Pub Date : 2022-11-28DOI: 10.1177/13591835221139676
Sam Holleran, Max Holleran
Steel has become the de facto material to memorialize 9/11. In this article, we show how the vast majority of steel from the World Trade Center (200,000 tons) was recycled abroad but what remained was sacralized and made into local memorials. Using newspaper reports and materials obtained from a freedom of information request, the article analyzes how dispersed memorialization honored first responders across the United States (and abroad) enlarging both the geography of trauma and responsibility to remember. We connect the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey's curation, gifting, and transportation of 9/11 steel to a form of mourning with military antecedents as well as the deliberate focus on strength, masculinity, and participation in the War on Terror. Finally, we show how local memorialization democratized the process of ‘sacred steel' distribution while also tightly controlling what could be done with salvaged metal in order to make sure that relics remained communal, rather than personalized, objects.
{"title":"9/11 steel: Distributed memorialization","authors":"Sam Holleran, Max Holleran","doi":"10.1177/13591835221139676","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835221139676","url":null,"abstract":"Steel has become the de facto material to memorialize 9/11. In this article, we show how the vast majority of steel from the World Trade Center (200,000 tons) was recycled abroad but what remained was sacralized and made into local memorials. Using newspaper reports and materials obtained from a freedom of information request, the article analyzes how dispersed memorialization honored first responders across the United States (and abroad) enlarging both the geography of trauma and responsibility to remember. We connect the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey's curation, gifting, and transportation of 9/11 steel to a form of mourning with military antecedents as well as the deliberate focus on strength, masculinity, and participation in the War on Terror. Finally, we show how local memorialization democratized the process of ‘sacred steel' distribution while also tightly controlling what could be done with salvaged metal in order to make sure that relics remained communal, rather than personalized, objects.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"28 1","pages":"351 - 370"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43283072","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-24DOI: 10.1177/13591835221139675
Nathan A Shank
Memorials and monuments often shape the narratives of public memory surrounding key events and figures, even as they help process and represent the trauma and remembered emotions that those subjects evoke. This essay develops a schema of four types of memorial ambiguity in order to provide more precise analytic tools for understanding memorials. Ambiguous physical representation, ambiguous messages, ambiguous emotions, and ambiguous political responses interrelate as parts of the rhetorical interpretation of memorials. Examples draw from national memorials such as the Iwo Jima Memorial in Washington, DC, and the USS Arizona Memorial in Hawai’i as well as regional examples like Oklahoma’s Yellow Ribbon Memorial commemorating a 1986 postal mass shooting and The Guardian atop Oklahoma’s state capitol. This typology matters to memorial scholars and memorial designers alike: those who seek to theorize memorials ought to have a more developed sense of the rhetorical nature of ambiguity, and those who seek to construct memorials ought to consider the possibly ambiguous effects of their design. Failure to understand memorial ambiguity can lead to forgotten or ineffective memorials.
{"title":"Memorial ambiguity: A typology of rhetorical effects in Oklahoma and the wider US context","authors":"Nathan A Shank","doi":"10.1177/13591835221139675","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835221139675","url":null,"abstract":"Memorials and monuments often shape the narratives of public memory surrounding key events and figures, even as they help process and represent the trauma and remembered emotions that those subjects evoke. This essay develops a schema of four types of memorial ambiguity in order to provide more precise analytic tools for understanding memorials. Ambiguous physical representation, ambiguous messages, ambiguous emotions, and ambiguous political responses interrelate as parts of the rhetorical interpretation of memorials. Examples draw from national memorials such as the Iwo Jima Memorial in Washington, DC, and the USS Arizona Memorial in Hawai’i as well as regional examples like Oklahoma’s Yellow Ribbon Memorial commemorating a 1986 postal mass shooting and The Guardian atop Oklahoma’s state capitol. This typology matters to memorial scholars and memorial designers alike: those who seek to theorize memorials ought to have a more developed sense of the rhetorical nature of ambiguity, and those who seek to construct memorials ought to consider the possibly ambiguous effects of their design. Failure to understand memorial ambiguity can lead to forgotten or ineffective memorials.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"28 1","pages":"302 - 323"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47831716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-16DOI: 10.1177/13591835221136807
Mads Daugbjerg
This article discusses the qualities and affordances of the remaining World War II bunkers still found along Europe's Western coastline. Drawing on ethnographic and historical material from a Danish section of the line, and on my involvement in establishing an alternative film festival among these ruins, I explore the bunkers as ‘invasive’ materialities, that is, externally imposed structures, still conceived in various ways as foreign, intrusive or out of place. The bunkers continue to disturb the status quo, prompting different kinds of responses – of opposition and consternation but also certain kinds of allure and fascination. With the film festival as the main case, I trace the bunkers as products of various kinds of collaboration and as natural-cultural amalgams around which questions of protection, ownership, and rights come to matter, socially and materially. I argue that an ‘invasive’ analytics may further our understanding of the different relationships and agencies involved in these dynamics.
