Spontaneous Memorialization: Violent Death and Emerging Mourning Ritual

Abstract

Violent deaths stand out in stark relief against the contemporary social climate of controlled private death and grieving. Both uncontrolled and public violent deaths call into question some of our most fundamental cultural values and prompt spontaneous rituals to publicly express individual and collective grief. We refer to these new rituals as spontaneous memorialization and to the impromptu shrines that result from this memorialization as spontaneous memorials. In this article, we introduce both concepts, delineate the characteristics of this emerging American mourning ritual and use it to illustrate our contention that death ritual is important in the contemporary United States but that it is changing form in response to the needs of a changing society.