disaster were focused on rescuing the survivors, which left little space for ceremonies for the deaths (Eyre 2006: 445)?3 All these explanations seem valid to some degree. In any case, neither the newspapers nor the accounts by persons who lived through the catastrophe mention any spontaneously identified memorial site that victims’ families, the public, or even the media or political figures might have converged on in sudden communion to lay flowers, photos of lost loved ones, or other objects. The collective act that most closely resembles the creation of a grassroots memorial was the immediate amassing in rescue centers of donations of all sorts—clothes, medicine, toys, food—sent by a variety of social groups from various regions of the country. Although these spontaneous donations were managed by institutions (church, Red Cross, government), they can be understood not merely as acts of solidarity or charity, but also as a means for people not directly affected by the disaster—those whom Santino designates as “the public” (2004: 365)— to participate in the event. An attempt at collective reparation enacted

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through the massive donation of all sorts of objects seemed to be an act of communion—with the survivors rather than the dead—and it was combined with a strong determination to declare the event unacceptable and to repair the consequences of it. The giving received a great deal of press and television coverage, celebrating the “national unity” that had suddenly become visible.4 In this contribution, however, I am more interested in the informal and official commemorations that were still taking place years after the catastrophe, and specifically in how they relate to the grassroots memorials created throughout the world today in circumstances of traumatic death, and in the political and performative dimensions of these memorials. In Venezuela, there are two ways of commemorating the catastrophe; both concern the relationship that the people have developed with the event.

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La Tragedia On the night of 15 December 1999, after a month of constant rain, the northern region of Venezuela was hit by a natural phenomenon of virtually unheard-of violence. The coastal state of Vargas—which is approximately twenty kilometers from the capital, Caracas, but separated from it by Mount Avila—was particularly affected. This narrow strip of land between sea and mountains is criss-crossed with streams and rivers racing down from the steep mountain crest. Here, the floods became mudslides, then landslides. Tons of mud, rocks, and trees rolled and crashed down to the coast into highly urbanized areas,5 causing several hundred deaths and colossal material damage. Many buildings and infrastructures were entirely destroyed. Approximately 80 percent of the population of the state of Vargas was affected—nearly 250,000 people. Certain towns were hit particularly hard. For example, Carmen de Uria, a village of approximately 2,600 inhabitants, was almost entirely destroyed by mudslides. The village has not been reconstructed, and each year there are ceremonies to commemorate the event. In Macuto (which before the disaster was a town of 15,000 inhabitants), certain districts such as La Veguita were utterly devastated and have been transformed into emblematic sites. It was in this last area that I did most of my field research, in the period 2003–2005. The years immediately following the disaster were marked by tense conflicts within Venezuelan society and an increasingly stark opposition between the defenders and the detractors of president Hugo Chávez’s government. The coup d’état against the president in April 2002, the petition circulated by the political opposition in December 2003 to organize

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a referendum aimed at removing Chávez from office, and the referendum of 2004 itself affected not only politics but also daily life in Venezuela. It is necessary to situate the commemorations of the disaster, as well as my field observations of them, within this context. At both the regional and the national scale, the 1999 disaster was highly singular, exceptional, and tragic, as attested by the name used for it in Venezuela: La Tragedia. At the global scale, however, this disaster resembles many others that regularly appear on television screens throughout the world, succeeding each other as a function of continent and season. The Vargas landslide exhibits characteristics that allow it to be qualified as one such disaster: thousands of tons of mud and rock, destroyed localities, half-naked victims in the grip of the elements or in the arms of firefighters or other brave rescuers, national and international organizations mobilized to provide first aid, shelters to receive survivors, the act of counting the dead, debates on the government’s responsibility for the crisis, controversy concerning the historical fact that permission had been granted for such heavy urban development on the coast, and, lastly, the media coverage that worked to turn the event into a major disaster comparable to other world-scale catastrophes. “It’s three times worse than Mitch;”6 “It’s the worst disaster the country has ever experienced.” Body-count estimates in Venezuela range from a few hundred to several tens of thousands. The highest estimate—fifty thousand—was put forward by both the mayor of La Guaira (the Vargas state capital) and the local head of the International Red Cross. No figure has been able to close the debate, though after investigation it can reasonably be concluded that the catastrophe probably resulted in between eight hundred and one thousand deaths (Altez and Revet 2005). The absence of any official answer to the question of the body count, together with the extremely high number of casualties declared by some actors and further manipulated locally, had a decisive influence on my study. It is indeed not without significance to enter a “field,” in all senses of the term, when one can imagine that one is walking over thousands of mud-buried bodies— as can all the former inhabitants who have resettled there. Figures like thirty thousand or fifty thousand correspond to 10 to 20 percent of the Vargas population, which would mean that every family in the area was in mourning. The city of Macuto was one of the most severely stricken, so I had prepared myself to meet a great number of persons mourning the traumatic death of family or friends. The high death estimate meant that I spent a considerable amount of my time in Vargas investigating the question of commemorative ceremonies to mark the disaster. I scheduled two of my four major visits to the

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region for the month of December, and on my first stay I realized that in the days leading up to 15 December, I would find a country engaged in the collective act of remembering: churches full of families grieving around memorial plaques engraved with lists of names. The situation I found there, however, was quite different. In the neighborhood I intended to study, nothing presaged that there would be any change in the usual daily activities around 15 December. The women of the neighborhood had assured me that a special mass would be held, and that there might be a procession, but no one could tell me exactly where it would take place or at what time, or even on which day—the fifteenth or the sixteenth? Assuming I was only interested in official, institutionally organized commemorations, and probably wanting to show how she herself kept her distance from such ceremonies, Evelyn, a fifty-year-old neighborhood resident, addressed me on the fourteenth in the following terms: “I don’t know if they’re going to say a mass tomorrow, the fifteenth—it might be the fifteenth.” On the other hand, a local commemoration organized by people from the neighborhood, without the intervention of any institution, was indeed planned for that very evening. No one had mentioned it to me, as they probably presumed that it had nothing to do with my work. That ceremony was perceived as a private matter, and I was a “stranger” in the neighborhood. However, this attitude changed the longer I stayed in the field; later, residents invited me to their ceremony, designating it as “our mass.” The press is a central actor in the Vargas commemorations. Every year, the catastrophe and the memory of it generate a great deal of press commentary. Photos of the disaster and “survivor accounts” are part and parcel of press coverage of and commentary on reconstruction work. In the tense political situation the country had been experiencing since Chávez came to power in 1999, the commemoration of La Tragedia is one more moment in which the opposition between Chávez supporters and Chávez opponents is likely to crystallize. Supporters are essentially from the “popular” strata, while opponents are from well-to-do groups of the population. Depending on their political orientation, then, newspapers either deplore the slow reconstruction process or express satisfaction at how well it is progressing. The “Vargas disaster” remains a national issue because the media continue to discuss it, keeping it a subject of national public debate particularly focused on the government’s inability to reconstruct the area. The press is also involved in the commemorations by annually publishing remembrance announcements submitted by the families of the victims; these generally include photos of the deceased. And, predictably, it falls to the media to announce and cover official annual commemorations.

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However, commemoratives are not confined to institutional acts. In fact, there are two types of ceremonies. The first type, which are usually not mentioned in the newspapers, function primarily to recreate “community” around the dead. They are situated at the local, private level; they are organized by the victims’ family and friends, and even their neighbors; neither the state nor the church plays a part in them. In these ceremonies, the disaster is apprehended in private terms. The dead that they are meant to remember were well known to the people who enact them, and the commemorations are understood to allow those people to live “with them.” They create moments of communion between those who died in the disaster and those who survived it. The second type are institutional commemorations: Governmental and regional institutions, political parties, and the Catholic church organize their own ceremonies. Although they are sometimes enacted in the same places as the more private ceremonies, they envision the catastrophe as a distant event, and the understanding is that the dead—who were unknown to the actors—must be forgotten so that life can go on.

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Celebrating the Dead in the Space of Families and Friends The district of La Veguita—which, in the official terminology, is a barrio de ranchos—lies along the Macuto River and the side of Mount Avila, the mountain separating Vargas from Caracas. Despite its popular, informal character, it is a relatively old district, dating from the early twentieth century. Most of the people living there at the time of the disaster had been living side by side for several decades; middle-class inhabitants lived in houses in the lower section of the district, while the poorer ones lived on the mountainside. However, the 1999 mudslides destroyed all the dwellings indiscriminately: The houses of the poor collapsed, and those of the more well-to-do were engulfed in mud. Ranchos inhabitants began resettling in the neighborhood as early as February 2000, just two months after the disaster. The middle-class residents were either in a better position to find other housing, or they simply did not have the same skills as the inhabitants of the “invasion” neighborhoods when it came to piecing back together what ruins the disaster had left behind. A little chapel that is used for private commemorations of the event was built in 2002–2003 by La Veguita inhabitants who had resettled in the devastated district. The materials were bought with funds they raised among themselves; as a grassroots initiative, the neighborhood men constructed the chapel and the women decorated it. The chapel is a small, marble-fronted, tile-roofed monument protected by a padlocked gate. In-

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side is a crucifix, a small altar with a statue of the Virgin, a number of plastic bouquets, some fresh flowers when the season allows, and candles on little doilies. There are no photos or name-engraved plaques; no direct mention is made of the victims. But the place has the characteristics of a sacred space, and the gate and padlock make it clear that it is a site to be respected, while its position in space makes it symbolically significant.

Illustration 8.1. The chapel built by La Veguita residents, December 2003. Photo: Sandrine Revet. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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The inhabitants located the chapel at the intersection of two former streets, on the site of a house that belonged to a “hero” of the disaster— José Luis, a physical education teacher who was well known to the neighborhood residents. The night of the disaster, he was having a party in his home, a big house some distance from the river. The neighborhood residents relate that when the river started to overflow its banks and the situation became critical, José Luis opened his house to shelter those fleeing the flood. According to their accounts, he took in several dozen people; some mentioned as many as a hundred. But the house itself was ultimately swallowed by a massive mudslide that killed José Luis and everyone else in it. Locating the chapel on the site of the house produced a local account of the event, highlighting the role played by figures like José Luis. He became identified as a hero, a person whose actions make it possible to have a positive image of an “us,” a community that became manifest during the catastrophe. The inhabitants of La Veguita organize their annual commemoration around the little chapel. Still, as attested by the failure of my first attempts to get information, the little ceremony is hardly publicized and is quite improvised. Significantly, it is held after nightfall on the evening of 15 December, making it quite unlikely that any strangers to the neighborhood will attend.7 I was finally able to go in December 2003, thanks to an invitation from the neighborhood women. We were told to assemble at nightfall in front of the little chapel. Approximately twenty people, mostly women and children, came. Everyone brought his or her own chair. In the evening calm, the discussions were lively and included conversations about everyday matters. The disaster was not a central focus of exchanges, and the tone was not one of sadness. Other people gradually approached, and by the end of the evening there were about thirty people there. At exactly 8 PM, the prayers began— sequences of Our Father and Ave Maria—initiated not by a priest but by a woman resident. There was no overt mention of the disaster. The woman leading the prayers apologized afterwards for having taken so long, then said: “It’s only once a year.” When the prayers were over, Mirna, another inhabitant, went to get the cookies and hot chocolate she had made with one of her neighbors. The conversations continued while this refreshment was shared. Mirna explained to me: “Those dead people, who died all of a sudden, you have to say a lot of prayers for them in order to raise their souls, because since it happened just like that, they weren’t prepared.” The people present lamented the fact that the number of people attending the ceremony was dwindling every year, and expressed surprise at the absence of people “from the other side” (the more well-to-do neighbor-

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hood on the other side of the river). After a short moment together, we dispersed, returning home with our chairs. This ceremony has taken place every year since the disaster. I was not present at the fifth anniversary commemoration in 2004, but Mirna told me about it the next day, referring to it as “our mass.” There had been more people than the previous year, including the son of José Luis, who had left Vargas. And that year there had also been people “from the other side”—a fact that provoked many remarks. After mentioning the coffee, chocolate, and cookies, she concluded her account: “We stayed there talking about things until ten in the evening.” The La Veguita ceremony has many characteristics of a funerary rite: There is a wake, shared food, religious contemplation or ceremony, a collective moment, and discussion. The function of these features is to unite the community around the dead (Thomas 1985). And the main point of the annual ceremony at La Veguita is to appease those who “died badly,” so as to be able to live with them. Those who died in the disaster and whose bodies could not be found, not only could not prepare themselves for death, but had not been ritually buried: They died “badly” in two ways and are therefore doubly disturbing.8 Since these victims of traumatic death were not accompanied out of life, the living residents project onto them all the fears associated with the wandering dead. And yet they want to be able to live with them, to accept them in the space they themselves live in—what I call the space of families and friends. For although some inhabitants mentioned the fact that not all the bodies were found and that many are “still” stuck in the mud that engulfed the houses, they also affirmed that they are not frightened of these dead: No, we come up here at any time, people aren’t afraid of the dead, no. You know how it is, it’s that these are people we know, so I imagine that … You say to yourself, you know, “Okay, I knew them, they’re good people and they don’t have any reason to give you any trouble.” I’ve never heard anyone say that a dead person or a spirit had … Nothing. Even though those people died tragically, even though they … for me they are not resting in peace. Because people who die like that don’t rest in peace. But I’ve never heard anything. Because we’ve always lived here. These people knew us, they saw us grow up and they may even have children here, babies … I don’t know.9

“We’re no longer neighbors, but brothers and sisters” Nothing remains of Carmen de Uria, another small town that was entirely destroyed by the mudslides. Unlike La Veguita, the inhabitants of Carmen de Uria did not reconstruct their homes in the years following the disaster. But the town church, which was destroyed by the floods, has been partially repaired. And every 16 December, a midday mass is held in this

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church for those who died in the disaster. This mass is organized not by the Catholic church but on the initiative of neighborhood residents, who all pay something to bring in a priest to officiate the part of the ceremony that takes place in the church. They themselves organize the procession down to the sea and the ritual of casting flowers into the waves. In 2003 and 2004, I attended this mass along with approximately a hundred other people. The many cars parked around the church attested to the social situation of most of the families that were present: They were middle or upper class. In the church, while children ran about among the pews, there was much friendly conversation between former neighbors who had been dispersed by the disaster. Near the altar, the association of victims’ families had hung a poster bearing the portraits of all the persons who were still unaccounted for. Here, too, people lamented how their numbers had dwindled each year. The mass began when the priest arrived. In his sermon, he insisted on the need to “live in peace with God each day and repent now because La Tragedia shows that we never know when death may come.” After the sermon, he asked how many of the people present had been living in Carmen de Uria before the disaster struck; nearly every hand went up. He then asked how many persons had lost members of their families: three quarters of the hands went up. And how many persons were displaced?

Illustration 8.2. Miniature memorial at Carmen de Uria, December 2003. Photo: Sandrine Revet. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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Three hands went up. He then said a prayer for the damnificados (disaster-struck) and the desplazados (displaced). Afterwards, the church emptied and the people walked in a procession to the beach, praying and chanting. The atmosphere was contemplative, but once again the tone was neither grim nor sad. On our way to the sea, we passed a lot that was empty except for a small structure made of two tiles in the form of a roof, which was meant to evoke the shape of the church of Carmen de Uria. Folded up beneath the tiles was one of the posters from the association of victims’ families. A few people broke off from the procession for a moment to lay flowers there. Once the procession reached the beach, people turned toward the sea and, after a moment of silence, threw their flowers into the waves. Some chanted. Then the group slowly dispersed. These celebrations are organized each year by Bertha, a forty-fiveyear-old former resident of Carmen de Uria, who is fighting to keep the church going, whatever other projects may be envisioned for the land on which the town once stood. At the time, there were proposals to raze the ruins and make a garden, a “cemetery,” or a place for commemorating the catastrophe.10 Bertha explained:

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The commemoration of La Tragedia every year on 16 December is an opportunity for us to see each other again. It’s very good for that, because it brings us to see each other again.

Illustration 8.3. Flower scattering at Carmen de Uria, December 2003. Photo: Sandrine Revet. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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We’re no longer neighbors, but brothers and sisters, because we were all born that day. When we meet up again on the sixteenth, all those who are still alive, we all feel we’re part of each other’s families. We’re like brothers and sisters. There is something that unites us … after having lived and survived like that.11

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It is clear that in Carmen de Uria, as in La Veguita, commemorations organized by the residents themselves, without intervention from either the Catholic church or the government, involve personal experiences and refer to being together in a circumscribed group. The point is to recreate the “us” (“our mass;” “we’re like brothers and sisters”) that surged into being as a result of the disaster. The survivors not only escaped death, but they were “born that day,” as Bertha explained, and their ties are so strong that they have symbolically become family ties. The people in the church at Carmen de Uria are victims’ families (as attested by the number of hands that went up in response to the priest’s question), and in La Veguita, the dead are “known.” La Tragedia thus gave rise to a form of “community,” and in this sense, commemoration of the disastrous event corresponds to celebration of the founding moment of that community. These communities are anchored locally around the “places of memory” (Nora 1992): the chapel of La Veguita and the church of Carmen de Uria. They provide a resting place for the graveless dead and allow the living to localize their cult of those dead. Both places are now emblematic of the catastrophe.

Memory for the Future? As a counterpart to these private commemorations, there also appears to be in Vargas a kind of “organized memory” (Clavandier 2004: 121) involving other “places of memory” and other commemorative acts for the casualties of the floods. Scattered throughout the Vargas region, these commemoratives are orchestrated by a variety of institutions. In midDecember, the regional legislative council organizes an annual flowerscattering ceremony in the state capital, La Guaira; some schools memorialize their lost pupils, the Catholic church holds masses in a number of churches along the coast, and associations arrange commemorations. In 2003, for example, the association Un Sueño para Venezuela (A Dream for Venezuela) organized a large public assembly on 11 December to present various reconstruction projects for Vargas. The focus here is the future, namely, the retrieval and reappropriation of the damaged sites, “converting La Tragedia into an opportunity.” In these ceremonies, the dead are mentioned only incidentally; for example, in a “tribute to those no longer in existence” made by one of the participants, a declaration meant

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not to induce sadness but to celebrate “a day of optimism” and urge people to “look toward the horizon” and forget about the past. In 2004, the regional governor, the mayor, and leaders of Corpo Vargas (the institution in charge of reconstruction work) held a joint press conference in front of one of Marcuto’s historic buildings, namely, the former presidential mansion known as La Guzmania, which was severely stricken by the mudslides but has since been restored. The point was to expound on the progress of the reconstruction—everything that had been accomplished over the previous five years—and to present a number of attractive redevelopment proposals for the zones that had been destroyed. This “ceremony” referred to the disaster exclusively as a take-off point for a new, radiant future. It is characteristic of the position of several institutions, which is summed up quite well in the declaration made by the president of Corpo Vargas on the third anniversary of the disaster: “To reconstruct, the tragedy must be forgotten.”12 Only two official, permanent monuments in memory of the event have been constructed. The first, which was erected immediately after the calamity on the initiative of the Catholic church, is a cross—“in memory of the floods’ victims”—located on the mountain overlooking Vargas. A mass was celebrated there just after the event in 1999, but today none of the Vargas residents I questioned mentioned the cross in our discussions of commemorations of the catastrophe. It can therefore be concluded that this “place of memory” has no relevance for most of the inhabitants affected by the disaster. The second monument was commissioned in 2002 by Corpo Vargas from the architect Fruto Vivas. It is a stone structure set in a pool of water with a huge rock balanced above its center. The monument faces the La Veguita district that was destroyed by the disaster. At the official unveiling in April 2003, it was baptized “The Place of Hope,” a name that oriented the commemorative toward the future. Linda and Migdalia—two La Veguita women in their forties who survived the disaster and came back to live in their old neighborhood—spoke of the monument in the following terms: It seems they call it “the monument to the first stone the river brought along” [they laugh]. But if we, who have always been here, knew which one had come down first we’d have put it up as a monument ourselves, and we might even have slapped the stone for being responsible for all this disgrace.13

The “monument to the stone,” as La Veguita residents are wont to call it, thus commemorates not the dead but the calamity. Death as such is absent: There are no mortuary images, no victims’ names, no flowers, Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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no mention of the date. The central stone is supposed to symbolize the “guilty party” in the disaster, but this has hardly moved the inhabitants to appropriate the monument, as is clear from the words of Linda and Migdalia. Distantly amused by the symbol’s inability to fulfill its function (Linda highlights the fact that it is not the right stone), the two women give us to understand that for them the catastrophe has a collective meaning only for those “who have always been here.” In doing so, they exclude all external, institutional commemoration that is aimed at socially organizing the memory of the event or using it for other ends. It is highly significant in this connection that residents or former residents of the devastated districts only rarely join in institutionally organized commemorations, and that when those acts “impinge” on their territory, they regard them with mistrust and disdain.

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Commemorations and Political Tensions In December 2003, the La Veguita chapel served as a theater for the inhabitants’ reluctance to accept institutional commemoration acts. On the morning of the sixteenth, a “pilgrimage” was organized from La Guaira to Macuto by persons of the regional political opposition, the center-right Primero Justicia party. The “march” was announced in that day’s local paper and was scheduled to pass by the little chapel built by La Veguita residents. The people of the district had heard about the plan; the organizers came by later in the week to invite them to participate. They were asked to dress in black and carry torches. Vicente (aged eighty), one of the longest-term residents, viewed the march as a “political recuperation” of the tragedy and told me that he would not participate in it. In fact, none of the neighborhood inhabitants planned to go. The “march” proved to be a car trip, and there were only about twelve participants—the five organizers and their families. The organizers met at some meters from the entrance to the neighborhood. When one of the organizers got close to La Veguita in his gleaming 4x4 SUV, he got out and announced through a megaphone that this was a “pilgrimage to the memory of those who died in the catastrophe of 1999,” as well as a “demonstration, to say that reconstruction in Vargas is too slow and that the government has forgotten the people of the state.” He was carrying a Venezuelan flag, the symbol of the political opposition at the time. For the members of Primero Justicia, which was organizing the ceremony, the aim was to make a link between the commemorations of the disaster and the opposition to the Chávez government’s administration. The

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members of this small group, all of whom were dressed in black, began to move toward the little chapel. But not one resident of La Veguita was present. Two nonresident women arrived carrying flowers; they were accompanied by little girls, and identified themselves as “families of victims.” María, a resident of the neighborhood who had taken on the task of keeping the chapel clean and bedecked with flowers, came to open the gate for them so they could lay down their bouquets. She looked at the group with a mistrustful air and informed them in a mocking tone that the rosary had already been said—the previous evening; an allusion to the ceremony held by the inhabitants themselves. Other residents who were passing by or watching the group from their windows maintained what was clearly a hostile distance. An organizer of the event then said a quick prayer in front of the chapel and invoked José Luis, “We came to show you we have not forgotten.” Then the little group left, some in cars, others on foot carrying torches and the flag. The “procession” headed toward Carmen de Uria, which is approximately twenty kilometers from Macuto. When the cars were nearly at the village, everyone got out and pretended that they had arrived on foot. The leader announced through the megaphone that the procession had left from La Guaira and had been walking since the previous day. This provoked reactions of hostility-tinged mistrust from the people present in Carmen de Uria, just as it had in La Veguita. What comes to the fore in the situation described here are the conflicts and tensions that run through a local society. In the attitude of rejection expressed by La Veguita residents, it is clear that the political orientations of the organizers of the pilgrimage–march (i.e., openly opposed to the Chávez government) elicited little sympathy in the neighborhood. In this sense, the attempt to turn the commemoration into a moment of political protest against the government failed. And it is striking that neither the residents of La Veguita nor those of Carmen de Uria thought of that act as “theirs.” Despite the fact that these other two ceremonies (the evening mass and the “pilgrimage” the next day) revolved around the same emblems (the chapel in La Veguita and José Luis, and the destroyed city of Carmen de Uria), they did not enable the people to “commemorate” together.

Conclusion Two types of commemorations have thus been held since the 1999 disaster. The first type, which are local and spontaneous, are organized by Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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the grassroots, by the inhabitants, who do not mix them with political considerations. The second type are officially organized by institutions or political parties, and they easily overflow onto the political field. Spontaneous, resident-organized commemorations in Vargas—such as prayers at the La Veguita chapel or the scattering of flowers at Carmen de Uria—share several characteristics of grassroots memorials, first and foremost the fact that they are unofficial, that they are organized outside or on the outer margins of official institutions. The ceremonies also prove to be moments of communion between those who died in the catastrophe and those who survived it. Lastly, it is through their connection with a particular public that these spontaneous ceremonies exhibit certain parallels with spontaneous memorials, even when that public is small, as in La Veguita, where, as we have seen, there is much appreciation at the evening ceremony for the presence and participation of persons from the nearby district. Other features—the performative aspect of commemorations; their inscription in the political sphere, where they are accompanied with a demand for social change—seem in this case more directly relevant to institutional commemorations organized by either the government or the opposition party. The fact that there are two types of commemorations and that the inhabitants are unlikely to participate in those that are officially organized also indicates the existence of at least two strategic uses of memory (Ricoeur 2000) that give rise to two ways of commemorating. One concentrates on the local need to “live with” the dead, the catastrophe, and the ruins. For those who partake in this type of commemoration, the catastrophe is inconceivable outside the history of the neighborhood and without the neighbors. It is a social fact and cannot be otherwise isolated. Institutional actors like the state and church, on the other hand, look resolutely toward the future, a future that can only be achieved by breaking away from the event. For them, the commemorations revolve around an event that is circumscribed in time and space, and memory is invoked as essential for preventing further disasters and as a basis for political demands. Institutional forms of commemoration alone do not seem capable of responding to all the demands expressed after a catastrophe like the one that occurred in 1999. This is expressed in the survivors’ demand especially for the opportunity to recognize the existence of a community, and their demand for a moment of communion with the dead, to whom they have returned to live beside. This is what we learn from the evening ceremony in the little chapel of La Veguita and the flower scattering at Carmen de Uria, commemorations that are maintained year after year as responses to official ceremonies that mention neither deaths nor community.

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Notes 1. Translation by Amy Jacobs. 2. Study conducted as part of a doctoral thesis in anthropology: “Anthropologie d’une catastrophe: les coulées de boue de 1999 sur le littoral central vénézuélien” (Institut des Hautes Etudes de l’Amérique Latine (IHEAL)-Université de Paris 3, 2006). 3. We might be tempted at first to interpret shelter doors and walls covered with photos of lost persons and telephone numbers as features of spontaneous shrines, but this would clearly be a mistake since the purpose of those announcements was to help locate possible survivors rather than to mourn persons whose death was an accepted fact. 4. The newspapers described the national unity as “sudden,” because the disaster took place the very day of the referendum on the new constitution put forward by the Chávez government, which at the time had been in power for a year. Debates on the proposed constitution had had a strongly divisive effect, intensifying the tension between the supporters of the new president and his plans for transforming the country, on the one hand, and the well-to-do sectors of the population on the other, together with the clergy, who were all strongly opposed to the new constitution. 5. Vargas is a region where several types of neighborhoods coexist in close, dense quarters: The poor live in flimsy constructions on the mountainside, the middle class live in apartment buildings and houses, and rich residents of the capital have vacation homes in the area. 6. Mitch was one of the strongest hurricanes ever in the region; it swept across Central America in 1998. 7. It is important to recall that this is an urban zone, that insecurity is a major problem in Venezuela, and that there is little in the way of public transportation after nightfall. For all these reasons, the barrios are thought of as dangerous, especially at night. 8. On this subject, see Thomas’s list of those who “died badly” in La Mort Africaine (1982). Edgar Morin (1970: 159) used the terms “ignoble dead,” “inconsolable ghosts,” and “obsessive dead” for persons who have not been ritually buried. James Frazer (1936) noted that “the spirits of persons who died a violent death” are thought of as among the most dangerous; examples of such death are murder, suicide, being eaten by a wild animal, dying in childbirth, and going unburied. Jean Delumeau cites categories of “dead people who have become demons,” including drowned persons and anyone who died a violent or otherwise nonnatural death (Delumeau 1978: 86). See also María Càtedra’s work on Asturian vaqueiros, who distinguish a “good” (i.e., natural, nonviolent) death from a violent one (Cátedra 1993). 9. Interview, 8 December 2004. 10. None of these projects has been realized, and the plot became surrounded by wire fencing and occupied by the naval police. 11. Interview, 16 December 2003. 12. Tal Cual, 16 December 2002. 13. Interview, 24 June 2004.

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References Altez, Rogelio, and Sandrine Revet. (2005). “Contar los muertos para contar la muerte: Discusión en torno al número de fallecidos en la tragedia de 1999 en el estado Vargas.” Revista Geográfica Venezolana, special issue, 21–43. Balandier, Georges. (1988). Le désordre: Eloge du mouvement. Paris: Fayard. Baudrillard, Jean. (1976). L’échange symbolique et la mort. Paris: Gallimard. Cátedra, María. (1993). “La maison du pendu: Le suicide chez les vaqueiros des Asturies.” Terrain 20: 57–68. Clavandier, Gaëlle. (2004). La mort collective: Pour une sociologie des catastrophes. Paris: CNRS Editions. Delumeau, Jean. (1978). La peur en Occident: XIVe–XVIIIe siècles. Paris: Fayard. Dodier, Nicolas. (2008). “L’expérience des victimes. L’économie de la réparation.” Paper presented to the Institut für Sozialforschung, Frankfurt, 21 January 2008. Eyre, Anne. (2006). “Remembering: Community Commemoration After Disaster.” In Havidan Rodriguez, Enrico Quarantelli, and Russel Dynes, eds., Handbook of Disaster Research. New York: Springer, 441–55. Frazer, James. (1937). La crainte des morts dans la Religion primitive. Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner [originally published: (1936), The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion. London: Macmillan and Co.] Grider, Sylvia. (2001). “Spontaneous Shrines: A Modern Response to Tragedy and Disaster.” New Directions in Folklore 5. http://www.temple.edu/isllc/newfolk/shrines .html. Accessed 28 January 2008. Margry, Peter Jan, and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero. (2007). “Memorializing Traumatic Death.” Anthropology Today 23(3): 1–2. Morin, Edgar. (1970). L’homme et la mort. Paris: Points Seuil. Nora, Pierre. (1992) Les lieux de mémoire. Paris: Gallimard. Revet, Sandrine. (2007). Anthropologie d”une catastrophe: Les coulées de boue de 1999 au Venezuela. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle. Ricoeur, Paul. (2000). La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Seuil. Santino, Jack. (1992). “‘Not an Important Failure’: Rituals of Death and Politics in Northern Ireland.” In Michael McCaughan ed., Displayed in Mortal Light. Antrim, Northern Ireland: Antrim Arts Council. ———. (2004). “Performative Commemoratives, the Personal, and the Public: Spontaneous Shrines, Emergent Ritual, and the Field of Folklore” (AFS Presidential Plenary Address 2003). Journal of American Folklore 117 (466): 363–72. Thomas, Louis-Vincent. (1982). La mort africaine: idéologie funéraire en Afrique noire. Paris: Payot. Thomas, Louis-Vincent, (1985). Rites de mort: Pour la paix des vivants. Paris: Fayard.

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Part III

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Sociability and Reflexive Antiterrorism

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Chapter 9

Street Shrines and the Writing of Disaster 9/11, New York, 2001 Béatrice Fraenkel

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A New Culture of Disaster First, I would like to put forward a general hypothesis that is, I think, corroborated by the various recent scholarly studies on grassroots memorials and spontaneous shrines. This phenomenon can be called a “new culture of disaster,” and it is currently shared by large numbers of people around the world. Beyond the specificity of each society, history, and religion, when a catastrophe strikes, people seem to draw on the same repertory of actions. For centuries, we have shared a common political activism in the form of demonstrations and strikes (Tilly 1986). But the public culture of disaster seems different for at least three reasons. First, the actions are mostly improvised; second, they tend to include a cross-section of the city’s inhabitants; and third, they are strongly oriented toward a global activism of care. These three features shape a general model of collective reaction to catastrophe and traumatic death. What should we do when the sky falls on our heads? Today we know how to respond to this question—and creating shrines is obviously part of the answer. The word “shrine” (autel in French, Altar in German) is so polysemic that I must start by defining its varied usages. Scholarly studies—particularly in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and history—abound with descriptions and analyses of shrines of very different shapes, statuses, and natures. The classic meaning of the term refers to the notion of a “table”; for example, the table on which the Catholic mass is celebrated, a sacrificial altar (like the Pergamon Altar, for example) or, more commonly, a

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table on which offerings are made to a divinity. But the word shrine can also be used to refer to an elaborate institution like a sanctuary—as, for example, in the title of John Nelson’s monograph A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine (1996), on the famous Suwa sanctuary in Nagasaki. In this essay, I am concerned with a third usage of the word shrine to refer to “a set of material objects and a way of organizing space” (Dubisch 1995: 162). In adopting this descriptive definition, I deliberately put on hold the issue of the shrine’s function and status. The New York “altars” discussed here belong to the broad category of urban altars.1 The shrines in Manhattan were constructed and managed by the citizens themselves; like the city, they were religiously eclectic and rich in political symbolism. In this respect, they are comparable to the market shrines studied by Ara Wilson in Bangkok (Wilson 2008), or to the Goa shrines studied by Alexander Henn (2008). What differentiates them from these examples is the fact that they were ephemeral. The shrines we will examine sprang up in New York immediately after the collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC) towers. They were temporary urban constructions not built to last, and not primarily intended to commemorate the dead. They were multifunctional sites combining all sorts of postings, pictures of the WTC, patriotic hymns, and posters of the missing. They were also places where various kinds of information could be found: lists of items needed by the emergency services, useful addresses, etc. As with all catastrophes (Clavandier 2004), we need to distinguish different temporal phases in any account of what happened on 11 September 2001: first the destruction phase; then the action phase (organizing help, searching for the living, tending the wounded, listing the dead); and lastly the mourning phase, when the searches stopped and the ceremonies began. The altars can be seen as belonging to an intermediate phase, spanning action and mourning. These altars remained in Manhattan for three weeks, their function gradually evolving from that of providing assistance to that of funereal memorial. A response to catastrophe, these shrines (and particularly the written messages that were an integral component of them) must be analyzed as part of the action phase that followed the shock of the attack (cf. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2003). They themselves are a form of action, as I hope to show in what follows.

Shrines and Writing Urban, ephemeral, and changing, the shrines were characterized by the presence of writing. That in itself is not surprising: written objects play Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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a part in public or domestic shrines in numerous traditions; for example, printed texts, manuscripts, and newspaper clippings are found from China to Mexico, from Ireland to Sicily. The presence of paper—shaped into chains or crowns, or simply folded—is well documented (Salvo 1997). However, the presence of written objects is insufficiently studied; scholars tend to note that they are found alongside other kinds of shrine objects but do not document or analyze the forms they take. We expect to find written objects in shrines, but they have tended to be treated as secondary materials, unworthy of scholarly attention (Hoffman 2002: 116). Recent studies of catastrophe shrines have, however, started to consider written objects. Most scholars treat them from the standpoint of creativity (Zeitlin 2006: 99–117). Such studies are welcome since we still do not know much about catastrophe writings. In particular, we are only now starting to appreciate their historical dimension; for example, eighteenth-century poetry dedicated to floods (Favier 2006: 271–81) or plague outbreaks (Fialcofschi 2006: 445–64). Some texts that have previously been seen as purely circumstantial could perhaps be regarded as belonging to a genre dating back several centuries, whose production, context, and survival need to be better understood. However, the importance that writing, in all its manifestations, took on in New York City in September 2001 cannot be related to a timehonored tradition nor to a cultural habitus. As I hope to show, the shrines constructed in Manhattan were sites of writing and reading—part of a scriptural fever that seized citizens after the catastrophe. But they were not an isolated phenomenon. The proliferation of writing and reading practices that I observed were constitutive elements of a new globalized culture of disaster that gives a new prominence to shrines. Reading and writing together in the public space of the city constitutes a program of action; the result is a new kind of shrine bound up in multiple, cosmopolitan literacies. The 9/11 disaster in New York provides an opportunity to systematically examine, analyze, and interpret thousands of written messages, viewed not as unique or exceptional but as practices of repetition and imitation (Fraenkel 2002). The fact that millions of people wrote “God bless America” or “We will always remember,” or just signed posters, invites one to reflect that what counts is not so much the message as the mere fact of writing. A striking feature of shrines constructed after catastrophes is often the sheer quantity of written messages displayed, rather than the literary quality of those writings. Of course, one can always find pearls among the mass of mediocre or repetitive texts. But what needs to be explored is the fact that it is a mass phenomenon. That will be my focus.

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In what follows, I analyze the practices I observed in Manhattan in September 2001 at two levels: as a generalized writing event, and as a set of specific social interventions—namely, the construction of shrines, considered as sites of writing and reading.

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NYC 9/11: A Writing Event When I decided to go to New York in September 2001 after the 9/11 attacks, it was not to study the shrines as such, but because I sensed that an extraordinary writing event was taking place in the city. I decided to go as soon as the skies were reopened to international air traffic, arriving on 16 September and staying for two weeks. The city had been inundated by a flood of paper messages and posters; their sheer quantity, widespread diffusion across the city, and the vitality of this scriptural fever (it stopped only because the mayor ordered the streets to be cleared) helped to make the phenomenon exceptional. However, quantity was not the event’s only notable feature. Also remarkable was the way texts and posters were put up all over the city. Manhattan was covered by a web of writings organized around nodes; for example, public places like Washington Square Park and Union Square, and buildings that had been directly affected by the catastrophe, like Saint Vincent’s Hospital and all the fire stations. Enormous memorials characterized by a mass of writing sprang up in these locations. But, after walking around Manhattan for hours on end, I started to notice, dotted all over the place, discrete and sometimes almost invisible shrines that always included written notes. Between the various nodes, and bridging them, written messages were to be seen everywhere on the walls of buildings, on phone booths, at bus stops, etc. The concentration of writings in these shrines allows me to discuss them as sites of writing. Clearly, these shrines had developed strategies for communicating with passersby. How did these strategies work? Was it the posters’ visual impact that made people stop and stand in front of them? Were these shrines primarily sites of reading or of writing? What kinds of interaction were facilitated by this written material? First, we need to consider how candles and flowers might be considered forms of writing.

