Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture PDF Download

Author: Holly J. Everett
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
ISBN: 1574411500
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
This work is a study of roadside crosses in which the author presents the history of these unique commemoratives and their relationship to contemporary memorial culture.

Author: Holly J. Everett
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This thesis considers issues in belief and material culture studies in an examination of roadside cross memorials in and around the city of Austin, Texas. Thirty-five memorial sites, including both Mothers Against Drunk Driving crosses, which are erected through the Texas Department of Transportation, and others constructed by private citizens, are featured in descriptions and photographs. -- The first two chapters provide the historical and current context for the appearance of vernacular memorials and discuss a number of memorials, both informal and formal, in North America and Europe, including roadside crosses in other areas of Texas. Chapter three details Austin's crosses, noting dominant patterns in construction and assembly and providing a thorough inventory of memorial offerings. Items placed at many of the crosses reflect an ongoing dialogue with the deceased (notes, inscriptions on bridge railings), and the continuation of missed celebrations (toys, homecoming mums, graduation tassels). The memorials thus become representative not only of the mystery of death, but of the deceased themselves. -- In chapters four and five, Austin area residents consider their involvement with, and perceptions of, various memorial assemblages. Informant responses are analyzed in terms of vernacular, domestic religious expression, political activism and grief processes. A number of roadside memorial assemblages contain elements more often associated with seasonal home and yard adornment, a manner of decoration which allows bereaved individuals to incorporate the dead into the world of the living, and vice versa. -- Whereas contemporary funeral custom and landscape emphasizes the difference between the deceased and those who mourn, roadside cross memorials present a more universally active, and thus affective threshold. Individuals mourning the sudden death of a loved one must negotiate a complex field of emotion, often dealing not only with their own grief, but that of other relatives and friends of the deceased. Additionally, magico-religious beliefs may be called into question and/or reaffirmed, as are individual priorities and expectations. In an effort to incorporate an unexpected loss, a number of my informants maintain memorial assemblages as places of intimacy and community, sacred spaces in which death may be contemplated, and life celebrated.

Author: Erika Lee Doss
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
ISBN: 9089640185
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 53

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Book Description
In The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials: Towards a Theory of Temporary Memorials Erika Doss examines this contemporary phenomenon of public commemoration in terms of changed cultural and social practices regarding mourning, memory, and publ.

Author: Harriet Senie
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190248394
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11 traces the evolution and consequences of a new hybrid paradigm, which grants a heroic status to victims of national tragedies, and by extension to their families, thereby creating a class of privileged participants in the permanent memorial process. Harriet F. Senie suggests that instead the victims' families be able to determine the nature of an interim memorial, one that addresses their needs in the critical time between the murder of their loved ones and the completion of the permanent memorial. She also observes that the memorials discussed herein are inadvertently based on strategies of diversion and denial that direct our attention away from actual events, and reframe tragedy as secular or religious triumph. In doing so, they camouflage history, and seen as an aggregate, they define a nation of victims, exactly the concept they and their accompanying celebratory narratives were apparently created to obscure.

Author: Hillary Kaell
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773552421
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Over the last decade there has been ongoing discussion about the place of religion in Québécois society, particularly following the proposed Charter of Quebec Values in 2013. The essays in Everyday Sacred emerged from this active and often tense period of debate. Revitalizing an awareness of how people encounter, create, and employ religion in everyday life, contributors to this volume explore communities’ networks of beliefs, traditions, and relationships. Through broad comparisons beyond the Quebec context, contributors look at African Pentecostal congregations, an Iraqi Jewish community in Montreal, a rural Catholic parish on the Saint Lawrence River, and Tewehikan drumming in Wemotaci. They also examine wayside crosses, places of pilgrimage and devotion, debates on the regulation of the hijab, and the place of Montreal Spiritualists and transhumanists in the religious landscape. Seeking a holistic definition of Québécois religion, Everyday Sacred considers religious and secular identity, pluralism, the bodily and material aspects of religion, the impact of gender on community and the public sphere, and the rise of hybridity, sociality, and new technologies in transnational and online networks, in order to uncover the transmission of practices and beliefs from one generation to another. Disrupting familiar dichotomies between Catholicism and other religions, “founders” and immigrants, new religious movements and traditional institutions, Everyday Sacred marks the beginning of a sustained conversation on contemporary religion in Quebec, both inside and outside of the province. Contributors include: Emma Anderson (University of Ottawa), Randall Balmer (Dartmouth College), Hélène Charron (Université Laval), Elysia Guzik (University of Toronto), Laurent Jérôme (Université du Québec à Montréal), Norma B. Joseph (Concordia University), Cory Andrew Labrecque (Université Laval), Deirdre Meintel (Université de Montréal), Géraldine Mossière (Université de Montréal), Frédéric Parent (Université de Québec à Montréal), Meena Sharify-Funk (Wilfrid Laurier University).

