The Materials of Memory

On 28 May 2022, ten thousand people gathered in Bedworth in central England to watch the ceremonial burning of the Sanctuary memorial devoted to victims of COVID-19. Filled with photographs, mementos, and messages associated with the dead, these materials rendered Sanctuary a sacred site amidst a country struggling to religiously locate its response to the pandemic. The sharp decline in Christian affiliation in the UK has led to a situation of religious-secular flux in memorialization of COVID-19, and through the Sanctuary project’s use – and ritual destruction – of materials of grief, the initiative offered a provocative new form of public mourning. Mixing inspiration from American counter-culture, conscious references to ritual spaces of British war memory, and a deliberate refusal to define its meaning for audiences, Sanctuary speaks to a national context of uncertainty regarding how to remember the pandemic and what constitute socially acceptable uses of bereavement materials.

Everyday Hinduism in India and in the diaspora is practiced, especially by women, through a calendar of religious fasts, called vratas. The concomitant food recipes have elaborately defined rules that are required to be followed by the worshippers. With the gradual dissolution of multigenerational families, many Hindu women now live in nuclear families in cities and countries away from their natal homes. Their childhood memories of religious fasting and feasting need to be documented, shared and buttressed by other accessible resources for memory-creation. One such resource is the proliferating Hindu religious recipes (which are conduits of material memories) on food websites and food blogs. This paper will investigate some food blogs and food-based websites—selected through purposive sampling method—and will attempt to explore how their recipes of vrata food function either as sites for the obedient replication and/or the more unruly refashioning of everyday religion and religious identities.

Decoration Day is a lesser-known tradition of the Upland and Appalachian South, in which members of the community gather to clean up and adorn the graves of departed family and friends. Liberty Hill Baptist Church Cemetery in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, holds its Decoration Day on the third Sunday in June, Father’s Day—though decoration refers to the whole weekend during which community members gather in the cemetery to do the work of clearing, cleaning, and decorating the graves of their departed loved ones. This paper examines how the para-ecclesial practice of decoration uses material practices of memory (particularly through the maintenance and decoration of graves) as a way of cultivating ongoing bodily relationship with the spirits of the dead. Decoration provides a different religious imaginary than either contemporary death-avoidance or unironic communitas, but material and spiritual communion with the dead which nevertheless holds space for alienation, brokenness, and repair.