Shrines: Written Messages, Candies, Flowers— A Paradigm of Vanitas The diversity of the installations, especially with regard to variations of scale and the variety of public locations involved, raises several ques-

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tions. When does a set of objects become a shrine? Is it possible to extract from an extreme heterogeneity a minimal definition of a shrine? For me, shrines are primarily places where written material is concentrated and intimately mixed with candles and flowers, and with a broad range of other objects such as toys, flags, ribbons, clothes, etc. I would suggest that candles, flowers, and written notes are the three elementary units of a sort of grammar of shrines. These three elements are fragile and ephemeral. They belong to an obvious cultural tradition of Vanitas (or memento mori) paintings—meditative images common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Written messages, flowers, candles, and skulls are the basic components of this pictorial vocabulary. This connection between shrines and still-life paintings devoted to death includes the principle of accumulation. Some Vanitas paintings are sober and austere, depicting only two or three objects; but most show a tangle of elements. Looking at the latter kind of Vanitas painting and looking at shrines produces the same sensation of feeling lost in front of a profusion of things. We are unsure about the nature of what we are seeing. A macabre display? A revival of a past tradition of making offerings to the dead? But at the same time we are attracted by the cumulative effect, the bright colors, the jumble of miniature objects. The disorder becomes an image of life. For that reason, I suggest that shrines can be seen as highly ambiguous Vanitas displays. Their Janus-like nature—one face looking at death, the other at life—is epitomized by the presence of

Illustration 9.1. Detail of Chico’s shrine, a local artist. Photo: Béatrice Fraenkel. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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written messages. Embedded in the shrine, the written objects reveal the allegorical power of their materiality, which so often goes unnoticed.

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Ambiguous Writings Let us now consider these writings in a more traditional way. I argue that, in Manhattan in September 2001, the majority of the millions of written messages had a performative rather than informative or expressive value. I refer here to Austin’s classic theory of “performativity.” To see these writings as performative is to argue that their power lay primarily not in their meaning, but in the very act of writing. By “act of writing” I mean choosing a medium, using a particular lettering and layout, addressing a message to someone, and publishing and disseminating it. I stress the need for material analysis of written messages in order to distance myself from more “literary” approaches that reduce writing to text. I am thinking here of methodological standpoints such as that defended by Jill Dubisch in her remarkable work on Tinos, in which she takes on the task of “reading” “what the shrine says” as though it were itself a text. In so doing, Dubisch appropriates for her own purposes Geertz’s famous definition: “Doing ethnography is like trying to read a manuscript—foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries … written in transient examples of shaped behavior” (Dubisch 1995: 10). By contrast, I argue that, when studying written messages, it is important to reject metaphorical uses of the notions of “writing” and “reading,” which may be of interest in other contexts but which block analysis by encouraging us to think we know a priori what writing and reading mean. One of the scholarly aims of this inquiry is precisely to question the meaning of these two actions, in order to show their complexity and sometimes their strangeness. I first discuss the ambiguity of the uses of writing found in the shrines I observed. I then propose a topographical analysis of one particular shrine—Chico’s shrine—which I documented in September 2001.

Internal Analysis: Medium, Graphics, Layout Medium The fact of writing a message on perishable paper, and exposing it to rain and wind by attaching it to a wall with scotch tape, shows that the fragility of the medium is the result of conscious choice. As noted previous,

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these paper notes constitute an indirect discourse on death and life. They are exposed to the elements in order to be destroyed by them. Faded ink and tattered sheets are signs that create a specific style. The decision to write on pieces of paper, cardboard, or index cards underlines another feature: all these writings, being precariously attached to a wall, were easily removable. There was clearly no intention of marking the space in a lasting or permanent way. This kind of writing in public space contradicts basic epigraphic skills. Even the authors of graffiti make indelible inscriptions. Writing is commonly extolled as durable, by contrast with the ephemerality of oral utterances. But the written messages posted in the street after 9/11 were made to be ephemeral. This is the first mark of ambiguity.

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Graphics Another ambiguity relates to their graphics and lettering. One might naively think that, if a written document is displayed in the street, it is so that it will be read. But most of the messages were handwritten in small cursive script. Even in those cases that employed calligraphy, the character size was too small to be read at a distance. Notices designed for street display need to use much larger lettering. If these written messages did not opt for a character size appropriate to street display, why were they written? The point, I suggest, is that the small lettering forces the reader to come close. The use of tiny characters makes a strong impact by forcing passersby to gravitate toward the message. Of course, when people wrote their messages in September 2001, they did not choose to write in small cursive script in order to influence other people’s behavior, but because it was their usual way of writing. And they employed a spontaneous style, simple and modest—the style of ordinary messages, the one usually used to write to friends, take notes, etc. This display of banal cursive graphics defines the level of interaction between reader and onlooker—what we might call a “phatic level,” a way of entering into contact. In this case, the graphics indicated that everybody felt concerned and that everyone could participate. Shrines were made by and for everybody. The level of literacy was not a barrier. This is confirmed by details I observed in certain messages that had been clumsily drawn by adults. In conclusion, the style of writing encouraged people to come close and made them feel the shrine was directed at them. The ambiguity of the graphics, like the ambiguity of the medium, appears to be the hidden force that makes these shrines so powerful. Using fragile paper and small cursive characters in the street does not enhance the message’s visibility,

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but it makes people act. It is in this sense that we can say that pieces of paper and written characters perform. Layout I have already mentioned the impressive accumulation of objects at some shrines. The principle of accumulation also operates in the writings themselves. Many posters were created by several writers. Many individuals shared the same graphic space on banners and walls. The layout of these shared spaces evidenced a remarkable degree of control. Each writer seemed to have followed a tacit rule: fill the surface but avoid overlap. The result was often a dense spread of tightly interlocking graphics, developing an art of contiguity. The density of the layout is another ambiguous aspect of these written messages. Like the use of small lettering within the individual note, it worked against readability. But what was lost in readability was offset by a gain at the level of publicity. The visual layout mirrors the collective composition, making everyone a potential contributor.

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External Analysis: Messages, Enunciation, Diffusion Can we say that the same ambiguity operates at the level of the messages’ linguistic content? The shrine I discuss in detail in the following section—Chico’s shrine on Avenue A—offered a wide selection of texts. Some were functional (a list of supplies needed by the rescuers, e.g., cotton gloves), while others were computer print-outs (the musical score of a song); there were also several “missing” posters, some letters written by kids, and a lot of anonymous texts. I studied all the messages at the shrine, as well as many others—on banners, posters, and even in books (at fire stations). My first conclusion was that the majority of these messages were formulaic, the result of copying and reproducing formulae. Repetition was a notable feature of the September 2001 writings produced in Manhattan. The same sentences—“Thank You,” “God Bless America,” “Peace Not War,” “We Will Always Remember,” etc.—were everywhere. As mentioned, most researchers have preferred to work on select messages, like poems, focusing on their authors’ creativity. I do not contest the fact that wonderful things were written. But I want to focus here on those basic messages that were repeated again and again, and to ask what that repetition might mean. The use of formulae—the act of writing exactly the same sentence that someone else had written before you—was part of the process. Formu-

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laic writing gave many participants the capacity to write, to add their words to the words of others, to participate in the collective action. Writing conventional messages was the rule, but the repetition of the same sentences created a polyphonic style. We must also consider that these sentences are typical speech acts, like promises, thanks, and wishes. What are the consequences of this use of polyphonic, polygraphic speech acts? If people use the same stereotyped sentences and write together to execute the same speech acts, who then is writing, or where is the subject of enunciation? The repetition of formulae creates the conditions for a collective enunciation. Each individual makes a contribution, but the subject of enunciation is the result of all these repetitive acts. What emerges from these speech acts, resulting from the participation of each individual writer, is a monumental subject. Paradoxically, the personal engagement in the writing pertains more to the graphic activity (each person takes a pen and writes by hand) than to the discourse. It might thus be more appropriate to talk of cooperation rather than coenunciation (Fraenkel 2010). What I have described is a genuinely cooperative practice of writing. I would take this further by proposing this practice as a praxis—a way to transform the political field; in this case, the polis itself. It is not a little ironic that the praxis is totally grounded in the poiesis, the bricks and mortar of the shrine. Having established this point, let us now return to in situ observation of a shrine, considering the specific ways in which its written messages are displayed and positioned.

Writings in Space: Chico’s Shrine Just as the analysis of written messages must address their various material aspects in accordance with the well-established methods of diplomatic texts (Guyotjeannin, Pycke and Tock 1993) and of the sociology of texts (McKenzie 1986), so too the study of shrines should abide by the elementary rules of ethnographic fieldwork by giving reliable descriptions. Unfortunately, such descriptions are rare: shrines are often reduced to one or more components, particularly the inventory of the deities to whom they are dedicated, and are rarely considered as integral sets, series, or ensembles. The general tendency, criticized by Brown (2003), is to single out elements that are considered meaningful, neglecting the study of the whole. Exceptions are the precise listings and descriptions of offering tables given by Rossana Lok (1991), or Brown’s acute observations about Juan Makongo’s construction of an abakua shrine in Irionda (2003: 60–61). In the course of Makongo’s activity, all the objects are listed, and their placement is observed in situ.

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The 9/11 shrines in New York City pose particular difficulties, since their assembly involved constant transformation. Chico’s shrine changed every day, because new objects were added, or it rained, or it was windy, etc. The choice of one site over another was purely arbitrary, because there was no central site, like the Lourdes grotto, for example. With Ground Zero out of bounds, all the shrines in the city could operate at the same level—they were all pseudo-locations of the catastrophe, Ground Zero by substitution. The observation of various sites, from the most modest to the most elaborate (e.g., in Washington Square), led me to distinguish significant groups of objects within the shrines. What at first sight had appeared to be a motley collection of objects started to take on the contours of assemblages organized according to time-honored principles. We have already observed the combination of perishable elements in the Vanitas pictorial tradition. Also significant are the display forms characteristic of ancient trophies—as, for example, in the arrangements of firemen’s helmets. When examined closely, the jumble of objects characteristic of so many shrines can be seen to be made up of a set of assemblages, each with its own logic. In order to go deeper into the spatial analysis of shrines, I now present an exhaustive description of Chico’s shrine, before which I often passed. I then draw some conclusions from my account.

Illustration 9.2. Shrine of local artist Chico, at the beginning of Avenue A. Photo: Béatrice Fraenkel. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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A Tabular Organization

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Chico’s shrine—a wall shrine—was at the beginning of Avenue A, just before 14th Street. The wall was divided into two parts by a door. A mural painted by the local artist Chico occupied the right half of the wall. Almost immediately, someone from the neighborhood designated himself responsible for the site. He kept it clean and watched over it, assuming the role of guardian, much like the person who kept watch over the shrine at the Place d’Alma in Paris after the death of Lady Diana (Glück 1999: 229–37). Written notes left by passersby were fixed to the bottom of the wall so as not to obscure Chico’s mural. On the sidewalk were masses of flowers and candles. The left part of the wall, covered with less paint, offered a large, bare surface. The array of documents was so dense and diverse that only a systematic inventory permitted me to analyze the profusion

Illustration 9.3. Analytical drawing of the composition of Chico’s shrine. Photo: Béatrice Fraenkel. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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of components. The posting of documents and the disposition of flowers, candles, and objects conformed to the simple laws that organize our tabular conception of written space. More or less regular columns, and more or less straight lines, were easily perceptible. By way of example, I list below the components of a selection of the graphic and photographic statements I used for my study. First column, from left to right: 1. Color photo poster of the WTC. 2. A printed list of victims sourced from the Internet (Yahoo!). Written in red on the list: “God bless the victims their families [with a heart].” 3. An extract from the song “Down by the riverside. Aint gonna to study war no mo’.” 4. A list of missing persons. 5. A prayer written in two columns. 6. In Spanish, the lacunary message: “martes 9/11/2001 8:45 AM. America se viste de luto, una amricatan poderosa-Hoy … terrorista …”

On the sidewalk, a statue of Christ on the cross.

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Second column: 7–9. Three posters of missing persons: • Poster of Jimmy Straine, who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, tower 1, 104th floor, room 593. Two photos show us 1) Straine with his child on his shoulder, and 2) Straine with his wife. The text reveals that he has blonde hair, blue eyes, freckles, a gold ring, and a TAG Heuer watch. • Poster of Manuel da Mota, born in 1957, green eyes, who worked on the 107th floor of the WTC. • Poster of Thomas Sparasio; we see that he has a tattoo on his left arm representing a flame coming out of the head of Jesus. 10. A paper giving a hotline number concerning victims of the crashed planes; the number of a hospital that offers psychological counseling and that welcomes blood donors and money donations. 11. A handwritten letter addressing the people of the world and preaching love between all, signed “Natacha.” 12–13. Two other posters of missing persons: • Poster of Sean Lugano (black and white photo). • Poster of Tom Hynes (large color photo). 14. An image of Jesus surrounded by wilting flowers and a flag.

On the sidewalk, a white chandelier and a pot of red flowers. Elsewhere, alongside an enormous stuffed white bear (document 67), several dolls are mixed with drawings ornamented with cut-out figurines. Beside the bear, a three-foot wooden panel has been fixed to the wall, covered with messages in English and Spanish. The word “WHY?” jumps out in big capital letters.

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Reliquary of Papers A systematic inventory of the documents exhibited led me to discover, almost at the center of the shrine, a different space where documents were displayed in bulk, unlike on the rest of the wall. In this space were three business envelopes (documents no. 22, 23, 23); one bore the words “World Trade Center Papers.” These envelopes were recovered from Ground Zero. Many witnesses mentioned the dense rain of papers that drifted down into the streets before the towers crumbled. Thousands of offices were wiped out in an instant by the blast of the explosion, which shattered all the windows. We can appreciate that the envelopes displayed in the center of the shrine have a different value than the writings surrounding them: they were gathered at Ground Zero and placed in the shrine as relics emanating from the towers. The presence of these remains confers on Chico’s shrine the status of a sanctuary. Eminently precious, these documents remained invisible to those who did not scrutinize the display; that is, to common passersby. The presence of relics reveals another function of the 9/11 shrines and writings in general: the invention of a compensatory ritual whose object is the WTC itself. In September 2001, it was forbidden to visit Ground Zero; the multiplication of shrines in the city can be understood as a response to the fact that it was not possible to erect a shrine at the only “legitimate” site. This evokes the proposition of the French anthropologist Alphons Dupront, who—noting the universality of sacred places (lieux sacrés)— distinguished between cosmic and historic places. The historic places are often burial sites containing bodies or relics. As the legitimate sacred place in New York was forbidden, the shrines were substitutes for it.

Writing as a Form of Participation Although exhaustive analysis of a shrine in situ is the determinant part of this study, I cannot remain focused on a unique example that would conceal the geographical dimension of the phenomenon, failing to recognize the importance, profusion, and dissemination of shrines across the urban fabric. Dupront proposes the hypothesis that these shrines traced out a map of Manhattan by offering citizens a pilgrimage route. Outside New York City, numerous shrines were built in the same spirit of solidarity. It is well known that the erection of shrines can construct a territorial network, sometimes at a national level (Harootunian 1999). In the case

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of New York City, this network had a global reach, since many shrines were created outside the United States—for example, in many European countries (Fraenkel 2002: 27–31). In this globalized context, the meaning of a simple gesture, like that of signing a message, changes. Signing becomes a cultural gesture, a “form of participation” in the event (Dupront 1987: 399). The signature is a familiar act that lends itself to collective action. In the case of New York, the existence of a veritable network of shrines in the city—and beyond its limits, encompassing the entire world—conferred on the gesture of signing a new gravity that amplified its universal resonance. This could happen because these shrines became sites of writing and reading. Returning to my initial point, such practices of writing contributed to the creation of a new culture of disaster.

Notes 1. This topic was recently the main theme of an interesting symposium, “Religion and the Urban in Asia and Africa,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32 (2008).

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References Austin, John L. (1961). Philosophical Papers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. (1962). How to Do Things With Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benveniste, Emile. (1966). Problèmes de linguistique générale. Paris: Gallimard. Brown, David H. (2003). The Light Inside: Abakuá Society and Cuban Cultural History. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books. Clavandier, Gaelle. (2004). La mort collective. Pour une sociologie des catastrophes. Paris: éditions du CNRS. Dubisch, Jill. (1995). In a Different Place. Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dupront, Alphonse. (1987). Du sacré. Croisades et pèlerinages. Images et langages. Paris: Gallimard. Favier, René. (2006). “Poésie de l’inondation et culture du risque.” In Anne-Marie MercierFaivre and Thomas Chantal, eds., L’invention de la catastrophe au XVIIIe siècle. Genève: Librairie Droz, 271–81. Fialcofschi, Roxana. (2006). “Poèmes de peste.” In Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre and Thomas Chantal, eds., L’invention de la catastrophe au XVIIIe siècle. Genève: Librairie Droz, 445–64. Fraenkel, Béatrice. (1992). La signature, genèse d’un signe. Paris: Gallimard. ———. (2002). Les écrits de septembre, New York 2001. Paris: Editions Textuel. ———. (2010). “Catastrophe Writings: in the Wake of September 11.” In Mary Shaw and Marija Dalbello, eds., Visible Writings: Cultures, Forms, Readings. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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Glück, Denise. (1999). “Une flamme dans le vent: un monument pour Lady Diana.” Les Cahiers de Médiologie 7: 229–37. Guyotjeannin, Oliver, Jacques Pycke, and Benoît-Michel Tock. (1993). Diplomatique Médiévale. Turnhout: Brepols. Harootunian, Harry. (1999). “Memory, Mourning and National Morality: Yasukuni Shrine and the Reunion State and Religion in Postwar Japan.” In Peter van der Veer and Harmut Lehmann, eds., Nation and Religion, Perspectives in Europe and Asia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 715–40. Henn, Alexander. (2008). “Crossroads of Religions: Shrines, Mobility and Urban Space in Goa.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(3): 658–70. Hoffman, Susanna M. (2002). “The Monster and the Mother: The Symbolism of Disaster.” In Susanna M. Hoffman and Oliver-Smith Anthony, eds., Catastrophe & Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 113–41. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. (2003). “Kodak Moments, Flashbulb Memories: Reflections on 9/11.” The Drama Review 47(1): 11–48. Lok, Rossana. (1991). Gifts to the Dead and the Living. Leiden: Leiden University Press. McKenzie, Donald F. (1986). Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts: The Panizzi Lectures 1985. London: The British Library. Nelson, John K. (1996). A Year in a Life of Shinto Shrine. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Salvo, Dana. (1997). Home Altars of Mexico, photographs by Dana Salvo, essays by Ramón Gutiérrez, Salvatore Scalora, and William Beezley. London: Thames and Hudson. Tilly, Charles. (1986). The Contentious French. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wilson, Ara. (2008). “The Sacred Geography of Bangkok’s Markets.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(3): 631–42. Zeitlin, Steve. (2006). “Poems posted in the wake of September 11.” In Jack Santino, ed., Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 99–117.

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Chapter 10

The Madrid Train Bombings Enacting the Emotional Body at the March 11 Grassroots Memorials

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Cristina Sánchez-Carretero

For more than a hundred years, anthropologists and psychologists have dealt with the role of collective mourning and the analysis of the roots of emotions. Although emotions are central for the understanding of grassroots memorials, emotions themselves are rarely the focus of research on the topic. At the same time, there is a clear social demand for the interpretation of emotions in order to, for example, understand the instrumentalizations that emotions can be the subject of in times of conflict and social unrest. In the acts of mourning performed at grassroots memorials, the emotions at play cover a wide range, from grief, hate, or rage, to love. The anthropology of emotion has broadened the scope of its investigations and, as Geoffrey White explains, “it increasingly considers a broader ecology of affect that locates emotional experience in the scenes and practices of everyday life. This line of thinking seeks to find emotions as much in situated practices as in minds and bodies” (White 2006: 51).1 Mourning is related to the ritual process of overcoming grief, but mourning itself cannot be considered an emotion. Although intense emotions might not explain the rituals, ritual acts themselves do not explain the intense emotions of bereavement (Rosaldo 1993: 187). Lutz and Abu-Lughod suggest that emotion is “about social life rather than internal states” (1990: 1–2), and to contribute to this debate, I look in this chapter at the social life of grassroots memorials in the aftermath of the March 11 Madrid train bombings. People grieve, mourn, and commemorate catastrophes. When a group of people in the West feel that certain deaths are particularly tragic or are

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related to mass-media celebrities, an established pattern of mourning— which the editors of this book call “grassroots memorials”—is becoming increasingly common. Mourning rituals in public and noninstitutionally sanctioned spaces after the death of high-status individuals have been documented throughout history. However, the origin of these rituals is not easy to trace, as is explored in this book’s introduction—which also argues that the mass-mediated pattern of grassroots memorials is a phenomenon that consolidated in the last two decades of the twentieth century. My focus is on the narratives of identification that deal with two aspects of the “emotional self ”: The effect that the actual sites—the locations of the materials deposited at the grassroots memorials—and the support employed to express emotions in writing have on the intensity and expressive qualities of the writings of the memorials; and the emotional aspects expressed through the body, that is, by the fabrics and clothes deposited at the train stations. In both parts, I analyze the narratives of emotions expressed through the writing of the messages, using the documentation of the Archive of Mourning project,2 a research undertaking conducted at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) that documented and analyzed grassroots memorials in the aftermath of the March 11 bombings. The first part of my contribution is dedicated to contextualizing the project, the second to analyzing these two spheres of emotionality. Many other aspects of the emotions linked to the public grieving after the March 11 attacks could be included, such as the emotional aspects of the political controversies following the bombings; the emotions linked to the blaming of ETA terrorists; an analysis of the outrage and antiwar sentiments; the controversies of remembrance and the instrumentalization of the remembrance after 11 March 2004; an analysis of the emotions involved in the conflicts over who commemorated and where, who participated in the commemorations, and which victims were being honored; an analysis of our interviews with young people whose first encounter with tragedy and death had been the bombings, and who described the event as their first ever grieving experience; or an analysis of the role of the media in the emotions lived in the aftermath of the attacks.

The Archive of Mourning Project On 11 March 2004, ten bombs were placed in four commuter trains on the line that links the town of Alcalá de Henares with Atocha station in central Madrid. The bombs went off within a few minutes of each other,

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between 7:36 and 7:39 AM. It was the morning rush hour, and the trains were packed with workers and some students.3 The bombs killed 192 people and injured a further 1,857.4 After the bombings, a group of anthropologists and literature scholars at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), and members of a CSIC research group on expressive culture in contemporary societies started a project to document and analyze the public expressions of grief. The researchers had received e-mails and telephone calls from colleagues who were concerned about the bombings; they asked for details about the attacks and, because the CSIC is close to the Atocha train station, whether we were okay.5 In a sense, our going to the stations with our cameras constituted an academic way to process our own grief. Photographs, as pointed out by Diana Taylor, are in themselves an act of interlocution, an action and antiaction in the face of the impossibility of doing, an archival impulse “to save the images to understand them at some future time” (Taylor 2003: 241; cf. Chulilla et al. 2005). The need for action is a recurrent motif that appears in most of the ethnographic accounts of grassroots memorials (cf. the introduction to this volume) and is the focus of this research project: A reflexive account of the researchers’ need for action, together with analyses of others’ need for action, in order to analyze those actions. Grief (and other emotions) is an effective trigger mechanism for actions of various kinds, including the actual academic endeavor, constituting what can be called an “emergency ethnology” (Sánchez-Carretero and Ortiz 2008: 23). The project was entitled the Archive of Mourning because the purpose was to catalogue the collection of almost seventy thousand writings and objects that document the grassroots memorialization at the train stations, including photographs, recordings of testimonies, and the actual objects, drawings, and messages deposited at the Atocha, El Pozo, and Santa Eugenia train stations; and to analyze the mourning practices that took place at those stations.6 Once the grassroots memorials had been dismantled and replaced by a cybershrine7 on 9 June 2004 (almost three months after the bombings), the national train company RENFE donated to the Archive of Mourning project the artifacts that had survived.8 RENFE’s original plan was to bury the materials beneath an official monument in memory of the deceased. However, when our team contacted them to ask for permission to document the materials, they changed their minds and decided that the best option was to allow us to preserve them. The decision to accept the documents touches upon important ethical issues regarding the role of research institutions and the change in the perspective of “collecting the ephemera of loss” (Gardner, this volume), while the act of burying opens up the discussion about what the impli-

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cations are of the symbolic act of burying the remains (cf. Margry, this volume). The ideas presented in this chapter arise from an analysis of the meaning of the documents in the archive, an analysis of the photographs I took in the period March–August 2004, and my observations at the train stations. The following ideas are drawn from the observation of the performative events at the train stations and the narratives embedded in the memorials.

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The Stations, Politics, and Communication Since the attacks, trains have been loaded with various layers of emotional meanings. For those who were injured, for the families of the victims, for those who directly experienced the bombings, and for those who were not directly involved but were equally affected via the mass media, for instance, or because they used the same trains, the long-lasting trauma is reflected metonymically in trains. Trains represent the whole bombing event: Although they were just a part of it, they symbolize the whole event. In some cases, getting on a train again was a difficult decision to make, while for others, it is still an impossible action, an unhealed aspect of the trauma. “We were all in those trains” was repeated at the demonstrations, written on columns, and depicted in drawings—thus becoming a symbol that was also used in other contexts, for instance, in books of poems and songs. “We were all in those trains” symbolizes the unity of the social body, unified but equally dismembered, after the attacks. The political dimension of that sentence, “We were all in those trains,” when uttered at demonstrations exemplifies the internal dynamic of performances of grief and its power to unify common action, and, therefore, the additional power when those emotions are instrumentalized (cf. Holst-Warhaft 2000: 2). The internal dynamics of the grassroots memorials differs depending on the station in which the memorial was placed. Atocha is one of the largest stations in Madrid; the others—Alcalá de Henares, Santa Eugenia, and El Pozo—are commuting stations in the corredor del Henares (the river Henares corridor). These three stations are used by commuters who work in Madrid, while Atocha, in addition to commuters, also handles long-distance travelers on the high-speed line (AVE) and other national and international lines. The four stations documented in the project—plus other ones, such as Vicálvaro, Coslada, or San Fernando—constituted noninstitutionalized spaces for the expression of emotions and the exchange of thoughts. The

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train stations represented a public arena for the expression of grief, rage, love, hate, and other emotions, as well as for discussions, mainly on the topics of politics and religion, that packaged those emotions embedded in narratives. They were a forum for communication. In their study of the representation of foreigners at the grassroots memorials after the bombings, Chulilla and colleagues use the image of the Chinese dazibao to describe, in particular, the columns at Atocha train station. Dazibao is a Chinese term that describes a space in a wall where passersby can leave messages about topics that are of interest to the community and also debate them (Chulilla et al. 2005: 370). This author uses the image of dazibao to talk about performativity (but without mentioning this concept) and the participation of those who visited the memorials. As opposed to the case of September 11, where the combination of postings was the result of accumulation (cf. Fraenkel, this volume), in the case of Madrid, a dialogic structure was the mechanism used at the train stations. The structure consisted not of a juxtaposition of messages, but of a combination of two mechanisms: dialogue between various voices expressed at the superimposed layers of communicative acts; and a palimpsest structure, in which the latest addition sometimes erases the previous one. In these palimpsestic and, at the same time, continuing conversations, the support is reused and conveys various levels of writings. For instance, illustration 10.1 shows a posting on top of graffiti on a column at Atocha station. A printed sheet of paper bearing the words “Immigrants are not to be blamed” serves as the support for other texts in Spanish and Arab written by different hands. The palimpsest structure—the paper covers or erases the graffiti—together with the dialogue embedded in grassroots memorials, provides information about the multiple narratives during the almost three-month period that the memorials lasted. This performative structure also establishes a particular mechanism of construction of narratives, and contributes to the processes of internalization and externalization of the narratives about the attacks, which found a public arena at the stations. In a conflictive (and instrumentalized) situation like post-March 11, the narratives expressed at the stations reflect multiple confronting elements, such as debates about the authorship of the attacks, protests against the war in Iraq and the participation of Spanish troops in that war, the instrumentalization of the victims, the political confrontation motivated by, among other things, the change of government three days after the attacks, the silences regarding the authorship of the attacks, as well as other narratives linked, for instance, to the victims, God, or the terrorists. To understand the externalizing/internalizing components at the memorials, I draw for this part on White’s analysis of the discourses of “survivors” of Pearl Harbor who present personal stories in

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Illustration 10.1. Palimpsest structure in a posting on a column in Atocha train station, April 2004. Photo: Cristina Sánchez-Carretero.

the memorial context. White argues that a repertoire of discursive strategies functions to emotionalize national narrative and also works to nationalize personal pasts, and that by externalizing repeated narratives, a process of internalization of those emotions takes place. White analyzes how the narratives are externalized and asks a very relevant question: “How do certain externalizations become fixed through repetition and institutionalization such as that they gain the status of collective or cultural texts?” (White 2000: 507). In a very different context, the Madrid train stations served as a forum to externalize narratives about the bombings that did not necessarily have other public forums. At the same time, that process allowed for an internalization of those narratives via the performances that gave shape to the grassroots memorials.9 During the months that the memorials stood at the stations, the main routinized narratives were an antipoliticians narrative (particularly anti-Bush and anti-Aznar messages) and rhetorics of solidarity and antiterrorism. In a sense, the grassroots memorials were part of a process of “entextualization” of these narratives,10 with antiIslam being one of the less-represented narratives, as explored below. The enactment of various emotions at the stations is one of the constituting elements of the memorials and is the foundation of its performa-

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tive quality. The externalization of somebody’s emotions was partially internalized by other people who visited the memorials, by means of the performances of grief at the stations. Interaction with each other, and sometimes participation, are the most common actions observed at the four train stations. Communication was the linking factor, the common thread that constitutes an action for the internalization of those narratives. In addition, the mass media is one of the most powerful externalization agents for narratives. How those narratives are received and internalized, and how the media change the perceptions of the events—and not so much behavior (Walter 2008)—require a thorough ethnographic study. The research results obtained by Thomas (2002, cited after Walter 2008) regarding the mourning of Lady Diana by the British people show that the media were more effective in changing perceptions than behavior. Although most of the people interviewed for that research project stated that the British had changed their ways of expressing emotions in public, no more than 10 percent of a panel of 249 ordinary British citizens had actually participated in acts of public mourning. The media, in the case of March 11 train attacks, played an essential role in the internationalization of mourning narratives and the emotions involved. To explore the emotions expressed and internalized at the grassroots memorials, in the next part of this chapter, I focus on the formats in which the narratives of emotions were expressed and, in the subsequent part, on the embodying practices linked to particular materials: clothes and fabrics.

Verticality and Materiality: Writings on Walls, Writings on Paper In this section, I draw on a series of photographs that document the columns at Atocha station on 8 and 9 June 2004, after the materials deposited at the grassroots memorials had been taken away. Until then, the columns had been covered by pieces of paper and other supports for writings and drawings, which did not allow for the complete reading of the graffiti. In preparation for the cybershrine that was inaugurated on 9 June by the minister of development, Magdalena Álvarez, the station’s cleaners dismantled all the grassroots memorials, clearing both the exterior and the interior of the station of candles, teddy bears, messages, flags, T-shirts, etc., and putting them in boxes.11 The graffiti on the columns were not erased, so the photographs of those columns provide interesting information about the very first writing reactions in the aftermath of the attacks, as they were soon covered by additional writings and drawings that used paper as their support. I took pictures of each of the four sides

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of the columns. Illustration 10.2 shows the state before the clean-up, and illustration 10.3 shows part of a column on the day of the inauguration of the cybershrine. The reason for substituting the grassroots memorials with a permanent way of memorializing the bombings is explained in a letter written by the workers at the train station. It was published on 31 May in Rojo y Negro,12 a union newsletter, but there was no explicit mention of who actually signed the letter. In this rather emotional letter, the workers explain their trauma after the bombings, and say that the odor of candles “entered into their lungs as an evil fluid.” By having the grassroots memorials inside the station, they felt that they were working in a funeral chapel. The workers end their letter with: “We ask for the candles to be taken away from the main hall of the station, and a permanent memorial to be built nearby. We ask for respect for the memory of the deceased and for the grief of the survivals. We ask, in short, to be allowed to overcome tragedy.”13 The train company also had a strong interest in seeing the removal of the grassroots memorials, as the move would break down the symbolic and emotional relationships that were being established between the bombings, the trains, and the train stations. The end of the grassroots memorials in the stations was marked by the exchange of the grassroots

Illustration 10.2. Photograph taken at Atocha train station on 14 April 2004. Photo: Cristina Sánchez-Carretero. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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character of the memorial for an authorized form of memorialization, like the web site to which mourners could add written messages and images of their palms. Institutionalization brings to an end the structuring pattern of grassroots memorials.

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Memorializing Vertically or Horizontally? The physical structure of the grassroots memorials in the four stations had both a vertical and a horizontal plane, as some of the offerings were placed on the floor and others were stuck to the walls. Although both planes include various types of support, some materials were more common depending on the plane. For instance, the vertical plane (walls) is more suitable for graffiti; pieces of paper and flags bearing messages are equally common horizontally and vertically; while flowers, candles, teddy bears, and other objects are most common on the floor. What is more relevant, however, is that verticality allows the visitor to improvise a message and to add something to the memorial in a written form and to do so on the spot; therefore, the act of writing in situ is linked to the walls: placing graffiti directly onto the walls and adding messages to other documents. The dynamism of the grassroots memorial in terms of spatiality and content is one of the key elements in the case of Madrid. The walls were a public message board during the three-month period in which discussions were conducted. The floors, on the other hand, accumulated materials the disposition of which changed very often. The graffiti on the bricks of the walls were not removable, contrary to the writings on paper hanging on the walls and the horizontally placed materials. The horizontally deposited materials and papers, and the other materials that were stuck to the vertical parts of the memorials, changed over time and were relocated, moved, and rearranged by improvised “memorial organizers” who changed the position of the offerings and arranged them according to various criteria (cf. Stengs, this volume). In the case of the Atocha train station, people working for the cleaning services performed that role, while in the case of the El Pozo train station, women from the neighborhood got together to light the candles, remove wilted flowers, and arrange the memorials. The life of the materials deposited during the three-month period was as fluid as the ephemerality of many of the offerings. In the Atocha station, the cleaners (most of whom were women) took care of lighting the candles and rearranging the memorials; they moved them from the train platforms, where they had been for the first few days, to various locations below the dome and in the connecting hall between the metro and the train station, and finally to the intermediate hall, where

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later on, the cybershrines were located. Chulilla and colleagues noticed that the rearrangement of the messages honoring Sanae ben Solah, one of the victims of Moroccan origin, was moved from the exterior columns to the glass dome in the last weeks of the Atocha grassroots memorials, and the researchers wondered whether it had been Spaniards, Moroccans, or station workers who had reorganized the space (Chulilla et al. 2005: 401). During my observations, I noticed many women, as well as personnel from the station, rearranging the offerings. However, I do not have evidence of families or the friends of victims doing the same for a particular victim. The limited ethnographic data during the first days (due in part to my own grief, which prevented me from talking to other mourners at the train stations), restricts the possibility to interpret the fluidity of the memorials in terms of their spatial structure and their reordering over time. My argument is that the three variables that reflect the most changes in the intensity and the type of emotion expressed in writing at the grassroots memorials are: the support, the station, and when the act of writing took place. The supports of the writing—walls, paper, and various fabrics—influence the type of dialogue that was established. The grassroots memorials constituted a public arena for the exchange of emotions, opinions, and information; they were places for debate and for searching for answers. It is interesting to note that the tone of the writings varies according to the type of support. In general, when paper supported writings and drawings, the emotions conveyed involve fewer insults, and the most common themes are remembering the victims, peace and solidarity, and being against terrorism. Insults aimed at politicians do appear when the supporting material is paper, but they are less common.14 The spatial immobility of the writing fixed to the bricks of the walls makes the graffiti hidden behind the postings on the walls a snapshot of the initial grassroots memorialization. Graffiti represent a change in the tone and volume of the emotions expressed on the walls. In the Atocha station, the walls offered a place for immediate reactions and the most violent expressions of hate, as well as of love and solidarity, leading to a combination of insults aimed at politicians and terrorists and messages of peace and the possibility of creating a better world. It is interesting to note the extremely limited presence of anti-Islam messages among the expressions of emotions.15 In Atocha station, there were six texts expressing anti-Islam sentiments: The word peace does not exist / in the Arab dictionary. We are Christians / we don’t want / to be Muslims / Isabel of Castille, Return! We are Christians we don’t wantobe [sic] islamicos.

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Hell with slam and the slamistas [sic] (in English in the original). The Qur’an says ‘mistreat those who mistreat you … kill those who do the same … ’ Let us follow these lessons and the same to them!!! Moors out / Mosques out.16

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To contextualize the proportion of these messages in the overall displays in the train stations, as stated—and taking into account only the collection of photographs that document the columns the day that the postings were cleared away—I could count in those pictures only six pieces of graffiti that had an anti-Islam content. See, for instance, illustration 10.3. The density of graffiti can be easily perceived in this picture, which shows a third of one of the four sides of the columns that surround Atocha station. The six anti-Islam texts are not examples of “types” of messages, but individual messages. In the same picture, there are various messages expressing hatred toward al-Qaeda and toward terrorists, and others saying “yes to Islam,” “no to war” (or “no to the war”), “here you have your 201 mass destruction weapons,” “It has been finally / AlQuada (it has just been confirmed),” and “those who are into politics are evil.” Written on one of the bricks, in smaller handwriting, are the words, “in that train there were people from the left, / from the right and other ideologies blame the / terrorists, not the government! We all / feel grief /

Illustration 10.3. One of the brick columns at Atocha train station, 9 June 2004. Photo: Cristina Sánchez-Carretero. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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Teresa;” and in white ink, “Go on, families, we are / with you! / We were all in those trains” and “People are not to be blamed. / 200 innocents have died.” Taking into account just the graffiti on the Atocha columns, the proportion of anti-Islam messages is extremely low. When the rest of the documentation from the pictures is added, the proportion is even lower due to the less violent quality of the narratives expressed on paper supports, as explored above. At El Pozo train station, the number of antiIslam messages is even lower, with two messages, written on a parking lot wall: “Moors, no”17 and “Islam = religion of death.”18 At Santa Eugenia, the vertical side of the memorials included fewer graffiti and more posted messages, drawings, photographs, and objects. Finally, at the Alcalá de Henares train station, the vertical component was minimal; there were virtually no graffiti. As the days passed, the intensity of the hate messages and the insults to politicians and terrorists also decreased. Until the elections on Sunday, 14 March 2004, the sentence, “We want to know the truth,” was repeated in multiple formats. The graffiti on the walls at Atocha, and on those at El Pozo, were the preferable locus for these manifestations of emotion. After a few weeks, the heated debate about politics and politicians’ instrumentalization of victims gave way to messages about solidarity, love, and peace.

