Abstract
This essay is an experiment in ethnographic writing using Bowman and Bowman's (2002) mystory method, based on my research with roadside shrines-called descansos in the Southwest-and how these sites perform in personal, popular and institutional culture. This essay also explores how my work has been influenced by one cross-country road trip to visit my friend Dan Vice, who was dying: along the way I come to terms with (among other things) our conflicted allegiances to the Catholic Church and eventual turn to a Navajo-inflected understanding of being-in-the-world which helped us, in our own way, make sense of living in the face of death. I perform my transition from a relatively objective, cinematic description of sites of death marked primarily by crosses, to a liminal experience of time, place and space where memory and meaning began to function differently. I wish to evoke what Stewart (2002) calls the "incantatory ... power of ritual: [whereby} ... subjectivity is dislocated and ultimately changed" (p. 330). I offer my field work, interrupted with bits of personal memory and sections of Vice's (1996) personal narrative, and the mystory method to invite scholars who are interested in studying roadside shrines a research and writing process that generates, liberates and connects memories, images, people, and scholarship, which then opens the way for a new analysis of the cultural performance of cross-cultural and inter-religious practices that often resists, or at least complicates, our understanding of institutionally-sanctioned death-related rituals.
Journal Title
Iowa Journal of Communication
Volume
47
Issue
1
First Page
96
Last Page
123
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Kennerly, Rebecca M.
(2015)
"At the Crossroads and Spiraling Back: A Mystory Experiment in/as Descansos,"
Iowa Journal of Communication: Vol. 47:
No.
1, Article 8.
Available at:
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/ijc/vol47/iss1/8
Copyright
©2015 Iowa Communication Association
