Reflection On The Memorial

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Earlier in the semester, I had posed a plethora of follow-up questions, regarding the memorial. Who comes to this memorial? How do people interpret the memorial? Is it a sacred space? What actions, movements, or rituals do people perform in order to interact with the memorial? What do people typically wear? What types of emotional responses are expressed? Through answering all of these questions, I would be able to answer my primary inquiry: how do society and people react to or interpret traumatic events in their histories? While I am confident I have answered these questions, some details regarding the nature of final question need further clarification and correction.
First, I realized after completing my research that the “their” in the question, was originally limited to Americans and American history, which is problematic because of the volume of international guests the memorial receives. I had assumed that the majority of visitors would be American, participating in the same American symbolic universe and sharing common understandings about nationalism and American mythology, since the event was a defining moment as an American people. Nevertheless, many of the guests are actually international. Tina, the tour guide informant, revealed to me that around forty to fifty percent …show more content…

This allowed me to be inconspicuous and appear as a normal visitor at the memorial. In regards to observations and photography, my strategy was simple. I circulated around the North and South Pools in a figure eight fashion, taking photos and videos of people and other non-human actors and directly speaking into a microphone about what I was seeing and feeling. This mobility allowed me to see more interactions and activities and provided a fuller contextualization of the scene instead of classic handwritten

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