Page 182 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Religion 165

from mainstream media, believe what you see, what you hear, and above
all, what you know. RIP eternal Eric and Dylan” (Foxtrot 2000). On these
online memorials, teenagers who felt marginalized by the public discourse
on Columbine challenged the news media’s representations of the shootings
and constructed their own narratives.
Another site for excluded discourses and the material culture of grief is
the Burning Man festival, a week-long art festival in the Nevada desert that
attracted more than 40,000 participants in 2007. Though news reports often
focus on the secular side of Burning Man, every year since 2000 a large
memorial temple that is burned at the end of the gathering has been one
of the most popular festival draws. Ritualizing at Burning Man, like online
rituals and park bench memorials, challenges any attempt to draw a clear
boundary between the secular and the religious. In 2003, the Burning Man
memorial temple was called “the Temple of Tears” or “Mausoleum” and
was dedicated to suicides. By the end of the week, the temple was covered
with thousands of hand-written messages, photographs, and offerings for
the dead, many of them focused on the central altar, dedicated to suicides.
“They can be honored here,” temple designer David Best told me. He wanted
to create a space for remembering suicides because he saw them ignored and
silenced by most religions (Pike 2005). Heterotopias writ small such as Eric’s
and Dylan’s memorial Web site and the Burning Man suicide altar allow for
personalized interactions with the dead unavailable elsewhere. Like other
forms of the civil religion of commemoration, the temple provided a space
for everyone to engage with religious forms (temple and altar) without being
committed to any particular religion.
Intimate bodily practices such as writing on the Mausoleum walls and
leaving flowers on crosses for the Columbine shooters become ways to
express religious aesthetics, attitudes and values that may conflict with those
of the dominant society. However, bodies themselves can also become living
memorials for the dead, testaments of faith or, as David Chidester sees them,
“the basic global ground for religion” (Chidester 2005: 5). Religious images
of the dead can be both worn and materialized in memorial shrines. As John
Berger reminds us in Ways of Seeing, though we explain the world with
words, “Seeing comes before words… It is seeing which establishes our place
in the surrounding world (Berger 1972: 7). Images of faith and grief are in
plain sight on bodies at gang funerals and inner-city high schools, and these
images serve as reminders of youth violence. Photographer Aswad Hayes
prints “R.I.P.” photographs on T-shirts for high school students in Oakland,
California who want to remember friends and relatives who died violently:
“It’s a way to show sympathy, mourning and grief… It’s immortalizing them
on a T-shirt” (May 2004). Attendees at a wake in New Orleans in 2004 wore
R.I.P. shirts that promised, under a photo of the deceased, “I’ll see you on