Similar to a recently published anthology on roadside memorials edited by Australian religious studies scholar Jennifer Clark (2007), Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death , edited by Jack Santino, is an admirable attempt to corral recent scholarship on the topic of these increasingly widespread memorial practices and to develop theoretical perspectives on the phenomena both within and across disciplines. As a result of the wide range of spontaneous shrines discussed, Santino’s newest book is useful both as a whole and for each chapter on its own. It is an important collection not only for those whose research or teaching includes spontaneous shrines but also for scholars of material culture, custom, and belief.
The volume begins with a short introduction providing brief summations of the individual articles. Following this is another, longer essay by Santino outlining the development of his thinking about memorial practices. Beginning with his application of the term “assemblage” in 1986 to outdoor Halloween displays, he notes that by 1992, his work in conjunction with a photographic exhibit of memorials inspired by political murders in Northern Ireland led him to choose the phrase “spontaneous shrine” as the most appropriate term for these poignant constructions. Given the conventional meaning of “spontaneous,” however, a reader cursorily browsing the collection may well be puzzled by the inclusion of articles on Day of the Dead activities and the display of photographs of desaparecidos in Chile. Santino’s conception of spontaneous shrines, though, employs one of the less commonly used meanings of the word “spontaneous.” Rather than referring to the timing of the initial construction of these assemblages, he explains, he uses the word in its expression of the “unofficial . . . . These are not instigated by either church or state. They are truly ‘popular,’ that is, of the people, or in that sense, ‘folk’” (12). Thus, with this expansion of the framework, Santino considers Day of the Dead altars a variety of spontaneous shrine, as are the photographs of missing relatives displayed by, among others, grieving Chilean women beginning in 1977.
Santino’s continuing research on customary behavior recently focused his attention on the communicative possibilities of shrines. In his discussion of the ways in which spontaneous shrines communicate, or facilitate communication, he emphasizes the performative nature of the assemblages, which he sees as inherently political. Thus, to further describe the shrines he offers the term “performative commemoratives,” to emphasize memorial, celebratory (as in celebrating the lives of those memorialized), and communicative intentions and possibilities embodied by ritual and assemblage. The term thus refers to both the objects and actions that result in the development and maintenance of a spontaneous shrine. As Santino rightly points out, these functions may operate to greater or lesser degrees in spontaneous shrines depending upon a number of factors. As I have found in my own research (e.g., Everett 2002), while roadside memorials may be constructed by individuals solely wishing to commemorate the life and death of a relative or friend, they are frequently assumed by passersby with no connection to the deceased to purposely mark the site of a fatality caused by drunk driving or a particularly hazardous stretch of road not adequately denoted by official signage.
The studies that follow Santino’s essay thus focus on the concept of “performative commemoratives” and therefore tend to emphasize political struggles embodied in spontaneous shrines. Although there are no formal sections or headings, the volume’s chapters appear to be loosely organized in small groups of thematically or topically complementary pieces. Jeannie Banks Thomas and Harriet F. Senie provide overviews of a number of shrines, including celebrity death and burial sites, roadside memorials, pet cemeteries, and sites of mass death. Margaret R. Yocom and Steve Zeitlin consider shrines that emerged after September 11, 2001. Yocom’s piece, one of the strongest in the collection, focuses on activity at the Pentagon, while Zeitlin examines New Yorkers’ poetic responses to the terrorist attacks.
The companion chapters on roadside memorials further the documentation of regional variation in this practice, with Maida Owens’ drawing on her extensive research on memorials in Louisiana. Hege Westgaard, by contrast, maintains a tight focus on a roadside memorial in a small Norwegian village. Competing constructions of death and their negotiation through spontaneous shrines are examined in Jonathan Lohman’s chapter on a memorial mural in Philadelphia, and Diane E. Goldstein’s and Diane Tye’s chapter examining a small community’s response to the drowning deaths of three teenagers. Sylvia Grider documents the transformation of Texas A&M students killed in the 1999 bonfire collapse into “Aggie Angels” through memorabilia left at a number of shrines on the university campus.
