Folk epigraphy at the world trade center, Oklahoma City, and beyond

Abstract

The former sites of theWord Trade Center's twin towers inManhattan and the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City are today commemorative places of deep symbolic and historical importance. The tragic events of scale that occurred at these sites on September 11, 2001 and April 19, 1995, respectively, are processually signified and resignified by a broad public through performative and embodied practices enacted by both tourists and locals at these sites and beyond. These practices work in the service of socially constructing memoryscapes, engendering the creation and performance of diverse subjectivities, politicized identities, and citizenship in a number of communities of belonging from the local to the global. The complex and ever-changing "heritage that hurts" (Schofield et al. 2002:1) that these sites represent is brought into being through a variety of tangible and ephemeral modes. In the cases of the events of September 11, 2001 and April 19, 1995, along with other tragedies of scale, ephemeral modes of memory-making and performing commemoration include the creation of commemorative folk assemblages and the performance of vernacular written and oral narratives of individuals' memories of and sentiments about these events and their aftermaths. These modes of expression are understood by both heritage practitioners and the public to be critically important to individual and social processes of memorialization, public participation in historiography, and the making of individual and collective historical consciousness. Yet in order to become a part of any relatively enduring historical record, and broadly shared memories over time, these ephemeral modes of expression must be somehow rendered less intangible. By addressing folk epigraphical practices within the contexts of commemorative sites and museum and virtual spaces, I present here several processes of and problems with making more durable folk epigraphy as a form of fundamentally intangible heritage. In doing so, I look to how both individuals and organizations are participating in these processes through a shared culture of collecting and display. This shared culture of collecting and display involves both old and new traditions and technologies for public and personal historiography. The active archiving of textual messages by both individuals and public historians is argued to have indeed rendered these markings somewhat more durable but not truly permanent. The dissemination of these texts also produces a new form of historiography, one that brings together vernacular and professional public history practices in novel ways. And with the inclusion of folk epigraphy into the physical architecture of present and future memorials, a once highly ephemeral mode of expression is becoming more permanently embedded in the material culture of commemorative sites themselves. However, folk epigraphy should continue to be understood primarily as an intangible heritage form. © 2009 Springer Science Business Media, LLC.