Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture

Western Folklore, Fall 2002 by Meyer, Richard E

Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture. By Holly Everett. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2002. Pp. viii 145, preface, acknowledgments, photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $22.95 cloth)

Present in a number of other cultures for centuries, roadside memorials have become an increasingly notable feature of the American material landscape in recent decades, and it is therefore not at all surprising that folklorists-and others-have begun to make them the subject of serious study. To date, however, such efforts have been limited to conference presentations and relatively short journal articles, making the present work the first attempt to provide an in-depth and highly contextualized analytical study of this phenomenon.

But the book is a ground breaker in far more important ways than simply being the first. Within its self-imposed limitations, it has the potential to become a seminal work in the manner of, say, Allan I. Ludwig's 1966 study, Graven Images: New England Stonecarving and its Symbols, 1650-1815. Like Ludwig, the current author thoroughly explicates the cultural implications of a prominent material presence within a defined geographical region (in this instance, the American Southwest and most particularly the area in and around Austin, Texas), while at the same time-and most importantly-providing a solid model for meaningful extrapolation to other locales and even to other forms of memorial expression.

Once beyond the first chapter-a highly theoretical and at times almost unreadable attempt to provide an overview of the relationship between material culture and personal or communal loss-the book gains both clarity and focus, with by far its strongest arguments coming in Chapter Three ("Roadside Memorial Case Studies"), a quite detailed and extensive analysis of numerous individual examples supported by meticulous fieldwork techniques. A large number of excellent photographs accompany the discussion and contribute significantly to its understanding.

There are a few problems, ranging from the highly particular to the more general. The author's credibility is strained by her statement that "memorials marking physical sites of mass death dot the European landscape, the great majority resulting from genocidal actions of the Nazi regime (3, emphasis added), betraying a seeming unawareness of the literally thousands of European battlefield cemeteries and other monuments dating from World War I, such as the great British memorials for the unknown dead at Thiepval, France and the Ypres Salient in Belgium, or the massive French ossuaries of the unknown near Verdun and elsewhere along the Western Front. Perhaps more importantly, the value of the book overall would have been strengthened greatly had a consistent effort been made to correlate roadside memorials with traditional cemetery markers, both to examine their shared functions and forms and even more significantly to explore the sometimes very different cultural attitudes and practices surrounding the place of death as opposed to the place of burial.

Such considerations aside, this remains a valuable work and one which demonstrates clearly once again the close connections between our constructed environments and our inner beings. Commemorative/memorial culture is a vast area of study, embodying many forms and practices and inviting the scholarly attention of a wide variety of disciplinary approaches. Folklore has often taken a leading role in this inquiry, and Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture demonstrates quite convincingly that such is still the case.

WORK CITED

Ludwig, Allan I. Graven Images: New England Stonecarving and its Symbols, 1650-1816. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1966.

RICHARD E. MEYER

Salem, Oregon