Page 183 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

166 Sarah M. Pike

the other side” (Young 2004). Like the offerings on the park bench I came
across during my morning run, R.I.P. T-shirts are personal testimonies of
faith expressed in public space. As Elizabeth Arweck and William Keenan
put it in their introduction to a recent book on material religion, “the idea
of religion itself is largely unintelligible outside its incarnation in material
expressions” (Arweck and Keenan 2006). Wearing symbols and religious
images can be important forms of religious observance that take place in
everyday life at home, school, the mall, and in the streets. The park bench
memorial, Columbine crosses, Burning Man temple, and memorial T-shirts
are contemporary examples that suggest one need not go to places publicly
marked as “religious” to find men and women doing religious work.

The sacred geography of back yards and roadsides

Sacred geographies are all around us: in homes, back yards, parking lots, and
roadsides. Immigrant communities exemplify the crossing and dwelling that
Thomas Tweed argues characterize religions in the form of “sacroscapes”
(Tweed 2006). Immigrants cross oceans and mountains and learn to dwell in
their new homes while keeping traditional beliefs and practices alive. Hmong
war refugees from Laos provide one of many examples of the conflicts
between immigrant religious cultures and modern Western expectations
about the nature of religion that extend into physical space. Not long after I
moved to northern California, I noticed a large gathering of Hmong families
under a tent in the tiny back yard of a house I passed on my way to work.
Though crowded in close to their neighbors, they kept chickens and brewed
exotic-smelling stews outside in a large kettle. Three days later, they were
still there for what I learned was a funeral gathering. Funerals and other
traditional rituals have attracted trouble for the Hmong, especially when they
include animal sacrifices in public places such as parking lots (Chow 2004).
For the Hmong in California, the troubles that come from transposing one
way of life onto another that is entirely different have been most visible at
sites where important life passages take place, such as hospitals and funeral
homes (Fadiman 1997).
“Shaman rituals are almost never performed in a hospital or a public
setting for an individual person, unless it is when there has been an accident
at an area and the shaman goes there to raise the spirit of the person who
experienced it,” argued an anonymous Hmong posting in response to a blog
about a “Grey’s Anatomy” episode in 2005 (“Racial Pro-File” 2005). In one
of the episode’s story lines, a young, Westernized Hmong woman refuses to
have life-saving surgery because her parents tell her that a shaman first needs
to call her soul back. Though the doctors and nurses are initially intolerant,
they eventually agree to fly in a shaman by helicopter to perform the ritual