Clothes and Fabrics: Embodied Emotions, Embodying the Memorials The body is the only place from which emotions are displayed, the only place for the location of mourning itself, and the most intimate site for the performance of memorialization. Clothes, as the liminal space between bodies and the world, exemplify the communicative process that takes places at grassroots memorials. Inscribing the self in clothes and then depositing one’s clothes at the memorials is depositing part of that self on the memorials themselves: Transporting the self outside, leaving the self at the memorials, materializing emotions via one’s clothes, and depositing part of the emotional self at the memorials. Following this line of thought, depositing one’s own clothes is translating the emotions into a material form and thus linking body and memorial. Some of the materials deposited at the shrines—clothes and fabrics— were linked to the body. The use of clothing in the memorials can be divided into two categories: clothes that were deposited at the memorials and clothes that were used as the support for printed images or symbols of

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the loved ones who were being memorialized. The former act is common at grassroots memorials, while the latter is more linked to other performative commemoratives (Santino 2004; 2006b), such as protest marches in which a component of protest is linked to particular victims; for instance, the images of the disappeared during the marches by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, who bear the portraits of their loved ones on signs and T-shirts. In the selection of examples included below, I concentrate on the first type of garments as memorializing material culture.

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Garments as Memorializing Material Culture: Clothes and Fabrics To provide a broad picture of the garments used as memorabilia at the stations and of their impact on the structure of the grassroots memorials, I distinguish seven types of clothing and fabrics: Uniforms: One of the types of clothes that were deposited at the train stations comprised official uniforms, such as those of emergency health workers, the social services, and other workers.19 Some of these clothes were worn during those traumatic days, either at hospitals or the train stations. T-shirts: Many of the T-shirts bore a logo indicating the name of an association, a town, or a company, but many others did not. In the latter case, the T-shirts were used as the support for writing.20 Scarves and caps: The most common scarves were soccer ones; however, also other types—such as scout scarves—were deposited at the memorials.21 Dolls clothes: Miniature clothes deposited by children.22 Carpets, tablecloths, and curtains used as the support for writing: The immediacy of the act of writing was, in many cases, decided on the spot, as evidenced by the presence of stained tablecloths, which had presumably been taken straight from tables to be written on or used as banners in demonstrations.23 Flags: The number and variety of flags is an emblematic element. It is interesting to note the variety of countries represented. One-third of the deceased were born outside Spain, and the mourning at the train stations reflects the variety of their origins (Sánchez-Carretero 2006: 339; Chulilla et al. 2005: 364–68). This variety contrasts with the almost exclusive presence of the American flag after September 11 (Ortiz and SánchezCarretero 2008: 165).24 Black ribbons made of various fabrics: Black ribbons together with white hands are the most important antiterrorism symbols in Spain. Blue ribbons were used in demonstrations demanding the release of people kidnapped by ETA. The blue ribbon turned into black as a mourning

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symbol to indicate an assassination committed by ETA. After the March 11 attacks, black ribbons could be found on facades and cars, and at offices, stores, banks, and the railway stations. Black ribbons were stuck to various supporting fabrics: sewed on curtains, painted on tablecloths, or pinned to towels. Clothes that had been in contact with the bodies of those who helped at the sites of this traumatic event constitute a particular type of clothing deposited at the memorials. And, related to this, another important aspect of the relationship between mourning processes and clothing, which could be located at the other side of the spectrum of private mourning process, is linked to keeping some of the garments of the deceased beloved that once touched his or her body (Hallam and Hockey 2001: 19).

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Conclusions: Toward an Epistemology of Emotions I have dealt with two aspects of the emotional internalization/externalization processes, namely, through my analysis of how the position and the material of the writing support affect the intensity of the emotions expressed in the writing at the memorials; and by presenting a particular type of support material, that is, garments. One could say that “Love is on white paper; hate is on the walls”—but this was not entirely the case. The love/hate relation expressed via the writing support elements does apply to the few xenophobic messages; however, in other messages, such as those that direct anger toward politicians, the paper/wall dichotomy is not strictly maintained. There is, however, an increase in the severity of the anti-PP25 and anti-Aznar messages on the walls compared to those on paper, but the antiwar, antipolitician feelings are also maintained when paper is used. Many questions remain open that are linked to, for instance, the senses used to internalize the emotions expressed, such as: Which senses were involved in the mourning processes that developed at the grassroots memorials? Which senses were involved in the process of analyzing them? How were the visitors affected emotionally by the memorials? How were people affected emotionally by the memorials they saw in the mass media? What was the emotional involvement of the mass-media participants? These questions need further analysis at a time when ethnologists and anthropologists are facing the social challenge to understand reactions from society as they occur. And, to do so, it is important to analyze the repertoire of emotions that are expressed at times of social trauma. Gail Holst-Warhaft starts her provocative book The Cue for Passion with a quote from Hamlet, a tragedy, which—like most tragedies—con-

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sists of an exploration of death, grief, and mourning. Grief is an emotional state, and “how we display that grief, how we act it out in public, or how others act it out for us is what mourning and its rituals are about” (Holst-Warhaft 2000: 1). According to this author, the cultural diversity of contemporary societies and the variety of approaches used to cope with grief means that “when the modern, increasingly private person is faced with the death of someone close, she has more to cope with than her own grief; she must invent ways to respond to it. … with no community to dramatize our grief, to translate and perform it, we are increasingly forced to do it for ourselves or to turn to strangers for advice” (Holst-Warhaft 2000: 10–11). The media are another element that provides models for grassroots memorials, as explored in the introduction to this book. The dramatization of grief after a traumatic event such as the March 11 bombings finds a formalized pattern via grassroots memorials for the expression of various and, sometimes, conflictive emotions. Among current studies on grief and mourning, there is a tendency to assume that grief is a private emotion, and that mourning is constituted by ritualized public practices that are designed to help people to ease and deal with their grief. However, grassroots memorials contradict this, because the emotions are publicly displayed in a ritualized format that is not necessarily intended to overcome grief, but to ask for action, by for instance protesting, asking for it never to happen again, or simply asking “Why?” Following Doss, I think that “these memorials problematize supposed distinctions between grief and mourning, as they embody both visibly public expressions of grief and performative rituals of mourning” (Doss 2008: 19). My thesis is that having a public arena for the display of emotions affects the ritualized practices and redirects into action the emotional power that generates this type of social grief. Therefore, the triangle emotion-action-communication is articulated and developed at the grassroots memorials. This chapter stressed the importance of focusing on the emotions channeled at grassroots memorials. It also pointed to the need to work toward an understanding of emotional repertoires, the chain of emotions, the senses that are affected, and the emotional states of being, as well as toward an interpretation of the emotional system involved in the current memorialization practice that constitutes grassroots memorials.26

Notes 1. White concentrates on the role of buildings in the emotional sphere, stating that “few studies have taken seriously the role of space and place in the production of affect, much less the architectural environment” (White 2006: 51).

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2. The project was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Culture (HUM2005–03490) and is part of the CRIC project (Cultural Heritage and the Reconstruction of Identities after Conflict), which is funded by the European Union 7FP (Ref. 217411). 3. A strike by students meant that the number of students on the train was lower than usual. 4. These are the official figures included in the judicial process. 5. In particular, an e-mail from Margaret Kruesi at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, wondering if we were going to start a documentation project, made us think about it. 6. For a complete description of the technical aspects of the project, see Pilar Martínez (2011); the analysis of the writings is provided by Paloma Díaz-Mas (2011), the religious iconography is analyzed by Antonio Cea (2011), and the uses of the public space are analyzed by Carmen Ortiz (2011). 7. The cybershrine consisted of a web site, www.mascercanos.com (no longer available). The site could be accessed online and also directly from computers in the Atocha and El Pozo train stations. The computers included a scanner so that visitors’ palms could be scanned and become part of the message. The symbolism of the palm in Spanish antiterrorism movements is explained below. For information about the cybershrines, see Truc (2011). 8. The collection was catalogued in December 2008. It contains: 2,482 photographs, 495 objects, 6,432 messages and drawings on paper, 58,732 e-mails, and 64 recordings. At the time of writing, the research team is preparing the final deposit of the collection at the Fundación de los Ferrocarriles Españoles (FFE). 9. White considers narrative performances to be a larger component of emotional identification than images, in the context of memorials (White 2000: 526). 10. Silverstein and Urban (1996) use the term “entextualized” to describe the routinization of discourse through repetition and/or institutionalization. 11. The boxes were donated by RENFE to the Archive of Mourning project. 12. Rojo y Negro is the newsletter of the Comisión General de Trabajadores (CGT), a large union in Spain. The letter is available at http://www.rojoynegro.info/2004/ article.php3?id_article=1603. Accessed 18 June 2009. 13. “Pedimos que se retiren las velas del vestíbulo de la estación, y que se alce en un lugar cercano un recuerdo permanente. Pedimos respeto para el recuerdo de los muertos y para el dolor de los supervivientes. Pedimos, en definitiva, que nos permitan superar la tragedia.” 14. A quantitative approach to the issue has been partially applied by Daniel Clarke, as part on his master’s thesis on the topic. Clarke quantified the themes of the documents preserved at the Archive of Mourning and compared them with the messages on the walls of Atocha. His conclusion is that politics (around 23 percent) and peace (almost 25 percent) constitute the most common themes on those walls (Clarke 2009: 29). However, a quantitative analysis has many limitations for a number of reasons: the Archive of Mourning does not have all the documents deposited at the train stations; the analysis of the photographs is used for the walls but not for the postings or papers deposited on the floor; and some of the wall messages from the photographs are readable, while others are not. 15. The studies that deal with Islamophobic messages at the Madrid memorials mention that they constitute a minority of messages when compared with other topics (Chulilla et al. 2005: 392; Clarke 2009: 48). For a study on the reactions of Muslim associations in Madrid after the bombings, see Téllez (2011).

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16. “La palabra paz no existe /en el diccionario árabe” (FD-825); “Somos cristianos / no queremos / ser islamicos / Isabel de Castilla regresa” (FD-688); “Somos cristianos no quereser [sic] islámicos” (FD-870); “El Corán dice: “maltrata a quien te maltrata … / Mata a quien lo mismo hace …” sigamos sus enseñanzas / y hagamos lo mismo con ellos!!!” (FD-711); and “Fuera moros / fuera mezquitas” (FD-824). The only other xenophobic examples that I could find not included in the studies mentioned above are: “We are Christians we don’t wantobe [sic] islamicos” (FD-870), which is slightly different from the previous example, which ends with “Isabel of Castille” and seems to have been written by the same hand; and the anti-Semitic graffiti messages “With the Jews to the electric chair” (FD-861) and “Jews sons of bitches” (FD-861). In addition, I also found an antiIslamic example among the graffiti expressions of El Pozo. 17. FD-1735. 18. FD-1838. 19. For instance, SUMMA workers (FD-1752; FD-1165)—who are the public emergency health service in Madrid—or IMEFE (FD-1646), the unemployment city service. 20. Examples of T-shirts are: FD-1645 (from El Pozo) (a week later, the same T-shirt appeared in another place [FD-2298]); FD-1940 (from Sta. Eugenia); FD-626, FD-2099, FD-1556, and FD-1557 (from Atocha). 21. See, for instance, examples of a scout scarf (FD-1020) and various soccer scarves (FD-618). 22. See, for instance, FD-1574 (from El Pozo). 23. See, for instance, FD-2026. Examples of banners are FD-2113 and FD-2250. 24. See, for instance, FD-2145. 25. The conservative party Partido Popular, headed by Aznar, was in power when the attacks took place; it was replaced by the socialist party (PSOE) after the 14 March 2004 elections. 26. A Spanish version of some parts of this essay can be found in Sánchez-Carretero 2011.

References Cea, Antonio. (2011). “Sistema y mentalidad devocional en las estampas del 11M.” In Cristina Sánchez-Carretero, ed., El Archivo del Duelo. Madrid: CSIC, 175–205. Chulilla, Juan Luis, et al. (2005). “Presencia de las comunidades inmigrantes en los Santuarios Populares del 11-M.” In Juan Luis Chulilla et al., Espacios urbanos e inmigración en el Madrid del s. XXI. Madrid: La Casa Encendida, 364–403. Clarke, Daniel. (2009). “‘Todos íbamos en ese tren’: Spontaneous Shrines and the Politics of Identity in the Aftermath of the Train Bombings of 11-M.” Master’s thesis, University of Cambridge. Díaz-Mas, Paloma. (2011). “Literatura para la vida: textos en los santuarios del 11-M.” In Cristina Sánchez-Carretero, ed., El Archivo del Duelo. Madrid: CSIC, 83–133. Doss, Erika. (2008). The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials: Towards a Theory of Temporary Memorials. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Grider, Sylvia. (2000). “The Archaeology of Grief: Texas A&M Bonfire Tragedy is a Sad Study in Modern Mourning.” Discovering Archaeology 2(3): 68–74.

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Hallam, Elizabeth, and Jenny Hockey. (2001). Death, Memory & Material Culture. Oxford: Berg. Holst-Warhaft, Gail. (2000). The Cue for Passion: Grief and Its Political Uses. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lutz, Catherine A., and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds. (1990). Language and the Politics of Emotion: Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction. New York: Cambridge University Press. Martínez, Pilar. (2011). “La colección documental y bibliográfica del Archivo del Duelo. Creación, conservación y descripción.” In Cristina Sánchez-Carretero, ed., El Archivo del Duelo. Madrid: CSIC. Ortiz, Carmen. (2011). “Memoriales del atentado del 11 de marzo en Madrid.” In Cristina Sánchez-Carretero, ed., El Archivo del Duelo. Madrid: CSIC. Ortiz, Carmen, and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero. (2008). “Archivos etnográficos, memoria y nuevos patrimonios: El caso del Archivo del Duelo.” In Xerardo Pereira et al., Patrimonios culturales: educación e interpretación. ANKULEGI: Donostia. Rosaldo, Renato. (1983). Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press. Sánchez-Carretero, Cristina, ed. (2011). El Archivo del Duelo. Análisis de la respuesta ciudadana ante los atentados del 11 de marzo en Madrid. Madrid: CSIC. Sánchez-Carretero, Cristina, and Carmen Ortiz. (2008). “Rethinking Ethnology in the Spanish Context.” Ethnologia Euroapea 38(1): 23–28. Santino, Jack. (2004). “Performance Commemoratives, the Personal, and the Public: Spontaneous Shrines, Emergent Ritual, and the Field of Folklore.” Journal of American Folklore 117, 363–72. ———., ed. (2006a). Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. (2006b). “Performative Commemoratives: Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death.” In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 5–15. Silverstein, Michael, and Greg Urban, eds. (1996). Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, Diana. (2003). The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Téllez, Virtudes. (2011). “Respuesta de los musulmanes a los atentados del 11-M.” In Cristina Sánchez-Carretero, ed., El Archivo del Duelo. Madrid: CSIC. Truc, Gérôme. (2006). “Le cosmopolitisme sous le coup de l’emotion: une lecture sociologique des messages de solidarité en reaction aux attentats du mars 2004 à Madrid.” Hermès 46: 189–99. ———. (2011). “Espacio de Palabras y rituales de solidaridad en Atocha.” In Cristina Sánchez-Carretero, ed., El Archivo del Duelo. Madrid: CSIC. Walter, Tony. (2008). “The New Public Mourning.” In Margaret S. Stroebe, Robert O. Hansson, Henk Schut, and Wolfgang Stroebe, eds., Handbook of Bereavement Research and Practice: 21st century perspectives, Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 241–62. White, Geoffrey. (2000). “Emotional Remembering: The Pragmatics of National Memory.” Ethos 27(4): 505–29. ———. (2006). “Landscapes of Power: National Memorials and the Domestication of Affect.” City and Society 18(1): 50–61.

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Chapter 11

Purification and Remembrance Eastern and Western Ways of Dealing with the Bali Bombings Huub de Jonge

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Introduction On Saturday, 12 October 2002, the island of Bali was hit by three bomb attacks, two in the always crowded Legian Street—which is in the heart of the well-known Kuta tourist resort—and one in Renon, a district of the capital Den Pasar. The first attack was perpetrated shortly after eleven at night in Paddy’s Bar, a pub visited mainly by Westerners, by a suicide bomber wearing a jacket lined with explosives. The second incident occurred a few minutes later: A Mitsubishi van filled with ammunition blew up across the street from Paddy’s outside the Sari Club, a nightclub that admitted only foreign guests.1 The two bombings took the lives of 202 persons—38 Indonesians and 164 foreigners from twenty-one countries—and injured more than 200 others. The Western nations that suffered the most fatalities were Australia and Great Britain: 88 Australians and 24 British people were killed. Both explosions caused enormous material damage: More than four hundred businesses and homes were either completely or partly destroyed. The third bomb, which was packed in human excrement, exploded fifteen minutes later near the American Consulate, but did not kill anyone or cause serious physical damage. The locations of the bombings made it abundantly clear that the attacks were primarily directed against the West. The calamity threw Bali into a state of consternation.2 The Indonesian government spoke of the most terrible act of terrorism since independence, and Australian newspapers called it the heaviest attack on Aus-

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tralian civilians in peacetime. Neighboring countries, such as Singapore and Malaysia, spoke of their worries and warned of more attacks in the region at large. The world now had its Asian ground zero. For Bali it was the greatest disaster since the 1960s, when the island was hit by the eruption of the island’s highest volcano, Gunung Agung, which killed 1600 people, and then by the violent acts of revenge after the coup d’état in 1965 that left eighty thousand people dead. Despite the considerably smaller number of victims, which did not include that many Balinese, the carnage in Kuta had the same general effect as these other disasters, namely, it led to a period of anxiety and insecurity. The calamity was seen, correctly as soon became evident, as an assault on Western tourists and their behavior. During the previous few decades, tourism had become one of the islanders’ most important sources of livelihood, although in the years immediately preceding the bombings, tourism had already suffered badly from the Gulf War, the Asian Crisis, and the SARS threat. At the end of the 1990s, Bali—which has a population of three million, most of whom are Hindus—was visited each year by two million tourists, two-thirds of whom came from abroad, who usually saw the island as a paradise. It was not without reason, therefore, that the Balinese were afraid that this dream (which they were happy to foster) would be disrupted, and with it their own future. In this essay, I describe how the Balinese and Westerners—and particularly Australians, the worst hit population group—have come to terms with the tragedy at the location of the bombings. First, I deal with the ceremonies and rituals they used to channel their traumatic experiences and to express their sympathy with the victims. Second, I focus on the improvised memorials and the construction of a permanent monument to commemorate the catastrophe. There are great differences between the ways that Westerners and the Balinese commemorate atrocities of this scale. In the West, a catastrophe like this is preserved in people’s memories through public commemorations, initially annually and later less frequently. Memories of it may also be preserved through a permanent memorial.3 Nowadays, these official and institutionalized manifestations of remembrance are, more often than not, preceded by spontaneous, informal gatherings of people and the erection of grassroots memorials at the site of the catastrophe. In Bali, however, memorial services—or to be more precise, purification rituals—are held only during a relatively short period of time, and it is unusual to erect either temporary or lasting memorials. It is therefore interesting to see how in the present case the Balinese, partly for strategic reasons, accommodated the wishes of foreigners and compatriots of other religious and ethnic backgrounds, without doing violence to their

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own traditions and religious rites. Finally, I pay attention to the discussion about Bali’s future that took place after the bombings. Despite the suppression of public expressions of emotions after the obligatory “time of mourning,” the social and political consequences of the event could not be neglected. First, however, let us take a look at what is known about the suspects and the culprits.4

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Bombs and Evil-Doers In the weeks following the attacks, the Indonesian police arrested a number of suspects who were regarded as members or cryptosympathizers of Jemaah Islamiyah, a Southeast Asian radical and militant Islamist organization that has close connections to the al-Qaeda network, and that wants to see the creation of a pan-Islamic state in Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and the southern Philippines. Several foreign intelligence services considered Abu Bakar Ba’ashir, the head of an Islamic boarding school near Solo in Central Java, to be the spiritual leader of the organization in Indonesia and beyond. Ba’ashir is an Indo-Arab who had been imprisoned for several years during the Soeharto era because he zealously advocated the introduction of the Sharia (Islamic law), and opposed the Indonesian state ideology, which champions religious freedom. After his release, Ba’ashir was suspected of involvement in the 1985 bomb attack on Borobudur, the greatest Buddhist sanctuary in the eastern hemisphere, after which he fled to Malaysia. During his exile, he became one of the most important protagonists of the jihad against the Western influence in Southeast Asia. Under the administration of president Abdurrahman Wahid, he was allowed to return to Indonesia, where he continued his struggle for an Islamic state, and apparently recruited volunteers for military training in Afghanistan. To this day, Ba’ashir denies any involvement with Jemaah Islamiyah, even asserting that it does not exist. Nevertheless, he is widely seen as the instigator of a series of assaults by followers of Jemaah Islamiyah, including the attack on Christian churches in Java on Christmas Eve 2000, which left eighteen people dead, the Bali bombing under discussion here, and the bomb attacks on the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta in 2003 and on the Australian Embassy in 2004, which killed twelve and eleven persons, respectively.5 As a result of international pressure, Ba’ashir has been arrested twice in recent years on suspicion of involvement. The first time, in 2003, he was sentenced for violating immigration rules; the second time, in 2005, for inciting the Bali bombings. Later, the latter sentence was overturned by the Su-

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preme Court owing to a lack of evidence of his direct involvement. In all, Ba’ashir spent about two years in prison. In 2003, four by then well-known suspects—Imam Samudra and the brothers Ali Ghufron, Amrozi Nurhasyimen, and Ali Imron—were convicted for committing the massacre. Ali Imron, the only one who regretted his actions, was sentenced to life. The others, two of whom had fought in Afghanistan, received the death penalty. During and after their trial, they repeatedly stated that they were disgusted by the Western way of life and the way that Westerners thwarted Islam. Considering the Western “excesses” that take place in Bali—varying from a shocking beach culture and excessive consumption to prostitution and alcohol and drug abuse—they found the island an appropriate location to make this clear to the world at large. After all kinds of delaying tactics by their lawyers, they were eventually executed on 9 November 2008, on Nusa Kambangan prison island off the south coast of Java. They had repeatedly emphasized their desire to die as martyrs “for their dream of creating an Islamic utopia across Southeast Asia,” the ideal of Jemaah Islamiyah.6 After their deaths, Ba’ashir called them holy warriors who had fought a just fight. Not many people agreed with this assessment. At the time of bombing, quite a number of anti-Western Muslims sympathized with their action, but as the political and economic consequences for the country became clear, people increasingly distanced themselves from the atrocity. The small Muslim minority in Bali shared the outrage of the Hindu majority.

Interreligious and Secular Ceremonies in Bali Besides the numerous funerals of identified victims, both in Indonesia and in other countries, a large number of large and small, spontaneous and organized ceremonies were held after the bombings. From the beginning, ground zero in Kuta was the center of these rituals. Even before the technical investigation was finished and the site was opened to the public (on 2 November), great numbers of people—both Indonesians and foreigners—visited the scene of the calamity every day. They came to show their sympathy—out of shame, guilt, grief, or curiosity—or to look for information about lost relatives or friends. They gazed disbelievingly at the damage, and they prayed, cried, and made offerings. The visitors included many dignitaries, such as President Megawati, who visited the bomb site the day after “Black Saturday.” As the grandchild of former President Soekarno’s Balinese mother, she has a special

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relationship with Bali; particularly the common people there adore her. During her visit, she faced a dilemma. From the beginning most Hindu Balinese, just like most Westerners, had suspected these attacks to be the work of radical Muslims, and they expected their president to call upon the Indonesian Muslim community to account for this outrage. Since the investigation had just started, however, Megawati could not permit herself any unfounded statements that Indonesian Muslims, who comprise the majority of the Indonesian population, would consider premature and offensive. The Indonesian government had every reason not to put to the test the already tense relationships between religious and implicitly ethnic groups. For this reason, officials emphasized from the start that the victims had been of different denominations and that the memorial services should be demonstrations of religious harmony. The Balinese authorities, which feared further unrest on the island and the collapse of tourism, also had no interest in stirring up the existing tensions between, in particular, the established Hindu population and Muslim migrants. For this reason, two days later the national leaders of the most important religions in Indonesia—Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Catholicism, and Protestantism—attended the laying of wreaths in Kuta by the Australian minister for foreign affairs and the Australian minister for justice. While these ministers used the opportunity to form a combined Australian–Indonesian investigative team, the religious leaders used it to close ranks. In a joint communiqué to the media, which was published in the Jakarta Post on 15 October 2002, they called the atrocity a “crime against humanity” and warned their followers not to play believers of different religions off against one another. In particular, the Islamic mass organizations Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah did their best to dispel their adherents’ sympathy for the bombers. In a sermon in the large Istiqbal mosque in Jakarta, an ulama (Muslim scholar) said that “the bombers were uncivilized, had lost their minds and had no religious faith.”7 Muslim students showed their disgust by lighting candles in front of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta. This religious solidarity remained intact, despite small cracks, during the first months of the postbombing period. At the end of the first week, a massive interreligious vigil was held at Jakarta’s most popular place for political demonstrations, the traffic circle near Hotel Indonesia. On the same day, Australian Prime Minister Howard spoke at a memorial service at the Australian Consulate in Den Pasar, which was attended by representatives of various religions. In the days following this, overcrowded interfaith services were held on Kuta Beach and in the center of Den Pasar. The meeting in Kuta consisted of a peace walk and a peace prayer. During the walk, participants held long

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Illustration 11.1. Western mourners near the bomb site, October 2002. Photo: Archives Bali Post.

white cloths above their heads, to emphasize the innocence of the victims, while songs from various religious musical repertoires were sung. After a communal prayer, each religious community successively performed a part of a ritual of its own, whereupon the white cloth was thrown into the sea and carried away by the current to symbolically liberate the souls of the victims. The service in Den Pasar was held in the presence of the Indonesian minister of religion and foreign consuls, and ended with the placing of lit candles in Puputan Square, where long ago the local royal family and its entourage had committed suicide in the face of the advancing Dutch colonial army. Early in November, a Western-inspired thousand-step walk from the beach to the bomb site was organized. The event was opened by a Hindu priest and closed by a Muslim preacher. At about the same time, a huge memorial concert was given in a nearby cultural park; at it, besides the Australian national anthem, national and international songs of “love, peace, and friendship” were sung by Indonesian and foreign artists. All these gatherings consisted of a varied mix of Eastern and Western, national and international, and secular and religious elements of memorial services. They were organized, after mutual consultation, by the local and provincial authorities, some even by the Balinese Tourist Board.

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They were held to do justice to the victims’ variety of national and religious backgrounds, and to meet the wishes that adherents of various religions, and people from other countries, had in such circumstances. At the same time, they were also held in order to save tourism in Bali: By showing compassion, the tourist industry hoped that Westerners would not turn their back on the island. However, all these memorials differed sharply from the way the Balinese ritually deal with this kind of adversity. Consequently, besides the various interreligious and secular ceremonies, all kinds of traditional Balinese Hindu rituals were conducted at the required times in the weeks following the bombings. As usual, these Balinese Hindu rituals were more spectacular than the multireligious and official events. Although in principle everybody was welcome to these ritual observances, and prominent figures of other religions were invited to attend them, no concessions were made with regard to their form and content. Nevertheless, the nonBalinese who made spontaneous contributions were not hindered in this; on the contrary, they were treated with respect and given free rein.

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Hindu Balinese Rituals According to the Hindu Balinese religion, order in the universe is the result of a precarious equilibrium between positive and negative forces. Dewa (gods) personify the positive forces, and bhuta kala (evil spirits or demons) the negative ones. To reach or maintain a harmonious balance between gods and men within the human world, and between men and the natural world, one must continuously make offerings to gods and demons. Natural disasters, wars, or in this case, bomb attacks, are seen as serious disturbances of the equilibrium. The disturbances are ascribed to the bhuta kala, who are not properly honored and feel neglected (Stuart Fox 1982: 28–29). In the days following the bombings, the Balinese, particularly those in and around Kuta, prayed intensively and made extensive offerings to ask for forgiveness and to bring about a change for the better. Moreover, the Desa Adat Kuta (the traditional, local customary community) organized a number of purifications to cleanse the bomb site ritually and to restore harmony.8 The first purification ritual—the Pemlebeh Pemrayasita Dumanggula— was held at the site of the disaster at the end of the first week following the bombings. Nineteen priests from the three most important local temples led the ceremony. They made offerings, sang hymns of praise to the gods, and sprinkled tirtha (holy water) from six famous island temples onto the physically and spiritually polluted soil. The ritual was

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meant to inform the gods and the demons that the people were aware of the seriousness of the situation, and to let them know that a much larger purification ritual—the Pamarisudha Karipubhaya—would be held on the day of the next full moon. The Pamarisudha Karipubhaya, which took place on 15 November, was conducted to calm the evil spirits and to ask the gods for help in solving the current problems, in order to bring the visible world (sekala) and the invisible world (nikala) back into harmony with each other.9 Furthermore, the ceremony aimed to heal or alleviate the traumatic experiences of the survivors of the carnage, relatives of the dead and wounded, relief workers, volunteers, villagers, and others involved. The ritual consisted of a ten-day series of ceremonies, culminating in the cleansing of all village temples and, once again, the bomb site (Sujaya 2004: 108–115). It started with preparatory rituals that were held to notify the gods and demons of the upcoming events. Then the ceremonial site was fenced off, the locations for religious structures were marked, and bamboo shrines and altars were built, draped, and decorated. In preparation for the last ceremonial phases, the high priests, who led the complex ritual from the beginning to the end, ordered tirtha from thirty holy places, including temples on the slopes of the highest mountains of Eastern Java, Bali, and Lombok, such as Gunung Semeru, Gunung Raung, and Gunung Rinjani. Through this water, the gods of these sacred locations were present at the activities. After its arrival, the holy water was poured into bamboo containers in Pura Bali Agung, the main village temple, after which women processed to the blast site, accompanied by men who had danced themselves into a trance, carrying the containers. On one of the days before the closing ceremonies, some of the water was used to purify the offerings, which included seventy-nine two-footed and four-footed animals, for example, swans, chickens, ducks, turtles, water buffaloes, bulls, cows, pigs, goats, apes, a civet cat, a black dog, and an antelope. Animal sacrifice is considered to be the best way to appease the bhuta kala. According to the chief editor of the Indonesian Hindu journal Sarad, it can also be interpreted as a kind of self-sacrifice, in the sense that it symbolically erases “animal instincts and behavior,” which had jeopardized the relationship between gods, man, and earth (Jakarta Post, 16 November 2002). The ceremonies culminated at two locations: the site of the calamity and the Segara temple at Kuta Beach. The bomb site was reserved for the Tawur Agung, the fourth-largest ceremony held on Bali for misfortunecausing demons. During the ceremony, offerings such as rice, fruits, flowers, leaves, cakes, cookies, alcoholic drinks, and the head, skin, and cooked meat of sixty-one animals were placed on the altars. Eleven animals were ritually killed by cutting their throats; their blood was allowed to flow onto

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the soil to cleanse it and give it energy. After offerings had been made and mantras had been uttered, both the site and the visitors were sprinkled with the remaining tirtha from the sacred places. Thereupon prayers were said for the souls of the victims, while earth from five wind directions was collected in order to be thrown into the sea later. The ritual ended with a plea for forgiveness for the errors that had inadvertently been made, and to ask for support in the process of recovery. During the ceremony on the beach—Labuh Gentuh, the third-largest ritual for evil spirits—seven sacrificial beasts, solely quadrupeds, were taken by fishing boats onto the open sea where they were drowned. Besides purification, the ritual also “aimed at sending the disturbed souls to a peaceful place.”10 Thousands of inhabitants of Kuta and the neighboring villages of Legian and Seminyak took part in the grand, spectacular rituals on 15 November, wearing colorful ceremonial dress. Tens of thousands of visitors of different nationalities, ethnicities, and denominations crowded the roads and the beach; among them were ministers, ambassadors, politicians, religious authorities, and relatives of the victims. The traveling expenses and accommodation costs of about fifty close relatives of Australian victims were paid by Garuda (the Indonesian airline) and the Balinese Tourist Board. To the astonishment of many Balinese, President Megawati was represented by her husband. Out of fear of alienating herself from her numerically strong Muslim supporters, she apparently preferred to make a low-profile visit at a later date, rather than to take a prominent place in a widely reported ceremony. As long as the role of the arrested Muslims was not fully clear and as long as Indonesian Muslim opinion was divided, she maintained a neutral position—which cost her a lot of goodwill among the Hindu Balinese. Although most foreigners attended the visually rich rituals as spectators, quite a few dressed themselves in traditional Balinese garments and participated in the processions or sat on the ground between the Balinese during the offerings. Some visitors even performed ceremonies of their own devising on the margins of the grand religious spectacles. For example, a small group of tourists held a small-scale service on the beach for a deceased friend, while others sang sacred and secular songs on street corners. Also on the days before, between, and after the official events, all kinds of spontaneous ceremonies took place. Surfers held a memorial service for a lost friend while floating on their boards, and relatives made a silent tour of the places where their son had spent his last days. During the first two months, hardly a day passed without such informal and improvised deeds of remembrance. To the Balinese, the tragedy had now been ritually and publicly dealt with. It signified the end of a turbulent period, which had now been of-

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Illustration 11.2. Spontaneous ceremony performed by Westerners on Kuta Beach, Bali, November 2002. Photo: Archives Bali Post.

ficially brought to a close. Purification had taken place and society was on the road to recovery, although nobody could guarantee that new setbacks would not occur. Priests urged the people not to neglect their daily religious obligations. To assure that no wandering souls of victims would remain at the bomb site, after the ceremony the leftover debris from the site was thrown into the sea. The same thing happened with the ashes of 160 bags containing unidentified body parts, which had been cremated during a small ceremony on 3 March 2003, in the presence of Balinese authorities and foreign diplomats. Thus, all tangible traces of the tragedy had been wiped out.

Memorials Until a permanent memorial was unveiled on the second anniversary of the bombings, ground zero functioned as a place for temporary commemorations. From day one, the desolate location was used as a stage for mourning, grief, and remembrance for people of different nationalities, religions, and ethnicities. Only the Balinese themselves avoided the place as much as possible after the expiration of the purification period. The restored physical and spiritual cleanness did not allow material signs that referred to the previous disturbance.

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In the weeks immediately after the site was opened to the general public, it was flooded every day by thousands of visitors, ranging from the relatives and friends of non-Balinese victims, to tourists and inquisitive persons, who lit candles, burned incense, placed flowers, wreaths, cards, beer cans, or cuddly toys, or attached to fences and posts photos of victims, farewell letters, messages, children’s drawings, or pieces of white cloth bearing such texts as “You made my Bali and all people cry,” “So much tears. So much pain. Why?” “You have destroyed my Bali. I hope you die” (New York Times, 16 November 2002), and “The sun will rise, the sun will fall. We will remember all those lost and know the terrorist will never win” (Hitchcock and Darma Putra 2007: 132). The whole site was strewn with grassroots memorials. The only solid memory was a pelingih, a tiny Balinese temple that had survived the bombing of Paddy’s Bar. For the first two years, it was the focal point of ground zero, where during the first weeks the Balinese laid small offerings of rice, vegetables, and meat wrapped in a pieces of leaf, and where, after purification had taken place, foreigners continued to place their ephemeral tributes. The visitors spent time at the bomb sites not only to remember the victims through prayers and offerings, but also to share their sorrow, to express their anger and worries, to show solidarity, and to find the strength to speak about what had happened. Strangers hugged and comforted each other, shared their experiences, talked about the aid given by Balinese and Australian relief workers and the failure of Western and Eastern intelligence services to prevent the attack, and discussed political causes and consequences. They unanimously condemned terrorism, sometimes loudly and agitatedly, and voiced their concern about the future of the world. The Balinese apologized during those first weeks for what had struck like a bolt from the blue, and expressed the hope that tourists would not stay away from their island. Ground zero had become a place not only of mourning but also for the expression of discontent and protest (cf. Margry and Sánchez-Carretero 2007). When I visited Kuta in May 2003, the bomb site still looked unkempt. Here and there grew a few banana trees, which, I was told, could survive the spiritual pollution of the place, but at the same time made clear that a new use for the site had not yet been found. Despite an inevitable slump in tourism, visitors from all over the world still placed flowers near the shrine. On the fences hung a few photographs of foreign victims with moving captions, a rugby shirt from a player who had lost a team mate, and several poems, including the following Indonesian verse: Aku menangis, bangsaku menangis, duniaku menangis Luka yang dalam menoreh direlung hati

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Aku hanyut dalam kesedihan Aku tenggalam dalam keterpurukan

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(I cry, my people cry, my world cries A deep wound tears my heart I drift away in distress I sink into oblivion)

It is the only text in Indonesian that I found at the site, and I heard that there had not been that many. The Balinese themselves did not undertake these kinds of initiatives, being afraid of evoking memories that they would rather suppress and of not respecting the reestablished equilibrium by way of purification. In the tourist shops in Kuta, a few souvenirs were for sale that referred to the tragedy, or more precisely, contained a judgment about it. These included T-shirts and stickers with texts like “jerk terrorist, fuck terrorist, suck terrorist, loser terrorist, damn terrorist, scum” (written in the form of a clenched fist), as well as “Osama bin Laden don’t surf ” and “Bush don’t surf.” These were not sold by Balinese shopkeepers, however, but, ironically, by Muslim petty traders from neighboring islands. The Balinese also refrained from remembering the bombings commercially. Shortly after the disaster, Dallas Finn—a friend of the mother of a young Australian victim—took the initiative to build a peace park at the Sari Club site, which was to be a place for prayer, contemplation, tolerance, and hope. Although in all large cities in Australia plans were made to build monuments in remembrance of the victims of the Bali bombings (all of which were realized), he felt that a memorial at the locus delicti should have the highest priority. The costs were estimated at two to three million Australian dollars. Although financial contributions poured in from all over Australia and elsewhere, the project did not get off the ground. At the end of 2007, five years after the atrocity, control of the project Illustration 11.3. Antiterrorist T-shirt, Bali, 2009. was taken over by the Perth- Photo: Huub de Jonge.

