Spontaneous Shrines And The Public Memorialization Of Death

This is an edited volume of approximately 17 essays that deal with various types of spontaneous shrines and other, related public memorializations of death. The articles address events such as New York after 9/11; roadside crosses, and the use of 'Day of the Dead' altars to bring attention to deceased undocumented immigrants.

This is an edited volume of approximately 17 essays that deal with various types of spontaneous shrines and other, related public memorializations of death. The articles address events such as New York after 9/11; roadside crosses, and the use of 'Day of the Dead' altars to bring attention to deceased undocumented immigrants.

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.

Grassroots memorials have become major areas of focus during times of trauma, danger, and social unrest. These improvised memorial assemblages continue to display new and more dynamic ways of representing collective and individual identities and in doing so reveal the steps that shape the national memories of those who struggle to come to terms with traumatic loss. This volume focuses on the hybrid quality of these temporary memorials as both monuments of mourning and as focal points for protest and expression of discontent. The broad range of case studies in this volume include anti-mafia shrines, Theo van Gogh’s memorial, September 11th memorials, March 11th shrines in Madrid, and Carlo Giuliani memorials in Genoa.

This comprehensive study of the intersection of death and religion offers a unique look at how religious people approach death in the twenty-first century. Previous scholarship has largely focused on traditional beliefs and paid little attention to how religious traditions evolve in relation to their changing social context. Employing a sociological approach, "Death and Religion in a Changing World" describes how people from a wide variety of faiths draw on and adapt traditional beliefs and practices as they deal with death in modern societies. The book includes coverage of newly emerging social and religious phenomena that are only just beginning to be analyzed by religion scholars, such as public shrines, the role of the media, spiritual bereavement groups, and the use of the Internet in death practices.

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.

As modern society’s routine sequestration of death and grief is increasingly replaced by late-modern society’s growing concern with existential issues and emotionality, this book explores grief as a social emotion, bringing together contributions from scholars across the social sciences and humanities to examine its social and cultural aspects. Thematically organised in order to consider the historical changes in our understanding of grief, literary treatments of grief, contemporary forms of grief and grief as a perspective from which to engage in critique of society, it provides insights into the sociality of grief and will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory and cultural studies with interests in the emotions and social pathologies.

Bringing together a diverse group of scholars representing the fields of cultural and literary studies, cultural politics and history, creative writing and photography, this collection examines the different ways in which human beings respond to, debate and interact with landscape. How do we feel, sense, know, cherish, memorise, imagine, dream, desire or even fear landscape? What are the specific qualities of experience that we can locate in the spaces in and through which we live? While the essays most often begin with the broadly literary - the memoir, the travelogue, the novel, poetry - the contributors approach the topic in diverse and innovative ways. The collection is divided into five sections: ’Peripheral Cultures’, dealing with dislocation and imagined landscapes'; ’Memory and Mobility’, concerning the road as the scene of trauma and movement; ’Suburbs and Estates’, contrasting American and English spaces; ’Literature and Place’, foregrounding the fluidity of the fictional and the real and the human and nonhuman; and finally, ’Sensescapes’, tracing the sensory response to landscape. Taken together, the essays interrogate important issues about how we live now and might live in the future.

Bringing together a truly global range of scholars, this volume explores heritage, memory, and identity through a diverse set of subjects, including heritage sites, practices of memorialization, museums, sites of contestation, and human rights.