No place to die: the poetics of roadside sacred places in Mexico

Roadside death memorials are a response to the sudden, tragic death of a loved one; and are appearing with increasing regularity in developed and developing countries across the globe. In Mexico, however, wayside memorials and shrines of religiosity are a centuries-old tradition. This work, an effort to understand why the exact location of a person’s death is so important that a sacred place must be created where no place is intended, is basic and exploratory research. A multi-method, and cross-disciplinary case study, based upon the author’s fieldwork in Mexico, produces massive data and constitutes a robust explanatory triangulation. A geographic survey identifies 9102 artifacts at 6891 locations and answers the question: “what is where?” An ethnographic method, applied to place as the physical manifestation of culture, minutely describes individual artifacts at 14% of the sites. Together these methods produce an interpretation, or reading, of the ‘landscape as text’ at the state, regional, and national scales as well as for individual artifacts and sites. The same concept of multi-scalar investigation is applied to the context in which this landscape appears. Context is addressed along two fronts: the conceptual or theoretical context, and the narrative context of the author’s field experience. The former is divided into three topics: religion and the conceptualization of death, emotions as a force, and culture as a dynamic mixture of specific cultures. The minute details of conceptual context, personal experience, and empirical description form a tapestry of hybrid culture and place. These, uniquely Latin American, ‘Mestizo Places’ signify multiple and simultaneous concepts of be-ing in the world, exist within different realities at different analytic scales, and resist, selectively accept, and modify modernity.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Social and Behavioral Sciences

Grantor

Geography and Anthropology

Year dc:date.available

2002

Author dc:creator

• Weir, Daniel Raymond

• death
• emotion
• religion
• landscape
• hybridity
• Catholic

Statement dc:rights

• unrestricted
• Release the entire work immediately for access worldwide.

Identifier

etd-0403102-215300
https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/310

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.lsu.edu:gradschool_dissertations-1309