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based Bali Peace Park Association. However, the association faces the same difficulties that Finn did. The Balinese living in the bandar (neighborhood), who want to forget the calamity, are far from enthusiastic about the park project. Moreover, until March 2009, it was not clear who owned the Sari plot. Since October 2002, no one had publicly claimed the property or shown a certificate of ownership to the authorities. There were conflicting rumors that the ownership of the plot of land was not registered, or that the land had been subleased so often that nobody knew who the real owner is, or that an unknown entrepreneur owned the land and wanted to rebuild the club, but was awaiting better times. Nevertheless, it looks like there is now a better chance that there will be a resolution: Local authorities have recently backed the construction of the park, and the new governor of Bali—the former police officer who headed the team investigating the bombings—has become a member of the association’s board. Australians decry the fact that this community-based endeavor has been delayed. To them, the bomb site is historical soil, not to say holy ground, that should not be desecrated. Eight years after the bombings, popular perception places the site on a par with Gallipoli in Turkey—the place of a major Australian defeat during World War I—or the Kokoda track in Papua New Guinea, which played an important role in Australia’s participation in World War II. According to the latest design, the peace park will consist of a memorial garden, corners for reflection, a picnic area, and a mural or museum commemorating the already legendary event. As such, it will help strengthen the symbolic meaning of the place and contribute to the construction of new interpretations of this unfortunate episode in Australia, Bali, and beyond. A local Balinese plan to erect a monument on the former site of Paddy’s Bar initially also caused quite a stir. Although the Balinese themselves, in accordance with their religion, do not need a permanent memorial, the Desa Adat Kuta did not want to deny Australians and others the opportunity to remember the victims in Kuta itself. As Pak Wendra, the head of the Desa Adat, told me, “We soon realized that we, but in each case they, have experienced a historical turning point, a hinge in time, that should be marked by a stately memorial.” Just as with the Peace Park, the bandar involved (a different one on the other side of the street) acted obstructively, although it had no objections to the installation of a small, barely noticeable column. The bandar council was afraid that a big monument would lead to the economic decline of Legian Street, and pled for the reconstruction of the nightclub and the surrounding shops and restaurants. The multiple owners of the site, all of whom were well known by this time, held the same view. They did not like the idea of hav-

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ing to sell their valuable parcel of land for a structure that would bring no profit. After a protracted and heated debate with neighboring bandar and higher administrative bodies, the local customary community decided to pursue its goal. The monument took the form of an enormous, carved stone gunungan—an image of the universe borrowed from the wayang (shadow-play)—on which a black marble plaque with the names and nationalities of all the victims was placed. It further included a fountain and the flags of the countries involved. In the plan, the Australian idea for a peace park at the Sari Club site was also taken into account: a street mosaic would link the monument and the park. However, it proved impossible to reach a mutually agreeable price for the site with its owners. The memorial was eventually built next to Paddy’s Bar where an art shop had stood before the bombing. A year later, only the plaque and the inscriptions were ready. The remaining parts were realized before the second memorial service in 2004. Since its opening, the monument has attracted large numbers of visitors, and not only during the annual commemorations. It has become a top attraction and a compulsory part of tours of the region. In March 2009, every day I saw dozens of tourist buses filled with Indonesian Muslims make a stop at the memorial; many foreigners also spent a few minutes at the place. Most Muslims I spoke with came out of curiosity or to commemorate coreligionists among the victims. As one of them said: “People tend to forget that we were hit seriously, too.” While immediately after the bombings a fair number of Muslims sympathized with the culprits, in recent years compassion has shifted almost completely to the victims. Every day, I saw that flowers, photographs, cards, and other perishable memories had been placed on the border beneath the plaque or fastened to the flag poles, mainly by foreigners. One message said: “Hope you are playing cricket up there. Think of you often and miss you always.” I once saw some Chinese people offering bottles of water and biscuits. Almost everyone had his or her photograph taken in front of the monument. It was interesting to see how visitors from different cultures had their picture taken: Generally speaking, Australians held each other tightly, while Indonesians stared intently into the distance, and Japanese visitors invariably made the peace sign. At night, many young people stopped at the memorial on their way between places of entertainment. As a visitor from down under said to a journalist with the Weekend Australian (7–8 February 2009): “This is absolutely a site of pilgrimage. I would say that every Australian who comes to Bali comes to the monument. We make a beeline for this place every time we come here, at least once, maybe twice.” The only ones who avoid the place are the Balinese, except those who work as tourist guides or taxi drivers. Just like the temporary memorials that

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were placed at the original bomb site, the permanent monument with its grassroots additions remains an anomalous phenomenon. Apart from the monument and the Sari Club bomb site, which is now used as a parking lot for motorbikes, hardly anything reminds one of “10/12.” On the site of Paddy’s Bar, a multistory building with a surf shop, restaurant, and tapas bar—the Vi Ai Pi (the pronunciation of “VIP”)—was opened in 2007. A waitress told me that the restaurant and bar did not attract many foreigners. She had heard that Westerners did not like to eat and drink in a place where so many people had died, and thus found the building’s name inappropriate or distasteful. Paddy’s itself had found a new location a few yards further down the road. In fact, the only references to the bombings I saw were banners, notably on the outside walls of discos, bearing euphemistic bilingual texts, such as “Love Peace” or “World Peace Can Only Be Achieved When There Is Peace in Every Heart.” For the Balinese, it is apparently easier to speak about the tragedy in these terms than to directly refer to terrorism itself. In that (and only that) respect, it seems comparable to what happens in Hiroshima today: The Japanese distance themselves from the concrete event by stressing peace and ignoring the preceding events that led to the dropping of the atom bomb. The fact that the Balinese themselves prefer not to visit the memorial or to hold rituals at the memorial site, does not mean that those who were involved in one way or another with the disaster have recovered from their traumas. It is well known that, generally speaking, the Balinese try to suppress their distress, pain, and sadness, and that adversity is masked by a forced cheerfulness. The Balinese believe that crying disturbs both the living and the souls of the dead. According to Wikan (1990: 156), “Sadness undermines the life force. It withers one’s energy away, and a person cannot afford to neglect her life force.” The shocks and strain of the wounded, the bereaved, voluntary workers, and witnesses to the bombings, however, are such that traditionally prescribed behavior is not always adequate. For this reason, the well-known Balinese psychiatrist Luh Ketut Suryani combined traditional meditation techniques with Western means to heal complaints of apathy, insomnia, fear, anger, and aggression. She also organized various activities to distract patients and give them the opportunity to express themselves in alternative ways, for example, by participating in communal singing and dances on the beach.

Bali for the Balinese For a small but growing number of Balinese, the purification rituals were insufficient to establish a new equilibrium or, as was implied, to assure the Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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future of the island: The bombings confirmed their opinion that Balinese society had become economically, socially, and culturally deranged and was heading in the wrong direction. They seized the opportunity to make clear that far-reaching structural changes were needed in order to solve existing societal problems (Cocteau 2003: 41–42). There had long been dissatisfaction among academics at Udayana University in Den Pasar, as well as among religious leaders and progressive administrators, with the unbridled growth of the tourist industry and the increasing dependency of the population on this sector. They particularly criticized the disproportionate influence of non-Balinese Indonesian investors on the insular economy, the presence of thousands of labor migrants from other islands, the unprecedented commercialization of Balinese culture and religion, and the negative effects of tourism on the physical environment. During Soeharto’s centralistic New Order regime, Bali came to be increasingly governed from the capital, and from the 1970s onward, it was gradually made into the destination par excellence for the millions of tourists who visited Indonesia each year. The island had become a touristic showpiece without a thought being given to the effects that this had on the society and its culture (cf. Picard 1992). By bribing government officials, business conglomerates and businessmen from Jakarta and Surabaya had a nearly free hand in Bali. They bought parcels of land from peasants at extremely low prices; built multistory, four- or five-star hotels; and opened Western-inspired tourist attractions, such as a whitewater rafting site and a wildlife park, in the most beautiful parts of the island or started small or medium-sized tourism-related factories in the vicinity of Den Pasar. The flourishing of tourism had also given rise to an increasingly large in-migration of skilled and unskilled Indonesian laborers. The activities of rich entrepreneurs and the employment of tens of thousands of migrant workers in the formal and the informal sector had led to economic inequality and social tensions. Well-trained outsiders filled the better jobs in the tourist centers, while the educated Balinese had to be content with lower positions. Even in the ambulatory street trade, the Balinese were trumped by unskilled newcomers who knew how to monopolize certain trades by organizing themselves on an ethnic basis (de Jonge 2000). This inequality in opportunity and income led to dissatisfaction and antagonism toward other ethnic groups. Even before the bomb attacks, there had been minor interethnic incidents. To counter environmental degradation—such as air and waste pollution, the felling of forests, the destruction of the landscape, and threats to biodiversity—they pled for a turn to ecotourism, which, in combination with an ecologically friendly diversification of the economy, would contribute to a ofmore sustainable development ofMargry, the island. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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Another point of criticism concerned the unrestrained commoditization of the Balinese heritage (cf. Setia 2002: 335–43). More and more cultural phenomena, such as temple dances and cremation rituals, were adapted to the needs of the tourists. Many young Balinese did not know what had disappeared from them or what had been added for commercial purposes. Historical and sacred sites, such as palaces and temples, were desecrated by exploiting them as tourist attractions or by building hotels on or near them. For example, a temple had been removed in order to construct Kuta Square, a small street full of boutiques and restaurants. As a journalist with the Bali Post told me, the rise of mass tourism in Kuta had made it a kind of Sodom and Gomorrah, where everything was permitted and traditional norms and values were increasingly disregarded. The resentment among the Balinese elite against these forms of spiritual and cultural pollution ran high. The French anthropologist Picard rightly pointed out that in this regard, the opinions of these peaceloving Balinese about the effects of Western tourism did not differ that much from those of the perpetrators of the bomb attacks.11 It is thus not surprising that the Balinese wanted to regain a voice in their own homeland. Those who opposed Bali’s economic appropriation and exploitation by outsiders, and who feared further societal disruption, called for restrictions on outside investments, labor migration, and cultural commodification. Those Hindu Balinese who had opted for the more universal variant of Hinduism instead of the local syncretic form pressed emphatically for the exclusion of tourists of other denominations from religious sites and ceremonies. The journalist Putu Setia (2002: vii) called for the “isolation” of Bali within the wider Indonesian society. Some even demanded an independent Bali. The political ideas of these Balinese critics did not differ much from those of the opponents of similar developments in tourist areas in other developing countries. Globalization in general and tourism in particular pose a serious threat to the identity of the peoples of regions that are ideologically dominated and economically controlled by the center of the nation to which they belong, especially when the inhabitants of such regions differ ethnically and religiously from the majority of the national population (Howe 2005, Picard 1997). The introspection that started after the tragedy on Bali has so far led to few significant improvements. Only in the administrative area has some progress been made, although this has more to do with the policy of decentralization that started after the fall of the Soeharto regime in 1998 than with the Bali bombings. Kuta itself saw some small successes. The Desa Adat Kuta, for example, took over some local competences from the village government. Thanks to this empowerment, it was able to for-

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bid ambulatory street trade and take over the commercial management of the beach from a regional army division. In this way it succeeded in reducing ethnic tensions between immigrants and the local Balinese, and to restore the balance between the beach as a place for recreation and as a location for traditional Hindu rituals. Efforts to improve the situation on Bali were put on hold as a result of the economic decline that resulted from the bombings. In the months following 12 October, the number of tourists dropped to less than 30 percent of the prebombing level (cf. Hitchcock and Darma Putra 2007: 122–24). The crisis threatened the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of local people and migrants. The provincial government has tried to restrict immigration by imposing a stricter control on the issuing of work permits to non-Balinese persons. To attract more tourists, the Balinese Tourist Board started promotional campaigns in Asian countries, and organized a number of art, dance, and street festivals, and even an annual parade in traditional dress that is called Bali Carnival, but has little in common with events of that name in Catholic areas of, for example, Europe or Latin America. The Balinese elite, whose objections were politely listened to and then ignored, regard all these commercial endeavors with disgust. Tourism has gradually regained its prebombing position, not least due to sharply falling prices. Although the greater part of the Balinese population has become aware of the need for less-damaging forms of tourism, the lesson from the bombings—namely, that the balance between the spiritual, the natural, and the secular world has to be restored—seems to have been forgotten. As an owner of a souvenir shop e-mailed me, “The Balinese have become stubborn. What we are waiting for is a new punishment.”

Concluding Remarks There are big differences in the way that Westerners and the Balinese perceive and cope with the bombings. Westerners see the calamity as an inhuman action carried out by evil-minded persons with repugnant ideas, and they want to commemorate that action by means of periodic memorial services and both temporary and permanent memorials. The Hindu Balinese see the tragedy as a disruption of the precarious balance between people, gods, and nature, a balance that has to be restored as soon as possible through purification rituals. The prescribed observances have been completed, and the Hindu Balinese do not desire further public memorial services or tangible ephemeral or permanent memorials for the victims. On the contrary, all marks of the sad event should be completely

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wiped out. Although during the rituals enormous quantities of offerings were made, the offerings did not have the characteristics of grassroots responses. There is no place in Balinese Hindu liturgy for spontaneous and idiosyncratic tributes to the victims. Even polluted sites do not receive special attention after they have been purified. Despite these strict ideas about the cause of the tragedy and the way to achieve a new equilibrium, the Balinese nevertheless gave Westerners the opportunity to hold spontaneous ceremonies on the margins of their own purification rites (besides organizing special memorial services), and to place grassroots memorials at the site of the tragedy with which they can express grief and grievances, as has become more and more common in the Western world after shocking events. To meet Western wishes, they even took the initiative to build a permanent memorial, albeit near rather than at the site of the disaster. Since the formal monument was officially opened, visitors have started to put up their informal memorials there. Balinese courtesy and tolerance toward Western ways of remembrance is, of course, greatly influenced by the importance of tourism to the island. The inhabitants do not want to insult the people on whom they have become so dependent. In fact, the permanent memorial soon became a tourist attraction in itself, where visitors from all over the world continued to meet each other, to put up handmade memorials, and to discuss the background to and implications of what happened there on 12 October 2002. Although for the Balinese it is not the consecrated place that it is for outsiders, but a place they prefer to avoid, it has, figuratively speaking, become a location they can no longer ignore. It reminds the common Balinese people of the dangers of imbalances in their worldly and supranatural surroundings, and the protagonists of sustainable development of the necessity of far-reaching economic and social changes. Each time a new project for Balinese development is proposed, the landmark figures in discussions as a symbolical point of orientation against which decisions are taken.

Notes 1. See for details, Atkinson 2003. 2. See e.g., Palguna 2006 and Manda 2005. 3. The few permanent, secular memorials on the island are established under the auspices of the national government to remember historical events. Services held there are mainly attended by government officials and soldiers. 4. Some of the data were collected during a stay in Kuta in May 2003 and February 2009.

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5. He was not seen as the mastermind behind the two smaller bomb attacks on Bali (in Jimbaran and, again, Kuta) on 1 October 2005 that left twenty-three people dead. 6. The Australian, 6 November 2008. 7. Jakarta Post, 14 October 2002. 8. For purification rituals on Bali, see Eiseman 1989 and Stuart Fox 1987. 9. Bali Post, 18 November 2002. 10. Jakarta Post, 16 November 2002. 11. See Michel Picard’s article ‘Un an après l’attentat de Bali’ of 1 November 2003, at http://www.reseau-asie.com.

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References Atkinson, Alan. (2003). Tragedy in Bali: A Personal Account of the Bali Bombing. Kerobokan, Indonesia: The Works/Sydney: ABC Books. Cocteau, Jean. (2003). “After the Kuta Bombing: In Search of the Balinese ‘Soul’.” Antropologi Indonesia 27(70): 41–59. de Jonge, Huub. (2000). “Trade and Ethnicity: Street and Beach Sellers from Raas on Bali.” Pacific Tourism Review 4: 75–86. Eiseman, Fred B. (1989). Bali: Sekala and Niskala, vol. 1, Essays on Religion, Ritual, and Art. Berkeley, CA: Periplus Editions. Hitchcock, Michael, and I Nyoman Darma Putra. (2007). Tourism, Development and Terrorism in Bali. Aldershot, UK: Asghate. Howe, Leo. (2005). The Changing World of Bali: Religion, Society and Tourism. London: Routledge. Manda, I Nyoman. (2005). Our Sorrow in Kuta. Gianyar, Indonesia: Pondok Tebawutu. Margry, Peter Jan, and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero. (2007). “Memorializing Traumatic Death.” Anthropology Today 23(3): 1–2. Palguna, IBM. Dharma, ed. (2006). Bom teroris dan “bom social.” Narasi dari balik harmoni Bali. Den Pasar, Indonesia: Yayasan Kanaivasu. Picard, Michel. (1992). Bali: Tourism culturele et culture touristique. Paris: L’Harmattan. ———. (1997). “Cultural Tourism, Nation-building, and Regional Culture: The Making of a Balinese Identity.” In Michel Picard and Robert E. Woods, eds., Tourism, Ethnicity and the State in Asia and the Pacific Societies. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 181–214. Setia, Putu. (2002). Mendebat Bali: Catatan perjalanan budaya Bali hingga bom Kuta. Den Pasar, Indonesia: Manikgeni. Stuart Fox, David J. (1982). Once A Century. Pura Besakih and the Eka Dasa Rudra Festival. Jakarta: Sinar Harapan and Citra Indonesia. ———. (1987). Pura Besakih: A Study of Balinese Religion and Society. Canberra: Australian National University. Sujaya, I Made. (2004). Sepotong nurani Kuta. Catatan seputar sikap warga Kuta dalam tragedi 12 oktober 2002. Kuta, Indonesia: LPM Kelurahan Kuta. Wikan, Unni. (1990). Managing Turbulent Hearts: A Balinese Formula for Living. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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Part IV

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Instrumentalizing Repositories of Memory

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Chapter 12

September 11 Museums, Spontaneous Memorials, and History

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James B. Gardner

Staff of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH), situated on the Mall in Washington, DC, began 11 September 2001 with a routine staff meeting, but things quickly changed as word spread through the auditorium of terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, threats to the Capitol, a car bomb at the US Department of State, fires on the National Mall, airplanes circling over the museum, and chaos on the streets. Fortunately, part of that was simply rumor, but the realities we shortly learned of were horrifying enough. Uncertain what would happen next, we kept the museum closed, set up a command center, pulled out our disaster plan, and sent staff home. We managed to get through the day, returning to resume our work in the days that followed.1 But much had changed and would change over the coming months. The museum itself was a different place—we soon had temporary concrete barriers ringing the building, bag checks at the entrances for every staff member and visitor, and uncertainty about what would happen next. Our behavior changed as well—we noticed sirens in the distance that we would have ignored before, we stole looks out the windows during meetings to see if the surveillance planes were still circling over, and many brought in radios and flashlights and discussed evacuation plans with friends and family. And then came the anthrax scare, increasing the sense of a city (or country) under siege. Years later, the temporary barriers have been replaced by a permanent perimeter security system, magnetometers now supplement bag checks, and the museum’s mail continues to be irradiated for anthrax. There has not been a real return to normal.

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But even as things changed, one thing has remained the same—the museum’s commitment to collecting and interpreting history. That did not, however, mean simply business as usual—the tragic events of September 11 reshaped the museum’s agenda, posing new challenges as we entered uncharted territory. As staff began returning to work in the days that followed the terrorist attacks, hallway discussion quickly turned to what September 11 would mean for the NMAH and the larger museum community. What role should museums play in a time of crisis? What public expectations would we face? What new responsibilities would we have? What role should we play in constructing collective memory? And, perhaps most importantly, how would we address our responsibilities as museums within that tragic context, at the difficult intersection of grief and history?

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Collecting the Ephemera of Loss Collecting is at the foundation of all that museums do, and so it was only natural that discussion at NMAH focused on collecting almost immediately. On 13 September 2001, NMAH’s Collections Committee changed the topic of an already scheduled conversation on collecting in order to address the issues and concerns that were being raised within the Museum about responding to September 11. The most basic question was simply “Should we collect?” Despite being known as “the nation’s attic,” the Smithsonian cannot collect everything, and does not. As is the case with most if not all history museums, the NMAH does not collect systematically and has built not an encyclopedic or comprehensive collection, but rather one that is selective and representative. Collecting history is more of an art than a science, and museum collections are shaped by curators’ perspectives and expertise rather than any hard and fast plans or rules. It is never a given that the museum will collect in a specific area or on any topic—whether to collect is a judgment call made by knowledgeable and experienced curators. But September 11 did not feel like a routine collecting opportunity that we could elect to pursue or not. It clearly constituted an important, perhaps even a defining, moment in the life of the nation. While some staff argued that the NMAH should move cautiously to avoid appearing opportunistic or ghoulish in a time of national mourning, most recognized that the public would expect us to collect. Although based on a lack of understanding of the work of museums and curators, the American public’s assumption of the objectivity and apolitical nature of museums provides a useful shield from such criticism (Rosenzweig and Thelen 1998: 195;

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Gardner 2004: 13–14). More importantly, if we didn’t collect, we would have to be prepared to explain why. Indeed, even though there was almost no discussion of potential museum collecting in the press or other public forums in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the public nevertheless demonstrated that they cared deeply about this through e-mails, calls, and letters to curators suggesting and even offering items for the museum to collect. And then in December 2001, the US Congress weighed in as well, officially charging the NMAH to collect and preserve artifacts relating to the September 11 attacks. Ultimately, the NMAH is one of the stewards of the nation’s memory—we are obligated to collect. But what about September 11 should the museum collect? We had our standard answer: our collecting centers on objects that tell stories, that evoke moments and lives. Our priorities were clear: compelling objects with compelling stories that reflect the diverse experiences and perspectives of September 11. That agenda meant collecting not just the more usual objects that tell the stories of death, survival, response, and rescue, but also ephemeral materials that reflect the outpouring of grief not only on that day but also in the weeks and months that followed. There were obvious precedents for collecting the ephemera of loss—the National Park Service’s collecting of such material at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial beginning in the early 1980s, the collection developed at the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum following the 1995 bombing in that city, and more recently the collecting led by the Littleton Historical Museum after the Columbine shootings in 1999.2 While very different circumstances gave rise to each, all three collections are overwhelmed with stuffed animals, cards and poems, prayers and religious objects, flags, and a wide range of personal mementos, both spontaneous and intentional, that dramatically reflect the public sense of anger and loss, and all three have faced enormous challenges in dealing with the sheer volume of materials (over fifty thousand items collected by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial alone) for which they have found themselves responsible. But the NMAH was facing a fundamentally different situation. While in each of those cases, collecting was an outgrowth of stewardship of a specific memorial site, the collecting imperative for the Museum of American History in regard to September 11 was very different: it was, quite simply, focused on developing a standalone museum collection that would represent all three crash sites, documenting the events of the day and their aftermath. The museum’s responsibility was not to any one memorial site but rather to the national memory, and that meant a different approach to collecting. Without the day-to-day responsibilities for a memorial site that our predecessors faced, the museum arguably did not face the same sense

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of urgency—we did not have to rush to rescue materials left in our care. As historians and curators, we value scholarly distance and perspective, and a cautious approach to collecting, divorced from the politics of the moment, held much attraction. But could we really wait? Was it instead our responsibility to move in quickly? Arguments for historical distance seemed disingenuous, since the museum has long engaged in contemporary collecting. For example, every four years, NMAH curators collect from presidential primaries and the national political conventions. That curatorial debate over timing did not reflect concerns about becoming entwined in a difficult political debate—indeed, the nation seemed more unified than ever, with little attention paid to the relatively small number of dissenters or critics. Instead curators’ reluctance masked a deeper concern—a real reticence about facing the raw emotions of the moment, a prospect outside the comfort zone of curators more at home in the world of scholarly detachment. Fulfilling the museum’s September 11 collecting responsibilities would mean dealing with those still grieving, those still in shock or traumatized. Avoidance was not an option, particularly when it came to documenting the significance of grief and memorialization in the public responses to the attacks and deaths. Curators had to move more quickly there than in any collecting area—the most compelling makeshift memorials were out-of-doors and quickly began falling prey to the weather. But what are the ethics of collecting in this context? The museum field expects curators to collect with sensitivity and respect, but offers little guidance beyond that for such collecting moments.3 In acquiring materials from the September 11 crash sites, curators faced unique challenges, juggling the needs and wishes of victims’ families and friends with the requirements of official investigations, while wrestling with more sensitive issues such as the almost certain presence of traces of human remains on the objects being collected. Collecting the ephemera of loss presented a very different but no less challenging set of issues. In contrast to scientists, history curators normally acquire objects from known donors rather than “in the field” and were wary about collecting materials left behind in spontaneous memorials. Would our urgency in collecting such materials be seen as callous and self-serving, as declaring an end to grief? At a moment when people still hoped their loved ones might be found alive, would museums appear to be telling them that it was over and they should move on? Moreover, collecting these materials and storing them in museums—removing them from public view—would negate the very purpose of the materials, the reasons they were created and left. Should museums remove memorial materials from public view, even if the intention is to save them from the weather? The

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National Park Service had certainly answered that affirmatively decades before, every evening systematically removing and preserving materials left at the Vietnam “Wall,” and that precedent had then been invoked in collecting materials in Oklahoma City. But Arnold Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, argued that such collecting violated the very imperative of memorialization: “These posters and great collections of flowers and candles are the real thing. This is made up of tears. What happens if, figuratively speaking, you put a box of plexiglass over it?” (New York Daily News, 1 October 2001). Indeed, when the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation began clearing memorial materials at Union Square when rain threatened, the public reacted with alarm: how can a museum dare to claim ownership of such very personal, albeit public, expressions of grief and loss? (Gardner and Henry 2002: 41) Years later, David Shayt, a curator at the Museum of American History reflecting back on his experience, articulated much the same sentiment: “I felt it would be an act of desecration to collect something off a living memorial.”4 But walking away and allowing the shrines to degrade was not ethically responsible, for it would mean the loss of materials that are in the public interest to preserve. Nor was it, quite simply, a viable solution. Although the public complained if the outdoor memorials were removed, they also complained if they were allowed to deteriorate. Sylvia Grider (2001) puts it simply: “Spontaneous shrines lose their emotional impact and symbolic integrity when they become soggy, windblown, and tattered.” The memorials were not only places of pilgrimage but evidence of our collective grief, and the public made clear in conversations on site and in phone calls and e-mails that they could not bear to see them degrade as though of no meaning or value. While makeshift in origin, the memorials had become icons of our shared loss, and preserving them became inextricably tied up in preserving the memory of that day. Museums operate in the public trust, and the public expected us to act accordingly. It was obvious that, whatever the course of action, there would be critics, not for political reasons but for emotional ones. To use an American colloquialism, there was a sense within the museum community of “damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.” There was no easy answer. In the final analysis, we needed to collect, but had to do so with more sensitivity to emotions than we are accustomed to. That meant, for example, sometimes quelling entrepreneurial collecting impulses and waiting for materials to be offered. But beyond the ethical and emotional issues, how much of that material could we realistically collect? The magnitude of memorial materials was overwhelming. Within days, New York City, the site of the crash of

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Flight 93 in Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon were inundated with spontaneous or makeshift memorials. In New York, “Union Square had become a sea of candles, photographs, poems, works of art, personal memorabilia, stuffed animals, and political manifestos. It had become a civic church—a place of pilgrimage, prayer, and protest,” observed Gardner and Henry (2002: 40). “The Brooklyn Heights promenade, with a commanding view of the still-smoldering skyline, was similarly adorned. The mayor’s Family Assistance Center … , the exterior and interior of every firehouse, police station, hospital, and school, the gates of St. Paul’s Chapel and Trinity Church, countless street corners, subway stations, phone booths, and building entryways—all held evidence of the outpouring of grief from within the city and around the country and the world. … The material was deeply felt and often highly evocative, but it could literally be measured by the ton.” For museums, the prospect of collecting that material was overwhelming. Over the course of two decades, the National Park Service’s collection from the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, DC, grew to around fifty thousand items, but the volume of September 11 materials from New York alone was clearly exponentially greater than that. The Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum had tried to follow the

Illustration 12.1. A young woman keeps candles burning at a Union Square memorial in a photograph taken by amateur photographer Doug Potoksky, documenting the September 11 memorials and tributes in New York. Gift by Douglas Potoksky. National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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Park Service’s precedent and soon found themselves managing a collection that was growing dramatically at significant cost but with little additional interpretive or exhibition value. While some scholars might have preferred that they save everything, they did not have the resources to do that and still fulfill their public roles. They have since established parameters or criteria for how long memorial materials will be left at specific locations and what kinds of materials will be collected, which directed to outreach, and which destroyed.5 Even with those guidelines in place, the museum still has collected over sixty-eight thousand memorial items. The harsh reality is that few history museums today have the resources to maintain systematic research collections. Instead, our priorities are representative objects for exhibition, and there are only so many teddy bears and T-shirts you need for that purpose. Moreover, the NMAH, the Museum of the City of New York, the New York Historical Society, the New York State Museum, and the other museums engaged in documenting September 11 had to consider whether they could process and house such materials. Memorials are complex, composite objects, consisting of textiles, candles, organic materials, synthetics, paper, tape, and other materials, and the unstable nature of those materials posed significant and potentially costly conservation challenges. The structural and varied material instabilities of the memorials presented a particularly perplexing situation. From a conservation standpoint, the prudent course of action would be to dismantle or disaggregate the memorials and address the varied preservation needs of the different materials. But if the power of the memorials is in the assemblage of the materials, wouldn’t such action, however well intentioned, be destructive (Grider 2001)? Is it instead more important to preserve the look of the memorial rather than the individual pieces that make it up? Is it enough to photograph memorials and create documentary records, as the New York Historical Society, CityLore, and the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center did, or must we preserve the actual memorials in their entirety, as the Museum of the City of New York did when it collected the 170-foot-long construction fence at the Bellevue Hospital that, covered with fliers, photographs, and other materials, became known as the “Wall of Prayers” (Gardner and Henry 2002: 41–42)? And as such issues were being discussed, the clock was ticking—the longer the exposure to the weather, the more likely such materials would be to mold, potentially spreading contaminants into the museum’s other collections and threatening the health of its staff. As Gardner and Henry (2002: 41) put it, “Museums always have to balance the cost of taking responsibility for objects offered to their collections with the benefit of preserving them, and in this case the potential costs could be considerable.”

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Intended to be evocative rather than systematic, the museum collections assembled over the days, months, and years that followed convey the complex, idiosyncratic nature of the makeshift memorials and of the memorialization process. Initially, the photos and messages people were posting were not intended as memorials but as part of the search for the missing—over ninety thousand such fliers were posted across New York. But in too short a time, the missing became the lost, and missing fliers became the core of more complex makeshift memorials consisting of jumbles of candles, flowers, flags, stuffed animals, and other objects that reflected the outpouring of public grief. While the National Museum of American History did not collect entire memorial installations, others did. For the NMAH, the issue was not whether it was appropriate to collect memorials—there was no concern about political or ideological issues—but where to best focus its collecting efforts, and its sister museums were clearly better positioned to take on this agenda. The memorials were site specific, rooted in place, and hence the best fit was with state and local institutions. The Museum of the City of New York collected the plywood construction wall at Bellevue Hospital that became a vehicle for families and friends seeking information about the missing and evolved into a tribute to those who had died. Similarly, the New York State Museum collected from Liberty Plaza three fence sections covered in photographs, flags, banners, and other materials, and collected and documented makeshift memorials at St. Paul’s Chapel, the New York City Fire Department, and other locations. The State Museum also collected the platform on Fulton Street where people went to view Ground Zero—constructed in the response to September 11, the utilitarian platform itself became the site of a makeshift memorial.6 But all such memorials were not in public—the Museum of American History collected materials from a makeshift memorial set up in a trailer by the New York Port Authority Police Department to honor fallen comrades. While a spontaneous expression of grief, the memorial was institutional in context, and the museum was not simply collecting materials left unattended on the sidewalk. Recognizing that, the museum’s curator did not take the materials or even ask for them—he collected them only when they were offered. In the context of September 11, many otherwise entrepreneurial curators demonstrated heightened ethical sensitivity. As those memorial materials became museum objects, they arguably ceased to be what they were, instead becoming part of our institutionalized memories, isolated from the dynamic in which they were created. A particularly striking case of transformation and meaning was the Chelsea Jeans Memorial. The owner of the Chelsea Jeans store on lower Broadway created his own memorial by walling off a fifty-foot-square portion

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of his shop as it was on September 11, creating a time capsule of ashcovered shelves of jeans, T-shirts, and tank tops bearing American flag logos. The owner stated simply, “I wanted to preserve it just as it was, to freeze this moment in history.” His memorial became a popular pilgrimage site for visitors to Ground Zero. And then in 2002, the New York Historical Society acquired the memorial, hazardous materials and all, and commissioned a custom-designed, sealed exhibition case that would allow the public to contemplate the memorial without direct exposure to its contents. Covering it with the box of Plexiglas feared by museum director Arnold Lehman arguably heightened its power, conferring on it the status of museum object while dramatically drawing visitor attention to what the Historical Society termed “hazardous, yet emotionally charged, dust.”7 While there was much attention to the spontaneous memorial materials, museums also collected what might be more accurately described as “intentional” memorial materials. While not spontaneously created, these materials were still grassroots in origin and rooted in ritual. For example, the Museum of American History collected a scrapbook created by an artist and poet from Mobile, Alabama, reflecting on the events around September 11. Much like a spontaneous memorial, the scrapbook is “a powerful personal expression that includes objects and original poetry, along with pictures and newspaper clippings” the curator argues. “The choice of format, reusing an old account book, conveys the layered nature of history—the present overlaid on the past.”8 Indeed, much like the spontaneous memorials, the scrapbook is an assemblage, albeit from a single perspective. An example of collective rather than individual expression is the community remembrance book collected by the NMAH from the city of Mountain View, California. The over three hundred messages from local residents and drawings by area children were an outpouring of grief from a community not directly impacted by the terrorist attacks but nonetheless grieving. While not part of a spontaneous shrine, this condolence book is arguably part of the same dynamic: a communal opportunity for creative expression of grief, spontaneous on the part of the individuals even if intentional on the part of the community. In other words, the dynamic behind the spontaneous memorials played out in very different ways for different people in different locations, and it is important to document and collect those less dramatic and public expressions as well.9 But even if museums have the resources to collect all these kinds of materials, should they? What exactly do memorial materials and the ephemera of loss tell us about history? Certainly they are important as evidence of grief and mourning, an important part of that moment, which connects us to larger issues of how our society mourns and copes with

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Illustration 12.2. Jeffrey Wiener’s family members distributed a poster during their search after 9/11. Sadly, they did not find Jeff alive. Gifted by Robin Wiener. National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

tragedy. “But how much do we actually need to tell that particular story, among all the stories of September 11?” Gardner and Henry (2002: 42) ask.w “As emotionally evocative as the missing persons posters, spontaneous memorials, and commemorative art may be, they do not tell all the stories that we need to tell.” Such objects were created to express grief and indeed are emotionally compelling, but other, less dramatic objects are often more effective in engaging the public in the many stories of

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September 11. As Gardner and Henry (2002: 45) note, “sometimes the most seemingly ordinary or unremarkable objects are the ones that speak most eloquently about the human experience of tragedy.” Thus NMAH collected objects that told stories of ordinary people in extraordinary situations—the squeegee of window washer Jan Demzcur that was the key to the escape of a group of men from a World Trade Center elevator, the shoes that Cecilia Benavente took off as she escaped from the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center, or Navy Lt. Commander David Tarantino’s nametag, torn off his shirt by a man he had just met who wanted to be able to tell about Tarantino’s heroic acts in rescuing survivors at the Pentagon. In collecting such objects, the NMAH did what museums do on a routine basis: make choices about what to collect, judgment calls that may sometimes appear idiosyncratic but are always grounded in curatorial knowledge and expertise. We had to take care in this situation not to let emotions overrule that judgment. Museum collecting is for the long term, not for the moment, and we have to be prepared to live with and care for what we collect long after the moment has passed.

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Collecting and Memorialization Field collecting of memorial materials was important in documenting loss and grief, but the way in which the materials were retrieved, often in bulk, distanced the museums from those who grieved. Such was not the case for more traditional collecting that involved a transaction between a museum and a known donor. In that context, grief and memorialization ceased to be just an area of collecting and became the key to understanding the collecting process or relationship. The collecting transaction between victims’ families and friends and the receiving museums—respectively the gift and the receipt of an object—reflected a different dynamic from field collecting, uniquely grounded in the interplay between grief, memory, and history. Giving objects to September 11 collections was itself an expression of grief and an act of memorialization by the individuals and institutions who did so—the act of giving was a way of memorializing the individuals and the day, of ensuring that those stories would not be forgotten. As such, donating to museums became part of what historian Ed Linenthal (2001: 98–108) terms “active grief ”—moving beyond private, intimate, passive grief to take action to preserve the memory of a moment and its consequences. While not as spontaneous an expression as the shrines, such donations are nevertheless self-directed and intensely personal, unlike official memorials. The need on the part of many people to express

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their grief in this way created collecting opportunities for curators: instead of holding on to objects for their individual needs, people offered them to museums, to public memory. But that “active grief ” also made the work of curators more difficult—they more often had to say “No, thank you” to individuals struggling to address their grief and preserve their memories through gifts to museums. No museum could collect everything, no matter the reason for the offer. And similarly, when museums collected such objects, they were also arguably participating in the act of memorialization, not simply being neutral collecting institutions going about their business. In choosing objects and bringing them into our museums’ collections, we infused them with power. Consider, for example, a firefighter’s pry bar collected by the Museum of American History. It was a standard firefighter’s tool owned by New York Fire Department Lt. Kevin Pfeifer, who was killed in the World Trade Center collapse, and was given to the museum in his memory by his brother, FDNY Battalion Chief Joseph W. Pfeifer.10 In deciding to collect it, the museum conferred on it special status—this ordinary object was transformed into one of “the” objects of September 11, part of the nation’s collection and part of the official memory of that day. Lt. Pfeifer’s story took on a level of meaning it would not otherwise have had—it ceased to be a private story of loss and became part of the public narrative, indeed part of our collective memory. Tied up in this concept of memorialization is what museums call “relics”—objects that may provide immediate, tangible, intimate connections to the past but do not constitute historical evidence or proof. Such objects, often no more than touchstones or keepsakes, evoke the feelings of the moment but do not help us understand what happened. In the context of September 11, ordinary, profane objects or fragments—pieces of twisted steel from the World Trade Center or airplane fragments—became objects of extraordinary emotional if not religious importance. In taking these objects into the collections, museums performed an active role in our collective grief, declaring them icons of our shared loss, concrete testimony to that day and its impact. While the stories of September 11 are more complicated than can be conveyed with a piece of steel or a fragment of architecture, such objects were immensely important to the public, constituting memorials to those who died that day. Museums also participated more directly and consciously in public memorialization. The Museum of the City of New York created a “Virtual Union Square,” an online version of the spontaneous memorials cropping up around the city. Visitors to the MCNY web site were invited to contribute artwork, photographs, or remembrances—as they were doing at locations around the city at the same time. (Gardner and Henry 2002:

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50) The NMAH worked with George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media and the American Social History Project at the City University of New York Graduate Center to collect September 11 stories through the web.11 Individuals have left over 12,500 stories about what they did, saw, or heard on September 11, some long and detailed but others simple statements of loss or anger. The resultant September 11 Digital Archive became a form of online memorial, a place to remember and reflect, to share the stories and images that constitute the memory of that day (Sparrow 2004: 397–415). The Museum of American History hoped that the development of this web-based archive would take off some of the pressure to memorialize September 11, a function the NMAH argued was inconsistent with its museum function. Well aware of the tension between memory and history, between memorialization and historical interpretation, the museum saw the digital archive as a vehicle for sharing voice, a virtual space for memory.

