"Materialising Memory: The Public Lives of Roadside Crash Shrines"

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Memory Connection
Volume 1 Number 1
© 2011 The Memory Waka
Materialising Memory: The Public
Lives of Roadside Crash Shrines
Robert M. Bednar

Memory Connection
Volume 1 Number 1
© 2011 The Memory Waka
18
Materialising Memory: The Public Lives of Roadside Crash Shrines
Robert M. Bednar
Abstract
This is a study in two parts. First I explore the containment and effervescence of
traumatic memory in roadside crash shrines, vernacular memorial assemblages
built by private individuals at sites where family or friends have died in automobile
accidents. Secondly I suggest that the ongoing production of spaces of mourning
not only materialises memory, but the limits of memory. This article enters into
the vigorous critical and theoretical dialogues within visual and material culture
and memory studies surrounding contemporary discourses of trauma, memory,
and space. It also analyses a set of shrines I have recursively photographed for the
past eight years in the US. Each of these shrines has grown and contracted over
time, not only because of changes made by those who maintain them, but also
because of the specific climate and weather phenomena they encounter on the
roadside. Some objects disperse. Others are replaced. Others fade. Others decay.
I argue that these shrines transfer the life lost in an automobile crash to the life
lived by the memory objects and spaces contained within them. These spaces and
objects then act as a proxy for the absent victim as the shrine takes on a life of its
own, alternately reinforcing and eliding discontinuities of time in the production
of memory/space. Especially when shrine objects decay, that first transference
of body to object is further materialised. This reveals that the shrine as memory/
space is not only living, but also dying all over again, there on the roadside.
Keywords: public memory, transference, material culture, trauma, automobility

Materialising Memory: The Public Lives of Roadside Crash Shrines — Robert M. Bednar
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Roadside crash shrines are vernacular memorial assemblages built at sites where
people have died in automobile accidents, either while driving cars or motorcycles,
or being hit by cars or motorcycles as pedestrians, cyclists, or motorcyclists.
Prevalent for decades in Latin America and the south-western U.S., they are
now seen throughout the country and around the world. Because crash shrines
are produced by multiple people at multiple moments in time, they can bring
together an extraordinary juxtaposition of signifying objects, images, and practices.
Yet somehow they seem to cohere materially, visually, and spatially not only
into powerfully sanctified spaces central to processes of working through road
trauma, but also as a distinctive form of public memory. This is because they are
immediately recognisable, even to strangers who witness them while driving by at
highway speeds.
As scholars from a number of different disciplines studying roadside crash
shrines have established, their primary function is to create a performative space
for mourning and a potential warning to other drivers who encounter them.1
What is not established, however, is an understanding of the processes by which
these mourning and warning functions work for both strangers and intimates at
particular sites.
It is also not clear how these functions are embedded within the larger
dynamics between individual and collective memories of trauma currently
observed in the U.S. For the last eight years, I have been traveling the roads of the
south-western U.S. doing mobile fieldwork at the sites of roadside crash shrines.
I am working on a book project that addresses this gap by situating crash shrines
within a dynamic of interlocking contemporary discourses—trauma, memory,
and automobility. I have found that individual acts of road trauma, memorialising
road trauma, and experiencing other people’s acts of memorialising road trauma
all mirror each other as they intersect on the road.
In this article I explore the key concepts of memory, space, temporality,
materiality, and transference to analyse the containment and effervescence of
traumatic memory in roadside crash shrines. I then suggest that the ongoing
production of spaces of mourning not only materialises memory, but also the limits
of memory. I argue that these shrines materialise memory by transferring the life
lost in an automobile crash to the life lived by the shrine itself on the roadside.
These memory/spaces then act as a proxy for the absent victim as the
shrine takes on a life of its own in the public right-of-way. When shrine objects
eventually decay, that first transference of absent body to present object is further
materialised, revealing that the shrine as memory/space is not only living, but
also dying all over again, in public. How that living and dying works, and what it
means for contemporary public memory and culture in the U.S., is the subject
of this article.