{"title":"Invasive materialities: War bunkers as disturbing nodes of collaboration","authors":"Mads Daugbjerg","doi":"10.1177/13591835221136807","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835221136807","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses the qualities and affordances of the remaining World War II bunkers still found along Europe's Western coastline. Drawing on ethnographic and historical material from a Danish section of the line, and on my involvement in establishing an alternative film festival among these ruins, I explore the bunkers as ‘invasive’ materialities, that is, externally imposed structures, still conceived in various ways as foreign, intrusive or out of place. The bunkers continue to disturb the status quo, prompting different kinds of responses – of opposition and consternation but also certain kinds of allure and fascination. With the film festival as the main case, I trace the bunkers as products of various kinds of collaboration and as natural-cultural amalgams around which questions of protection, ownership, and rights come to matter, socially and materially. I argue that an ‘invasive’ analytics may further our understanding of the different relationships and agencies involved in these dynamics.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"28 1","pages":"390 - 408"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47119535","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-16DOI: 10.1177/13591835221136806
Julie de Vos
In this article, I will explore the concepts of absence and presence in the context of the Francoist repression during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the following dictatorship (1939–1975) ruled by General Francisco Franco. My aim is to explore how this tension between absence and presence has been deliberately used as a repressive means in the construction of a new social order and how this has been materially maintained until the present day. To accomplish this, I will focus on Domanska's concept of non-absence (2006) and Kristeva's concept of abjection (1982). I intend to use observations of the material phenomenon from the field – in the context of mass graves and monuments – to discuss the concepts of absence and presence in the archaeological record and on a broader level. The Spanish case thereby serves as a ground for the emergence of a conceptual frame that serves as a tool for working on the ideas of absence and presence. Absence is undeniably an inherent part of archaeology and indeed, as so, and in the midst of the material turn, the role of absence should be paid as much attention as the presence of things. Even more so in specific archaeological contexts where certain presences are dominating the landscape deliberately excluding others.
{"title":"The absence that will not go away","authors":"Julie de Vos","doi":"10.1177/13591835221136806","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835221136806","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I will explore the concepts of absence and presence in the context of the Francoist repression during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the following dictatorship (1939–1975) ruled by General Francisco Franco. My aim is to explore how this tension between absence and presence has been deliberately used as a repressive means in the construction of a new social order and how this has been materially maintained until the present day. To accomplish this, I will focus on Domanska's concept of non-absence (2006) and Kristeva's concept of abjection (1982). I intend to use observations of the material phenomenon from the field – in the context of mass graves and monuments – to discuss the concepts of absence and presence in the archaeological record and on a broader level. The Spanish case thereby serves as a ground for the emergence of a conceptual frame that serves as a tool for working on the ideas of absence and presence. Absence is undeniably an inherent part of archaeology and indeed, as so, and in the midst of the material turn, the role of absence should be paid as much attention as the presence of things. Even more so in specific archaeological contexts where certain presences are dominating the landscape deliberately excluding others.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"28 1","pages":"371 - 389"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47074022","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-26DOI: 10.1177/13591835221132197
Jeremy F. Walton, Çiçek İlengiz
In this introduction to our edited volume, Material Afterlives, we specify the interventions and arguments of our collection as a whole. To begin, we reflect on the recent proliferation of “afterlives” as a concept and metaphor within the social sciences and humanities, a development that we describe as the “new hauntology.” As we argue, this new hauntology favors the subjective rather than objective aspects of afterlives and consequently neglects questions of materiality. The overarching goal of Material Afterlives is to remedy this neglect. Following this, we examine the contributions and limitations of the concepts of ruin/ruination and waste to the investigation of material afterlives. While the concepts of ruin and waste presuppose a decrease in value in the face of time and change of function, material afterlives, by contrast, accentuate the proliferation of enhanced and unanticipated material values. We then enumerate the implications of our consideration of material afterlives for Memory Studies broadly, with particular emphasis on how material afterlives unsettle the orienting role of trauma in the discipline. Finally, we briefly outline the five specific contributions that constitute our volume.