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Museums as Sacred Places Museums played an important role in the public’s transition from active grief to memory to history in the months that followed the terrorist attacks. In the immediate aftermath, spontaneous shrines functioned as pilgrimage sites, providing, as Grider (2001) argues, places at which we could attempt “to come to grips with events which numb our emotions and defy explanation. The shrines reduce the overwhelming enormity of the catastrophe to a more manageable human scale, thus helping to make the event more comprehensible.” As the days stretched into weeks and months and the temporary shrines were dismantled, museums faced pressure to step in and fill that need for a sacred space. Some museums embraced that role as part of their mission as cultural institutions, arguing that museums could play an important role in civic healing. Others such as the National Museum of American History emphasized repeatedly that museums and memorials serve fundamentally different purposes. The NMAH argued that the function of museums is to provide historical meaning or understanding, but that the role of memorials is only to evoke emotion and inspire memory, with messages that are very selective and lack the complexity that are at the heart of good history. This perspective is institutionalized in, for example, the establishment of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza separate from the John F. Kennedy Memorial Plaza, and in the development of both the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum as composed each of two distinct spaces and functions.

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In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, a number of museums in New York invited the public to write in memory books, light candles, draw pictures—in other words to express their grief within museum walls as they were doing elsewhere around the city. The New York State Museum decided to embrace that role more formally, erecting in a gallery that November two silhouettes of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, composed of small bronzed squares representing individuals who had died there (Gardner and Henry 2001: 49–50). Naming it the World Trade Center Memorial, the museum explicitly adopted a memorial role. But others stopped short of that role and only exhibited memorial material, proposing that exhibiting such materials was a more appropriate healing role for museums—providing a context for people to reflect and remember. The New York Fire Museum created a changing exhibit of memorial material, the Mesoamerica Foundation developed a traveling exhibition of missing fliers entitled Missing: Last Seen at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and CityLore organized Missing: The Streetscape and Wordscape of a City in Mourning, an exhibition of photographs of the memorials (Gardner and Henry 2001: 50).

Illustration 12.3. Imam Moujahed Bakhach reflects on his experience of September 11 in the exhibition September 11: Bearing Witness to History, on view at the Fort Worth (TX) Museum of Science and History, the inaugural museum on a seven-city tour (2003–2006). The exhibition was organized by the National Museum of American History. Photo: Smithsonian Institution. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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The Museum of American History tried to avoid any involvement in memorialization, arguing that what museums do is provide perspective and context, not serve as vehicles for expression of grief or condolence. This echoed the stance of the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum, which explicitly separated their memorial function from that of their museum. An outdoor space populated by empty chairs and featuring monumental gates, a reflecting pool, and other symbolic features, the Oklahoma City memorial provides a sacred place to remember and reflect, while the nearby museum features didactic exhibitions developed to help people understand the events of 19 April 1995.12 The NMAH quickly learned, however, that the public did not understand or share that perspective. The museum received proposal after proposal for memorials—to take portions of the World Trade Center or a smashed fire truck and establish a place at the museum where Americans could honor those who had lost their lives. As the first anniversary loomed, that discussion became more than theoretical. How would the Museum of American History mark that day? Should the museum’s goal be simply to provide a place to remember and reflect? Or should it try to do more, to interpret the events of September 11? Could we bring historical perspective to this event only one year later? Should we even try? What would be the appropriate role for the museum? The NMAH spent quite a bit of time working through those questions and concluded that, although we did not feel that we yet had the distance or perspective to explain the events of September 11, we could provide a place for Americans to come together to mark that anniversary, a place to remember and reflect—we should indeed serve a memorial function, despite our initial misgivings. We also recognized that, at that moment, that was the only politically feasible response—few people would welcome a careful explanation of why September 11 happened. The time was simply not right. What we could and should do is provide the public a place for commemoration and memorialization, acknowledge the many voices, stories, perspectives of that day, and give visitors opportunities to contribute, not simply observe. In other words, we could provide a sacred space, a place for civic healing. On 11 September 2002, NMAH opened the exhibit September 11: Bearing Witness to History. In developing the exhibit, the museum looked to the work of colleagues at the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum, the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC—they have demonstrated that “the emotional impact for the visitor of being physically confronted with the raw material of

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history, of being asked to remember and reflect, can be a powerful step in the process of questioning and understanding broader historical issues” (Gardner and Henry 2001: 43). Arguably the look and feel of the exhibit was more memorial than museum:

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• The design was spare, with the objects spaced apart for emotional impact—open, quiet space for contemplation and reflection. • The museum worked with grief counselors in developing the exhibit—it was designed so that you could always see your way out, so that you could make choices about what to see. • The museum did not attempt to tell a comprehensive story but rather to evoke the day and its aftermath. • The exhibit focused on the victims, survivors, and rescuers rather than on the terrorists, relegating the latter to only brief references. • The museum crafted the exhibition as a place for memory, taking care to share voice and authority with not only the victims, survivors, and rescuers but also our visitors.

In other words, the museum engaged with the public on very personal levels—which was a departure for a museum that usually just interprets the past. The events of September 11 were still fresh in many people’s minds, and the exhibition was designed to evoke strong emotions and memories. However, the museum avoided perhaps “the” defining element of a memorial—there was no list of victims. Instead the museum simply dedicated the exhibit to the victims, the survivors, and the rescuers. Over its ten-month run in Washington, DC, the exhibition became a pilgrimage site, with over a million visitors quietly filing through it as though on holy ground. While the public response exceeded all expectations, the exhibition did not evoke the one response we were concerned about. No one left objects or tokens—no one responded to it as they did to the spontaneous memorials or to official memorials such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. But perhaps that was because the museum incorporated into the exhibition opportunities for visitors to express themselves through the written word, the spoken word, and drawing, as well as to express themselves later through the exhibition web site. At the end of the exhibition, visitors were asked: “How did you witness history on September 11, 2001? How has your life been affected by that day?” They could respond by either writing or drawing on cards provided by the museum or speaking over a phone set up in the space. While there were some expressions of anger toward not only the terrorists but Muslims in general, few expressed political sentiments beyond pride and patriotism, with numerous repetitions of “God bless America” or “United we stand.” What runs through nearly all the comments are expressions of sadness, loss, and fear. Over 20,000 of the cards have been digitized,

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and 425 voicemails have been preserved, all made available through the September 11 Digital Archive, constituting a more institutionalized version of the cybershrines that proliferated in response September 11.13 Selected cards were also posted in the exhibition, much as expressions of grief and condolences were shared at the spontaneous shrines. The overall experience was communal, with visitors grouped quietly around tables, sharing with each other their responses. In sum, the exhibition clearly served a memorial function, and the museum indeed engaged in memorialization despite our original intentions. The Tribute WTC Visitor Center has since established a similar area, collecting tens of thousands of visitor response cards in forty-seven languages from individuals from 110 countries.14

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Conclusion Americans responded to September 11 with grief for themselves and anger toward the terrorists and those who supported them—indeed, it provided an all too rare sense of connectedness. Unfortunately, racial profiling and discrimination, uncritical patriotism, and war were also consequences of that day. September 11 posed challenges for museums as they attempted to do their work in a new and difficult context, but that context did not include political criticism or censorship, and collecting was not politicized. While the actions or positions of American museums after September 11 may be viewed from outside the country as political, within the United States they were not. The only differences or disagreements had to do with museums’ collecting jurisdictions, not politics—and even those tensions eased when, in a rare moment of collaboration, the NMAH and the MCNY organized a thirty-museum collecting consortium in September 2001. The use of September 11 collections in future exhibitions, however, will almost certainly be contested. As the shock of September 11 fades into memory, museums face the challenge of coming to grips with why terrorists attacked the United States and what that says about the nation’s role in a globalized society—and an honest assessment is certain to be unsettling for the American public. The challenge for not only the NMAH but all museums regarding September 11 was to steer a course that responded to the needs and concerns of the public without compromising our fundamental commitment to making meaning of the past. But then, that is always our goal. What was different was the level of emotion that constituted the context for and shaped our work. We faced new challenges to our sense of our work and ourselves as professionals, and it was critical that we respond to

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those challenges thoughtfully and positively, embracing the opportunity to help our visitors understand these tragic events and contributing to the nation’s healing.

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Notes 1. This section draws on my article in Museum News, Gardner (2002). 2. For background on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the related collection, see http://www.nps.gov/mrc/vvmc/vvmc.htm; see also Michael Sofarelli, Letters on the Wall: Offerings and Remembrances from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (New York: Smithsonian Books, 2006). For background on the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum and its collection, see http://www .oklahomacitynationalmemorial.org/index.php. For background on the events at Columbine High School, see http://www.littletongov.org/news/columbine.asp, and the contribution of Sylvia Grider in this volume. 3. See the ethics statement of the International Council of Museums at http://icom .museum/ethics.html#intro, the statement of the American Association of Museums at http://www.aam-us.org/museumresources/ethics/coe.cfm, and the statement of the American Association for State and Local History at http://www .aaslh.org/ethics.htm. 4. E-mail, David Shayt to Jim Gardner, 5 March 2007. 5. Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum, “Policy for Removing Items Left on Memorial Site” and “Revised Policy for Processing Fence Materials,” Archives Policies and Procedures (Revised October 2007). 6. For more details on the New York State Museum’s September 11 collection and exhibition, see http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/wtc/index.html. 7. Press release, New York Historical Society, 29 August 2006, https://www .nyhistory.org/web/default.php?section=whats_new&page=detail_pr&id= 6585462. Accessed 28 April 2008. 8. Quoted at http://americanhistory.si.edu/september11/collection/search_record .asp?search=1&keywords=Mobile&mode=&record=0. 9. For additional information on the NMAH’s September 11 collections, see http:// americanhistory.si.edu/september11/collection/index.asp. 10. For additional information on the pry bar, see http://americanhistory.si.edu/ september11/collection/search_record.asp?search=1&keywords=Pry percent20bar &mode=&record=0. 11. The entries can be accessed at http://911digitalarchive.org/galleries.php?colle ction_id=23. 12. For additional information on the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum, see http://www.oklahomacitynationalmemorial.org/index.php. 13. For digitized comments and drawings, see http://911digitalarchive.org/smithsoniancards/. For voicemails, see http://911digitalarchive.org/galleries.php? collection_id=40. An additional 2,285 individuals left comments via the web— see http://911digitalarchive.org/galleries.php?collection_id=30. 14. For examples of the comment cards from the Tribute WTC Visitor Center, see http://www.tributewtc.org/exhibits/visitor_cards.html.

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References

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Gardner, James B. (2002). “Collecting a National Tragedy.” Museum News 81(2): 42–45, 66–67. ———. (2004). “Contested Terrain: History, Museums, and the Public.” Public Historian 26(4): 11–21. Gardner, James B., and Sarah M. Henry. (2002). “September 11 and the Mourning After: Reflections on Collecting and Interpreting the History of Tragedy.” Public Historian 24(3): 37–52. Grider, Sylvia (2001). “Spontaneous Shrines: A Modern Response to Tragedy and Disaster.” New Directions in Folklore 5(5), http://www.temple.edu/isllc/newFolk/ shrines.html. Accessed 30 April 2008. Linenthal, Edward (2001). The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory. New York: Oxford University Press. Rosenzweig, Roy, and David Thelen. (1998). The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Sparrow, James J. (2004). “On the Web: The September 11 Digital Archive.” In James B. Gardner and Peter S. LaPaglia, eds., Public History: Essays from the Field. Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing Company, 397–415.

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Chapter 13

Piazza Carlo Giuliani— G8 Summit, Genoa 2001 Death, Testimony, Memory1 Fabio Caffarena and Carlo Stiaccini

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From the Piazza Alimonda to the Archive If memory is to be collective and useful, “an altar cannot be in honor of, but is to the memory of a person” (Camon 1978: 84). The memory of major events tends to crystallize, to acquire a fixed frame of interpretations and analysis, suggested by personal feelings and political beliefs. Tragedies, especially when highly shocking, tend to turn into “legendary” narratives, and the more important they are, the harder it becomes to examine them critically. The events of July 2001 in Genoa are already part of a militant legend. The death of Carlo Giuliani during the G8 riots was instantly transformed into a symbol of a new Resistenza, which had its roots—directly and perhaps not thoroughly correctly—in the legend of the fight against Nazism and Fascism between 1943 and 1945. The heated debates that followed the events of July 2001 in Genoa were largely based on opposing ideologies and interpretations, rather than on an objective reconstruction of the facts and their impact. It was the idea of a group of researchers and students from the University of Genoa to collect the messages that had been left in the Piazza Alimonda, in order not to let the material relics of these complex social events, the result of many individual motivations, to go to waste, and to explore them with the right instruments and methods. For that goal, the Fondo Carlo Giuliani was created in the Archivio Ligure della Scrittura Popolare (ALSP), a research center of the Department of Modern and Contemporary History of

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the University of Genoa that promotes studies on popular writings.2 The Fondo consists of thousands of messages that would otherwise have been destroyed by weather and devastation. The first acquisitions started three months after the event and date back to November 2001. At the same time, the electronic reproduction of all the documents was set in motion. We soon realized that it was impossible to collect everything and put it all in one archive: monitoring the piazza daily to avoid losses and destruction proved too hard a task. The research team was helped by Carlo Giuliani’s parents, who patiently collected most of the testimonies and gave us the material they had already taken from the piazza, to be copied and catalogued. Over two thousand items were collected in the period 2001–2005. These unusual examples of popular communication, saved and ordered, are characterized first of all by the inventive, easy, and bold way in which their authors deal with a variety of forms and styles. We could describe them as “noncompliant,” not only because of their contents, but also in view of the broad range of materials on which the messages were written (T-shirts, stones, train tickets, balloons) and the writing tools used (felt-tip pens, ballpoint pens, colored pencils, spray paints). These are also meaningful, and cannot be separated from the writings itself: these elements are words to touch. Our work resulted in an anthology of images and transcriptions, Fragili, resistenti, which was published in 2005 (Caffarena and Stiaccini 2005).3 Given the wide variety of miscellaneous texts, the documents were divided into five sections: “Words to Touch,” “Itineraries,” “Appurtenance,” “Generations,” and “Emotions.” For instance, those that were closely related to their writing material were collected under the title “Words to Touch,” whereas the most intimate ones, mostly written by women of all ages, were listed under “Emotions.” The cataloguing and analyzing of the collection did not consist of making a simple summary. We had doubts, opposing views, and long discussions about which documents to select, what criteria to use, and where to draw the line between the need to report and the right to privacy. Although the anthology is imbued with all these tensions, the team agreed on the main objective of the book, which was to explore the explosion of protest through writing. Our intention was not to raise a monument to Carlo Giuliani, although our work could be misunderstood in that regard. The Fondo Giuliani is intended as a basic source for further study on the 2001 G8 summit, the creation of places of collective identity, and the processes of memorialization. Although the texts collected from Piazza Alimonda are pieces of a puzzle that will never be completed, and will not be sufficient to totally

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reconstruct the events leading to Carlo’s death, they do provide access to important parts of the events. Moreover, the railings of the church of Nostra Signora del Rimedio have since been cleared, cleaned, and repainted, as though nothing ever happened there. The need to restore order and keep the site tidy and organized eventually prevailed over the disturbing colorfulness of memory.

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G8 Summit, Genoa, 20–22 July 2001: The Show In July 2001, the annual summit meeting of the G8—the former Group of Eight, an intergovernmental forum of the richest industrial nations— was held in Genoa. For the occasion, the Italian city was turned into a metropolitan open-air theater, with menacing scenes and props, like the metal fences and containers that surrounded the off-limits red zone of the G8 summit itself, conjuring up images of an urban battlefield. The whole historic center and the old harbor area were temporarily closed off and set aside for heads of state and diplomats. It was an incredible media spectacle, and normality was put on hold until the end of the summit. Trapped between the sea and the mountains, and with a center that is a maze of small streets and alleys, Genoa is not an ideal location for frontpage events, especially when the risk of accidents and conflicts is high and security is of paramount importance. Nevertheless, despite its glaring logistic shortcomings, Genoa was turned into a metropolitan theater populated by actors and crowd artists: dozens of political leaders, fifteen thousand policemen, and an estimated three hundred thousand demonstrators, including a small, violent minority. A center-left government had decided on the venue for the G8 summit, and the subsequent center-right government (elected in June 2001) was determined to use the summit as a kind of governing ouverture, its political debut on the international stage. Everything, even the decorations, had to be perfect: green plants and trees, embellished with plastic fruit, were strategically set out, and for the duration of the summit, citizens were not allowed to hang out their laundry, in order not to spoil the image of a city that had to be on display for the media and shown to the world. Death was presumably not supposed to be part of the show, but nothing was really done to prevent it. In these types of events, violence can be useful, either to discredit the demonstrators or, from the point of view of extremist protesters, as an example of a global repressive system. Not surprisingly, the events of the summit were widely mediatized and instrumentalized by all parties involved. Media coverage was ex-

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tensive not only at the time of the summit, but also in the months leading up to it, thereby contributing to the creation of a conflictualesque atmosphere. The articles and stories that appeared in the main Italian newspapers constitute a proof of the construction of this atmosphere. On 6 May, for example, La Stampa announced “Genova, arrivano i capi dell’esercito anti G8” (Leaders of the anti-G8 movement march to Genoa). On 23 June, La Repubblica dedicated a story to the summit entitled “E a Genova sarà schierata anche la contraerei” (Genoa needs land-to-air missiles). On 10 June, Il Corriere della Sera published “G8—allarme per i duemila irriducibili pronti a tutto” (G8—Alarm for 2,000 stop-atnothing extremists). Thus, although the urban battle that took place during the summit in Genoa was, in a way, stage directed, the train of events that led from violence to death was not in the screenplay. Already during the 1970s, street battles in Italy between workers, students, protesters, and the police were frequent and often violent. For instance, on 12 May 1977, student Giorgiana Masi was killed in Rome during a demonstration of autonomi against the government’s repressive policy. At that time, however, both sides seemed more prepared for fighting, which was then properly organized, and the intention of the government to adopt the logic of a state of emergency was more obvious. At the G8 summit in Genoa, however, the fight was organized only by small fringe groups of activists; the demonstrators in general had no military planning whatsoever. Most people took part in the demonstrations as individuals, not as members of political parties or militant groups. In Genoa, however, the tension could be felt days in advance, fueled by pressure from the media, which covered every disturbing detail and helped to create a seemingly self-fulfilling prophecy that the worst would happen. When Carlo Giuliani was shot, his death was reported live, almost following a movie script. Although not programmed, the bloodshed could in fact have been foreseen, considering the violent turn taken by the events. At the time, the news was monopolized by images of what can be described as urban guerrilla warfare, which gripped TV viewers and newspaper readers alike. It could be argued that violence was advertised through the media, as there was endless filming of and reporting on the events by TV networks and freelance reporters, and there were countless online presentations of videos and photographs taken by ordinary people (Genoa Social Forum 2001). The radio broadcasts had even more dramatic effects, with the frantic voices of those who were attacking and those who were running away, of people assaulting and being assaulted, of journalists being prevented from doing their work, of rescuers being prevented from helping those in need, accompanied by the background

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sounds of devastation. The inhabitants of Genoa felt deprived, for the first time in their lives, of their most fundamental civil rights. It was the outcry of a city that was deeply upset both at the level of individual consciences and collectively (Radio Popolare 2001).

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Death in Real Time Carlo Giuliani was twenty-three years old. On 20 July 2001, in circumstances yet to be fully ascertained, he was shot dead by Mario Placanica, a carabiniere of the same age, during an antiglobal demonstration that turned violent near Genova Brignole railway station, in the course of a violent fight between demonstrators and police officers. This is the version presented during the trial—a version that was contested by Carlo’s parents and also by Placanica (who was later discharged from the police force). In their opinion, both the circumstances of Carlo’s death and the identity of his murderer are still unclear. After the shooting, Carlo Giuliani lay motionless on the pavement, covered in blood. His lifeless body—a simple T-shirt, a roll of tape around one arm—and his disfigured face were exposed, displayed to the world. It was a tragic event that nevertheless gained massive media coverage, just like the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York City did a few months later. Although the two events had different impacts, both were broadcast in real time, watched as they were happening, with an impressive simultaneousness of signifier and signified (Grasso 2006). Carlo Giuliani’s death was thus broadcast live. “There could have been more cases like Giuliani’s,” the deputy chief of police told the inquiry committee that was set up by the Italian parliament. His words voiced the fear that all those who had been in Genoa at the time had experienced. The closing off of the city center and the violent methods of repression used against thousands of protesters were seen as the government’s new, harsher approach to maintaining law and order. These disturbing feelings gained substance from the news that hundreds of demonstrators had been taken to the temporary detention center in the district of Bolzaneto and submitted to physical and verbal abuse, along with details of a police raid carried out on 22 July against demonstrators housed in the Armando Diaz public school complex. Carlo Giuliani’s death, the acts at the detention center in Bolzaneto, and the raid on the school shocked the general public. These, however, are still open cases in the attorney’s office. In this context, Carlo Giuliani immediately became an icon of crushed dignity and hopes, a symbol of vulnerability and pain. Not a hero, defi-

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nitely, but a victim among countless other victims; unprepared for the fight (his weapon was a fire extinguisher picked up in the confusion), unprepared for his death. It is because of this disarming vulnerability that Carlo was not turned into a militant legend. As anthropologist Marco Aime wrote, “Carlo Giuliani was not one of the many ‘fallen comrades’ and did not become a martyr.” He was not transformed into the symbol of a political ideal or of a political party, unlike the victims of the 1960s and the 1970s. Carlo was rather an antihero turned into a hero by sheer chance, the victim of an unforeseeable and unacceptable violent death that gave him a symbolic meaning. Not surprisingly, Carlo is universally considered un ragazzo (“just a guy”)—basic, neutral, minimal features allowing for no political exploitations or labels. “Just a guy:” this simple attribute has become a new, alternative, way to make small politics. For example, in 2006 the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista dedicated their office at the Senate in honor of Carlo Giuliani. The person, the individual, was thus more important than any political or social roles, or functions served. No longer “one of them,” but one among many others. Compared to the protest movements of the previous decades, the focus changed: the world was no longer looked at through a wide-angle lens, to capture it as a whole, but through a telephoto lens, narrowing the angle of view and enlarging details. Thus, Carlo Giuliani has not become an ideological martyr. The love and affection shown by those who wanted to keep his memory alive was warm, addressed to him as an individual, not as a member of a group or a follower of a political credo. That is why so many people felt the need to communicate to Carlo. And, since he was not there to listen, they did it in writing. Carlo Giuliani was the recipient of many written messages—sent to him when he was dead.

Talking Places: A Testimony The history of the Republic of Italy is full of killed protesters, and the places where they died are remembered in songs and books, and by means of memorials, monuments, plaques, and dedications. Piazza Alimonda in Genoa is one of them, the first to become a crime scene in real time. Gaetano Alimonda (1818–1891) was a Genoese cardinal. Ironically, the peak of his popularity occurred when the square dedicated to him became a tragic crime scene, and thus he was virtually dispossessed. Although Carlo Giuliani’s ashes are in the monumental Staglieno cemetery in Genoa, his last abode is in the square where he was killed. Since then, Piazza Alimonda has become a place of collective memory, where

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the events leading to Carlo’s death have been kept alive. Notwithstanding the removal of the grassroots memorial, the square is still imbued with contrasting emotions. Right after Carlo’s death, messages started to be attached to the iron railings around the church of Santa Maria del Rimedio in Piazza Alimonda, a testimony that is at the same time personal and collective, intimate and civic. Small gifts were left there, turning that corner of the square into a memorial, almost a shrine. Concita De Gregorio, from the journal La Repubblica, vividly described this memorial of paper, objects, and words, emphasizing its immediate and unprompted nature: Sirio, 20 years old, rode a silver Vespa. He had a black band around his nice, clean T-shirt. He took off his helmet, crossed the road, climbed on the wall and crossed out “Gaetano Alimonda” on the plaque marking the square. Under “Piazza,” he wrote with a green felt tip pen “Carlo Giuliano, ragazzo.” A foreign journalist approached him with a microphone. Sirio answered in English: “He was not a punk, he was not a deadbeat. He was just a guy.” Then he added: “Now go away, please.” He sat down on the pavement near the others, silent. People passing by saw the plaque and briefly clapped. It was a hot and windy day. On the sawdust that had been used to soak up Carlo’s blood there were a few red blossoms, their stems and roots still covered in soil. Somebody took them off the flower bed in front of the church of Nostra Signora del Rimedio and placed them there. The spot where Carlo died was shielded by two ice-cream boards, with a tear bomb in the middle, like a candle. There were also a camp stove, two red candles, lit, and a packet of cigarettes. “For the journey,” said the two guys who left them there. Old people who lived nearby shook their heads. A note, on a piece of paper, said: “For this blood and this life not to go to waste.” A T-shirt, with a few words written in ink, “A guy was killed in the square where I was born.” Andrea was gently moving things around, putting them in order. His friends stood close by. (De Gregorio 2006: 52)

Illustration 13.1. Memorial at the gates of the church of Nostra Signora del Rimedio in Piazza Alimonda, Genoa, July 2001. Photo: ALSP. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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There have been talks about a permanent monument to Carlo Giuliani, or at least an official plaque, promoted mainly by a few members of the local left, but political opposition and a certain resistance on the part of the population have so far stalled the project. Openly encouraging a “proper” monument could be embarrassing for the left-wing party, which could be accused of being too radical, and the very idea of a monument was highly irritating for the right wing and unwelcomed by the population at large. In any case, an official recognition would probably have changed the nature of this spontaneous memorial. “We will not turn you into a memorial stone … because you were no paper hero” is written in a note left there for Carlo. A ritual celebration of memory through “meaningless” books or “empty” official plaques was felt as inadequate for what happened to Carlo. The iron railings around the church of Nostra Signora del Rimedio, however, were also a sacred site, a memorial in progress, almost a forum that in its openness was like a wound for the city, distressingly effective in a way that a permanent monument or a marble stone could never have been. If one accepts Marc Augé’s definition of urban and depersonalized existential spaces, often outside a local, physical context, as “non places” (1995), then the Piazza Alimonda must be seen as a real place. The identity it has acquired in time is closely related to its reality, to the actual space lived in after Carlo’s death. So much that, albeit not included in any directory, it proved to be a proper address, and postcards and letters from all over Italy addressed to “Piazza Carlo Giuliani” have actually been delivered to Piazza Alimonda, and not returned to sender, or lost in the mail bureaucracy, classified as having no recognizable address. As late as August 2002, a postcard sent to “Cancellata di Piazza Alimonda” (Piazza Alimonda’s railings) arrived from the Isle of Elba. It said: “I’m not there today with mum and dad to greet you, but I’m thinking of you all the same, and I’ve been looking for you in the blue sea, imagining you diving from the rocks. A big hug. With love, Roberta.” Carlo was adopted by a spontaneous, unorganized community comprising a variety of people, with different backgrounds and different political opinions, different genders and different nationalities, who, however, shared a sense of profound sorrow for a boy who had been shot dead in the middle of a street and were united by a sense of emotional belonging. To have this adoption actually take place and express itself, even in a sometimes contradictory way, a specific physical place was needed, a kind of meeting point. Almost in retaliation for the temporary eviction order that the red zone had meant for the people of Genoa during the G8 summit, the people took possession of Piazza Alimonda in order to give it

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to Carlo, together with the collection of documents and testimonies dedicated to his memory. If the place took over the event, the event took over the place too, inextricably connecting space and memory. The church railings became a giant billboard for anybody to express their feelings and emotions. Just a few hours after Carlo’s death, people of all ages and social backgrounds felt the need to go there and leave messages, signs of their presence. Many people traveled to Genoa to visit Piazza Carlo Giuliani, and many decided to pass by while they were traveling through, as though it were the destination of a pilgrimage. “I like stopping here,” is written in one of the notes, “in this city which is not mine, or perhaps it is.” “I’m only staying a few hours here in Genoa, waiting for the train to Florence,” a girl had written on a railway ticket that was attached to the railings almost two years after the event, “but any time I come here I feel the need to pay a visit to this square and think of you.” Tokens, diaries, drawings, notes, collages, poems, small objects, and annotated newspaper clips formed a kind of collective diary, expressing rage, love, loyalty, regret, a need to remember. Someone wrote on the railings: “Do not hope in our violence.” The messages do not invoke violence: they are full of flowers and little hearts, with no guns or weapons. Carlo is a “sweet child,” not a fallen warrior. Nobody promised to vindicate him. Rather, many wished him well, “wherever you are.” “Be happy,” says one. A few hug him, “you and all the other citizens of the world.” Words are tinged with love for Carlo and with rage about the tragedy, but there are no bitter comments against the then prime minister, and no animosity toward Placanica. A note even describes the carabiniere as “a child.” In time, personal diaries and long letters were added too, bits and pieces of personal lives to be shared with others. It was a kind of spontaneous, collective autobiography, where people talked about themselves, where they expressed their loathing of injustice and violence, and their feelings for Carlo, deeply identifying with him. Taken individually or as a whole, these texts account for a complex and manifold narrative, not devoid of inconsistencies, but certainly very useful in order to understand the process of dealing with a death like Carlo’s, in its political and social aspects, but also in its personal and intimate dimensions. Messages bear witness to shared views and generation clashes, to individual and collective stands, but there are also notes written together by parents and children, and by grandparents and grandchildren. Young generations have often been the soul and culture of new movements, but in this case the connections with movements of the past are undeniable. The railings of the church in Piazza Carlo Giuliani were the gathering point for different generations, even with obvious differences. Children’s

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drawings, teenagers’ slogans, and the reminiscences of fifty-year-olds who took part in demonstrations in the 1960s, were side by side without clashing. The writers often gave their ages beside their signatures, as though to emphasize the differences, and to make the whole thing more precious. The messages on the railings of Piazza Alimonda seem to run across a complex society, sometimes as difficult to comprehend as some of the texts. Attached to Carlo’s memorial were communist hammer and sickle symbols, images of Padre Pio4 and Buddha, a mix of atheism and religious consolation that sometimes coexist at the same place. It is not easy to find a way through so many words, so many intimate notes that, however, were written to be exposed, at once simple and cryptic, private and public. Cataloguing and explaining them in a consistent way as a whole is not possible. They include original texts, quotations, popular images (like Che Guevara), disarmingly spontaneous thoughts, and organic mili-

Illustration 13.2. Letter and rubber balls: “Dear Carlo Giuliani, I wish bullets were like these colored rubber balls. Life would be easier for all and you would still be with us. Tommaso, 10, 12/08/01. Andrea, 9, Milan.” Photo: ALSP. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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tant positions. What they have in common, however, is the grassroots need to fight indifference and a desire to take sides, for “partisanship” according to Gramsci’s definition of civic responsibility as the sole dignified form of citizenship (Gramsci 1917). There are notes set out in the tidiest writing and formal letters, as well as messages that follow no traditional standards, written on anything from stones to pill boxes, cigarette packs to T-shirts, beer bottles, banknotes, balloons, CD boxes, and CDs (by Vasco Rossi, for example), and even on clothes, tissues, and brown paper bags. This patchwork of forms and objects implies a variety of writers, from the old granny to the young anarchist. They all stopped by and left a little thought, a memento, a note; some had traveled all the way to Genoa specifically to do so. It was not a constant flow, at least until 2005. There were peaks around the time of the anniversary of Carlo’s death and on other poignant dates, such as Carlo’s birthday on 14 March. The nature of the texts changed in time too: the most recent tend to be more intimate and introspective, the result of the writers having thought over the events, also in view of the social and political developments that occurred after the G8 summit. A woman called Milla writes: Dear diary, it is Sunday night, almost a year after Genoa. My mind is full, full of voices and images. I was in Genoa this week last year, a week before the day that became one of the most important in my whole life. Cristiano and I rode our bikes through Genoa night and day and we felt like ‘those in Genoa,’ those who were there and lived the darkest days of their democracy, a blackout of law and order. … They told us Genoa was still the same, as if nothing had happened, but Cristiano and I noticed almost invisible traces, open wounds from a battle that was artificial but became history and it is still living and painful, like a scar. We noticed shop windows still boarded up, a broken grate, words written on walls with spray paint, a renovated bank and the police station, as motionless and as deadly as a statue, just like a year ago. … It was powerful, it was sad, and possibly meaningless. We could have done without it—you can be a rebel much more efficiently, you can object and disobey in a much more intelligent way. … But, albeit dismayed and critical, we watched yet again Comencini’s movie,5 and remained motionless in front of those images, still painful and fascinating, impossible to explain. We were looking for an answer: could something be done in order to avoid so much pain?

The motivations behind these texts are not easy to understand. Some messages seem to spring from an impulsive need on the part of the writers to record their presence there or to express grief for Carlo’s tragic death, while others seem the result of a subtle form of mediatization. Several messages include observations such as “I saw you on TV” or “I don’t know you, but I read about you in the papers and I think you are a good guy.” It is possible that extensive media coverage of certain events, people, or even deaths, might prompt in the public a desire to be part of it, regardless of the event per se, of personal emotions, or ideals: a mediainduced, highly contagious presentiality syndrome.

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However, most of the notes dedicated to Carlo are undoubtedly the expression of a sense of active belonging to a community. In a way, Carlo’s death was a symbolic, and dramatically positive, beginning. The memorial marked a new, more active approach to politics on the part of the common people, conveying a deeper personal and social awareness. The tributes left in the square where Carlo died, or perhaps to the square where Carlo died, bear witness to this new attitude. Among the many notes that claim to be part of this new trend is Filippo’s message:

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[A] year after your death we are all here again even more than last year to show that the movement exists and it exists also thanks to you, thinking about your innocent death many young people understood that it is no longer time to play and to try to make this world better that it is not easy to change.

This grassroots community has been defined as a “Movimento dei Movimenti” (Movement of Movements), but it is a definition that fails to capture the characteristics of this collection of antiglobalization groups and individuals. The notes in Piazza Alimonda testify that this movement, the community, consists of a variety of individuals with various social backgrounds and ideas, and various ages and nationalities. They coexist side by side, sharing ideals and values that are interpreted and expressed in their lives according to their particular point of view. It may not be a revolutionary movement, but it is definitely a strong form of grassroots contestation against global trends of massification and dominant cultural models imposed by today’s society. The texts of Piazza Alimonda form a broad variety of different ways to oppose stereotypes and dogmatic adhesion, and to communicate civic values. One of the most meaningful representations of this view was signed “Prisoners of the Present”: Prisoners of brand names, of comfortable luxury, of frenzied shopping and doped up nights! Prisoners of temporary jobs, alienated and underpaid; Prisoners of anxiety, deadlines, rising bills and low budgets! Prisoners of GDP, MIB, NASDAQ,6 of the ugly, impersonal, sterile system of a “minority”! Prisoners of indifference, of intolerance of hatred deep inside for all those who are different!

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In this regard, the notes in Piazza Carlo Giuliani are not completely different from those sent to public figures or showbiz idols. However, they are not exclusively ethical or political: they include love letters and postcards with no political reference whatsoever. Politics—in its widest sense, not limited to party politics—makes the patchwork even more complex, but there is no doubt that ethical values and ideals, such as justice and peace, prevail over abstract ideology and militancy. Whereas the claims expressed by the contesters of the 1960s were compressed in theoretical frames according to specific political stands, here appurtenance is manifold, as shown by the variety of different membership cards that were attached to the railings: members of political parties, religious communities, trade unions, football clubs, and sports and leisure associations left their cards. Notes are written in a variety of languages, too: “Hi, sweet child, we’re still talking 2 u, ’cause we want to recall you, every second, how much we love you. … a better world, it is possible. Love Kid Simo”; “Wir sind alle Carlo Giuliani”; “Reclaim the world”; “El poder corrompe las consciencias.” The focus on individuality and subjectivity is reflected in the words and symbols offered, evoking different cultural contexts, and different ways of living. Individual, personal hopes prevail over collective claims, and texts are often autobiographical, as though behind the wish to talk about Carlo there was a need to talk about oneself. Some of the messages—particularly the notebooks containing the writings of more than one person—seem to be part of a dialogue between faraway people almost chatting through the collective writing in the square. This actual forum is not dissimilar from the virtual ones that have appeared on the web, as they address the same issues. It is as though the messages written to Carlo, as well as expressing grief and protest, outlined a self-portrait of a generation wishing to record its ways and ambitions. A variety of individuals made up this spontaneous chorus, expressing their need to integrate into a community without losing themselves in it. A study of the messages in Piazza Alimonda must take into account a number of other factors, however. How, for instance, did the exceptional ability on the part of Carlo’s parents to sublimate grief at a public level—besides the inevitable personal suffering—affect the development and quality of the phenomenon? Mr. and Mrs. Giuliani set up a network of national and international contacts in order to have the media follow the legal proceedings and make sure that justice could be done. They also created a committee (Comitato Piazza Carlo Giuliani) and a web site (www.piazzacarlogiuliani.org) to promote events to preserve the memory

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of what happened in Genoa in July 2001. Furthermore, they helped create RETI-INVISIBILI, a network of Italian associations that are fighting for truth and justice in a number of similar, still unsolved cases. Mr. and Mrs. Giuliani were the first to collect the notes left in Piazza Alimonda, and their hard work for justice has had an effect on the texts written for Carlo. Many of the messages are addressed to them, and particularly to Carlo’s mother, Heidi. And, to conclude, it is relevant to ask to what extent did Carlo’s personal visuals, with his baby face and small, slender, vulnerable body, influence his collective representation. The number of postcards portraying the Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry, and the number of references made to his character, mean something. Had an older person been killed, or a bigger and stronger man, would that have resulted in an equally intense memorialization? Death was not supposed to be part of the show, and Carlo Giulani, “just a guy,” the coincidental and unjust victim became part of a new Resistenza, expressed by the posted texts and mementos accumulated in a grassroots memorial. An instrument to fight indifference and mobilize civic responsibility and contest global trends of massification and current dominant cultural structures.

