Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Cultural Significance of Informal American Commemorative Sites

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Commemorative sites are an essential part of American cultural life, as they provide a space for reflecting, sustaining, and challenging deeply held values and beliefs. Public memorialization often emerges in the aftermath of fraught, sometimes violent, encounters. The spaces dedicated to preserving those social memories can therefore function as much to resolve conflicts as to erase or remember particular identities or histories. This has been well-documented within formal, public spaces, but we know less about the informal mechanisms through which commemorative spaces are established, maintained, and contested. This project, which trains a student in methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, conducts a case study of informal forms of memorialization in an American city in order to understand what impact the establishment and maintenance of a commemorative sites has on identity formation, civil society, and violence reduction. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology, the project would enhance scientific understanding by broadly disseminating its findings to organizations engaged in policy dialogues related to understanding the origins and motivations for urban violence, and to what extent memorialization attenuates its prevalence. Harvard University anthropology doctoral student Samantha Hawkins, under the supervision of Dr. Laurence Ralph, will explore the inner-city as a complex, affective landscape, wherein urban memorials function as tools of cultural recollection in a context marked by violence. These memorials are also sites of regulation and contestation, made evident by their ongoing obliteration and reinscription. She will conduct ethnographic fieldwork in Baltimore, which is an ideal site to conduct the study as it has the second highest per capita murder rate in the U.S. The makeup of and changes to memorials in Baltimore, the different levels of engagement and investment, the varying reasons that they are erected and/or destroyed, the patterns of aesthetic composition, demonstrate something significant about material claims to space and identity. The project asks how social relations and political ideologies are woven into a topography of memory. Can a material object both reflect political authority and social hierarchies, while also serving efforts of urban black populations to preserve a cultural identity? The investigator will employ a range of qualitative ethnographically-grounded techniques, pursuing three key areas of inquiry: how the memorial functions as an object of argument through which survivors of those lost to violence seek to legitimize their lived experience and assert value; the role of urban space in re-presenting material traces of memory and defining personhood; and the impact of violence in the formation of identities. This research will produce a critical account of memory politics in Baltimore's inner-city, contributing both to the anthropology of race and class, as well as broader scientific debates about memorialization.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.