{"title":"Introduction: Afterlives in objects","authors":"Jeremy F. Walton, Çiçek İlengiz","doi":"10.1177/13591835221132197","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835221132197","url":null,"abstract":"In this introduction to our edited volume, Material Afterlives, we specify the interventions and arguments of our collection as a whole. To begin, we reflect on the recent proliferation of “afterlives” as a concept and metaphor within the social sciences and humanities, a development that we describe as the “new hauntology.” As we argue, this new hauntology favors the subjective rather than objective aspects of afterlives and consequently neglects questions of materiality. The overarching goal of Material Afterlives is to remedy this neglect. Following this, we examine the contributions and limitations of the concepts of ruin/ruination and waste to the investigation of material afterlives. While the concepts of ruin and waste presuppose a decrease in value in the face of time and change of function, material afterlives, by contrast, accentuate the proliferation of enhanced and unanticipated material values. We then enumerate the implications of our consideration of material afterlives for Memory Studies broadly, with particular emphasis on how material afterlives unsettle the orienting role of trauma in the discipline. Finally, we briefly outline the five specific contributions that constitute our volume.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"27 1","pages":"347 - 358"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45138249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-26DOI: 10.1177/13591835221132494
Çiçek İlengiz
What happens to the notion of commemoration when its object is not fixed in time? Intervening in scholarly discussions on the contested nature of public remembering, this ethnographic research analyses how the afterlives of genocidal violence, of people and of mythical characters, are intermingled in divergent temporalities of public memorials. Through the case of the statue commemorating a locally known holy-madman, Şeywuşen (1930–1994), inaugurated in 1995 in Dersim (Tunceli), Turkey, it examines the possibilities and limitations of the statue's aesthetic form in representing madness and holiness both of which lie beyond the bounded character of rationality in its normative form. The article first juxtaposes the fluctuating temporality generated by the statue of Şeywuşen with that of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938), representing the official memory regime of nationalism. Secondly, it contrasts the temporal multiplicity enabled by the statue of Şeywuşen with the statue of Seyyid Rıza (1863–1937), which commemorates the officially denied Dersim Genocide (1937–1938) and represents collective trauma. By putting it into conversation with monumental and counter-monumental aesthetic representations, the article illustrates that the statue of Şeywuşen paradoxically memorializes what is uncontainable within the political order and temporality of the nation-state. It argues that this case presents the possibility of joining different communities of loss by generating space for open-ended mourning for multiple injuries resulting from state violence.
当纪念的对象在时间上不固定时,纪念的概念会发生什么?在关于公众记忆的争议性的学术讨论中,这个民族志研究分析了种族灭绝暴力的来生,人和神话人物的来生,是如何在不同的公共纪念中交织在一起的。通过纪念当地著名的神圣疯子Şeywuşen(1930-1994)雕像的案例,该雕像于1995年在土耳其的Dersim (Tunceli)落成,它考察了雕像在表现疯狂和神圣方面的审美形式的可能性和局限性,这两者都超越了理性的规范形式。文章首先将Şeywuşen雕像与代表民族主义官方记忆政权的穆斯塔法·凯末尔(Mustafa Kemal atatatrk, 1881-1938)雕像所产生的波动时间性并置。其次,它将Şeywuşen雕像与赛义德Rıza雕像(1863-1937)的时间多样性进行了对比,后者纪念了官方否认的德西姆种族灭绝(1937-1938),并代表了集体创伤。通过将其与纪念性和反纪念性的美学表现进行对话,文章说明Şeywuşen雕像矛盾地纪念了民族国家政治秩序和时间性中无法遏制的东西。它认为,这一案件通过为国家暴力造成的多重伤害创造开放式哀悼空间,提供了加入不同损失社区的可能性。
{"title":"The aesthetics of open-ended mourning: The statue of a holy-madman in Dersim, Turkey","authors":"Çiçek İlengiz","doi":"10.1177/13591835221132494","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835221132494","url":null,"abstract":"What happens to the notion of commemoration when its object is not fixed in time? Intervening in scholarly discussions on the contested nature of public remembering, this ethnographic research analyses how the afterlives of genocidal violence, of people and of mythical characters, are intermingled in divergent temporalities of public memorials. Through the case of the statue commemorating a locally known holy-madman, Şeywuşen (1930–1994), inaugurated in 1995 in Dersim (Tunceli), Turkey, it examines the possibilities and limitations of the statue's aesthetic form in representing madness and holiness both of which lie beyond the bounded character of rationality in its normative form. The article first juxtaposes the fluctuating temporality generated by the statue of Şeywuşen with that of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938), representing the official memory regime of nationalism. Secondly, it contrasts the temporal multiplicity enabled by the statue of Şeywuşen with the statue of Seyyid Rıza (1863–1937), which commemorates the officially denied Dersim Genocide (1937–1938) and represents collective trauma. By putting it into conversation with monumental and counter-monumental aesthetic representations, the article illustrates that the statue of Şeywuşen paradoxically memorializes what is uncontainable within the political order and temporality of the nation-state. It argues that this case presents the possibility of joining different communities of loss by generating space for open-ended mourning for multiple injuries resulting from state violence.