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Notes 1. The sections “From the Piazza Alimonda to the Archive”; “G8 Summit, Genoa, 20–22 July 2001: The Show” and “Death in real time” are by Fabio Caffarena; the section “Talking Places: A Testimony” is by Carlo Stiaccini. All sections were translated from Italian into English by Annamaria Biavasco. 2. The Archivio Ligure della Scrittura Popolare (ALSP) was founded in 1986. It is part of an international network of research centers that promote studies on popular writings. Its purpose is to recover and preserve original texts and/or electronic copies of writings by emigrants, soldiers, artisans, prisoners of war, political activists, women, and children from the past two centuries. By preventing the loss of these documents, it allows studies on contemporary events from the point of view of ordinary people to be carried out. The ALSP collection consists of more than 25,000 documents (letters, diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, accounts, school texts and photographs (http://www.dismec.unige.it). 3. This anthology by Caffarena and Stiaccini contains essays by anthropologist Marco Aime, linguist Lorenzo Coveri, sociologist Donatella Della Porta, and historian Antonio Gibelli. In 2002, ALSP published a special issue of its bulletin, Archivivo, entitled Ciao Carlo! Io non ti conosco neanche … Lettere, messaggi e poesie per Carlo Giuliani, also available at http://www.dismec.unige.it. 4. Padre Pio (1887–1968) was a Capuchin friar from San Giovanni Rotondo, in the south of Italy. He is the object of strong popular devotion, also because of his alleged stigmatization; his convent has become a major pilgrimage site.

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5. Referring to Carlo Giuliani ragazzo, by Francesca Comencini, made in 2002. 6. GDP stands for gross domestic product, a basic measure of a country’s economic performance; MIB is an international school of business management in Trieste, Italy; NASDAQ (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) is a very large electronic American stock exchange.

References

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Augé, Marc. (1995). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. New York: Verso Books. Caffarena, Fabio, and Carlo Stiaccini, eds. (2005). Fragili, resistenti. I messaggi di piazza Alimonda e la nascita di un luogo di identità collettiva. Milan: Terre di mezzo. Camon, Ferdinando. (1978). Un altare per la madre. Milan: Garzanti. ———. (1996). Memorial. Marlboro, VT: Marlboro Press. De Gregorio, Concita. (2006). Non lavate questo sangue. Luglio 2001: i giorni di Genova. Milan: Sperling & Kupfer Editori. Genoa Social Forum, ed. (2001). Genova. Il libro bianco. Milan: Nuova Iniziativa Editoriale (Cd). Gramsci, Antonio. (1917). “Indifferenti.” La città futura (11 February): 1. Grasso, Aldo, ed. (2006). Fare storia con la televisione. L’immagine come fonte, evento, memoria. Milan: Vita e Pensiero. Radio Popolare, ed. (2001). Genova/luglio 2001. Cronache. Milan: Errepi.

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Chapter 14

Memorializing a Controversial Politician The “Heritagization” of a Materialized Vox Populi Peter Jan Margry

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Smell of the Grave It was still dark when we arrived, early in the morning of 7 April 2004, at the Westerveld cemetery in Driehuis, a small town that lies north of Haarlem and about a twenty-minute drive from Amsterdam. The archivist of the Meertens Institute had driven there in her van, while I had taken my station wagon. Between them, the two vehicles had enough room to carry all the material we had come to fetch. The old, out-of-the-way cemetery—which in daylight is one of the most beautiful in the Netherlands, situated as it is in the hilly and romantically overgrown dune landscape along the Dutch coast—was pitch black and totally deserted. A small light was burning in the reception center at the entrance, where we met the cemetery director. We introduced ourselves and went through the rest of the procedure, speaking in somewhat hushed voices. This lent an extra charge to the excitement, precisely because our stillness suddenly began to contrast strangely with the swelling sound of a tow truck slowly climbing the dune behind the building. Speed was of the essence now that dawn was approaching, as our task had to be finished before anyone in the vicinity discovered what we were up to. We followed the tow truck up the dune. We did not have far to go, as the grave was quite close to the entrance. When we arrived at the grave, we saw that the gravedigger had done the necessary excavation: He had carefully removed the flower bed around the grave and uncovered the

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vault. The tow truck maneuvered into position and long cables were fixed around the heavy stone slab covering the tomb. A small glass monument mounted on top of the slab was in the way of the operations and was in danger of being shattered by the cables. However, the tow truck operator skillfully avoided the danger and lifted the slab without problems. When a floodlight lit up the open vault, we breathed a collective sigh of relief: There was indeed no longer a corpse in the grave. The Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn1—for this was his grave—had specified in his will that when he died he wished to be buried near his vacation home, namely, in the cemetery of the Tuscan village of Provesano. And that is what happened. On 19 July 2002, slightly over two months after Fortuyn’s murder, his body was removed from this temporary resting place. The event received massive media coverage and was shown live on a national TV broadcast. The body was subsequently flown from Rotterdam to Italy. Out of reverence—and to avoid reinflaming the still heated feelings in Dutch society—the exhumation itself was carefully planned and shielded from public view. Large screens were set up around the cemetery to hide the grave from the gaze of the public and the media. As a result of the exhumation, the grave became a pseudo-grave; it is now no more than a memorial. The fact that Fortuyn had been temporarily buried there at all was related to his unexpected death. The monumental grave that Fortuyn had in mind for himself in Italy took some time to prepare. Moreover, in light of the immense social upheaval and the collective mourning sparked by the murder, it seemed desirable to offer people a safety valve in the form of a temporary focus for their grief. But the screening off of the exhumation and removal of the body led to intermittent rumors that Fortuyn’s body had not been taken to Italy, but still rested in the cemetery at Driehuis, his town of birth. As witnesses to this operation, we could now confute these rumors. What we could discern there in the vague half-light of dawn were parts of the improvised memorial that had been assembled by visitors to the grave in the period between the burial on 10 May and the exhumation on 19 July, carelessly crammed into boxes. In that period about 130,000 people from all over the Netherlands visited the grave.2 They collectively created a memorial that was continually subject to change and constantly grew larger. Because the majority of the memorial gifts were flowers and plants, which soon withered, a permanent memorial management was set up to keep the site manageable and presentable. This meant that perishable elements were regularly removed, while written documents—such as letters and the mourning cards affixed to bouquets—were collected so that they could be given to the family. Every week most of the material deposited was cleared away; some was stored, while the rest was dis-

Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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carded. Less-perishable objects were sometimes left at the graveside for a longer period. During these two months, the temporary memorial thus regrew every day by accretion. After the removal of the coffin, the family decided to give the vault a new function by filling it with the letters and objects that visitors had left at the grave over the preceding two months. The emotional scenes during Fortuyn’s funeral on 10 May 2002, and during the period of mourning that followed, were still clearly in everybody’s mind two years later. It was for this reason that the director of the cemetery wished to open the vault for us under the cover of darkness, so that no one would be aware of the removal of the materials that had been placed in it. The odor that arose after this second opening of the vault made it all too clear that burial had not done the material any good. The damp and unventilated space appeared to have affected various objects and documents. However, there was no time for further inspection or reflection, as dawn was breaking. The staff hastily lifted the boxes from the vault and put them on a tractor, which took them to our vehicles. Immediately thereafter we returned to Amsterdam, the stuffy, moldy smell in the vehicles forcing us to keep the windows rolled down. It was not until we arrived at the Meertens Institute that what we had brought back really began to sink in. There were no fewer than twelve large boxes filled with diverse

Illustration 14.1. Grave violation—or safeguarding cultural heritage? The excavation of the Fortuyn memorabilia from his pseudo-grave in Driehuis, 7 April 2004. Photo: Peter Jan Margry. Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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objects, letters, and cards. Because some of the boxes had been affected by damp, the material was laid out to dry so that it could be inventoried.3 At the time, the strong sensitivities related to the Fortuyn case were still widely felt in Dutch society, and not uncommonly fed by nondescript feelings of personal and collective shame and even guilt. The delicacy of the whole case prompted the described secluded and arcane behavior, especially concerning the memory and memorializing of Fortuyn, or what seemed to be the beginning of a dememorialization process. This last aspect makes it all the more relevant to know why these materials were nevertheless “saved” from decay and oblivion. After all, the collected ephemera were meant for a temporary purpose. In this partly autoreflective contribution, I analyze why and how an academic institution counterbalanced this process of dememorialization with a special case of heritage production. But before I present my analysis of such contemporary processes of memorialization and “heritagization,” it is necessary to contextualize and sketch how it was possible that the brand-new politician Pim Fortuyn could cause such an emotional upheaval and have post mortem such a profound impact on Dutch society, and for which a process of immediate heritage production seemed appropriate and relevant.

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A Controversial Politician The fifty-four-year-old Pim Fortuyn was killed on 6 May 2002 in the parking lot of the national Mediapark in Hilversum as he left a radio interview, which had formed part of his election campaign. He was slain by five shots from a Firestar pistol wielded by Volkert van der Graaf, a thirty-two-year-old environmentalist and animal rights activist. Fortuyn was a complete political outsider, as apart from some flirtations with another conservative party six months earlier, there was only a month to go before the closing date for registering political parties for the parliamentary elections on 15 May 2002, when on 11 February, he founded a new party named after himself: the Lijst Pim Fortuyn (Pim Fortuyn List), or LPF for short.4 It had been only in mid-2001 that the former professor of sociology resolved to do something about the nation’s problems and became really politically active. His increasing opposition to the dominant political culture, combined with the incapacity or refusal of politicians to acknowledge the extent and depth of the country’s problems, acted as a catalyst for his success. From that moment, Fortuyn intensified his across-the-board attack on the established political order. The government at the time was the “purple” coalition, named after the red and blue party colors of the Labor and Liberal coalition mem-

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bers, respectively. This coalition had governed for eight years, in two cabinets. Fortuyn broke with the rigid sociability of Dutch management and politics, which sought to maintain the negotiated “polder model” of consensus politics in order to minimize conflict. Time and again, Fortuyn pointed out the problems that this supposedly caused and the problems that it could not solve. His central themes were asylum seekers (“The Netherlands is full”), foreign-born residents and their inadequate adaptation to Dutch life, criminality and a lack of safety on the streets, bureaucracy and political correctness, an inadequate healthcare system, poor infrastructure, and massive traffic jams (Akkerman 2005; Rydgren and van Holsteyn 2005). His message was taken seriously, especially by groups that had become alienated from conventional politics. These groups included those who were confronted in their day-to-day lives with the problems he was highlighting, as well as young people who felt no attraction to the “old” politics or regarded themselves as antiestablishment. Politicians and media commentators labeled him “populist” and his proposals “demagogic” or “too simplistic.” They tried to undermine his popularity by stereotyping and stigmatizing him as “extreme right” (Eckardt 2003; Lucardie and Voerman 2007). This was all brought up in the media, and as a consequence the press started to cover Fortuyn and his campaign even more intensely. Fortuyn was able to strategically use this demonization, the “underdog effect,” his role as a victim, and his openness about his shortcomings and personal peculiarities. It all helped to increase his popularity. By the time of his assassination, polls indicated that his party would take between 20 and 38 of the 150 seats in parliament—which would have been an unprecedented political upheaval. He was even being spoken of as a potential prime minister. His killing was the first political murder in the Netherlands since the country had become a kingdom, and it sent an unprecedented shock wave through Dutch society. It was not only the political nature of the murder that shocked society—such a murder was perceived as anomalous to the so-called nonviolent and pacifist traditions of Dutch society5—but also the sudden silencing of this powerful, new political voice and movement that was challenging the otherwise staid Dutch political establishment and presenting the image of a new society. Fortuyn represented a new political voice that reflected the views and feelings of a substantial, but regularly ignored, section of the nation’s lower and middle classes. Despite his death, on 15 May 2002 over 17 percent of Dutch voters voted for his party, giving it twenty-six seats. In one leap, the LPF became the second largest party in the country and a partner in the new government (Chorus and de Galan 2002; Nicolasen 2002; Dekkers 2002; van Holsteyn and Irwin 2003).

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In only a few months, Fortuyn had managed to mobilize a relatively large group of nonimmigrant Dutch men and women who, in the preceding years, had taken practically no part in public political debates and had entirely lost interest in political and administrative electoral matters. To a great extent, these were precisely the people who were most often confronted with the problems of contemporary global and multicultural society, problems that were not being addressed because of the viscidity of administrators and the bureaucracy (Cuperus 2003). Through Fortuyn’s assassination, they suddenly lost their leader, who was perceived as a “prophet of redemption.” In their form and function, the public and collective emotion and the wave of condolence were massive (de Hart 2005). Their central function was not only a form of public mourning, but also an instrument of Fortuyn’s supporters to prevent the disappearance of their critique of politics and government and to maintain public attention to the issues they had raised. Despite the loss of their spokesman, they still wanted to be seen and heard. In this sense, the grassroots memorials and their media coverage facilitated a public and collective performance and expression of the self.

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Memorialization Cultural phenomena such as memorialization and commemoration are important instruments for creating and propagating values, and for influencing and manipulating personal and societal values. Setting up various monuments and memorial activities to Fortuyn could contribute amply to such processes. Through values that individuals and groups connect with memorialization, cultural differences can be normalized, reduced (process of “connectivity”), increased (process of “isolation”), or reassessed. The collective public action that was initiated after the murder was focused on retaining the substance and content of Fortuyn’s ideas. Pierre Nora observed that man is doomed to forget (cited in Perry 1999: 110). Thus, some months after the murder and the removal of the powerful grassroots memorials, worries arose within his political circles and his family that in the Dutch context of changing social circumstances and political machinations, Fortuyn’s significance would soon be forgotten—a development that the Fortuyn family and his political party wanted to counteract. On the one hand this was striven for via traditional commemorative ways, while on the other hand they received “support” from a national heritage institution. The background to the nocturnal operation by the Meertens Institute6 can be traced back to a suggestion made by Pim Fortuyn’s immediate

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family. Marten and Simon Fortuyn were sympathetic to their brother’s aims, concerned about the possible loss of his ideas and political heritage, and wanted to continue his political mission. They were initially driven by the desire to obtain redress for what in their eyes was the failure of the Dutch government to provide better security for their brother, a politician who had regularly been threatened. They subsequently tried to morally and, if possible, financially support the spread of their brother’s political thought, as embodied in the LPF. To do this they had to follow in his political footsteps, at least to some extent. Especially his older brother, Marten, therefore became a partner in the discussions at all sorts of national political and administrative consultations and activities that arose as a result of the murder. The family also encouraged activities that would perpetuate the memory of Pim Fortuyn, which was expressed in involvement in diverse projects, monuments, memorial processions, statues, books, etc. The memorialization and monumentalization consequently took various forms during the three years following Fortuyn’s death. During that time, the Fortuyn family and several “Fortuynist” groups and organizations worked to devise more permanent material and immaterial symbolic, ritual, and political expressions of Pim Fortuyn and his ideas. In addition to the two monumental graves—one in the Netherlands, the other in Italy—they erected a conventional statue for him in front of his house in Rotterdam. His social and political constituents then attempted to realize a primarily immaterial memorial for society as a whole: They established the fully independent Pim Fortuyn Foundation, whose aim, regardless of Fortuyn’s actual political views, was to innovate society and public administration and to promote freedom of expression.7 Fortuyn’s brothers, however, tried to sustain the central political concepts in their murdered brother’s theories—administrative innovation and freedom of expression—through the institution of a ideological day of remembrance. With the help of Fortuyn’s political party, in 2003 the family decided to designate 6 May as a new national day of commemoration. This transformed the idea from an optional initiative into a socially and politically controversial proposal, as the suggested date immediately followed the Dutch days for commemorating the dead and the observance of the Netherlands’ liberation at the end of World War II, on 4 and 5 May, respectively. The intention of the family was for 6 May to become the new liberation day, a national day of democracy, and against violence, according to Fortuyn’s motto: “Let us uphold freedom of speech.”8 This was to be a “Day of the People.” Since the holidays on 4 and 5 May serve similar purposes, this proposal was an attempt to repeat the moral settling of scores with the “old” Netherlands, as Fortuyn had intended

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to settle the score with the incumbent political system. Underlining the symbolic connotation, a provocative commemorative flag was also introduced: The Dutch national flag with a portrait of Fortuyn in its center. The whole idea was generally perceived as improper—being of another level—because it was too close or connected to both “sacrosanct” national celebrations. The idea of a “Fortuyn Day” on 6 May subsided after a very low turnout at the 2003 commemoration.9 Notwithstanding the disappointing result, Fortuyn was still materially immortalized that same year, as the Statue of Pim Foundation had a rather large commemorative monument built in a square along the Korte Hoogstraat in the center of Rotterdam. The artist made the pedestal of cracked marble and placed a twisted obelisk on it to symbolize how Fortuyn transcended the established structures and the subsequent social turnaround he achieved. The obelisk bears Fortuyn’s bronze bust “in debate,” to represent his active proclamation of free speech. It was intended to be the focal point for future massive commemorations, but it proved only to symbolize the rapid déconfiture of the movement. At roughly the same time, Harry Mens—an affluent real estate broker and television host who had embraced Fortuyn’s ideas—had sponsored, as a special tribute, a life-sized bronze statue of Fortuyn performing his characteristic salute. His aim was to create a semipublic commemorative site in front of Fortuyn’s residence. At first, neighborhood residents successfully resisted the erection of the statue in the square in front of Fortuyn’s former home, for fear that it would become a place of pilgrimage for right-wing extremists (Oosthoek 2005: 208). The statue was eventually erected in the front garden of the residence. The house itself was also turned into a monument. The house was purchased by one of Fortuyn’s wealthy admirers, and the interior was “immortalized” exactly as it was when Fortuyn left it on 6 May.10 On the anniversary of his murder, both statues became foci for commemoratives organized by small groups of Fortuyn supporters. The home also served as the last stop on a kind of pilgrimage, with prior stops at the murder site in Hilversum and the grave monument at Westerveld (Colombijn 2007). In the meantime, Fortuyn’s family were working on a memorial book comparable to the one that appeared on the Virginia Tech shooting,11 but in this case made of the documents that were originally placed at the street memorials for Fortuyn (cf. Lazenby 2007). They conceived the idea of a book that would present the most beautiful, moving, and typical, and the politically most characteristic, letters and drawings from the temporary and improvised memorials, as a homage to Pim Fortuyn and his ideas. However, problems related to privacy, the editing procedure,

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their inexperience with that kind of work, and the size of the work forced the shelving of the project. At that moment, my request on behalf of the Meertens Institute to examine the mourning documents that had been preserved brought this draft book to the surface.12 I was, however, less interested in this personal and glorifying selection as in the entire lot of existing material. For the time being, however, it remained unclear to me what precisely that material was composed of, what was left of it, and how the significance and the value of the items were to be assessed.

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The Vox Populi In the week following the murder, six major grassroots memorials became the preeminent temporary foci for a large part of Dutch society as it dealt with and processed the murder of Fortuyn, with people spontaneously gathering at these sites to express their feelings.13 Because there had never before been such a massive, spontaneous, and public display of mourning in the Netherlands for an “ordinary” citizen, these places received constant media attention from all the public and commercial networks, and thus they appeared on the television screen in every living room as virtual sites of remembrance, to fulfill a memorial or mourning function there (Kleinnijenhuis et al. 2003). As a result of the media attention, more people were mobilized to visit the memorials. A large number of them did not come purely as spectators, or stand in silence, but actively participated in the development and construction of the memorials. They did this by leaving not only flowers or personal objects, but also a huge number of notes, messages, and statements. People came together at these sites to express their feelings. This resulted in assemblages and piles of objects, messages, and statements.14 These were expressions of condolence and, especially, of anger and protest directed against the incumbent politicians and parties and their incapacity to do anything about the problems of the modern, multicultural society—something for which they believed Fortuyn would have had solutions. Apart from grief, condolences, and dismay, the political dimensions of these memorial bricolages were more than evident. The great number of expressions of protest, grievance, criticism, and rage, calls for revenge, and protest messages about and against social wrongs, and against the “hate campaign” purportedly conducted against Fortuyn, gave the memorials extra meanings. These were primarily in the form of letters of protest or social critique that either were addressed to Fortuyn or were left as open, unaddressed manifestos. By far the most frequent reproach

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Illustration 14.2. Composition photo, made by order of the Fortuyn family, with a central picture of the sea of gifts in front of Pim Fortuyn’s home in Rotterdam, surrounded by a collage of details of documents and memorabilia. Photos: Olaf Schwencke, 2002/4.

concerned the loss of Fortuyn as the spokesman for the feelings and ideas of his supporters, and as their representative in society and politics. Many report that through him they had become interested and involved in politics and administration for the first time, or for the first time in many years, and that he was the first to give them hope of solving the major social problems with which they were confronted every day. Many said that he had “shaken the Netherlands awake,” but that his voice had been silenced. Others wrote, “We have all been silenced,” or “Pim, now that we have lost you, we are without a voice.” More generally, one finds the cry “No freedom of speech!”15 The most frequent formulation, in all sorts of variants, was, “You said what we thought.” This quote is therefore one of the keys to explaining the surge of collective emotion that was felt by a large part of the Dutch population, and that was brought into the public domain by hundreds of thousands of shocked and mourning people, only some of whom were core Fortuynists (Margry 2003). It also points to the projection of the personal responsibilities of his supporters onto Fortuyn (“You said what we thought”) and to his functioning as an extension of them. This suggests that his death touched them in an especially fundamental and deeply personal way. For

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those who felt themselves unheard and unrepresented, and who had identified with Fortuyn because of their social position, their voting history, or their marginal involvement in society, it seems that losing their voice, shepherd, and leader all in one go felt like the “amputation of a part of their being,” as one of the anonymous authors wrote. The rage that this sparked was intended by the Fortuynists to be heard loudly and clearly, and can to a great extent be seen separate from their grief. It should therefore be understood that such letters were often written to Fortuyn without words of address, or were addressed more generally to the people or to the motherland itself. In this way, the grassroots memorials functioned as a public whipping post, where the people pilloried politics and the administration. It was a ritual commemorative performance in which the ideas of Fortuyn and his criticism of current politics were recollected and reenacted (cf. Connerton 1989: 61–71). All this formed a mediagenic setting that received constant live television coverage and extended the substantive discussions way beyond the physical sites. This process and the mobilizing power of the media further reinforced the suggestion of broad social discontent. It stressed the importance of the protest element of the memorials and claimed its historical dimension and impact. It was an implicit first step toward heritage creation. From most of the television and newspaper commentators, and many of those interviewed by journalists, it appeared that there was a general consensus that the Netherlands would never be the same again. The events marked a fault line in history; this loss of “national innocence” is an important aspect in explaining the outbreak of collective emotionality in the days that followed. Because of the extent and seriousness of the dissatisfaction expressed, it has justifiably been called the “Fortuyn revolt,” and is regarded by many as a political earthquake, a turning point in Dutch history (Carle 2006; Chorus and de Galan 2002; de Vries and van der Lubben 2005; Wansink 2004). Anyone who lived through the events of the week following 6 May 2002 will be able to bear witness to the singularity of what took place within Dutch affairs in the space of a few days. It was a postmodern revolt, one that would shake up the political system severely and influence the political agenda and political policy for years to come, as demonstrated by the continuing centrality of the debate on norms and values and immigration today.16 Proof that the significance of Fortuyn, and in particular of the political revolution connected with him, will not soon disappear from collective memory is the fact that in 2004, Pim Fortuyn was voted the “Greatest Dutchman” of all time. In 2007, at the Dutch

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Illustration 14.3. Fortuyn as a major attraction at the “Dutch Heroes” exhibition of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 2007. Photo: Peter Jan Margry.

“Heroes” exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Fortuyn was accorded a prominent position, based on Fortuyn material from the Meertens collection (van der Ham 2007). There, “Hero Fortuyn” continued to enjoy great public interest.17

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Heritagization: The Meanings of Materiality To return to the documents left at the impromptu memorials: several weeks after the murder, Fortuyn’s family received the objects and documents that had been deposited at the temporary memorials from the various municipal sanitation departments that had been responsible for clearing them away.18 In the meantime, questions about the significance and consequences of the murder, the riots that had broken out, and what for some were almost hysterical scenes of grief and anger had created a national wave of demands in the media for interpretation. Both the events surrounding the public memorials and the intense emotions were considered “un-Dutch,” at the very least, or as an indication that new forms of public mourning had also affected Dutch society (cf. de Hart 2005). As a cogwheel in the media machine, in my role as a fellow in Religious Culture at the Meertens Institute, I was asked by a national newspaper to write an article reflecting on how these temporary memorials were to be understood, and especially on whether the spontaneous post mortem veneration of Fortuyn implied a form of sanctity. Based on what I had experienced of the occurrences and on analogies with other traumatic death situations in Western religious culture, I wrote an initial, tentative analysis of the events.19 There indeed seemed to be a certain attributed saintliness, which I did not think would last very long. When I subsequently received invitations to delve more deeply into the subject at academic venues, it was necessary to have empirical material and harder data, so that I could arrive at a scientific analysis.20 The impact of the murder on Dutch society and the unique role that the memorials had played during the week of 6 May validated the materials as “national” heritage. The events had affected the nation so profoundly that the materials did not need a historical patina. In the meantime, the material attracted the interest of several Dutch national heritage institutions. They used the media to make their interest known, thereby laying claim to the material.21 These “premature” claims proved to be a counterproductive way of going about things, because the Fortuyn family—and the media—aired their feelings, letting it be known they did not appreciate such forms of “body-snatching” and turned them down. It was only months later, in mid-February 2003, that I decided to seek contact with Fortuyn’s family to try to determine whether the documents had indeed been preserved and, if they had, whether I could consult them for my research. However, the family still appeared to be asserting their interests, and were also busy with the preparations for the first commem-

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oration of Fortuyn’s death on 6 May 2003. I was therefore kept on hold. Despite the great expectations, the memorial day turned out to be a fiasco. It proved impossible to mobilize the masses who only a year earlier had come out so spontaneously. In any case, it appeared the movement had said all it had to say the year before. Moreover, through all its political machinations in the center of government—The Hague—the Fortuyn Party had by now played itself out in the national administration. And finally, after a long year of excessive media attention, both the media and the population were suffering from severe “Fortuyn fatigue” (Kleinnijenhuis et al. 2003; Bosman 2008). In the interests of my research and other commitments, I could not wait much longer for the data, so in July 2003 I decided to contact the family again—at just the right moment, as it turned out. The prevailing mood in the family was now one of disappointment and frustration, for it seemed that politics had again returned to its old ways. With that, the failure of the first commemoration of the murder became a sort of unintentional conclusion to the movement (Pennings and Keman 2003; Vis 2004; Vijf jaar 2007). This disillusionment made the family unsure about how to proceed from there with Fortuyn’s legacy. Even the enormous sea container filled with all the cuddly toys that had been left at the memorials, and that had initially been regarded as an ideal gift for third-world children, was orphaned: the complicated regulations and the spiraling costs for cleaning them made the project unfeasible. Further, the family’s planned book of letters had come to a total dead end. Out of desperation, they had packed up all the letters and documents from the memorials and readied them for transport to Italy. There, in Provesano, the local stonemason was already at work preparing the spacious vault of Fortuyn’s grave so that the paper memories of the revolt could be buried alongside its auctor intellectualis. However, when I asked whether I could first be permitted to examine the material, Simon Fortuyn invited me to come to his place in Utrecht, where it was stored in his envelope factory. Once there I explained to him that these time-stained and ephemeral documents had perhaps lost their topicality and apparently were of little value, but that one could also see them in a different light. At any rate, I would regard it from a historical and cultural perspective as a great loss if these documents were literally buried and lost to society for ever. He was curious about what the Meertens Institute wanted to do with them. I explained that in their entirety they were an extraordinary resource for the study of a unique form of a grassroots sociopolitical action in modern Dutch society—the materialization of a strongly politically colored public outcry—a vox populi, and not a collection, like so many, compiled by administrations or ruling classes.

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For the Netherlands, it was, in its nature, a totally new form of “collective” social action and a temporary inversion of Foucauldian power relations (cf. Foucault 1982). The documents were literally the physical record of the voice of the people—or better, the voices of individuals, and certainly not only Fortuynists—that had reverberated in the Netherlands in the tumultuous year 2002.22 They were ethnographic source material par excellence. For no other single crucial event or episode in Dutch history was there such an extensive and spontaneously formed collection of ego documents. As commentaries they could be turned into important material cultural heritage for the social and political history of the Netherlands. Thus in the end, the Meertens Institute—in its strategy and quest for cultural and scientific capital—won, by mere coincidence, the “national competition” and became the custodian of a major new expression of Dutch cultural patrimonium (cf. Lowenthal 1998: 227). If the Fortuyn family would hand over the material, the Meertens Institute would assume the management and conservation of the material for them. This would mean cataloguing and making it accessible, physically and online, to both scholars and the general public.23 We realized that in practice this collection of “dissonant heritage” could also come down to the implicit creation of a lieux de memoire, a site of memory, for Fortuyn’s movement or as an important resource for supporters who feel “disinherited” of the material (cf. Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996: 21– 33).24 At the time, we in the institute’s management team had discussions about whether the institute might not become too closely associated with this populist movement, and what the risks were that the institute might be used for its political ends. The movement had, however, already become so impotent that such fears seemed unrealistic. That the question arose at all in the context of “cultural heritage” may perhaps be more surprising. At the same time, it illustrates the odium with which Fortuynism was regarded. After I had clarified our conditions and possibilities, Simon Fortuyn told me that he would consult the rest of the family. Several days later, he telephoned to confirm that they were convinced of the importance of preserving the material and keeping it accessible to the public. Burying it in a vault in Provesano was off the agenda. Shortly thereafter, on 10 July 2003, I was able to come back and take away fifteen large moving boxes, and deposit them in the Meertens storage room. As a result of these developments, the enthusiasm among the Fortuyn family for a public function for this cultural heritage collection and its operationalization grew strongly: The family realized that by doing this it could still create a substantive memorial to their late brother, even though the Fortuyn movement and the public interest had practically gone silent,

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and statues of Fortuyn had already been realized. The assumption of the management by a national cultural institution that would make it available to the public was an implicit confirmation of the lasting importance of the movement and of Fortuyn’s legacy. Encouraged by this thought, in 2004 the family decided to grant permission for and to support the nocturnal operation described at the beginning of this chapter, so that the documents in the pseudo-grave at Westerveld could be united with the Fortuyn collection that had already been turned over. A third expansion of the collection took place in 2005, when audiovisual material about Pim Fortuyn was offered to the Meertens Institute.25 This almost complete collection was a functional supplement to that already present, precisely because the media had played an important, and often supportive, role in Fortuyn’s meteoric rise as a politician, in response to the murder, and in the subsequent political revolution. The existence of the memorials led to a considerable part of the reporting taking place at the memorials, so that they assumed a central, performative role in shaping public images of the events, and in the medialization of those events (Margry 2007: 116–20; cf. Santino 2006b). Never before has an extensive collection from grassroots memorials been housed in a Dutch heritage institution.26 Its size, however, does not guarantee its completeness. Most of the material from four of the six memorials that were set up after 6 May and lasted for a week has been preserved.27 In addition, the Schielandshuis (Rotterdam’s historical museum) acquired some objects and written material. One of the Fortuyn groups kept a collection of documents at its office in the “Kubus” houses in Rotterdam, but most of it was apparently stolen by fans and competing Fortuynist factions while it was exhibited and stored there. Collections like these will never be complete, also because individual objects or documents are kept by members of the Fortuyn family, or were blown or taken away from the sites. However, it does not make much difference to the general idea whether they are complete or not. When one wants to use the preserved material as source material for research, one encounters methodological problems. For example, the items offer little or no information about their context or provenance. Only a few are dated precisely, or can be placed with regard to the town or city the author came from, or even the memorial they came from, and are thus difficult to link with the author’s social or political background. Unfortunately, after the material from the various memorials was handed over to the family, it was not kept separated according to its source. Documents from the six memorials are thus partly mixed together; only the material from Driehuis-Westerveld is clearly distinguished, as it was acquired later. However, as Fraenkel also points out in this volume, the

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importance of the collection is to be measured not only by its individual postings and their contents, but also by its collectivity in writing, its performative value, and the visual or graphic display. The collection further includes a large number of condolence registers that were opened in many Dutch cities and towns during the week, many of which, in contrast to usual practice, include extensive (and politically colored) comments. Within three hours of Fortuyn’s death, the first condolence page as a web register, based on the format of the paper registers, was opened as an Internet site or cybershrine. After some months, several of the Internet providers involved had, on their own initiative, thousands of the messages from their digital condolence registers printed out, exactly dated, and bound, to give to the family. That they did this is another indication of how very exceptional the events in society were seen as being. Because of the sympathy felt for the family, staff at the providers removed the insensitive postings from the digital files.28 This resulted in a subjective and somewhat one-sided document, from which the most negative remarks about the controversial politician Fortuyn had been filtered out. The presence of realia in the collection raised yet another issue: Should these be included in a document archive? Many of these objects were intended as representations of Fortuyn as an individual or his lifestyle (neckties, cigars, small dogs (King Charles Spaniels), cars (Jaguars), etc.). It was decided to preserve these characteristic presents as much as possible, and especially those that, through the addition of texts, had been transformed into “documents.” In general, the collection will be preserved as it was collected, namely, without any cleaning or polishing of the material. The large number of unmarked stuffed animals were not preserved, as they would not produce enough additional relevant information for research. Moreover, the costs for disinfection, preservation, and storage would have exceeded the budget. That the Fortuyn collection should have ended up at an ethnological research institute like Meertens is less of a coincidence than it might seem. History, the recent past, and current events are to an increasing extent labeled by professional “conductors of memory”29 as and transformed into “cultural heritage” (Lowenthal 1998). Research institutions should be aware of the political and educational dimensions of processes of “heritagization” through which cultural expressions acquire other meanings. This phenomenon can be identified worldwide; it is particularly influenced by UNESCO policy, and is strongly encouraged by national governments and organizations within countries. The concept of “heritagization,” as introduced by Kevin Walsh (1992: 4), focused on the heritagizing processes of places and

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spaces in connection with “acceptable national themes.” Walsh treats heritagization as a negative and destructive process that could even threaten democratic values (1992: 135). He employs a value-laden concept that I do not support.30 “Heritagization” is understood here as the process by which cultural phenomena or cultural objects, old and modern, are labeled “cultural heritage” by the involved actors and, as a consequence, get new meanings, undergo transformative changes, and become an instrumentalization of the past for the future.31 The Fortuyn case—where documents, especially those that were produced spontaneously and impulsively after the murder and that were intended as means of communication for that moment, but were subsequently acquired and preserved for scientific research and the extension of source collections, also made available for use by others, ended up in an academic, musealized context and had a cultural and scientific significance ascribed to them—is a textbook example of that process (cf. Ames 2006; Gardner, this volume). The Meertens Institute is an institution for scholarly research, but like other institutes that come under the umbrella of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, it fulfills a double function: research, as well as documentation and archiving. In recent years the documentary task out of which the institute arose has to a great extent been overshadowed by its research functions. In 2002, the growing significance of cultural heritage and the discussions about national and regional identities and the drawing up of historical canons (Margry and Roodenburg 2007: 1–3) brought me, as a former Meertens archivist and management team member, to the conclusion that the institute should be more emphatically positioned as a heritage institution in order to enhance to possibilities for safeguarding relevant ethnological collections and archives, as there was no other institutional facility assigned for such a task.32 As a consequence, in practice the institute began to function as a national depot for ethnological data collections, and for the records and collections of the “culture of everyday life.”33 The collections already present were primarily the result of the institute’s own research projects and of incidental acquisitions or gifts that, in terms of content, strongly reflected the traditional canon of folklore studies. A clearly defined, active acquisitions policy had never been formulated. With an eye to acquiring more ethnological databases of a “national” and contemporary nature, the Fortuyn material would be a good start, especially because ephemeral and popular materials are usually not categorized as cultural heritage, and because the letters contradict Walsh’s proposition that modernity—including the heritage industry—is distancing people from basic processes that affect their lives (cf. Walsh 1992: 176–78).