Materialising Memory: The Public Lives of Roadside Crash Shrines — Robert M. Bednar
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Roadside crash shrines as contained memory
These shrines take shape within a particular memory culture present today.
Likewise, their study is located at the convergence of strong movements within
contemporary academic discourse. In Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates,
Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz argue that “although the contemporary
‘presentness’ of memory is evident” in media, politics, and the academy, there are
“many divergent currents” articulated in attempts to understand the prevalence of
memory in public discourse today.2
Shrines, in particular, demand a theoretical framework and methodology
that reaches beyond any one discipline to encompass ways of seeing and doing
scholarship that can account for their complex shapes. My work in this area is
thus located at the convergence of many interdisciplinary “turns” in contemporary
scholarship—visual, spatial, material, and affective—that engage non-
representational and extra-linguistic cultural forms with what Victor Buchli calls a
multi-sensory approach to “the phenomenological and somatic effects” of visual,
material, and spatial culture “beyond textuality”.3
Memory works at multiple scales of individual and social life and is
simultaneously a thing and a process. Making sense of memory is extraordinarily
complex; making sense of the interrelationship between individual and group
memory is therefore even more difficult. Theorists in the interdisciplinary field of
memory studies have generated multiple taxonomies of group memory, each with
its own set of definitions and commitments: collective memory, cultural memory,
social memory, public memory, post-memory, and prosthetic memory.
All seek to describe and theorise intersubjective, extrasomatic forms of memory
located outside of any one individual where social relations, cultural discourses,
and material constraints intervene even more strongly than they do within
individual memories. At stake is not only understanding that individual memories
are different from group memories, but also how they interrelate. As Barbara
Misztal puts it, “while it is an individual who remembers, his or her memory
exists, and is shaped by … what has been shared with others”. Moreover, collective
memory is also “always memory of an intersubjective past, of a past lived in
relation to other people” within a particular social and cultural context.4
How these memories are shared and that process is materialised within the
spaces where memory is performed is a question that needs to be answered. It
is best asked not in the abstract but, as Radstone and Schwarz also advocate,
while “working close to the ground”, where we can analyse “historically specific
formations of remembering and forgetting” where we find them, situated within
their historical, cultural, and material contexts.5 Thus my goal here is to theorise
while staying close to the ground. Within the space of this article, the words and
photographs play off each other as I enter into critical and theoretical dialogues
within memory studies surrounding contemporary discourses of trauma, memory,
and space. This is to show how shrines work as material and spatial forms to
produce a particular kind of public memory.6 `

Materialising Memory: The Public Lives of Roadside Crash Shrines — Robert M. Bednar
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Roadside crash shrines are part of a wider worldwide phenomenon: something
that Jack Santino calls “spontaneous shrines”.7 With roots reaching deeply
and widely through many different cultural traditions, these shrines aim to “make
sense of senseless deaths”, where the deaths are “unanticipated violent deaths
of people who do not fit into categories of those we expect to die, who may be
engaging in routine activities in which there is a reasonable expectation of safety”.8
The fact that these shrines are located not in cemeteries where accident victims
are ultimately buried or cremated but within those spaces of everyday life where
the unexpected deaths occurred—on roadsides, sidewalks, fences, buildings etc—is
critical to their functioning. Santino argues that spontaneous shrines “insert
and insist upon the presence of absent people”; they “place deceased individuals
back into the fabric of society”.9
Because they occur in public spaces, these shrines are both commemorative
(dedicated to sustaining the memory of individuals and events) and performative
(meant to “make something happen”—to materially transform the space of
the event, the significance of event, and anyone who interacts with the site).10
Moreover, as Erika Doss argues, spontaneous shrines “are often aggressively
physical entities”—creating assemblages of objects that seem to reach out from the
site to demand public recognition and negotiation by passers-by.11 These shrines
are also memory spaces made of material objects brought into relation with
each other and with those who encounter them while being located in a unique
space: at the site of a particular automobile crash, which is usually in the liminal
space of the public right-of-way.
This last point is critical to understanding roadside shrines because they
contain memory in three main ways—emplacement, enclosure, and management—
and all of these take shape only within a particular spatial location. First, crash
shrines emplace memory in a certain unique spatial location, the site of the
crash itself (see Figure 1). Here, contained means located “here” versus “there”.
Because these crash shrines are located in public spaces, they are usually set
off from their surroundings in some way. Thus they also carve out a space for
themselves to enclose memory into an “inside” separated from an “outside” (see
Figure 2). Here, contained means inside a container. Finally, once enclosed and
emplaced, memory spaces and objects allow shrine builders and visitors to manage
memory over time by adding, moving, removing, or replacing things within the
site, and even revising its overall design (see Figures 3-4). Here contained means
maintained, extended, revised, or contested as the site is negotiated over time.
The first two of these processes are spatial and the third is temporal. How
these three processes interact at particular sites is what gives each one its distinct
identity. In the following analysis, there is evidence of all three of these processes.
Here I am focused primarily on the latter temporal dimension of managing sites
once they have been established.