Ariel Dorfman’s essay is a broad consideration of photographic elements of spontaneous shrines, specifically those that bring attention to political abductees, thus making the disappeared, or invisible, visible again. Similarly, Regina Marchi’s inventory of political uses of Day of the Dead celebrations in the United States recounts efforts to make seemingly “invisible” minorities and their issues palpable to a wider public. Ralph Hartley, in his chapter exploring the conditions that work against spontaneous shrine construction in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and Matthew J. Taylor’s and Michael K. Steinberg’s equally absorbing account of the dynamics of memorialization in Guatemala, are powerful reminders that while shrines may communicate political positions, there must be a certain degree of political freedom that allows their existence in the first place. As Taylor and Steinberg note, for individuals living among those who “abducted, tortured, or killed their loved ones,” it can be “dangerous to remember, because to remember is to repeat the past like a nightmare” (309; quoting from Wilson 1998).
The volume concludes with Cristina Sánchez-Carretero’s discussion of spontaneous shrines that developed after the March 11, 2004, terrorist attacks in Madrid. This piece, together with Zeitlin’s essay on 9/11-inspired poetry and Grider’s examination of shrines in memory of the Texas A&M bonfire tragedy, form the backbone of the collection. Each of these chapters was written by an individual living in the community, large or small, in which the tragedy commemorated in each shrine or related activity took place. Moreover, each researcher soon found her/himself in the position of both documenting and preserving shrine artifacts for future display and study, and in Zeitlin’s case, of facilitating further memorial activity. These contributions enrich the volume by providing practical perspectives and grounding the more theoretical pieces.
Unfortunately, the volume is riddled with typos, particularly misspellings and errors in punctuation (e.g., apostrophes inserted where they shouldn’t be and omitted where they should be; quotations and parentheses with no end punctuation). In most cases, however, these mistakes are obvious and do not hinder the reader’s understanding of the text. More vexing for scholars and others using the volume for research purposes is the inconsistency of the index. For example, authors and other individuals cited by name in the text (e.g., Oscar Wilde) are sometimes listed in the index, but sometimes not. Terminology critical to some of the featured essays, such as “assemblage” or “religion,” do not appear in the index either.
While I personally would like to have seen more discussion of the shrines as manifestations and loci of vernacular religious practices, this was not the goal of the volume, as noted above. Having pursued research on roadside memorials for just over a decade now, though, I feel obligated to point out a couple of factual errors. In Maida Owens’ otherwise excellent discussion of this kind of shrine in Louisiana, she writes, “In Australia, wreaths have appeared in the past few years, but not crosses” (141). A number of Australian scholars, including Robert James Smith, whom Owens includes in her bibliography, have documented these sites, which include crosses, dating back to the early 1960s (see also Clark and Chesire 2003-2004). Also, in comparing a shrine for drowning deaths to those for automobile accidents, Diane E. Goldstein and Diane Tye assert that roadside memorials “tend to evolve sometime after the deaths and not with the same immediacy as spontaneous shrines” (242). This statement runs contrary to numerous accounts, including Owens’ article in the same volume, of roadside memorials which begin to take shape within twenty-four hours (or less) of a fatal crash (see also, e.g., Collins and Rhine 2003). Such errors, as well as a few subjective generalizations about regional attitudes, however, do not significantly diminish the ethnographic and theoretical value of this absorbing, provocative collection.
Works Cited
Clark, Jennifer, ed. Roadside Memorials: A Multidisciplinary Approach . Armidale, NSW: EMU Press, 2007.
Clark, Jennifer and Ashley Cheshire. “RIP By the Roadside: A Comparative Study of Roadside Memorials in New South Wales, Australia, and Texas, United States.” Omega: Journal of Death & Dying 48.3 (2003-2004): 203-222.
Collins, Charles and Charles D. Rhine. “Roadside Memorials.” Omega: Journal of Death & Dying , 47.3 (2003): 221-244.
Everett, Holly. Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture . Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2002.
Smith, Robert James. "Roadside Memorials--Some Australian Examples." Folklore 110 (1999): 103-5.
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[Review length: 1487 words • Review posted on September 5, 2007]