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Performative Commemoratives, the Personal, and the Public:Spontaneous Shrines, Emergent Ritual, and the Field of Folklore (AFS Presidential Plenary Address, 2003) Jack Santino, Professor of Folklore and Popular Culture (bio) In this Presidential Plenary Address, I discuss the concept of "spontaneous shrines," along with other examples of public memorializations of death. These phenomena combine the personal with the public, or, following the work of linguist J. L. Austin, the performative with the commemorative (1962). I discuss the social dynamics and political repercussions of spontaneous shrines and suggest that, by combining the personal with the public, they can be seen as a metaphor for folklore itself. In keeping with the theme of the 2003 AFS meetings, I examine the concept of "the public" throughout. I recently attended a ceremony at Bowling Green State University called "Operation Transformation," held in memory of victims of domestic violence. The event was sponsored by the BGSU Women's Center and was held inside a Christian chapel on campus. In front of the prominent cross were twenty-two votive candles in purple glasses—purple being the designated color of mourning; twenty-two victims were being remembered. This was the opening event of a month-long public display of twenty-two two-dimensional silhouettes, each shrouded in black cloth. October 1, 2003, was the unveiling. As each effigy was unveiled, an individual woman read the stories of the deceased in the first person and the present tense: "My name is________. I am __ years old and have _ children. On ________ I was shot to death in front of my children by my estranged husband. My name is _____; remember my name." Audience members included family members of the victims and BGSU students. Overcome with emotion, some of the women reading the brief biographies had trouble maintaining their composure. The victims and the audience members were young and old, black, white, and Latino. All were from the surrounding area. This ritualistic event, the unveiling, simultaneously memorialized deceased individuals and drew attention and tried to mobilize action toward a social problem, that is, domestic violence. Both aspects—the personal identity of the victims and the social malignancy that led to their deaths—were emphatically manifest in the presentation. [End Page 363] The readers called attention to the life stories and personal relationships of the victims, and the entire event was presented in the context of domestic violence as a gendered crime. Moreover, the ceremony borrowed heavily from traditional Christian ritual. This kind of public memorialization of death toward a social end seems to be a growing phenomenon. The AIDS quilt is an example, as are the demonstrations of the Madres de la Plaza—calling attention to the disappeared in Argentina and Chile, the Bloody Sunday commemorations in Northern Ireland, gang memorial walls, roadside crosses, and all the other "spontaneous shrines" (as I term them) that we see. Central to all of these phenomena is the conjunction of the performative memorializing of personal deaths in the framework of the social conditions that caused those deaths with the commemorative or celebratory. (To commemorate is, in a sense, to celebrate something or someone. I use the terms equivalently, but not interchangeably.) In a sense, death has always been publicly memorialized. Think of the funeral procession of hearse and cars down the street; the rituals held in houses of worship and in cemeteries. In these and other cases, though, participation in the ritual activities is restricted to a particular group—family and friends, for instance. I refer to the tendency to commemorate a deceased individual in front of an undifferentiated public that can then become participatory if it so chooses. First, then, I explore the concept of the public, beginning with rituals generally found in public, and not just rituals concerned with death and mourning. Rituals in Public Historian Samuel Kinser cites the slaughtering of "steers and other animals before the Pope and other Roman notables after a parade through the city," as reported in a document circa A.D. 1140, as the earliest report of festive customs held prior to Lent, that is, Mardi Gras or carnival (Kinser 1990:3). This is clearly an expressive public event in that it is...
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