Road Scars

Place, Automobility and Road Trauma

Robert Matej Bednar

Despite the ubiquity of automobility, the reality of automotive death is hidden from everyday view. There are accident blackspots all over the roads that we use and go past every day but the people that have died there or been injured are not marked, unless by homemade shrines and personal memorialization. Nowhere on the planet is this practice as densely actioned as in the United States.

Road Scars is a highly visual scholarly monograph about how roadside car crash shrines place the collective trauma of living in a car culture in the everyday landscapes of automobility. Roadside shrines—or road trauma shrines—are vernacular memorial assemblages built by private individuals at sites where family and friends have died in automobile accidents, either while driving cars or motorcycles or being hit by cars as pedestrians, bicyclists, or motorcyclists. Prevalent for decades in Latin America and in the American Southwest, roadside car crash shrines are now present throughout the U.S. and around the world. Some are simply small white crosses, almost silent markers of places of traumatic death. Others are elaborate collections of objects, texts, and materials from all over the map culturally and physically, all significantly brought together not in the home or in a cemetery but on the roadside, in drivable public space—a space where private individuals perform private identities alongside each other in public, and where these private mobilities sometimes collide with one another in traumatic ways that are negotiated in roadside shrines. This book touches on something many of us have seen, but few have explored intellectually. « less more »

Rowman & Littlefield International

Pages: 384 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-78661-413-1 • Hardback • January 2021 • $135.00 • (£90.00)

Series: Place, Memory, Affect

Subjects: Social Science / Anthropology / Physical, Social Science / Anthropology / Applied Anthropology, Social Science / Comparative Cultural Studies

Road Scars

Place, Automobility and Road Trauma

Hardback

Summary

Despite the ubiquity of automobility, the reality of automotive death is hidden from everyday view. There are accident blackspots all over the roads that we use and go past every day but the people that have died there or been injured are not marked, unless by homemade shrines and personal memorialization. Nowhere on the planet is this practice as densely actioned as in the United States.

Road Scars is a highly visual scholarly monograph about how roadside car crash shrines place the collective trauma of living in a car culture in the everyday landscapes of automobility. Roadside shrines—or road trauma shrines—are vernacular memorial assemblages built by private individuals at sites where family and friends have died in automobile accidents, either while driving cars or motorcycles or being hit by cars as pedestrians, bicyclists, or motorcyclists. Prevalent for decades in Latin America and in the American Southwest, roadside car crash shrines are now present throughout the U.S. and around the world. Some are simply small white crosses, almost silent markers of places of traumatic death. Others are elaborate collections of objects, texts, and materials from all over the map culturally and physically, all significantly brought together not in the home or in a cemetery but on the roadside, in drivable public space—a space where private individuals perform private identities alongside each other in public, and where these private mobilities sometimes collide with one another in traumatic ways that are negotiated in roadside shrines. This book touches on something many of us have seen, but few have explored intellectually.

Book Details

Rowman & Littlefield International

Pages: 384 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-78661-413-1 • Hardback • January 2021 • $135.00 • (£90.00)

Series: Place, Memory, Affect

Subjects: Social Science / Anthropology / Physical, Social Science / Anthropology / Applied Anthropology, Social Science / Comparative Cultural Studies

Author

Robert Matej Bednar is Associate Professor of Communication Studies, Chair, Strategic Planning + Budget Committee and Co-Coordinator of the Situating Place Paideia Cluster, Southwestern University

Table of Contents

Preface: Guide to the Book
Part I: Introduction
1. Witnessing Road Scars
Part II: Field Guide to Road Trauma Shrines
2. Welcome to the Drive-Through Museum of Accidents
3. Making Places for Feeling Road Trauma
4. Materializing Road Trauma
5. Performing Road Trauma
6. Interpellating the Motoring Public
7. Displacing Road Trauma
Part III: Conclusion
8. Melancholy Remains: Remembering Strangers While Driving into the Future

Road Scars

Place, Automobility and Road Trauma

Robert Matej Bednar

Road Scars

Place, Automobility and Road Trauma

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