Materialising Memory: The Public Lives of Roadside Crash Shrines — Robert M. Bednar
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Presenting absence
While roadside shrines sometimes include debris from the crash in their form, very
few contain any explicit mention of the crash itself. This suggests that they are
not about remembering a concretely-located event or time contained in the past,
but rather about performing a continuing memory in the present. These shrines
assert and actually materialise an ongoing social presence for the person who is
“no longer with us” in body, but is very much present in proxy form in the shrine.
Clearly, there is a spiritual and theological dimension to this, and different shrines
perform different conceptions of the afterlife. However all seem to materialise a
belief that it is a portal through which the living can communicate with the dead
as if they are still present.
Indeed, a shrine is a technology for making sure that this presence is
maintained publicly. Photographs and objects are central to this mediation, and
sometimes the “speaking” to the dead is represented in writing inscribed onto
Figure 1. Shrines emplace
memory. Avenue M, near
the Sierra Highway, south of
Lancaster, California, U.S., 2006.
Photo by author.
Figure 2. Shrines enclose
memory. U.S. Highway 285/84,
south of Española, New
Mexico, U.S., 2010. Photo
by author.
Figures 3, 4. Shrines manage
memory. U.S. Highway 285/84,
north of Santa Fe, New Mexico,
U.S., 2006 and 2010. Photos
by author.

Materialising Memory: The Public Lives of Roadside Crash Shrines — Robert M. Bednar
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photographs and objects. When people leave messages at shrines they often speak
directly to the dead from first-person (“I” or “we”) to second-person (“you”). They
do so using the present tense and future tense (“I miss you”, “I will miss you”,
“We will never forget you”), but hardly ever using the past tense (see Figure 5).
These speech acts project an ongoing presence for the victim, materialising
a continuing relationship between mourners and mourned through the shrine.
However in serving this very function for the people who use the shrines this way
in full view of strangers—by asserting the continued presence of the dead through
actively performing commemoration—roadside crash shrines ensure that those
who suddenly die biologically do not also suddenly die socially.
Figure 5. Close-up, Avenue
M near the Sierra Highway,
Lancaster, California, U.S., 2006.
Photo by author.
Crash shrines share this with other vernacular sites of memory in contemporary
culture, where the cultural line between life and death is becoming increasingly
blurred. In Death, Memory, & Material Culture, Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny
Hockey argue that material memory objects, sites, and practices are not only
commemorations of loss but “attempts to counter loss caused by death, making
connections with the absent individuals and bringing them into the present”.12
Analysing elaborately built and maintained gravesites that are similar in some
respects to roadside shrines, they argue that actively maintained memorial sites
work to “sustain the dead as socially living persons”. Such sites also provide “a
means to maintain a physical proximity with the deceased—a sense of ‘being with’
a particular person now, rather than simply recalling what has passed”.13
The many objects contained within shrines play a central role in this process
of keeping absent people present. As Margaret Gibson argues, “people grieve with
and through objects”, where the “transitional nature of corporeal existence is both
compensated for and replaced by representations and objects” that are used to help
people mourn.14 This sense of a memory/space as a location for ongoing “being
with” the dead is particularly pronounced at roadside shrines, which augment the

