Getting Messy: In the Field and at the Crossroads with Roadside Shrines

Abstract

Roadside shrines marking sites of death along the road increasingly seek our attention. These sites, the materials that mark them, how it is that people come to build them, the messages that those who build them hope to convey, and the accumulative force these sites bring to bear in various contexts offer unique insighst into our complex, fragmented, and often agonistic relationships with death and living memory. Combining critical theory, ethnographic methods, and performative writing affords investigators wishing to study roadside shrines as performance and by means of performance the opportunity to work with, within, and against the multiple discourses and practices that crisscross and surround the objects of their investigations. This essay attempts to tease out a performative space on the page that evokes the sometimes audacious and often poetic stance that cultural performances of and at roadside shrines so often take.