The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials: Towards a Theory of Temporary Memorials - Meertens ethnology cahier (Paperback)

From the commemoration of September 11

to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, recent

decades have witnessed a substantial

increase in the number of new public

memorials built in both Europe and the

United States. This volume considers the

contemporary explosion of public

commemoration in terms of changed

cultural and social practices of mourning,

memory, and public feeling. Positing

memorials as the physical and visual

embodiment of our affective responses to

loss, Erika Doss focuses especially on the memorial ephemera of flowers, candles,

balloons, and cards placed at sites of tragic

death in order to better comprehend

how grief is mediated in contemporary

commemorative cultures.