Materialising Memory: The Public Lives of Roadside Crash Shrines — Robert M. Bednar
24
gravesite with a separate site in the public roadscape that commemorates the place
where the deceased not only died, but was last alive.15
Transferred lives
As Jay Winter has written about war memorials, public commemoration at sites
of memory satisfies and materialises a need to remember, but even sites with the
power of the state mobilised behind them tend towards dissolution: “When that
need (to commemorate a certain event important to a public) vanishes, so does
the glue that holds together the social practice of commemoration. Then collective
memories diminish and sites of memory decompose or simply fade into the
landscape”.16 Like other memorial spaces and structures, roadside shrines have a
life-cycle: they are created, they live, and eventually they will die. However they do
not do so symmetrically. Most shrines disappear shortly after they appear, either
because they are removed to comply with legal restrictions or because they are
simply no longer used.
A shrine with staying power prolongs its existence because it is continually
renewed—actively maintained by friends and family members. They visit the sites
and re-decorate them on holidays, as well as the victim’s birthday and significant
days in their familial lives such as wedding anniversaries. Some sites sustain
central elements across these revisions while removing the older objects, while
others simply add to the existing objects, sometimes re-arranging them. At some
sites there is a coherent and clean revision, while at others, the collection grows
and contracts from the centre, often spilling out of the defined space of the shrine.
Figure 6. U.S. Highway 1,
Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu,
California, U.S., 2006. Photo
by author.

Materialising Memory: The Public Lives of Roadside Crash Shrines — Robert M. Bednar
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At these long-standing shrines, the ongoing temporal production of space-bound
memory asserts a certain kind of indefinitely accumulating time, where the
shrine takes on a life of its own through the continually unfolding production of
space. This indicates that the evolving life of the shrine is predicated on a kind
of transference between the life of the victim and the life of the shrine. At some
shrines, the transference of life to a material object is made even more literal when
a plant is grown at the site. If it is cared for long enough to be established, it will
develop over time, taking the place of the person whose life is now separated
from time.
Figures 7, 8. New Mexico State
Highway 76, west of Chimayo,
New Mexico, U.S., 2003 and
2010. Photos by author.
Figure 9. New Mexico State
Highway 518, west of Sipapu,
New Mexico, U.S., 2010. Photo
by author.
Each crash shrine materialises not only the memory of crash victims, but also
its own history as a site of memory.17 Its location on the roadside contributes to
its specific spatio-temporal constraints within these histories. Crash shrines are
vernacular cultural productions inserted into a space officially produced by the
state on behalf of the public. Unlike domestic in-home shrines, they are not only
subject to regulation by the state and to vandalism, but are also literally “outside”.
They are therefore subject to the specific climate and weather phenomena
encountered on the roadside. Some shrines will accumulate objects for years and

Materialising Memory: The Public Lives of Roadside Crash Shrines — Robert M. Bednar
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then suddenly disappear. Sometimes there is also material evidence of the crash
itself left behind in the form of tree scars and bent guardrails and crash debris, but
no evidence of the shrine’s mediation of the crash, as it no longer exists. Other
sites materialise signs of slow dispersal and decay.
Figure 10. California State
Highway 67, south of Ramona,
California, U.S., 2006. Photo
by author.
Figure 11. Interstate Highway 35
at MLK Boulevard, Austin, Texas,
U.S., 2008. Photo by author.
My first response to such decay—a material reminder of the physical and social
death of the persons commemorated at these sites—was to feel melancholy at the
evident loss. Indeed, it is hard to describe these sites in neutral terms in a way that
does not put a value on the change. The words that come to mind are decayed,
abandoned, neglected, incoherent, dispersed, messy, toppled, dirty, broken, faded.
Certainly the mirroring of a body’s dissolution in the decay of objects at a shrine
is poignant. However what exactly is lost when a roadside shrine dies in public? If
such a process of dissolution were invisible, or located in private space, it would
have no claim on a public. Because it happens in a public space, however, the
death of a long-standing shrine does something else.
If a shrine transfers the life of the victim to itself, ensuring that it will live past
the victim, it not only literally re-places them in social space, but also compensates
for their lost future as a social entity. While the victim will no longer celebrate
new birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays, the shrine does. As living memory/
space, the shrine is a means of replacing the interrupted life with a new life that
is allowed to take its course as the victim’s life was expected to before it was cut
short by the crash. This applies not only to the shrine’s life, but also to its death.
While the victim’s life was ended prematurely, without the possibility of living
until the “natural” processes of bodily decay prevail, the shrine is allowed that
privilege too. It spends its everyday life standing there in the wind and the sun and
the rain, doing its job, like a person, living its life instead of having its life ended
by a tragic and untimely death.

