Spontaneous Memorials, Museums, and Public History: Memorialization of September 11, 2001 at the Pentagon

Greenspan, Elizabeth

doi:10.2307/3379064

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…The city has tried to regiment this outpouring of emotion by indicating appropriate locations for these testimonials to mourning and grief, but, to a large extent, it has not been able to contain the informal memorials (Greenspan 2003). Each day, city workers remove the informal accretions from the construction walls and fences.…”

Section: Fear Consumption and The Postindustrial City: The Limited mentioning

confidence: 99%

The memorialization of September 11: Dominant and local discourses on the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site

Low

2004

American Ethnologist

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An inherent tension exists between the meanings of the World Trade Center site created by dominant political and economic players and the significance of the space for those who actually live near it. Most of the writing on and analysis of the site have focused on the construction of a memorial space for an imagined national and global community of visitors who identify with its broader, state‐produced meanings. But New Yorkers, in general, and downtown residents, in particular, bring to meaning making their own personal involvement in and knowledge of a located history that has social, political, and economic significance for their everyday lives. These meanings are as much a part of memorialization as the dominant players' political machinations and economic competition for space and status. Uncovering and eliciting these local memorial discourses is part of an ethnographic project that focuses on how personalized narratives of loss emerge and are manipulated within mass‐mediated representations of the World Trade Center space. My contribution to understanding how the memorial process works has been to analyze what downtown residents say about their experience of September 11 and its aftermath, to record their feelings about a memorial, and, in so doing, to contest, expand, and modify the dominant media and governmental representations of September 11 and its memorialization.

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Section: Fear Consumption and The Postindustrial City: The Limited mentioning

confidence: 99%

The memorialization of September 11: Dominant and local discourses on the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site

Low

2004

American Ethnologist

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“…These shrines thus address universal anxieties of life and death, leading to their easy syncretism with other religions and their widespread use even by non-Christians (Everett, 2000: 91). This core feature helps explain the popular emergence of such shrines in new kinds of modern contexts, ranging from Princess Diana's death to 9/11 (Greenspan, 2003;Kear and Steinberg, 1999).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Saints and evil and the wayside shrines of Mauritius

Colwell–Chanthaphonh

Salle-Essoo

2014

Journal of Material Culture

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This article discusses the cultural practice of constructing wayside shrines in the Black River district of Mauritius. Using interdisciplinary methods, the authors map the material practices of shrine-making, examine their historical and social contexts, and investigate their contemporary cultural meanings and values. The Mauritian tradition draws important parallels to what scholars have termed 'spontaneous shrines' but is a singular material expression of popular religion that is deliberate, often durable, apolitical, profoundly religious, and inextricably tied to the supernatural. In Black River, the majority of roadside shrines are grounded in a local folk Catholic tradition, derived from beliefs about the power of saints in everyday lives, the co-dependent relationship between the living and the dead, and the omnipresence of evil in the world. These shrines are complex sites that materially locate Catholic believers in the country's varied ethnic geography, yet they also work as an articulation of popular religion that creates a unique intercultural space.

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“…Typically, memorials occur in three stages. Immediately following a tragic event, spontaneous memorials spring up as individuals express their concern, bringing flowers, candles, teddy bears, posters, and notes for the victims and their families (Greenspan, 2003). After this initial stage, items left at the site may be preserved, photographed, given to survivors, or removed and discarded.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Memorializing Columbine

Bingham

Heath

Lyon

et al. 2009

Illness, Crisis & Loss

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On April 20, 1999, two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, armed with guns, knives, and bombs, terrorized Columbine High School, killing 13 individuals, wounding 24, and emotionally traumatizing thousands. The perpetrators then completed suicide. Moving beyond the tragic events of that day, this study focused on memorializing victims' lives. In particular, the planning of Columbine Memorial was considered from three committee leaders' perspectives. Supplementing their input, additional information was gathered from the memorial's official website and news articles describing related activities. This information is summarized, offering suggestions for planning permanent memorials and facilitating grief.

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Spontaneous Memorials, Museums, and Public History: Memorialization of September 11, 2001 at the Pentagon

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

The memorialization of September 11: Dominant and local discourses on the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site

The memorialization of September 11: Dominant and local discourses on the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site

Saints and evil and the wayside shrines of Mauritius

Memorializing Columbine

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