I even have documented dozens of memorials to the deceased in North Philadelphia – here's what they tell us about memory, grief and trauma

I used to be walking through the Kensington neighborhood of North Philadelphia after I noticed a shrine manufactured from scrap wood and old furniture. Empty liquor bottles were placed inside. A menagerie of stuffed animals, their fur matted by rain and bleached by the sun, covered the highest. “RIP Bug” was written in black marker across the chest of a koala.

In answer to my query—who’s “Bug”?—I discovered a plaster heart nearby, obscured by weeds. It was set in concrete together with burnt votive candles. Inside the center was a baby’s footprint, the words “In memory of Bough,” and a photograph of a young man with a dimpled smile wearing a cap and a sports jersey.

Over the following few weeks, I returned to the shrine repeatedly, drawn repeatedly by questions on the very personal work of public mourning it was doing. How had it come to be on this unremarkable stretch of sidewalk? Who had built it, lit the candles, emptied the bottles, and placed the stuffed animals there?

As a professor of communication sciences, whose research focuses Collective memory and trauma after September 11I’m fascinated by the makeshift memorials that pop up throughout Kensington, a neighborhood that has long been at the middle of the town's drug, poverty and violence epidemics.

Over the last seven years I even have visited and Dozens of monuments documented within the neighborhood. Some, like Boughs, are like altars, while others consist of graffiti, hand-crafted benches, and even clothing items like t-shirts and trucker jackets.

These monuments are what cultural theorists Mieke Bal demands “Acts of remembrance“They function a public expression of personal grief in response to the traumas and tragedies of on a regular basis urban life.

“Past becomes present”

People normally think that memory is a purely personal, mental record of the past.

But in his book concerning the Legacy of the HolocaustMemory researcher Michael Rothberg challenges this view. He defines memory as “the past becoming the present” and highlights three details concerning the social features of memory.

The first part recognizes that memories all the time have a social dimension. But that doesn’t mean that private memories of traumatic events reminiscent of 9/11 aren’t necessary. Many Americans will remember exactly where they were and what they did once they heard the World Trade Center was attacked.

But personal acts of remembrance also reflect cultural ideas about what must be remembered and why. the rituals related to the commemoration of September 11 – with flags and the slogan “Never forget”. It is obvious that the importance of this traumatic event goes beyond the sum of our personal memories of that day.

The second feature of Rothberg's definition is that collective memory is definitely concerning the present, not the past. “Never forget,” for instance, doesn’t mean remembering the historical details of 9/11, but keeping the cultural significance of the event alive in the current. Likewise, shrines, memorials, prayer cards, and park benches keep the memory of family members present for many who mourn their loss.

The third characteristic of memories is that they’re created. As anyone who has ever studied for an exam knows, remembering is figure. Collective memory requires collective work.

For example, a number of blocks from Bough's memorial, one other memorial stands in a neighborhood park. It commemorates a young man who was shot nearby. In the years since his murder in 2020The shrine has been repeatedly repaired and renewed with prayer candles and other items. His friends and neighbors proceed to recollect him together in public.

Why collective memory is essential

We make the past present together. But why? Why don't we just forget it, like we frequently do with unpleasant things – especially when it's traumatic?

An obvious answer is because we understand the current by the past. More specifically, groups use features of the past to clarify why the current is the best way it’s, or why it will not be the best way it must be.

Look on the statue of former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo, which away from the town center in 2020. As an article within the Philadelphia Inquirer explained on the time, Debate about Rizzo's statue Who will Rizzo be remembered as – the “flamboyant leader who tolerated no crime” or the person “who was willing to nip in the bud any hint of unrest, especially in the black community, with brute force”?

As communication and memory scientists argue, The collective memory is all the time incomplete and due to this fact also partisanIn the case of the Rizzo statue, the conflict can also be a contest over whose traumas count as traumas and whose suffering deserves public recognition.

Likewise, lots of the memorials in Kensington are linked to trauma and sometimes stand at sites where tragedies occurred. In this sense, they resemble open wounds quite than scars.

A sidewalk monument dedicated to Frankie Caraballoa 33-year-old man and father from West Kensington, is just such a wound. The memorial, reportedly created by Caraballo's family and neighbors, is attached to a street sign on the corner where he was shot, and it calls for confirmation and determination of his still unsolved murder.

Caraballo's memorial is certainly one of many efforts to publicly express private grief, to make present and material the injuries that frequent violence can leave in a neighborhood. Trauma is commonplace in places like Kensington. But as The American philosopher Judith Butler asks, does that make these lives less “mournful”?

Memorials like those for Bough and Caraballo use collective memory to expand our ideas about whose traumas matter. Like the collective memory of other traumas, they invite us to expand the circle of compassion.