Materialising Memory: The Public Lives of Roadside Crash Shrines — Robert M. Bednar
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Thus, one of the things shrines do as memory forms is to re-create the lost body’s
ability to live long enough to die of natural causes. Sometimes this fact is so
evident that it is uncanny, as in the case of a shrine north of Albuquerque, New
Mexico (see Figures 12-13). The site has featured a stuffed cartoon Tasmanian
devil at least since I took the first picture in 2006, where he appears new. In 2010,
I photographed the site again and ‘TAZ’ has a new friend and graying eyebrows.18
Clearly, the iconic and anthropomorphic aspects of these objects contribute to the
uncanny feeling. It is even more pronounced when, as in another shrine from New
Mexico, the central figure at the site takes on human form (see Figures 14-15).
Figures 12, 13. Interstate
Highway 25, north of
Albuquerque, New Mexico,
U.S., 2006 and 2010. Photos
by author.
Figures 14, 15. North-east corner
of Rodeo and Yucca, Santa Fe,
New Mexico, U.S., 2003 and
2006. Photos by author.

Materialising Memory: The Public Lives of Roadside Crash Shrines — Robert M. Bednar
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Making memory public
A shrine is not only a living memory of someone lost—an active attempt to keep
the memory of the past loss present and alive in the public sphere—but also a
talking-back to that death itself through material means. This is an assertion not of
the memory of absence but of presence: they are still here, included socially in the
motoring public that lives on and is driving past every day. In short, roadside crash
shrines open up collective spaces for remembering individual road traumas that
assert an ongoing social presence of lost drivers, passengers, and others killed in
automobile accidents.
However scholars working on roadside shrines have focused more on the
producers and direct users of crash shrines and have not adequately theorised or
explained their wider collectivising functions. For instance, Catherine Collins and
Alexandra Opie argue that they provide a space for working-through the violent
deaths that occur. This creates an orderly inversion of “the chaos of traumatic
memory and grief”, giving the people who build and maintain shrines a sense of
agency in the face of traumatic loss.19
This is also a central claim of Jennifer Clark and Majella Franzmann, who
see roadside shrines as a way for mourners to claim an “authority from grief” in
the public sphere.20 This is certainly a primary function of any roadside shrine.
However while these other scholars have shown how shrines give the people who
build them agency, I contend that they have their own agency once they are built
and this has everything to do with how they work as collective memory forms.
Simply put, shrines can be said to have agency because they seem to be alive there
on the roadside while they have all sorts of things “done to them”. They are built,
maintained, revised, contested and removed, but they also do something in the
public sphere as they live their lives on the roadside.
That “doing something” is what I explore by way of conclusion. In Stuff, Daniel
Miller argues that material culture is not simply a system of “stuff” but one where
people and stuff “mutually constitute each other” within a dialectic between
subject and object: where “objects make us, as part of the very same process by
which we make them”.21 I hope it has become clear that I share Miller’s conception
of material objects and formations as locations for cultural work and not only
containers of cultural work. The question then is: precisely how does this mutually
constitutive cultural work work at crash shrines?
I have been arguing that a shrine transfers the life of the lost victim onto itself
and I would like to be more precise about that claim. Thus far, my use of the term
“transference” has implied a simple act of transferring something from one thing
or state of being into another, but it also has a much more specific meaning within
psychoanalytic theory, particularly within what is called object relations theory.
Recently, scholars in the humanities and social sciences have been applying this
psychoanalytic concept to a more literal kind of “object relations” between people
and objects within material culture.