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The actual acquisition of this material went quite smoothly, partly because several delicate issues had already resolved themselves through the passage of time. The question of when the material from a memorial site should be secured was no longer relevant. Dismantling a makeshift memorial usually takes place when the initial grief has been considerably moderated, or when the assemblage due to weather conditions has decayed to such an extent that the “sacrality” of the site seems to be violated. Bad weather and decay directly influence the performativity of a memorial, as it will attract fewer people and less media. Moreover, the deterioration of the visual aesthetics will also diminish the interest of the media and weaken its performative power in general. In the Fortuyn case, no juridical or practical issues regarding the placing of the memorials were at stake.34 After a week of good weather, and with the funeral having been held, an upcoming disturbance made the various municipalities decide to collect all objects and documents and remove the remains (flowers, candles, etc.) of the memorials. This coincided with an implicitly perceived idea that a period of one week was the right timeframe for public mourning. The removal of the memorials did not raise any objections. The collected materials were subsequently given to the Fortuyn family. Sensitivities related to the nature and ownership of the material largely no longer played a role because of the unconditional gifting by the owners and the lack of interest on the part of society at large. It should be noted, however, that after the acquisition of the material, several cases did arise where persons who had placed material at the memorials let the institute know that they wished their documents to be anonymized, as they no longer wanted to be associated with Fortuyn as a controversial individual, with the LPF movement, or with the mourning hype after his death. To a certain extent, these reactions can be attributed to the political obstinacy, incapabilities, and clumsiness of the Fortuyn movement in national government, the subsequent political déconfiture, and the failure of Fortuyn’s memorialization. Another ethical issue that the institute had to consider was where the material was to be preserved. Did these mourning gifts, farewell letters, and condolences not deserve to rest in Fortuyn’s grave in Italy, or in the pseudo-grave in Westerveld, for which the material was initially intended and, in the latter case, where some of it had already been deposited? After all, the Fortuyn memorials were much more than purely mourning sites: They had immediately become “soapboxes” and “whipping posts” where a national political and social debate was carried out publicly. In the end, a decision about the location did not have to be taken inside the institute, since the family did that themselves, allowing themselves to be guided by the importance of having the materials openly available

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to society. In contrast to, for instance, the 9/11 documents,35 in this case we were not dealing with items from relatives and friends, but almost exclusively with reactions from citizens at large. This does not detract from the fact that many documents are written as though the author were a friend or a relative. They are regularly accompanied with names, and sometimes also with addresses and photographs. This made it necessary that the letters placed online or on exhibition be anonymized. What the Meertens Institute did not want to do is create a new collection that could serve as an alternative memorial for future grief. We did not want to preserve (nor could we) “the sacred qualities of the shrine as the embodiment of the memory of the deceased,” which was the primary ground for preserving the Texas A&M University Bonfire memorial of 1999 (Grider 2007: 46–48). Our dedication was to preserve the material as national cultural heritage and to realize a neutral research instrument and a database for comparative analysis.36 In retrospect, one can see that the institute was not alert enough to, or was not prepared for, this new form of mourning and protest to have been able to realize the interviewing and the fieldwork and to document the memorials in situ more extensively than was actually done.37 An ethnographic film that documents at length the creation and performativity of the memorials and includes detailed photography is dearly lacking. Because the family transferred the material of their own volition, on the condition of good management and public accessibility, no further ethically sensitive questions regarding property rights played a role in the negotiations. They gave the institute a free hand to administer it in a respectful manner. The collapse of the Fortuyn movement in fact made several things easier. For all practical purposes, the rapid collapse of the LPF (in part through the appropriation of issues that had been specifically Fortuyn’s by the other political parties), the decline of both the “popular” movement and the public memorialization process, and subsequently the 2004 murder of the agitator/film-maker Theo van Gogh, reduced Fortuynism to a more or less “historical” phenomenon (cf. Buruma 2006). The volume of research into this period and the acquisition of the related material culture sparked off a process of heritagization. This was not an autonomous development, because the Fortuyn family clearly recognized its importance. They were disturbed that there were too few “good” (i.e., written in line with Fortuynism) articles and reports about their brother and his movement coming out, particularly because these were too often based only on vague sources. They therefore hoped that through this participation in the heritagization of the Fortuyn legacy, the contested aspects would be reduced, neutralized, or even disappear. It was partly with

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this in mind that the family decided to make the collection available for research and to the public: It would be a paper memorial, as “testimony to the movement that Pim Fortuyn brought about for Dutch society.”38 In this sense, these temporary memorials are to be considered more important than the permanent Fortuyn monuments, and with which I contest the opposite stance of Durbin (2003: 38).

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Institutional Creation of Heritage What, in sum, can be said about the role of academic institutions in the creation of heritage? It is evident how the acquisition of, and even research on, recent material culture and its dissemination in print and image are in themselves forms of heritage production. The Fortuyn case shows how, more or less accidentally, academia and its institutional setting came to be in the position to contribute strongly to heritagization processes, and how the intrinsic value of otherwise neglected and concealed materials acquire completely new meanings. The preservation of the commemorative drawings and letters has provided a clearer view on the broad scope and impact of the Fortuyn movement in Dutch society and situates its ideological heritage in a new perspective. Although the difficulties and effects of turning such materials into cultural heritage might be less for academia than for museums—which are obliged to display artifacts and explain them to a general public—managing emotions and privacy issues in relation to the public’s search for authenticity is nevertheless a problematic issue for both academia and museums. As became clear after 9/11, collecting has become an intrinsic part of the mourning and coping processes. This is why Appleton (2002) questioned the value of such collections as being too self-conscious, mediated, and emotional to serve as a public record. In my opinion, however, these materials form an individual and collective mirrored representation of the confusion, emotionality, anger, and intensity of contemporary subjectified, individualized, and mediatized society. These collections are crucial additions to our cultural heritage, as they—as uncommon heritage—had never previously come into being. Historiography has always been dependent upon other sources, without taking emotionality into account. Fortuyn or 9/11 collections can provide new perspectives on how societies deal with traumatic death, disaster, and fear. The implications for academic institutions that are dealing with cultural heritage (acquisition, management, and research) thus need to be thoroughly considered and evaluated, as these institutions are the creators of new heritages.

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Notes 1. On Fortuyn, see: Het fenomeen Fortuyn 2002; Pels 2003; Smalhout 2003; Oosthoek 2005; cf. also the ego document: Fortuyn 1998; republished in revised form after his death, with a revised title Fortuyn 2002. 2. Number estimated by the management of Westerveld cemetery. The following year (i.e., from 21 June 2002 to July 2003), 120,000 people visited the pseudo-grave. 3. The Fortuyn materials have not been cleaned and polished, unlike the Theo van Gogh collection, from which such characteristic elements as protective sleeves were also removed (cf. https://stadsarchief.amsterdam.nl/archieven/archiefbank/ overzicht/30051.nl.html). Nor is the material rigidly (and wrongly) thematically categorized; the Fortuyn materials are to a certain extent preserved as found at the various memorials and the pseudo-grave. 4. For this party, see: http://www.lijstpimfortuyn.nl/partij/partij.html. 5. Comparable feelings and shock were experienced by the Swedes after the murder of Olof Palme in 1986 (cf. Scharfe 1989). 6. It is an academic institution for research into and documentation of culture and language in the Netherlands; it functions under the aegis of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Department of Ethnology within the Meertens Institute is engaged in research into everyday culture; see: http://www. meertens.knaw.nl/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id= 35&Itemid=98. 7. http://www.pimfortuynfoundation.nl, last visited on December 12, 2008. 8. Based on the Latin maxim invoked by Pim Fortuyn, Loquendi Libertatem Custodiamus; explained at http://www.pim6mei.nl. 9. A similarly negligible turnout took place at the first anniversary of Diana’s death in 1998, cf. Walter 2008. 10. Precipitated by the credit crunch of 2008–9, the owners no longer wanted to maintain the preserved house and interior as a monument. The house was sold and its full inventory and library auctioned on 27 June 2009, after which the remaining documents and objects were dispersed all over the world. The auction rekindled the national interest and led to fierce protest by his followers, who felt “disinherited” as moral heirs to his legacy and depicted it as a “sale of national heritage.” See for the auctioned objects: Hessink’s Collectie Pim Fortuyn. Veiling 27 juni 2009. Auction catalogue. Nijmegen: Hessink. Fortuyn’s library was acquired by the Rotterdam Municipal Archives; the Rotterdam Historical Museum bought his writing desk and a portrait painting at the auction. 11. See for the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, the contribution of Sylvia Grider in this volume. 12. See http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/meertensnet/file/edwinb/20050420/Brieven_ PimF-BundelJolandaF.pdf. 13. These six memorials were: in front of Fortuyn’s home in Rotterdam; in front of the Rotterdam City Hall (Fortuyn was member of the city council); in the parking lot of the Mediapark in Hilversum (the scene of the murder); the monument to William of Orange, opposite the entrance to parliament in The Hague; the National War Monument in Amsterdam; and the Homomonument in Amsterdam. The material culture that was left at the memorials has to a large degree been preserved. The sites were “chosen” by the public as the appropriate ones already on the night after the killing; the first three because they were related to Fortuyn’s

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15. 16. 17.

18.

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19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

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life and political career, the last three because they are more regularly used for national commemorations and demonstrations. The material can be roughly categorized as follows: 1. Floral tributes with or without short message cards (except for roses, few other specific types of flowers); 2. Textual documents: letters, notes, pamphlets, placards, cards, books; 3. Visual documents: posters, photographs, drawings (by both adults and children), paintings and frames with pictures and messages; 4. Materialobj ects: Objects or symbols related to Fortuyn and his lifestyle: ties, cigars, bottles of wine, dog figurines (the statuettes of dogs generally referred to Fortuyn’s own King Charles spaniels, Carla and Kenneth) b. Emotional objects: hearts, artificial flowers c. Stuffed toy animals, including many teddy bears and dogs d. Novena and votive candles; paraffin tea warmers e. Cloth: flags, T-shirts, soccer scarves, caps. Another anonymous author wrote, “Let us therefore proclaim 6 May a national day • for guarding freedom of speech • for democracy • against violence.” The latter had previously been placed on the agenda, e.g., by Paul Scheffer in the case of the multicultural debate. For the new National Historical Museum in Arnhem, for which the exhibits are now being planned, it will again be necessary to examine how this material can best express the “Fortuyn caesura” of the early twenty-first century and place it in a historical perspective. With regard to the sites themselves, thanks to an unusually dry spell, the memorials remained intact until several days after Fortuyn’s funeral on 10 May and were then removed. Peter Jan Margry, “De tijdelijke heiligheid van Pim Fortuyn,” Trouw, 26 July 2002, 13. The following presentations: “The Rise and Fall of a Political Messiah. A Case Study on Sanctity in Profane Modern Culture. Saints and Role Models in Christian Liturgy,” at the Congress of the Societas Liturgica at Veldhoven (NL), 12 August 2003; “The Murder of a Political Dutch Messiah and the Spontaneous Creation of Secular Shrines of Protest and Devotion” at the Annual Congress of the American Folklore Society in Albuquerque, New Mexico, 9 October 2003. Shortly after the murder, both the National Archives in The Hague and the International Institute of Social History (IISG) in Amsterdam let it be known that they wished to acquire the material, cf. Los 2002. The contents of the letters, cards, messages, and the web postings can be divided into four rough categories: 1. expressions of sorrow, condolence, grief, and dismay; 2. expressions of affection and love; 3. attributions of metaphysical qualities of holiness, sanctity, and messianic leadership; 4. expressions of protest, criticism, anger or threats of retaliation; protest messages directed at and against political and social evils. For an analysis of the contents in these categories, see Margry 2003: 115–25. See: http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/meertensnet/wdb.php?sel=138759; for the inventory: http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/meertensnet/file/edwinb/20050421/Coll_ Fortuyn_invent.pdf.

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24. The presence of the Fortuyn collection made small Fortuynist pressure groups presuppose that the institute could be mobilized as an authoritative ally. They (vainly) tried to mobilize the Meertens Institute for commemorations or as authority for their goals. 25. A supporter of Fortuyn’s LPF had archived the TV and radio broadcasts with and about Pim Fortuyn on DVD and audio tapes. See: http://www.meertens.knaw .nl/pdf/etnologie/PIMaudiovisueel.pdf. 26. A comparable collection was acquired in 2004 by the Municipal Archive in Amsterdam, which had the material from the temporary memorial for the murdered filmmaker and agitator Theo van Gogh placed at its disposal. With regard to van Gogh and his memorial, see the contribution by Stengs in this volume; cf. https:// stadsarchief.amsterdam.nl/english/archives_database/printversie/30051.en.pdf. 27. Material from the memorials in front of Fortuyn’s home in Rotterdam, in front of the Rotterdam City Hall, from the monument to William of Orange opposite the entrance to the Parliament in The Hague, and at the National War Monument in Amsterdam has to a large extent been preserved. It is not yet clear what happened to the materials from the parking lot of the Mediapark in Hilversum or from the Homomonument in Amsterdam. 28. Apart from the Meertens collection, in July 2009 there were still two sites with web page surveys and links to digital registers and some memorial sites: http:// pim-fortuyn.startkabel.nl and http://www.pim-fortuyn.pagina.nl. 29. Cf. for this term de Jong 2007. 30. Walsh defined it as “the reduction of real places to tourist space, contested by the selective quotation of images of many different pasts which more often than not contribute to the destruction of actual places” (1992: 4). 31. David Lowenthal does not actually use the concept of heritagization, but describes modern developments in which heritage functions as a celebration of the past (Lowenthal 1998: x). 32. Although “heritage” is not an analytical concept, the use of the word does not always imply an intentional manipulation of history, as nowadays all categories of the past are, due to the political fashionability of the word, labeled “heritage,” and thus often overlap with more neutral former fields of research. For example, archival collections are now often depicted as “archival heritage.” 33. For an overview of all the Meertens collections, see: http://www.meertens.knaw .nl/archieven. 34. The memorial in Amsterdam’s Dam Square was initially contested, as two days earlier the national Remembrance Day ceremonies had taken place at the national war memorial. Anti-Fortuynists perceived it as a profanation that memorialization of this right-wing politician took place at the same site where the heroes of war are commemorated, cf. Margry 2003: 113. 35. Regarding the Smithsonian’s ethical problems related to the personal ephemera of loss, see the contribution by Jim Gardner in this volume. 36. Just a fraction of the material is now available online; the collection waits final inventorization and digitalization. An archival inventory is to be found at: http://www .meertens.knaw.nl/meertensnet/file/edwinb/20050421/Coll_Fortuyn_invent.pdf. 37. The national Institute for Image and Sound (Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid) in Hilversum has the journalistic footage on the memorials; part of this material is stored on DVD in the audiovisual section of the Fortuyn collection at the Meertens Institute. 38. Marten Fortuyn, interviewed on telephone by Peter Jan Margry on 25 July 2003.

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References Akkerman, Tjitske. (2005). “Anti-immigration Parties and the Defence of Liberal Values. The Exceptional Case of the List Pim Fortuyn.” Journal of Political Ideologies 10(3): 337–54. Ames, Rebeca. (2006). “Managing Emotions: Spontaneous Shrines and the Collections of 9/11.” Master’s thesis, Columbia University, New York. Appleton, Josie. (2002). A Very Strange Time Capsule. http://www.spiked-online.com/ Printable/00000002D466.htm. Accessed 31 August 2009. Bosman, Jan. (2008). “News Reporting on Pim Fortuyn. Framing in Two Dutch Newspapers.” Media, Culture & Society 30(5): 735–48. Buruma, Ian. (2006). Murder in Amsterdam. The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance. London: Atlantic Books. Carle, Robert. (2006). “Demise of Dutch Multiculturalism.” Society (March/April): 68–74. Chorus, Jutta, and Menno de Galan. (2002) In de ban van Fortuyn. Reconstrutie van een politieke aardschok. Amsterdam: Mets & Schilt. Colombijn, Freek. (2007). “The Search for an Extinct Volcano in the Dutch Polder: Pilgrimage to Memorials Sites of Pim Fortuyn.” Anthropos 102(1): 71–90. Connerton, Paul. (1989). How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cuperus, René. (2003). “From Polder Model to Postmodern Populism. Five Explanations for the ‘Fortuyn Revolt’ in the Netherlands.” In René Cuperus, Karl A. Duffek, and Johannes Kandel, eds., The Challenge of Diversity. European Social Democracy Facing Migration, Integration, and Multiculturalism. Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 276–99. De Hart, Joep. (2005). Voorbeelden en nabeelden. Historische vergelijkingen naar aanleiding van de dood van Fortuyn en Hazes. Den Haag: Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau. De Jong, Ad. (2007). Die Dirigenten der Erinnerung. Musealisierung und Nationalisierung der Volkskultur in den Niederlanden 1815–1940. Münster: Waxmann. De Vries, Jouke, and Sebastiaan van der Lubben. (2005). Een ononderbroken evenwicht in de Nederlandse politiek. Paars II en de revolte van Fortuyn. Amsterdam: Van Gennep. Dekkers, Peter ed. (2002). Nederland na Fortuyn. Trouw-dossier nr. 21. Amsterdam: Rainbow / Trouw. Durbin, Jeffrey L. (2003). “Expressions of Mass Grief and Mourning. The Material Culture of Makeshift Memorials.” Material Culture 35(1): 22–47. Eckardt, Frank. (2003). Pim Fortuyn und die Niederlande. Populismus als Reaktion auf die Globalisierung. Marburg: Tectum Verlag. Fortuyn, Pim. (1998). Babyboomers, autobiografie van een generatie. Utrecht: Bruna. ———. (2002). Autobiografi e van een babyboomer. Het persoonlijke en openhartige levensverhaal van een eigenzinnige outsider die zich, tegen de stroom in, ontwikkelde tot een politicus van groot formaat. Uithoorn: Karakter. Foucault, Michel. (1982). “The Subject and Power.” In Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 208–28. Grider, Sylvia Ann. (2007). “Collection and Documentation of Artifacts Associated with Roadside Memorials and Spontaneous Shrines.” In Jennifer Clark, ed., Roadside Memorials. A Multidisciplinary Approach. Armidale, NSW: EMU Press, 41–55. Het fenomeen Fortuyn (2002). Amsterdam: Meulenhoff / de Volkskrant.

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Holsteyn, J. J. M. van, and G. A. Irwin. (2003). “Never a Dull Moment. Pim Fortuyn and the Dutch Parliamentary Election of 2002.” West European Politics 26(2): 41–66. Kleinnijenhuis, Jan et al. (2003). De puinhopen van het nieuws. De rol van de media bij de Tweede Kamerverkiezingen van 2002. Alphen aan den Rijn: Kluwer. Lazenby, Roland, ed. (2007). April 16th: Virginia Tech Remembers. New York: Plume/ Penguin. Los, Emma. (2002). Stichting krijgt brieven aan Fortuyn. Historisch Nieuwsblad (June): 9. Lowenthal, David. (1998). The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Lucardie, Paul, and Gerrit Voerman. (2007). “The List of Pim Fortuyn and the Government: A Love-Hate Relationship.” In Pascal Delwit and Philippe Poirier, eds., Extrème droite et pouvoir en Europe. The Extreme Right Parties and Power in Europe. Brussel: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 247–63. Margry, Peter Jan. (2003). “The Murder of Pim Fortuyn and Collective Emotions. Hype, Hysteria and Holiness in the Netherlands?” Etnofoor 16(2): 102–27. ———. (2007). “Performative Memorials: Arenas of Political Resentment in Dutch Society.” In Peter Jan Margry and Herman Roodenburg, eds., Reframing Dutch Culture. Between Otherness and Authenticity. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 109–33. Margry, Peter Jan, and Herman Roodenburg, eds. (2007). Reframing Dutch Culture. Between Otherness and Authenticity. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Nicolasen, Lidy. (2002). Van onze verslaggeefster. Dagboek van een politieke aardverschuiving. Amsterdam: Contact. Oosthoek, Albert. (2005). Pim Fortuyn en Rotterdam. Rotterdam: Ad. Donker. Pels, Dick. (2003). De geest van Pim, Het gedachtegoed van een politieke dandy. Amsterdam: Anthos. Pennings, Paul, and Hans Keman. (2003). “The Dutch Parliamentary Elections in 2002 and 2003. The Rise and Decline of the Fortuyn Movement.” Acta politica 38(1): 51–68. Perry, Jos. (1999), Wij herdenken, dus wij bestaan. Over jubilea, monumenten en de collectieve herinnering. Nijmegen: SUN. Rydgren, Jens, and J. M. van Holsteyn. (2005). “Holland and Pim Fortuyn: A Deviant Case or the Beginning of Something New? In Jens Rydgren, ed., Movements of Exclusion: Radical Right-Wing Populism in the Western World. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 41–63. Santino, Jack, ed. (2006a). Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. (2006b). “Performative Commemoratives: Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death.” In Santino, Spontaneous Shrines, 5–15. Scharfe, Martin. (1989). “Totengedenken. Zur Historizität von Brauch-traditionen. Das Beispiel Olof Palme 1986.” Ethnologia Scandinavica 19: 142–53. Smalhout, Bob. (2003). De erfenis van Pim. Op het scherp van de snede. Den Haag: Bzztôh. Tunbridge, John E., and Gregory J. Ashworth. (1996). Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict. Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons. Van der Ham, Gijs. (2007). Held. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum. Vijf jaar na Fortuyn. (2007). Den Haag: Boom. Vis, J. J. (2004). “Fortuyn-revolte is uitgewerkt.” Civis Mundi 43(2): 104–8. Walsh, Kevin. (1992). The Representation of the Past. Museums and Heritage in the PostModern World. London: Routledge.

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Walter, Tony. (2008). “The New Public Mourning.” In Margaret S. Stroebe, Robert O. Hansson, Henk Schut, and Wolfgang Stroebe, eds., Handbook of Bereavement Research and Practice: 21st Century perspectives. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 241–62. Wansink, Hans. (2004). De erfenis van Fortuyn. De Nederlandse democratie na de opstand van de kiezers. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff.

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Notes on Contributors

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Fabio Caffarena is a university researcher and teaches contemporary history at the Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia of the University of Genoa. In 2004, he was awarded a PhD for his thesis on “European and American societies in contemporary times,” which he wrote in the context of a research project on World War I. He is the coordinator of the Archivio Ligure della Scrittura Popolare and has published a number of essays on texts written by ordinary people, including Lettere dalla Grande Guerra. Scritture del quotidiano, monumenti della memoria, fonti per la storia. Il caso italiano (Unicopli, 2005). In 2007, he published “Dai conti ai racconti. Appunti quotidiani e racconto di sé fra ’800 e ’900,” in the volume El legado de Mnemosyne (Gijón: Trea), and “Le scritture dei soldati semplici,” in La Prima guerra mondiale (Turin: Einaudi). In 2008, he published “In fondo alla scrittura (la scrittura di chi sta in fondo). Le testimonianze scritte dalla gente comune,” in Revista de Italianística, which was edited at the University of São Paulo. Robert Thomas Dobler received his BA in English from Pennsylvania State University in 2003, and is currently completing his MA in the folklore program at the University of Oregon. His thesis deals with alternative forms of memorialization in contemporary US culture. He has written on spontaneous Internet shrines, graffiti, bohemian and antinomian movements, apocalyptic comic books, spiritualism, and memorial tattoos. His articles have received several awards, including the Don Yoder Prize for Best Paper in Folk Belief and Religious Folklife, and the Warren E. Roberts Prize for Best Paper in Folk Art. James B. Gardner is senior scholar at the National Museum of American History (NMAH), Smithsonian Institution. Prior to joining the NMAH, Dr. Gardner served as deputy executive director of the American Historical Association, and as director of Education and Special Programs for the American Association for State and Local History. At NMAH, he previously served as associate director for Curatorial Affairs. His professional activities have included service as president of the National Council on Public History, on the Board of Editors of The Public Historian, on the AASLH Council, and as founding chair of the Smithsonian’s Ethics Advisory Board. His publications include Public History: Essays from

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the Field (2004), Ordinary People and Everyday Life: Perspectives on the New Social History (1983), and contributions to The Public Historian and other journals.

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Sylvia Grider is senior professor emerita of anthropology at Texas A&M University, where she taught courses in folklore, including material culture and folk narrative. She has a PhD in folklore from Indiana University. Her interest in vernacular memorialization resulted from the fatal collapse of the student bonfire at Texas A&M in 1999, which killed twelve students. Since that time, her research has focused on various aspects of the memorialization process, including the international spread of the roadside memorial phenomenon and the archiving of shrine memorabilia. She has spoken and published widely on spontaneous shrines and roadside memorials in journal articles and book chapters. Huub de Jonge is senior lecturer in economic anthropology at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He was awarded a PhD from the same university in 1984 for his dissertation on commercialization and Islamization on the island of Madura, Indonesia. His main fields of interest are economy and culture, lifestyles and identity, and entrepreneurship and ethnicity. In 1991, he coedited (with Willy Jansen) a volume on Islamic pilgrimages. He is coeditor (with Nico Kaptein) of Transcending Borders: Arabs, Politics, Trade, and Islam in Southeast Asia (Leiden 2002), and (with Frans Hüsken) of Violence and Vengeance: Discontent and Conflict in New Order Indonesia (Saarbrücken 2002) and of Schemerzones en schaduwzijden. Opstellen over ambiguïteit in samenlevingen (Nijmegen 2005). Recently he coedited (with Toon van Meijl) On the Subject of Labour (Nijmegen 2010). Béatrice Fraenkel is professor at the EHESS (École des hautes études en sciences sociales) in Paris, where she teaches anthropology of writing. Her publications include La Signature, genèse d’un signe (Paris 1992); the edited volume Illettrismes, Approches historiques et anthropologiques (Paris 1993); Langage et Travail, Communication, cognition, action (Paris 2001), coedited with A. Borzeix, and the book Les écrits de Septembre: New York 2001 (Paris 2002). She is director of the anthropology of writing research team, which is part of the IIAC (Interdisciplinary Institute of Contemporary Anthropology, EHESS-CNRS). She directed (with C. Licoppe) the “Ecology and Politics of Writing” research program, which was supported by the Agence Nationale pour la Recherche

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(2006–2009), and she is now the head of the program “The Urban Writings of Paris 2030” funded by the Mairie de Paris (2009–2011).

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Ewa Klekot is assistant professor at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Warsaw. She graduated in archaeology and ethnology, and received her doctoral degree in the humanities (art history) at the same university in 2002 for her dissertation on the social construction of the image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Since 1990, she has been teaching at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology. In the 1990s, she also worked as a freelance art critic collaborating with Polish art magazines, periodicals, and galleries. She has translated into Polish many works by leading social scientists, for example Zygmunt Bauman, Ruth Benedict, Mary Douglas, and Marcel Griaule. Her recent postdoctoral research concerns the social construction of national heritage places in Poland, especially as a result of visiting practices. Her main research interests are anthropology of art (especially visual arts), vernacular forms of artistic expression, and heritage studies. She has published in English on, for instance, the “Visual Identity of Modern Catholicism in Spain” and on tourism in the old town of Warsaw: “Authenticity as a Strategy.” Peter Jan Margry is an ethnologist. He studied history at the University of Amsterdam, and was awarded his PhD by the University of Tilburg (2000) for his dissertation on the religious culture war in the nineteenthcentury Netherlands. He became director of the Department of Ethnology at the Meertens Institute, a research center of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam. As a senior fellow at the institute, his current focus is on contemporary religious cultures in the Netherlands and Europe. He has published many books and articles in these fields, among them a four-volume standard work on the pilgrimage culture in the Netherlands. He coedited (with H. Roodenburg) Reframing Dutch Culture. Between Otherness and Authenticity (Ashgate, 2007). In 2008, he published the edited volume Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World: New Itineraries into the Sacred (Amsterdam University Press). Deborah Puccio-Den is an anthropologist and a research fellow at the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research). She works in Paris, at the Marcel Mauss Institute–GSPM (Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale), a research laboratory of the EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales). She is the author of Masques et dévoilements (CNRS Editions, 2002). She also edited a special issue of La Pensée

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de Midi entitled “Retrouver Palerme” (Actes Sud 2002). Puccio-Den has written many articles on the Sicilian Mafia, including “L’ethnologue et le juge. L’enquête de Giovanni Falcone sur la mafia en Sicile” in Ethnologie française (2001). Her recent works analyze the connections between the Catholic religion and the politics within the anti-Mafia movement: “De la sainte pèlerine au juge saint: les parcours de l’antimafia en Sicile” in Politix (2007); “Victimes, héros ou martyrs? Les juges antimafia” in Terrain (2008); “The Anti-mafia Movement as Religion? The Pilgrimage to the Falcone Tree” in Peter Jan Margry, ed., Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World. New Itineraries into the Sacred (Amsterdam University Press, 2008); “The Sicilian Mafia: Transformation to a Global Evil,” in Ethnográfica (2008). Her latest book is entitled: Les théâtres des “Maures et Chrétiens.” Conflits politiques et dispositifs de réconciliation, (Espagne, Sicile. XVIIe-XXIe siècles) (Brepols, 2009). Sandrine Revet is an anthropologist. She is a research fellow at the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI, Sciences Po) in Paris. She is the author of Anthropologie d’une catastrophe (Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2007), and she coedited Le Veneruela au-delà du Mythe with Olivier Compagnon and Julien Rebotier (Ed. de l’Atelier, 2009). Her work proposes an anthropological approach to “natural” disasters, analyzing how these events are socially and culturally elaborated: “Le sens du désastre. Les multiples interprétations d’une catastrophe ‘naturelle’ au Venezuala” in Terrain (2010). She is one of the founders of the Association pour la Recherche sur les Risques et les Catastrophes en Anthropologie (ARCRA). Monika Rulfs is an ethnologist. She studied at the University of Hamburg and at the London School of Economics. She did fieldwork in Georgetown (Guyana) for her MA and in Hamburg (Germany) for her PhD. For her dissertation, she studied the public protest and urban political conflict that arose after a child was killed in a traffic accident. Another crisis she studied was the flood of the river Elbe in 2001, and how this flood moved through media, culture, science, and politics. Apart from being a social anthropologist, she has worked as a journalist. From 2004 till 2007, she was a research fellow at the Institute for Cultural Research of the University of Bremen, doing research on Internet policies and ethnic identity, and working in a project on e-learning in higher education. Her teaching at the University of Bremen covered the fields of ethnographic fieldwork, net culture, ethnography of art, and science and technology. Since 2007, she has worked as press and public relations officer of the Lutheran Church in Hamburg.

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Cristina Sánchez-Carretero is a staff researcher at The Institute of Heritage Sciences (Incipit) of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. She was awarded a PhD in ethnology by the University of Pennsylvania for her dissertation on the revitalization of traditions among Dominican migrant workers in Spain (2002). Her areas of interest are: processes of traditionalization and heritage formation; the intersection of migration and cultural heritage (in particular, the role of the revitalization of religious practices after migrating); and the role of rituals and expressive culture in contemporary societies. She has published extensively on these topics and has coedited the books: Performance, arte verbal y comunicación (2000), with Dorothy Noyes; Holidays, Ritual, Festival, Celebration, and Public Display (2003), with Jack Santino; and Maneras de mirar. Lecturas antropológicas de la fotografía (2005), with Carmen Ortiz and Antonio Cea. She is currently the coordinator of the CSIC team that participates in the Cultural Heritage and the Reconstruction of Identities after Conflict project, funded by the EU Seventh Framework Program. Jack Santino is a past president of the American Folklore Society. He holds a PhD in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania. He was editor of the Journal of American Folklore between 1995 and 2000. He is professor of folklore and popular culture at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, and has published widely in the areas of ritual, festival, and celebration. He is editor of Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and he has authored several books, including Signs of War and Peace: Social Conflict and the Uses of Symbols in Public in Northern Ireland (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), and Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life (1994). His work has received numerous awards, including four Emmy awards for documentary films. Irene Stengs is a cultural anthropologist. She is a senior researcher at the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam, where she works on festive culture and ritual in the Netherlands. In 2003, she was awarded a PhD by the University of Amsterdam for her dissertation on “Modernity, social imaginary and Buddhist kingship in Thailand.” The commercial version of her thesis (Worshipping the Great Modernizer. King Chulalongkorn, Patron Saint of the Thai Middle Class) was published in 2009. She also teaches at the Anthropology Department of the University of Amsterdam on various topics (e.g., anthropology of the margin; anthropology of Europe). In her current research she focuses on public mourning ritual, dance culture, and local identity in the Netherlands. Special interests in

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these fields are the ways in which media, culture, and individual politics are interrelated in contemporary society.

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Carlo Stiaccini was awarded his PhD by the University of Genoa in 2006 for his dissertation on religious culture during World War I. He works at the Department of Modern and Contemporary History of the University of Genoa and at the Archivio Ligure della Scrittura Popolare; he also teaches contemporary history at the Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia. In addition, he is a researcher at the CISEI (International Centre of Italian Emigration Studies) and studies texts written by the lower classes in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. He has written a number of essays on war and migration texts, including Trincee di carta. Lettere di soldati della Prima Guerra mondiale al parroco di Fara Novarese (2005; Novara: Interlinea). In 2007 he published “L’Italia la Chiesa e la guerra” in La Prima guerra mondiale (Turin: Einaudi) and in 2008 “Col mare in coperta si fa rotta per New York. I percorsi dei migranti tra banche dati, corrispondenza privata, giornali nautici” in Lamerica!, Da Genova a Ellis Island. Il viaggio per mare negli anni dell’emigrazione italiana.

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Index

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A abakua shrine, 237 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 244 academics analyzing grassroots memorials, 5, 28–35 emotions and academics, 244, 246 ethnography, 52, 53, 75, 189, 234, 246 fieldwork, 146, 184n1 memory studies, 1 narrative versus performancecentered analysis, 31 scholarly distance, 287 study of the whole, 237 text analysis, 234–241 Achivio Ligure della Scrittura Popolare (ALSP). See Carlo Giuliani Archive action, 246. See also social action Africa, geographical distribution of grassroots memorials in, 35, 42n39 agency bereaved, 178 of objects, 3 performativity and, 180 of texts, 3 AIDS quilts, 6 Albero Falcone. See Falcone Tree Alcalá de Henares, 245, 247, 255 alienation effect, 172–173 Alimonda, Gaetano, 309 All Saints’ Day, 194, 199–200 altar, 23, 178, 194, 229

urban altars, 230 Álvarez, Magdalena, 250 American Airlines 587 (Queens), 21–22 American Consulate (Bali), 262 American History Museum. See Museum of American History Americas, geographical distribution of grassroots memorials in, 35 Amish community, 127 Amsterdam, Netherlands, 71–95 passim, 74 archives, 95n30 Dam Square, 8, 85, 94n22, 342n34 Linnaeusstraat See Linnaeusstraat memorial noise wake, 85–87 Oosterpark, 95n31 Anderson, Benedict, 205 anthrax scare, 285 anti-G8 demonstration (Genoa), 17, 32, 307–310 anti-Mafia remembrance, 51–70 passim difficulty of, 65, 68n32 applause, 95n29 Apprentice Boys, 101–106 passim appropriation personal versus public, 19, 100 of space, 100 “architectural muzak,” 20

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Index

Archive of Mourning project, 245–247, 259n14 archives, 16, 95n30, 118. See also Smithsonian collection; specific events Archive of Mourning project, 245–247, 259n14 Carlo Giuliani Archive, 16, 304–306 March 11 (Madrid) memorials, 16, 245–247, 259n8, 259n14 9/11 terrorist attacks Digital Archives, 297, 301 Northern Illinois University massacre, 132–133 “Prevail Archive,” 127 Archivio Ligure della Scrittura Popolare (ALSP), 317n2. See also Carlo Giuliani Archive Asia, geographical distribution of grassroots memorials, 35 Assman, Aleida, 17 Atlanta Olympics bombing, 20 Atocha train station (Madrid), 13, 14, 38, 245, 246, 247, 249, 251, 252, 254–255 audience issues, 88–89 Augé, Marc, 311 Austin, John, 3, 103–104, 186n25 Australia aboriginal sacred places, 22 cross, 41n28 geographical distribution of grassroots memorials, 35 male drivers, 41–42n37 roadside memorials, 7 Australian tourists, 262, 263. See also Bali; Bali bombings; Western tourists Austria, 6

353

authenticity, 24, 41n27, 203 physical presence and, 77 spontaneity and, 12 autochthonous, 85 automobile culture, 169, 173–177. See also ghost bike movement; traffic accidents

B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 103 Bali commodification of culture, 278 environmentalism, 277 historical memorials, 280n3 immigration issues, 277, 278 tourism, 266–267, 276–279 ecotourism, 277 Bali bombings, 35, 262–281 death site, 265 grassroots memorials, 271–274 intereligious ceremonies, 265–268 memorials. See grassroots memorials permanent memorials, 273–276 purification rituals. See purification rituals (Bali) suspects, 265 Bali Peace Park Association, 274 Balinese tourist Board, 267–268, 270 Bank of England memorial, 1 barrios, 224n7 Bartos´, Tadeusz, 188, 190 Bath Township, Michigan, 137n7 Battaglia, Letizia, 52 “Battle of the Bogsides,” 98, 101–106 passim

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Index

Baudrillard, Jean, 181 Bauman, Richard, 30–31 Bellevue Hospital fence, 291, 292 Benelux countries, 6 Benjamin, Walter, 20 bereavement. See mourning Berlin, Germany, 156, 160 Bernall, Cassie, 113 Beslan school massacre (North Ossetia), 20 Blackburg Baptist Church, 125–126 Blagojevich, Rod, 133 blame, 33, 173, 245 Bloody Sunday (Northern Ireland), 6, 97, 98, 101–106 passim body clothing and, 245 emotions and, 245 Booij, Lennart, 86, 89 “boom” memorial, 1 Borsellino, Paolo, 67n15, 68n23 Bowling for Columbine (Moore), 27, 120 Branch Davidian, 110 Brecht, Bertolt, 172–173 bricolages, 2, 4, 5, 6, 23, 170, 178, 327. See also grassroots memorials British tourists, 262 Brooklyn Heights promenade, 290 Brooklyn Museum of Art, 289 Brooklyn Paper, The, 183 Brown, David H., 237

C Caffarena, Fabio, 304, 346 cancer forests, 40n17 Capaci massacre, 51, 61

aftermath, 57 Carlo Giuliani Archive, 16, 304–306 Carmen de Uria, Venezuela, 210, 216–219, 217, 218 carnivalesque, 103–106 passim Catholic symbolism, 191, 194, 199–200, 203, 216–219 censorship, 84 Chávez, Hugo, 210–211, 224n4 Chelsea Jeans Memorial, 292–293 Chico shrine, 233, 234–242, 238 tabular organization, 239, 239–240 Chiesa, Carlo Alberto Dalla, 57 Cho, Sung-Hui, 110, 121–128 passim Cho family, 126, 137n10 Christian Democrats, 57 Christian evangelicalism, 112–113 Christian symbolism, 112, 133. See also Catholic symbolism Cinisi, Italy, 65, 68n22 City University of New York, American Social History Project, 297 CityLore, 298 class issues, 88–89, 92 closure (model of social drama), 89–93 clothing, 245, 255–257 Cohen, Job, 77–79, 85, 86, 89 Columbine High School shootings, 2, 12, 34, 109–120, 163n1 media and, 26 youth alienation, 135 Columbine shrines, 110–120 passim, 111

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Index

permanent, 119 commemorations, 20, 95n31. See also memorialization Derry, North Ireland, 97–106 emotions and, 245 for Fortuyn, 324–327 “Fortuyn fatigue,” 332 grassroots versus political, 222–223 for John Paul II, 193–204 official, 58–61, 100 performativity, 180 private, 213–216 public, 18, 52, 53, 100, 193– 197, 213, 222–223 Falcone Foundation, 58–61 policy in Italy, 52 writing policy in Italy, 52 space, 213–216 values and, 324 Venezuelan landslides, 208– 224 passim, 214, 217, 218 monument to the stone, 220–221 Communist Party (Italy), 68n27 Communist Party (Poland), 191 communitas, 198, 205 community, 176, 182, 213 Amish community, 127 community remembrance books, 293 Concorde catastrophy in France, 163n1 connectivity, 324 copy versus original, 12 corporality, representation of, 32, 245. See also clothing; materiality Cosa Nostra, 57, 63. See also Mafia Couldry’s model, 27, 89–93