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"27 1","pages":"396 - 413"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44946896","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-25DOI: 10.1177/13591835221132650
Jelena Radovanović
While historians of Southeast Europe have recently increasingly turned to photographs as primary sources, this article reads a late 19th century photographic album not as an (objective) representation of a city, but as a carefully constructed visual narrative with afterlives of its own. The album, created upon the annexation of the city of Niš from the Ottoman Empire, produces multiple temporalities: the “recurring” and “timeless” national authenticity of the village, shown through costumes and church ruins, is contrasted with the images of the city, which the album constitutes as “old” and photographs as “future ruins.” The latter serves to establish a temporal break between the Ottoman past and the pending Serbian modernization project. Today, the album embodies two distinct afterlives. First, the Ottoman city—and the Empire itself—which the album proclaims “dead,” continues to live only as an object of photography. Second, the album today represents an afterlife of the foundational ideologies and images of post-Ottoman nation-making in and beyond Serbia. The two afterlives are not without contradiction: even though it is used to proclaim the empire “dead,” the album represents an ambivalent material afterlife of the empire in the present (Walton, 2019), while the ambivalence of photography as a medium itself opens avenues for readings beyond the prescribed.
{"title":"Between past and future ruins: Post-Ottoman Niš in the album of Knez Milan Obrenović","authors":"Jelena Radovanović","doi":"10.1177/13591835221132650","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835221132650","url":null,"abstract":"While historians of Southeast Europe have recently increasingly turned to photographs as primary sources, this article reads a late 19th century photographic album not as an (objective) representation of a city, but as a carefully constructed visual narrative with afterlives of its own. The album, created upon the annexation of the city of Niš from the Ottoman Empire, produces multiple temporalities: the “recurring” and “timeless” national authenticity of the village, shown through costumes and church ruins, is contrasted with the images of the city, which the album constitutes as “old” and photographs as “future ruins.” The latter serves to establish a temporal break between the Ottoman past and the pending Serbian modernization project. Today, the album embodies two distinct afterlives. First, the Ottoman city—and the Empire itself—which the album proclaims “dead,” continues to live only as an object of photography. Second, the album today represents an afterlife of the foundational ideologies and images of post-Ottoman nation-making in and beyond Serbia. The two afterlives are not without contradiction: even though it is used to proclaim the empire “dead,” the album represents an ambivalent material afterlife of the empire in the present (Walton, 2019), while the ambivalence of photography as a medium itself opens avenues for readings beyond the prescribed.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"27 1","pages":"359 - 376"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44792436","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-19DOI: 10.1177/13591835221132187
Sofia Pinedo-Padoch
When someone dies without a will and with no close family willing to administer their estate in New York City and other large US cities, the Public Administrator (PA), a small state agency, steps in to take care of the deceased's estate. Because the subject of the PA's work—the deceased—is no longer present, the office relies on things—objects, homes, money, and documents—as legal markers of identity. The afterlife of a person, therefore, is a distinctly material afterlife. Though death may signify an end, it is in fact the beginning of a different kind of time that is orchestrated in stops and starts by the work of the law, people, and material objects. The ethnographic stories told in this essay demonstrate how two temporal categories—the legal and extralegal—come up against each other in tense and uncanny ways, and how this convergence of legal and extralegal temporalities produces the distinctive material afterlives of the dead.
