Chapter 13: Experiencing Contemporary Memorials: A Process-Ecological Methodology

Memorials are public sites that promote memory of a collectively shared past. They function as cultural and historical artifacts that mediate memory and in so doing give meaning to the past based on present and future challenges. Put differently, they provide a rich “cognitive ecology” for people to relate to the past, and as such offer a contrasting case to the impoverished set of resources available in the environment of the mental ward, analyzed by Brown and Reavey (this volume). Brown and Reavey (2015) have in other places analyzed material environments promoting memory, such as a remembrance museum located in a Dutch retirement home. However, memorials have specificities even in comparison to this, in their emphasis on highly symbolic meanings concentrated on a particular historical event, which is to be related to in the first person plural—“we must remember and grieve for our dead.” This chapter aims to apply Brown and Reavey’s “expanded view of memory” in a study of people’s flow of experience within memorial sites, which are spatial frameworks built in order to maximally evoke the past.