Author: S. Bergmann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351915673
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
Nature, Space and the Sacred offers the first investigative mapping of a new and highly significant agenda: the spatial interactions between religion, nature and culture. In this ground-breaking work, different concepts of religion, theology, space and place and their internal relations are discussed in an impressive range of approaches. Weaving together a diversity of perspectives, this book presents an innovative and truly transdisciplinary environmental science. Its broad range offers a rich exchange of insights, methods and theoretical engagements.

Author: Robert Matej Bednar
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786614146
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Despite the ubiquity of automobility, the reality of automotive death is hidden from everyday view. There are accident blackspots all over the roads that we use and go past every day but the people that have died there or been injured are not marked, unless by homemade shrines and personal memorialization. Nowhere on the planet is this practice as densely actioned as in the United States. Road Scars is a highly visual scholarly monograph about how roadside car crash shrines place the collective trauma of living in a car culture in the everyday landscapes of automobility. Roadside shrines—or road trauma shrines—are vernacular memorial assemblages built by private individuals at sites where family and friends have died in automobile accidents, either while driving cars or motorcycles or being hit by cars as pedestrians, bicyclists, or motorcyclists. Prevalent for decades in Latin America and in the American Southwest, roadside car crash shrines are now present throughout the U.S. and around the world. Some are simply small white crosses, almost silent markers of places of traumatic death. Others are elaborate collections of objects, texts, and materials from all over the map culturally and physically, all significantly brought together not in the home or in a cemetery but on the roadside, in drivable public space—a space where private individuals perform private identities alongside each other in public, and where these private mobilities sometimes collide with one another in traumatic ways that are negotiated in roadside shrines. This book touches on something many of us have seen, but few have explored intellectually.

Author: Anne Teresa Demo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136633545
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
This volume offers a multifaceted investigation of intersections among visual and memorial forms in modern art, politics, and society. The question of the relationships among images and memory is particularly relevant to contemporary society, at a time when visually-based technologies are increasingly employed in both grand and modest efforts to preserve the past amid rapid social change. The chapters in Rhetoric, Remembrance, and Visual Form provide valuable insights concerning not only how memories may be seen (or sighted) in visual form but also how visual forms constitute noteworthy material sites of memory. The collection addresses this central theme with a wealth of interdisciplinary and international approaches, featuring conventional scholarly as well as artistic works from such disciplines as rhetoric and communication, art and art history, architecture, landscape studies, and more, by contributors from around the globe.

Author: Clifton D. Bryant
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 141295178X
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 1161

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Book Description
This two-volume Encyclopdia - through multidisciplinary and international contributions and perspectives - organizes, defines and clarifies more than 300 death-related concepts.

Author: Anne Clarke
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443888710
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
That Was Then, This Is Now is a compendium of innovative research into the ideas, experiences, and iconographies embodied in materialities of the recent past. Drawing upon a variety of disciplines, including archaeology, history, art, and cultural geography, authors examine themes of relevance to the contemporary world, such as the impacts of automobility, the invisible effects of radioactivity, and the scale of future cities. It serves as a reminder, moreover, that issues that confront us as global citizens – mass consumption, population growth, technological development, and the conditions of belonging – find expression in the everyday objects, images and vestiges encountered in our ordinary lives. Through their examination of such artefacts as comic books, road memorials, bullet holes, showbags and cable ties, the authors explore the complex relations between people, places, and things and the emotions underpinning them – nostalgia, play, grief, and humour. Issues and ideas of international scope are addressed through a focused approach as authors locate their site-specific studies in both rural and urban geographies, as well as in the spaces of the imagination, the universe and even the personal home. Given the enormous scale and diversity of material generated by the practices of living in the present, it is difficult to imagine how the archaeologies and material cultures of the contemporary world may be defined. The studies presented here offer a way forward, and, in doing so, point reflexively to the past, as well as the now and the future of things to come.