{"title":"Time after death: Material afterlives in the work of estate administration","authors":"Sofia Pinedo-Padoch","doi":"10.1177/13591835221132187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835221132187","url":null,"abstract":"When someone dies without a will and with no close family willing to administer their estate in New York City and other large US cities, the Public Administrator (PA), a small state agency, steps in to take care of the deceased's estate. Because the subject of the PA's work—the deceased—is no longer present, the office relies on things—objects, homes, money, and documents—as legal markers of identity. The afterlife of a person, therefore, is a distinctly material afterlife. Though death may signify an end, it is in fact the beginning of a different kind of time that is orchestrated in stops and starts by the work of the law, people, and material objects. The ethnographic stories told in this essay demonstrate how two temporal categories—the legal and extralegal—come up against each other in tense and uncanny ways, and how this convergence of legal and extralegal temporalities produces the distinctive material afterlives of the dead.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"27 1","pages":"432 - 449"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43724350","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-18DOI: 10.1177/13591835221133289
R. Liu
This article builds upon literature on materialities of care and departs from a relational view of care and place. Using the concept of atmosphere, it investigates how care practices are situated spatially and temporally in pharmacies. In many countries, pharmacies are viewed as an important sector in formal healthcare systems. Rarely discussed in pharmacy literature is the affective and embodied aspect of care and care services. Drawing on an ethnographic study of Swedish pharmacies, I demonstrate that pharmaceutical care services are more than filling prescriptions and giving medical advice. Senses of care are partly accomplished through pharmacy staff's routinized and embodied engagement with the material environment. They also are performed through staff's tacit reading of customers. This article argues for an alternative understanding of care than an institutionally scripted one.
{"title":"Care in the air? Atmospheres of care in Swedish pharmacies","authors":"R. Liu","doi":"10.1177/13591835221133289","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835221133289","url":null,"abstract":"This article builds upon literature on materialities of care and departs from a relational view of care and place. Using the concept of atmosphere, it investigates how care practices are situated spatially and temporally in pharmacies. In many countries, pharmacies are viewed as an important sector in formal healthcare systems. Rarely discussed in pharmacy literature is the affective and embodied aspect of care and care services. Drawing on an ethnographic study of Swedish pharmacies, I demonstrate that pharmaceutical care services are more than filling prescriptions and giving medical advice. Senses of care are partly accomplished through pharmacy staff's routinized and embodied engagement with the material environment. They also are performed through staff's tacit reading of customers. This article argues for an alternative understanding of care than an institutionally scripted one.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"28 1","pages":"409 - 425"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41812095","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-18DOI: 10.1177/13591835221132200
R. Bednar
This is an essay about how the material remains of automobile crashes remain in place to give road trauma a performative dimension through material objects. The paper draws on two decades of fieldwork on multiple roadside shrines throughout the American Southwest, but focuses on the site of the 1989 Alton school bus crash, which claimed the lives of 21 junior high and high school students in Alton, Texas, a small town on the border between Texas and Mexico. My analysis focuses on the way the trauma of the crash lives on in the materiality of the site—how it is structured visually, materially, and spatially at the shrine, but also how it is situated in relation to the adjacent intersection, guardrails, and fence, as well as the quarry and city park below. I argue that the shrine ensures not only that lost bodies receive a material afterlife in the form of a commemorative memorial, but also that the trauma of losing those lost bodies takes on a material afterlife in the structure of the site as well. By integrating both of these sets of material afterlives, the shrine becomes capable of translating Alton's collective trauma to a much broader collective made up not only of subsequent generations of Alton residents, but also of anonymous non-residents, forming a vast trauma collective that is stretched across time but always anchored to the materiality of the site.
{"title":"Trauma remains: The material afterlives of the 1989 Alton school bus crash","authors":"R. Bednar","doi":"10.1177/13591835221132200","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835221132200","url":null,"abstract":"This is an essay about how the material remains of automobile crashes remain in place to give road trauma a performative dimension through material objects. The paper draws on two decades of fieldwork on multiple roadside shrines throughout the American Southwest, but focuses on the site of the 1989 Alton school bus crash, which claimed the lives of 21 junior high and high school students in Alton, Texas, a small town on the border between Texas and Mexico. My analysis focuses on the way the trauma of the crash lives on in the materiality of the site—how it is structured visually, materially, and spatially at the shrine, but also how it is situated in relation to the adjacent intersection, guardrails, and fence, as well as the quarry and city park below. I argue that the shrine ensures not only that lost bodies receive a material afterlife in the form of a commemorative memorial, but also that the trauma of losing those lost bodies takes on a material afterlife in the structure of the site as well. By integrating both of these sets of material afterlives, the shrine becomes capable of translating Alton's collective trauma to a much broader collective made up not only of subsequent generations of Alton residents, but also of anonymous non-residents, forming a vast trauma collective that is stretched across time but always anchored to the materiality of the site.","PeriodicalId":46892,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Material Culture","volume":"27 1","pages":"414 - 431"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45926871","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}