Materialising Memory: The Public Lives of Roadside Crash Shrines — Robert M. Bednar
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Within object-relations and relational psychoanalytic theoretical models,
transference describes a particular therapeutic situation. When a patient’s
memory or experience is revived in a therapeutic session, an earlier experience
is experienced as “in process” in the present, and the earlier person is replaced
by the therapist who is projected upon as a therapeutic “object”. In transference,
the subject treats the object as if the object is equivalent to the subject’s image
of the object, erasing difference through what is called “projective identification”.
However transference refers to more than projection. It is, as Peter Redman argues,
“a process of unconscious communication firmly located in the present and within
a relational field”, where transference dynamics “are simultaneously internal
and shared, felt as belonging inside a particular individual while having no clear
home in any single person”.22
The dynamic is radically uncontained—”a flow rather than a location” where
“the ‘inner’ always has the ‘outer’ present within it (and vice versa) such that the
boundaries between inside and outside are fundamentally blurred and unstable”.23
This aligns the concept squarely with current theories of intersubjectivity
within material culture, which emphasise not only the agency and “excessiveness”
of objects, but also the kind of interpenetration of self and object contained by
the dynamic of transference.24 Thus transference is a crucial process to engage in
explaining how individual and collective memories interplay at particular
memory/spaces.
Roadside shrines clearly are transference objects, but they are also comprised
of transference objects. As Margaret Gibson argues, “Through death, the most
mundane objects can rise in symbolic, emotional and mnemonic value, sometimes
outweighing all other measures of value—particularly the economic”.25 By engaging
in transference and investing in things, shrine builders transform everyday mass-
produced objects (such as teddy bears, plastic flowers, and balloons) into magical
objects capable of affect. It is exactly this micro-process of transference that gives
shrines their agency within the larger public sphere as well, where both the victim
and the shrine builders are generally unknown to drive-by witnesses. If it were not
for the initial transference of affect accomplished by shrine builders a shrine would
be inert—a dead collection of stuff on the side of the road with no claim on the
rest of us—but it is anything but inert.
A crash shrine materialises the process of investment in things, but it also
renders them affective to those who witness the shrines as strangers. When you
drive by one and notice it, you are brought into its web of transference. It can
“trigger” your own memories of road trauma. It can “remind” you of other shrines
you have seen. It can “make” you slow down. It can “cause” you to feel empathy.
Literally, the shrine “does nothing”, but nonetheless, things happen.
This is what I mean by saying that crash shrines “do something”. What they do
is create a public that knows trauma. They depend on the agency of others to give
them their agency. By performing a specific, very local, site of memory in a public
space—by living and dying on the roadside at the same place where the person
they commemorate was lost—they materialise a wider memory/space as well. This

Materialising Memory: The Public Lives of Roadside Crash Shrines — Robert M. Bednar
30
is a space for secondary witnessing of the everyday traumas embedded within a
culture that lives in and through automobiles.
Created as transference objects for the bereaved, crash shrines live and die also
as transference objects for anonymous drivers as well. They encounter shrines
without knowing the people memorialised, without being “inside” the micro-
public who maintain a social presence for the victim by commemorating a specific
life lost, but being contained inside a different public: a motoring public made
aware of lost fellow drivers. Seen this way, the mourning and warning functions
of shrines converge: crash shrines do important work not only for the individuals
who mourn the loss of their loved ones, but also for the larger collective. This is
not only as a warning, but as an implicit assertion of affiliation—an assertion that
their memory is our memory.
Endnotes
1See especially Rudolfo Anaya, Denise Chavez and Juan Estevan Arellano,
Descansos: An Interrupted Journey (Albuquerque: El Norte Publications, 1995);
Jennifer Clark, “Challenging Motoring Functionalism: Roadside Memorials,
Heritage and History in Australia and New Zealand,” The Journal of Transport
History 29 (2008): 23-43; Jennifer Clark and Majella Franzmann, “Authority From
Grief: Presence and Place in the Making of Roadside Memorials,” Death Studies 30
(2006): 57999; Charles Collins and Charles Rhine, “Roadside Memorials,” Omega
47 (2003): 221-44; Holly Everett, Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial
Culture (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2002).
2Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz, “Introduction: Mapping Memory,” in eds.
Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz, Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 1.
3Victor Buchli, “Introduction,” in ed. Victor Buchli, The Material Culture Reader
(Oxford: Berg, 2002), 1-22: 9. See especially Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect,
Trauma and Contemporary Art (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005);
Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden and Ruth Phillips, Sensible Objects: Colonialism,
Museums and Material Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2006); Carl Knappett, Thinking
Through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives
and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Gillian Rose,
Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (2nd
edn), (London: Sage, 2007).
4Barbara Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering (Maidenhead: Open University
Press, 2003), 6.
5Radstone and Schwarz, “Mapping Memory,” 2.
6Throughout, I am committed to creating what W.J.T. Mitchell calls an “image-
text” where my words and photographs carry the argument through different