355

crisis (model of social drama), 73, 90 Cromagnon nightclub fire (Argentina), 28, 35 cross, 24, 41n28, 137n5, 206n5 burning, 132 at Columbine, 113–119, 116, 135 Crosses for Losses, 113, 136 flower crosses, 194, 196, 201, 203 grave-cross-death-resurrection, 190, 201 memory, 31 murder, 31 at Northern Illinois University, 130, 130–133 roadside, 177–178 semiotically charged icons, 109, 156 traffic accidents, 150–151 Cuffaro, Salvatore, 68n32 culture culture wars, 170, 173–177 of disaster, 229 diversity and, 258 subculture, 183 text versus performance, 31 cunto, 67–68n20 curators. See preservation issues cyber shrines, 28, 246, 250, 259n7, 259n 7 Fortuyn, 334 9/11, 301 Virtual Union Square, 296 Czech Republic, The, 6

D damnificados, 218 Dardón, Diane, 132 dazibao, 248

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356

Index

de Jonge, Huub, 262, 347 De Schreeuw, 95n31 Dealey Plaza (Dallas), 7, 297 death, 31–35, 181 “death in real time,” 308–309 diachronic association, 82–83 ignoble dead, 224n8 premature death, 9 rendering body strange, 185n4 return of the dead, 181 as rupture, 75. See also rupture sacredness, 20–21 violent, 71–95 passim death sites, 21, 34, 99, 326 Bali bombings, 265, 272 ghost bike movement, 177 media and, 72 mourning and, 72 physical presence and, 76–77 ritualized sites, 72 substitution, 238 traffic accidents, 145, 150–154 Delumeau, Jean, 224n8 democratization, 4 media access and, 89 “demotic,” 89 Den Pasar, Bali, 266–267, 277 Derry, Northern Ireland, 97–106 passim city’s name, 101 commemorations ceremonies, 101–106 Desa Adat Kuta, 268, 274, 278 descansos, 32, 177–178, 185n22 desplazados, 218 diachronic association, 82–83 Diana (princess), 2, 7, 15, 18, 154, 193, 250 media and, 27, 41n30 Place D’Alma, 16, 20 disaster repertory, 229 disaster tourists, 76, 83, 112

discourse of memorialization, 276 control of, 100 discourse of survivors, 248–249 family, 100 makeshift memorials, 5–6 military, 100 patriotic discourse, 191–192 spontaneous shrines, 5–6 Dobler, Robert, 4, 169, 346 documents. See texts Doka, Kenneth, 179 Doman´ska, Ewa, 189–190, 192–193, 201, 204 Doss, Erika, 12, 25, 36, 38–39n3, 108, 112, 134, 258 Dowd, Maureen, 20 Driehuis, Netherlands, 319–320. See also Westerveld cemetery (Netherlands) Dubisch, Jill, 234 Dupront, Alphons, 241 Dutch Labor Party, 85, 85 Dutch national broadcasting, 76

E Earth Day, 104 ecological issues, 170, 277 ghost bike movement, 180–181 economic crash (2008), 1 Edkins, Jenny, 83 education, 58–59 El Día de la Raza, 104, 252 El Pozo train station (Spain), 13, 246, 247, 255 Elephant (Van Sant), 37, 42n40 emotions, 18, 24 agency and, 178 anthropology of, 244 embodied emotions, 255–257

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Index

“emotional self,” 245 emotional system versus remembrance system, 25, 53, 55, 58 epistemology of, 257–258 externalization of, 249–250 institutionalization of, 249–250 instrumentalization of, 247 internalization of, 249–250 materializing, 24–26 media and, 245 negotiation process and, 25, 36 research and, 244 sacredness and, 21 social action and, 156–160 social life versus internal state, 244 tensions and, 25–26 texts and, 16, 245, 250–255 ephemeral memorials, 194, 195, 199–200, 201, 230, 252, 286–295 passim. See also grassroots memorials ETA terrorists, 245 ethics. See preservation issues ethnography, 75, 189, 234, 246 auto-, 52 emergency ethnology, 246 fieldwork, 52 oral sources, 53 Eugene, Oregon, 169, 170, 172 Europe geographical distribution of grassroots memorials, 35 roadside memorials, 7 “event,” 53–58 collective identifications, 208 as heuristic tool, 58 media event, 87 rupture and, 76 Everett, Holly, 177, 178

357

externalization, 249–250 Eyerman, Ron, 73

F fabrics, 245, 255–257 Falcone, Giovanni, 51–70 passim, 68n23 biographies, 62–63 Falcone Foundation, 51, 54, 58–61 change and, 60–61 versus Falcone Tree, 60–63 institutional representatives and, 63 as NGO, 67n17 state and, 63 Falcone Tree, 15, 51–70 passim, 56 versus Falcone Foundation, 60–63 mementos, 53 memories crystallized in space, 57 spontaneous nature, 54 family, 100, 183, 213–216 versus individualization, 10 mementos and, 137n10 Finn, Dallas, 273 Fire Department of New York, 18 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 31, 41n31, 41n34 Flight 93 in Pennsylvania, 290. See also 9/11 terrorist attacks Fondo Carlo Giuliani. See Carlo Giuliani Archive Foote, Kenneth, 33, 127 formality, 11–15 institutions and, 18, 213 Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, 298

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358

Index

Fortuyn, Marten, 325 Fortuyn, Pim, 15, 26, 32, 76, 81–82, 93n2, 134, 163n1, 319–342 archive, 16 diachronic association, 82 flag, 86 freedom of speech and, 325, 326 grassroots memorials, 327– 330, 328 grave sites, 319–320, 321, 334 media and, 28 memorial, 94n11 memorial book, 326 murder, 94n12 as politician, 322–324 process of forgetting, 324 Fortuyn, Simon, 325, 332 Fortuyn Day, 326 Fraenkel, Béatrice, 3, 18, 23, 25, 30, 32, 67n8, 229, 347–348 France, 6 Frankfurt, Germany, 156 Frear, Stephen, 27 freedom of religion, 137n5 freedom of speech, 137n5 at Columbine, 119 Fortuyn and, 325, 326 van Gogh and, 81–83 Freud, Sigmund, 184–185n4 functionality, 17 Fundación de los Ferrocarriles Españoles (FEE), 259n8 funeral industry, 180 Funk, Charles Earle, 38n2

G G8 Summit, 304–318 passim “the show,” 306–308

Gardner, Jim B., 18, 285, 346 Gay Pride Day, 104 gazing, 76, 83 Geertz, Clifford, 12, 234 gender issues, 32 male drivers, 34, 41–42n37 Genoa killing, 17, 32, 304–318 passim George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, 297 Germany, 6 ghost bike movement, 4, 34, 169–186, 171, 172 blame, 173–174 carelessness of motorists, 173 commemoration versus safety, 174 community and, 176, 182 ecological issues, 170, 180–181 helmets, 174–175 mementos, 169–170, 172 performativity, 179–181 personal responsibility, 173, 174 thefts, 186n32 web sites, 170 white paint, 172, 184n4 Ghufran, Ali, 265 Giammanco, Pietro, 68n28 Giovanni, Nikki, 127 Giuliani, Carlo, 17, 304–318 passim archive, 16, 304–306 globalization, 29, 278, 301, 308, 315–316 Głowin´ski, Michał, 191, 192–193 Goa shrines, 230 “goat fucker,” 84, 94n19 graffiti, 171, 184n3, 248, 250, 252, 254–255

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Index

graphic objects, 53, 235–236 grassroots (terminology), 37–38n2 grassroots memorials. See also memorialization action and, 246 analyzing, 28–35, 246 Bali bombings, 263, 271–274 Bellevue Hospital fence, 291 communal tolerance of, 13, 14, 65, 251 crosses and, 31. See also cross definition of, 1–2 degree of formality of, 11–15 degree of spontaneity of, 11–15 democracy and, 4 in Derry, Northern Ireland, 97–106 passim dismantling of, 291 embodied, 255–257 emotion-action-communication pattern, 258 first anniversary of, 15 Fortuyn memorials, 327–330, 328 in Genoa, Italy, 310, 310–318 passim geographical distribution of, 34–35 of ghost bike movement, 177. See also memorialization horizontality versus verticality of, 30, 250–255 legal issues, 14. See also legal issues. Linnaeusstraat memorial, 70–95 passim, 74 longevity of, 13 of Madrid bombings, 248–260, 249

359

maintenance of, 13. See also maintenance issues media patterns of, 245, 248 modeling of forms of, 11–12 narratives embedded in, 247 9/11 terrorist attacks, 229–242 passim, 287–295 origins of, 6–9 performativity and, 27, 72, 117, 179 personal level of, 3 preservation issues of, 16, 246. See also preservation issues self-motivation of, 10 spread of, 6–7 studies of, 39–40n9 temporality of, 15–18 territorial networks and, 241–242 thefts of, 186n32 uniform markings of, 14–15 in Venezuela, 217. See also commemorations Green Party, 149, 155 Greenhalgh, Susanne, 154 Grider, Sylvia, 26, 34, 108, 347 grief, 112, 157. See also mourning action and, 246 active grief, 295 cultural diversity and, 258 management, 178 memorialization and, 2 performance of, 247. See also performativity social action and, 29 sublimation of, 17 traffic accidents, 145–166 passim Ground Zero. See also 9/11 terrorist attacks Last Column, 24

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360

Index

light columns, 20 performative documents, 3 sacredness and, 24 void, 20 World Trade Center Memorial, 40n23 gun control movement, 27, 112, 128, 134

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H Hamburg, Germany traffic policy, 146, 149–150 Hamburg memorial, 4, 29, 34, 150–160 passim immigrant participation, 165n53 marking death site, 150–154 meaning and, 29–30, 152 mementos, 151–152 permanent memorial, 154 Handelman, Don, 155 Haney, Allen, 6 happenings, 8, 155 Harris, Eric, 110–120 passim Henn, Alexander, 230 heritagization, 17, 18, 36, 331– 342, 342n32 auto-, 16, 40n19 definition, 336 institutional creation of, 339 political dimensions, 335–336 hero worship, 62, 185n23, 215, 309, 329–330, 330 folk hero, 179 messianism, 190 un regazzo, 309 Herzfeld, Michael, 68n30 Hillsborough football stadium disaster, 7, 112, 163n1 Hilversum, Netherlands, 326 Hindu religion (Bali), 268–271

Hirsi Ali, Ayaan, 78–79 history, interpreting, 286–302 passim tension with memorialization, 297–301 passim Hokie Bird, 122 Hokie stones, 122, 123 Hokies United, 122, 125 Holst-Warhaft, Gail, 29, 257 horizontality versus verticality, 30, 250–255 Howard, Prime Minister (Australia), 266 Hungary, 6 Hunter Cigarette Company, 8 Hyun, Roh Mo, 35

I icons, 109, 289 identity reconstruction, 178 immigration issues in Bali, 277, 278 immigrant participation in memorials, 165n53 in Netherlands, 72–73, 77, 86, 323, 329 Impastato, Giuseppe, 65, 68n22, 68n25 Imron, Ali, 265 individualization, 9–10 Indonesia, 35, 36 attack on Christian churches, 264 Australian embassy, 264 Bali bombings, 35, 262–281 ethnic tensions, 277 Marriott Hotel bombings, 264 tourist industry, 266–267, 276–279 informality, 11–15 injustice, 9

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Index

inscription, 52–70 passim. See also texts commemorative sheet, 62 emotions and, 53–55 graffiti, 171, 184n3 link between living and dead, 66 link between living and living, 66 performance and, 65 witnessing and, 57 internalization, 249–250 Internet, 26 memorialization, 10, 26 virtual shrines, 28 Irionda, 237 Islam in Bali, 264, 265, 266, 276–279 views in Netherlands, 71, 77–78, 84, 86, 87 views in Spain, 249, 255, 259n15, 260n16 isolation process, 324 Italy. See also Palermo, Italy government collusion with Mafia, 62–63, 65, 67n9 heroes in, 57 protest and, 309–310 as young country, 57

J Jakarta, Indonesia, 264 Jaruzelski, General, 191, 199 Jemaah Islamuyah (political organization), 264 John F. Kennedy Memorial Plaza, 297 John Paul II, 19, 23, 188–206 “Week of Vigil,” 189, 193–199 Johnson, Katelynn, 136

361

Jones, Michael, 176, 179, 183 Jonge, Huub de, 35

K Kazmierczak, Steven, 129–133 passim Kennedy, John F., 7–8, 40n12, 156 Kennedy, John F., Jr., 8 Kent State University, 8 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 156 Klebold, Dylan, 110–120 passim Klekot, Ewa, 12, 19, 188, 348 Knuckle, Ryan, 183 Köstlin, Konrad, 6, 34 Kraków, Poland, 206n5 Kubik, Jan, 191, 201, 206n8 Kuta, Bali, 263, 265–266 tourist shops, 273

L La Licata, Francesco, 62, 68n28 La Repubblica, 310 La Rete, 55 La Veguita, Venezuela, 213, 215–216, 220 chapel, 221 L’Albero Falcone (Amurri), 67n7, 67n10 Last Column, 24 Law, John, 161 League of American Bicyclists, The, 180 legal issues, 14 Netherlands, 14 roadside memorials, 14 Lehman, Arnold, 289, 293 Lennon, John, 7, 156 Letters on the Wall (Sofarelli), 16 Liberty Plaza, 292 lieu de mémoire, 52

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362

Index

Lincoln Memorial Diary, 8 Lindh, Anna, 82 Linenthal, Ed, 295 Linnaeusstraat memorial, 70–86 passim, 74, 80, 85, 88–89, 95n31 audience, 88–89 freedom of speech, 81–83 inception of, 75–81 relocation, 83–86 removal, 92–93 research, 93n3 Lisle, Debbie, 76, 83 Littleton cemetery, 118 Littleton Historical Museum, 287 Livatino, Rosario, 68n25 Lok, Rossana, 237 Lowenthal, David, 22, 342n31 LPF (Lijst Pim Fortuyn), 322– 324, 325, 332, 338 Lundy, Robert, 101 Luthern Campus Ministry (Northern Illinois University), 131–133 Lutz, Catherine A., 244

M Mach, Zbigniew, 19w Macuto, Venezuela, 210, 211 MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), 4, 180 Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (Argentina), 6 Madrid bombings. See March 11 (Madrid) memorials Mafia, 15–16, 25 civil war and, 69n35 collusion with government, 62–63, 65, 67n9 dramatic representation, 67–68n20

memorializing victims of, 51–70 passim maintenance issues, 13–14, 17. See also preservation issues makeshift (term), 39n7–8 makeshift memorial, 5–6, 19, 52. See also grassroots memorials media and, 7 performative power of, 20 Makongo, Juan, 237 Malaysia, 263 March 11 (Madrid) memorials, 2, 32, 134, 163n1, 180, 244–260, 249, 251 archive, 16, 245–247, 259n8, 259n14 dismantling of memorial, 251 embodied emotions, 255–257 horizontality of memorial, 252–255 media and, 27, 245, 250, 257 mementos, 246–260 passim. See also clothing mirror on wall of memorial, 38 texts at memorials, 248–260 passim train station as memorial, 13, 246–260 passim trains, symbolism of, 247 verticality of memorial, 30, 250–255 worker tolerance of memorial, 14, 251 marches. See processions Margry, Peter Jan, 1, 109, 193, 194, 348 martyrs, 57, 100, 113 Bali, 265 Masi, Giorgiana, 307

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Index

materiality, 17, 250–252, 255– 257, 331–339 material culture, 97 McVeigh, Timothy, 110 meaning, 29–30, 152, 208 identity transformation, 30 materiality, 331–339 museums and, 301 photographs and, 247 texts and, 247 media, 13, 26–28, 40n15, 160 access, 89 authority, 27 boundaries and, 76, 90 categories, 73 close-ups, 87 Couldry’s model, 27 “death in real time,” 308–309 emotions and, 245, 257 externalization agent, 250 G-8 Summit, 306–307 globalization protests, 308 “makeshift memorials,” 7 media events, 87 performative effect, 28, 75 performative memorials, 27 perpetuation of violence and, 27–28 power and, 72 rituals, 27, 72–95 passim space, 27, 81, 89 “spontaneous shrines,” 7 television coverage, 26, 87, 158, 307, 327, 329 Columbine, 110, 117 values, 73 Venezuelan landslides commemoration, 212 Media Events (Dayan and Katz), 87 mediatization, 26–28, 75, 306, 334. See also media

363

medical profession, 180 Meertens Institute, 319–320, 324–325, 327, 336–339, 340n6, 342n36 Fortuyn mementos, 319–321, 321 Religious Culture, 331 Megawati, President, 265–266, 270 mementos, 2, 7, 9, 17, 19, 21, 25, 38, 145 for Bali bombings, 272, 273, 275 candles as, 150, 232–234, 239, 251 for Carlo Giuliani, 311. See also texts cartoons as, 94n13 Christian content of, 112 cigarettes as, 79, 88 clothing as, 245. See also clothing for Columbine shrines, 110– 120 passim, 111 cross as, 150–151. See also cross at Falcone Tree, 51, 53 family and, 137n10 firemen helmets as, 238 firemen pry bar as, 295 flowers as, 232–234, 239 for Fortuyn, 319–321, 321, 327–339, 328, 340n3, 341n14, 342n27 for ghost bike memorials, 169–170, 172 for Hamburg memorial, 151–152 as infused with power, 295 for John Paul II, 194, 196, 197, 199–200, 200, 202, 203

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364

Index

for Linnaeusstraat memorial, 85, 88 for Madrid bombing memorials, 244–260 passim memorial book as, 326 for 9/11 terrorist attacks, 238, 239–240, 287 for Northern Ireland memorials, 97–98 permanence versus termporality of, 97–98 quantity of collectibles, 289–291 realia, 335 for van Gogh memorial, 77 for Virginia Tech memorials, 122, 126 memorabilia. See mementos memorial art, 17. See also mementos folk art, 178 murals, 102, 102 void and, 20 memorial bricolages. See bricolages; grassroots memorials memorial mania, 108 memorial organizer, 252 memorial site, 23, 194–195, 287, 292. See also grassroots memorials culture clashes in Bali, 271–276 horizontality versus verticality, 30, 250–255 managing emotions, 24 memorial stones, 20, 122, 123 memorialization, 36, 104. See also commemorations; grassroots memorials of Carlo Giuliani, 305–318 passim

forgetting and, 104 of Fortuyn, 324–327, 340n13 gender issues of, 32 ghost bike movement and, 169–186 passim grief and, 2. See also grief horizontality versus verticality, 30, 250–255 Internet, 10. See also cyber shrines of Mafia victims, 51–70 passim “memorial mania,” 38–39n3 outside of country of death, 19 performativity and. See also performativity permanent memorials in Bali, 273–276 public space versus private space and, 13, 58–63, 100 revitalizing, 15 secondary memorials, 18–19 social action and, 2. See also social action tension with interpreting history, 297–301 passim terminology, 5–6, 39n7–8. See also discourse of memorialization urban versus rural, 19, 40n22, 170, 181, 230 values and, 324 void and, 20 memory academics and, 1 collective, 295, 304 commemoration, 58 crystallized in space, 57 duty of remembering, 64 emotional system versus remembrance system, 25, 53, 58

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Index

instrumentalization of remembrance, 245, 292–293 learning lessons, 58–59 national, 287 organized, 219 social, 208 Mens, Harry, 326 mental health, 128, 134 Mesoamerica Foundation, 298 messages. See texts Mexico, descansos, 7, 31, 32, 177–178, 185n22 Meysenburg, Nat, 186n31 Minor, David, 170–173, 181 memorial, 171 Minor, Susan, 174 Missing: Last Seen at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, 298 Missing: The Streetscape and Wordscape of a City in Mourning, 298 model of social drama, 73–74 monumentalization, 325. See also memorialization house of Fortuyn, 326, 340n10 monument to the stone, 220–221 statue of Fortuyn, 326 Moore, Michael, 27, 120 Morrison, Jim, 40n15 Morvillo, Francesca, 51, 61, 68n23 mourning, 2, 179. See also grief grievance and, 32 public, 8 range of emotions, 244 ritualized, 178 shame and, 33 Mourning Wall (Oklahoma), 2, 25. See also Oklahoma bombing

365

Museum of American History, 18, 289, 292, 299 Museum of the City of New York, 291, 292, 296 museums, 17, 285–302 passim. See also archives; preservation issues; Smithsonian collection civic healing and, 297 costs of collection, 291 ethics and, 302n3 expressing grief in, 298, 298–299 memorialization versus interpreting history, 297–301 passim quantity of collectibles, 289–291 as sacred place, 297–301

N narratives, 30, 36–37, 179, 248 entextualization, 249–250 externalization, 249–250 grassroots memorials, 247 institutionalization, 249–250 internalization, 249–250 narrative performance, 259n9 public, 295 National Museum of American History (NMAH). See Smithsonian collection natural disasters, 208 Nelson, John, 230 Netherlands, 4, 319–342 “Dutch Heroes,” 329–330, 330 immigration issues, 72–73, 86, 323, 329 legal issues, 14 marches, 4, 19–20, 86 national color, 94n16

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366

Index

political murders, 93–94n10 politics and, 322–324 New York Fire Department, 292 New York Fire Museum, 298 New York Historical Society, 291 New York State Museum, 291, 292 New York Times, 32, 173 9/11 terrorist attacks, 2, 5, 7, 25, 134, 145, 229–242. See also Ground Zero Digital Archives, 297, 301 end of mourning period, 16 functions of shrines for, 230 media and, 28. See also media mementos and, 230–242, 238, 239–240, 287 posters of missing persons and, 294, 294 preservation issues of, 285– 302 passim social action and, 230 social bonds and, 23 stories collected through web about, 297 street shrines for, 229–242 texts of, 230–242 noise wake, 85–87 Nora, Pierre, 52, 324 Northern Illinois University, 128–133 Cole Hall, 128, 129, 133 Lutheran Campus Ministry, 131–133 MLK Commons, 130 Northern Illinois University memorials, 130, 130–133 Northern Ireland, 97–106 passim political assassinations in, 5. See also Bloody Sunday (Northern Ireland)

Nostra Signora del Rimedio, 310, 310–312 Noys, Benjamin, 181 Nurhasyimen, Amrozi, 265

O Offerings of the Wall (Allen), 16 Ohnesorg, Benno, 156 Oklahoma bombing, 2, 110, 112, 163n1, 287, 289, 290. See also Mourning Wall (Oklahoma) Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum, 297, 299 Oklahoma Fence. See Mourning Wall (Oklahoma) omerta, 57 Oregon, 169 Orlando, Leoluca, 55 “other, the,” 33 Ozone Disco Club fire (Philippines), 35

P Paddy’s Bar (Bali), 262 memorial on site of, 274–276 Padre Pio, 317n4 Palermo, Italy, 25, 51–70 passim communists, 55 Palermo Spring, 55 street naming, 52 Palme, Olof, 6, 82, 156, 163n1, 193 palms, symbolism of, 259n7 patrimonialization, 17. See also heritagization pedestrians, 166n65, 176 Pentagon attacks, 290. See also 9/11 terrorist attacks Prefontaine, Steve, 185–186n23

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Index

performativity, 2–3, 20, 72, 103–104, 117, 234, 247 copresence of actors, 41n31, 41n34 ghost bike movement, 179–181 Madrid memorials, 248 media and, 27, 28, 75 narrative performance, 259n9 performance of self, 29 performative commemoratives, 6 performative memorials, 27 politics and, 28–31 verticality and, 30, 250–255 permanence, 15–18, 20, 65 emotional system versus remembrance system, 25 permanent memorials in Bali, 273–276 perpetrators, 34, 41–42n37. See also shooters, memorializing Perrow, Charles, 161 Petrucci, Armando, 65 Pfeifer, Kevin, 295 Philippines, 35 photography, 250–251, 251 analysis, 247 interlocution and, 246 role of photography in preservation, 291 Piazza Alimonda (Italy), 304– 306, 309–310, 310 Picard, Michel, 278 pilgrimages, 99, 112, 178, 221, 241–242, 275, 289, 297, 326 Pim Fortuyn Foundation, 325 Placanica, Mario, 308 place, memorial, 18–20, 104, 220, 241. See also memorial site

367

alternative locations for memorials, 18–19 antiplace, 21, 311 death sites, 21, 34 (See also death sites) geographical distribution of grassroots memorials, 34–35, 42n39 “non place,” 311 physical presence, 76 place of remembrance, 67n4 reclamation by owner, 21–22 as “the real,” 76 Playing Columbine: A True Story of Video Game Controversy, 120 Poland black myth of West, 193 Catholic symbolism, 191, 194, 199–200, 203 John Paul II and, 19, 23, 188–206 messianism, 190 national mythology, 188, 189–193 grave-cross-death-resurrection, 190, 201 patriotic discourse, 191–192, 203 plane crash, 18 Polish identity, 189–190 prohibitions, 206n6 romanticism, 188, 190, 191 second baptism, 191 Second Republic, 192 struggle against communism, 191 Third Republic, 192 T-shirts for Freedom, 193, 204–205 Polish plane crash (Katyn), 18 political action. See social action

Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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368

Index

politics performativity and, 28–31 of remembrance, 64–66 traffic accidents, 145–166 passim Portland, Oregon, 169, 180–181, 183 power clerical, 100–101 commercial, 101 infusing collected items with, 295 media and, 72 memorials and, 108 premature death, 9, 9, 31–35 preservation issues, 16–17, 22, 40n19, 246, 334, 337. See also archives; museums critics of preservation, 289 dismantling memorials, 291 ethics and, 246, 286–287, 288–289, 305, 338 functionality and, 17 information and, 18 of 9/11 terrorist attacks, 285–302 passim role of photography, 291 Presley, Elvis, 193 “Prevail Archive,” 127 Primero Justicia, 221 Primiano, Leonard, 184n2 processions, 19–20, 156, 222, 267, 270. See also specific places profane, the. See sacredness protest. See social action Provos, 8 public space, 2, 8, 32, 64, 169, 199 anti-Mafia and, 57 Civil Rights movement and, 8 clashes over, 100

emotion and, 248, 258 happenings and, 8 identity reconstruction, 178 as liminal space, 75 mourning, 8, 11 performativity and, 9 versus private space, 13, 58–63 shrine, 99 train stations as, 247–248, 249–250 Puccio-Den, Deborah, 25, 51, 348–349 Puglisi, Giuseppe, 65, 68n25 Puputan Square, 267 purification rituals (Bali), 268–271 animal sacrifice, 269 location, 269

Q Queen, The (Frears), 27 Queens, New York, 21

R Rabin, Yitzhak, 40n10 Ramstein, Germany plane crash, 163n1 Rattay, Klaus-Jürgen, 156 realia, 335 reclaiming property, 21–22 redress (model of social drama), 73, 86–87, 94n27, 325 “Reflecting Absence,” 40n23 ragazzo, un, 309 relics, 295. See also mementos RENFE, 246 RETI-INVISIBILI network, 317 Revet, Sandrine, 35, 208, 349 Ricoeur, Paul, 52 Rijksmuseum, “Dutch Heroes,” 329–330, 330

Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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Index

ritual, 3, 30, 104, 258. See also purification rituals (Bali) disaster ritual, 137–138n11 media and, 27 mourning, 178 ritual space, 72, 81 versus ritualization, 72 ritualized sites, 72 van Gogh and, 71–95 passim ritual expert, 79–81, 80, 83 ritualesque, 3, 97, 103–106 roadside memorials, 4, 146, 170, 177–179 cross and, 31 expansion of, 7 geographical distribution, 34–35 legal issues, 14 personal appropriation, 19 uniform markings, 14–15 Rohrbough, Brian, 117, 119 Rojo y Negro, 259n12 Rotterdam, Netherlands, 326 Royle, Nicholas, 171–172 Rubik Effect, 10–28, 36–37 ruins, 20 Rulfs, Monika, 4, 12, 29, 145, 349 rupture event and, 76 spatial, 75 temporal, 75

S sacredness, 18, 20–24, 178, 183, 214, 241 as buzz word, 22 creating life as, 20–21 dissension, 22 museums and, 297–301

369

Nostra Signora del Rimedio, 310, 310–312 reclaiming property, 21–22 sacred-profane, 22, 65 social bonds, 22–23 taking life as, 20–21 vernacular religion, 184n2 Salamone, 64–65, 68n31 Samudra, Imam, 265 San Ysidro McDonald massacre, 7, 22 Sánchez-Carretero, Cristina, 1, 109, 193, 194, 244, 350 Santa Eugenia train station (Spain), 246, 247, 255 Santino, Jack, 3, 5, 6, 12, 23, 30, 97, 115, 135, 136, 178, 179–180, 186n25, 194, 209, 350 Sari Club (Bali), 262, 273 Scandinavia, 6 Scharfe, Martin, 6 school shootings, 108–138 date of, 110 Sciascia, Leonardo, 63 Scott, Rachel, 113 scrapbooks, 293, 326 secondary memorials, 18–19 secularization, 20–24, 156 Seher, Nicola, 145–166 passim accident aftermath, 148–149 accident event, 146–148, 147 funeral, 158–159, 159 self-reference, 10 Senie, Harriet, 181 September 11 Memorial and Museum, 297. See also 9/11 terrorist attacks Setia, Putu, 278 Shayt, David, 289

Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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370

Index

shooters, memorializing, 108–138 passim. See also perpetrators Columbine High School, 113–119 forgiveness, 125 hate messages, 117, 132 Northern Illinois University, 130, 130–133 reconciliation, 117 Virginia Tech, 123–128 passim shrine civil, 51, 66n2 grammar of, 232–234 grief, 112 meaning of name, 23, 99, 178, 229–230 portal to other world, 23, 99, 112, 137n2 public space, 99 territorial networks, 241–242 Siege of Derry, 101 silent mourning marches (Netherlands). See Netherlands Singapore, 263 Slowacki, Juliusz, poem, 190, 193 Smithsonian collection, 16, 285–302 passim digital archives, 297, 301 ephemera of loss, 286–295 field collecting, 295–297 versus donors, 288, 295 memorialization versus interpreting history, 297–301 passim quantity of collectibles, 289–291 September 11: Bearing Witness to History, 299–300 social action, 28–31, 36, 85, 87, 103, 134

anti-G8 demonstration (Genoa), 17, 32, 307–310 Bali bombings and, 272 Derry, North Ireland and, 97–106 ecological issues and, 170, 180–181, 277 emotions and, 156–160 Fortuyn letters and, 327 ghost bike movement and, 173–177, 180–181 globalization protests, 308 Madrid memorials and, 248 memorialization and, 2, 248 moral legitimacy of, 159 motivation of, 156–160 9/11 terrorist attacks and, 230 people’s protest, 88–89 subversive, 200 traffic accidents and, 150–166 passim, 151 in Venezuela, 222 writing and, 305 social bonds, 22–23 social poetics, 68n30 Solidarity Movement, 199 South Africa, 42n39 Southwest United States, 177 roadside memorials, 7 space, 18–20, 104 appropriation of, 100 clothes as liminal space, 255 enlargement of memorial space, 19–20 family, 213–216 friends, 213–216 media (See media) “non place,” 311 texts and, 237–240 Spanish National Library, 18 Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), 245, 246

Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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Index

“special time,” 196, 198 speech acts, 3. See also performativity spontaneity, 11–15, 194 authenticity and, 12, 203 conventions of, 154 “spontaneous reaction,” 146, 154–156 spontaneous memorials, 39n8, 103, 293. See also grassroots memorials; spontaneous shrines communal tolerance of, 13, 14, 65, 251 preservation issues, 288 spontaneous shrines, 5–6, 12, 39n8, 97–106 passim, 133, 177–179, 209, 297. See also grassroots memorials; spontaneous memorials controversy over term, 98–99 conventions of, 154 deterioration of, 289 media and, 7 9/11 (New York), 229–242 performativity and, 179 Sprouse, Shannon, 175–176, 179, 181 St. Louis, Missouri, 169, 173 St. Paul’s Chapel memorial, 292 status issues, 33 Stengs, Irene, 27, 34, 71, 350–351 Stiaccini, Carlo, 304, 351 Stille, Alexander, 63 Stocchetti, Matteo, 82–93 Storia di Giovanni Falcone (La Licata), 62–63 Storia di Giovannuzzu beddicchui, 67–68n20 Street Memorial Project, The (New York), 176, 182

371

street naming, 52 street shrines. See spontaneous shrines Stresemannstraße road (Hamburg, Germany), 146–166 passim accident aftermath, 148–149 accident event, 146–148, 147 conceptualization of accident, 160–163 danger, 149–150, 153, 155 police statistics, 149, 162 pollution, 149–150 traffic island, 151, 154 traffic policy, 146, 163 Submission, 79, 88 Sumial-Seppänen, Johanna, 82–83 sunflowers, 93n6 Super Columbine RPG!, 120 Suryani, Luh Ketut, 276

T taboo, analysis of, 37 object of horror, 83–84 Taylor, Diana, 246 temporality, 15–18, 65, 183. See also ephemeral memorials emotional system versus remembrance system, 25 narrative and, 179 safety issues, 16 weather conditions, 16, 288 temporary monuments. See grassroots memorials Terre’Blanche, Eugene, 42n39 Texas A&M University fire, 18, 112, 137n1, 338 texts, 3, 15–16. See also inscription; writing media ambiguous, 234

Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

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372

Index

analysis of, 234–241 at Bali bombing memorials, 272–273 bearing witness and, 57 collective, 249–250 commemorative sheet, 62 cultural, 249–250 dialogue and, 248 emotion and, 16, 25, 250–255 entextualization, 249–250 formulaic, 236–237 graffiti, 171, 184n3 inappropriate, 26 layout of, 236 letters as, 51, 54 levels of writing, 248 meaning and, 247 messages for Carlo Giuliani, 304–318 passim, 313 messages for Pim Fortuyn, 328–329, 335, 341n22 motivation for, 314 at 9/11 terrorist attack memorials, 230–242 palimpsest effect of, 30, 248, 249 as participation, 241–242 performativity of, 16, 234 removal of, 26 repetition in, 236 signing of as cultural gesture, 242 spatial analysis of, 237–240 at traffic accident memorials, 151–152 therapy, 179 Tiananmen massacre, 40n10 Todd, Leah, 176, 182 tolerance of shrines, 14, 65 tourist memorials, 35, 262–281 passim tourist “place,” 342n30

tourists Australian tourists, 262, 263 British tourists, 262 disaster tourists, 76, 83, 112 tourist industry in Bali, 266– 267, 276–279 tourist shops in Bali, 273 Western tourists, 35, 262–281 passim traffic accidents, 2, 4, 98, 134, 145–166, 180 blame, 161 cause-effect, 161 conceptualization of, 160–162 normal accidents, 161 Seher accident, 146–148 trains, symbolism of, 247 trauma, 31–35, 37, 194, 247, 251, 263 aftermath, 179 therapy, 179 T-shirts for Freedom, 193, 204–205 tsunami (Indian Ocean), 35 Turner, Graeme, 89 Turner, Kay, 7 Turner, Victor, 198

U “uncanny, the,” 172, 184n4 unchurchization, 24 UNESCO, 335 Union Square memorial, 290, 290 Virtual Union Square, 296 University of Texas shootings, 110 unjust death, 9. See also premature death urban guerrilla warfare, 307

Grassroots Memorials : The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Margry, et al., Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/binghamton/detail.action?docID=769397. Created from binghamton on 2020-10-09 05:54:27.

Index

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V van der Graaf, Volkert, 94n12, 322 Van Der Tuin, Patrick, 173, 179 van Gogh, Theo, 13, 27, 34, 71– 95 passim, 338, 342n26 commemorations, 95n31 cremation ceremony, 91–93 diachronic association, 82 films, 91 memorial. See Linnaeusstraat memorial noise wake, 85–87 private home, 18, 72 Van Sant, Gus, 37 van Weegen, Maartje, 90–91 vandalism, 22, 186n32 versus moral protection, 22 Vanitas, 232–234, 238 accummulation, 233 Vargas, Venezuela, 210, 211, 224n5 Venezuela, landslides in, 35, 208–224 body counts, 211 donations after, 209 la tragedia, 210–213 victims, 215 Verdonk, Rita, 86, 89 vernacular religion, 184n2 victimship, 9, 33, 309 discourse of survivors, 248–249 Madrid bombings, 248–249 versus perpetrators, 34, 41–42n37 victims of shooters, 108–138 passim video games, 120 Vietnam Memorial (Washington, D.C.), 9, 287, 289, 290, 302n2

373

preservation issues, 16 Vietnam War, 8 Virginia Tech massacre, 27, 34, 120–128 date, 120 Norris Building, 127 Virginia Tech memorials, 122– 128 passim, 123 flagpoles, 125–126 Hokie stones, 122, 123 plywood boards, 125 Visual Resistance arts collective, 176, 182 Vivas, Fruto, 220 void, 18–20 as absence, 20 as meaningful, 20 as realm of memory, 20 “Reflecting Absence,” 40n23 Vox Populi, 327–330, 332 voyeurism, 83–84 VPRO broadcasting, 88

W Waco, Texas, 110 Wałe˛sa, Lech, 191 Wahid, Abdurrahman, 264 Walsh, Kevin, 335, 342n30 Walter, Tony, 9, 32, 35, 41n30 Warsaw, Poland, 189–206 passim John Paul II Avenue, 201, 202 Pilsudski Square, 201 Victory Square, 201 “Week of Vigil,” 189, 193– 199, 201–204, 205 web sites. See also cyber shrines Carlo Giuliani, 316–317 community and, 182 ghost bike movement, 170, 182 Internet message boards, 173 Meertens Institute, 342n36

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374

Index

9/11 stories, 297 “Week of Vigil,” 189, 193–199, 205 meaning of vigil, 206n4 Weiner, Jeffrey, 294 Wendra, Pak, 274 Western (term), 39n4 Western tourists, 35, 262–281 passim Islamic criticisms of, 265, 276–279 mourners of Bali bombing, 267, 271 Westerveld cemetery (Netherlands), 319–320, 326, 334 White, Geoffrey, 244, 249, 259n9 Whitman, Charles, 110 Wit brothers, 93–94n10 witnesses, 53, 54, 62, 169 World Trade Center, 2. See also 9/11 terrorist attacks World Trade Center Memorial, 40n23. See also Ground Zero; 9/11 terrorist attacks World War II memorial, 94n25 writing. See inscription; texts writing media, 234–235, 305, 314. See also inscription; texts fabric, 255–257 paper, 53, 234–235, 250–252 permanence of, 65, 230 temporality of, 65, 230 wall, 250–252 writing tools, 305

Y Young, James E., 104 youth alienation, 135 YouTube, 10, 137n8

Z Zanis, Greg, 113–119, 130–133, 136 Zecchin, Franco, 52 Zeitlin, Steven, 99 Zoba, Wendy, 115, 116, 118 Zowczak, Magdalena, 198, 205

X Xenophobia, 260n16. See also immigration issues; Islam

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