Materialising Memory: The Public Lives of Roadside Crash Shrines — Robert M. Bednar
31
registers within a productive tension. See W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994).
7Jack Santino, “Performative Commemoratives: Spontaneous Shrines and the
8Public Memorialization of Death,” in Spontaneous Shrines and the Public
Memorialization of Death (Ed.) Jack Santino (New York: Palgrave, 2006).
9Diane E. Goldstein and Diane Tye, “‘The Call of the Ice’: Tragedy and Vernacular
Responses of Resistance, Heroic Reconstruction, and Reclamation,” in ed. Jack
Santino Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death (New
York: Palgrave, 2006), 243; C. Allen Haney, Christina Leimer and Juliann Lowery,
“Spontaneous Memorialization: Violent Death and Emerging Mourning Ritual,”
Omega 35 (1997): 161.
10Jack Santino, “Performative Commemoratives,” 13.
11Jack Santino, “Performative Commemoratives,” 5, 10.
12Erika Doss, “Spontaneous Memorials and Contemporary Modes of Mourning in
America,” Material Religion 2 (2006): 300.
13Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey, Death, Memory & Material Culture (Oxford:
Berg, 2001), 181.
14Hallam and Hockey, Death, Memory & Material Culture, 152.
15Margaret Gibson, “Melancholy Objects,” Mortality 9 (2004): 297, 291.
16See Collins and Rhine, “Roadside Memorials,” 234; and Everett, Roadside Crosses
in Contemporary Memorial Culture, 95-96.
17Jay Winter, “Sites of Memory,” in Radstone and Swartz, Memory: Histories,
Theories, Debates, 324. See also Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning:
The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998).
18Here I am referring to a more general sense of ‘site of memory’ than Pierre
Nora’s, which is too entangled with the nation as public to apply to radically
localised roadside shrines. Cf. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les
Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989).
19In both pictures, the photo in the frame above ‘TAZ’ is faded beyond recognition,
indicating a site history even longer than I picture here.
20Catherine Collins and Alexandra Opie, “When Places Have Agency: Roadside
Shrines as Traumascapes,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 24
(2009): 110.
21Jennifer Clark and Majella Franzmann, “Authority From Grief.”
22Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010), 80, 108, 60.
23Peter Redman, “Affect Revisited: Transference-Countertransference and the
24Unconscious Dimensions of Affective, Felt, and Emotional Experience,”
Subjectivity 26 (2009): 61-62.
25Redman, “Affect Revisited,” 63.
26See especially Knappett, Thinking Through Material Culture.
27Gibson, “Melancholy Objects,” 292.

Materialising Memory: The Public Lives of Roadside Crash Shrines — Robert M. Bednar
32
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Biographical note
Robert M. Bednar is Associate Professor and Chair of Communication Studies at
Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, where he teaches media studies,
visual communication, and cultural studies. His work as an analyst, photographer,
and theorist of critical visual communication focuses on the ways that people
perform identities visually, materially, and spatially in public landscapes. The
paper included here is part of his current book project titled Road Scars: Trauma,
Memory, and Automobility which explores the visual, material, and spatial
dimensions of roadside crash shrines as they are situated in the roadscape and
within the discourse of automobility in the contemporary U.S.
Email: bednarb@southwestern.edu