This article explores the significance of monuments in ritual and religion from the perspective of prehistoric and early historic societies, illustrated by examples from North and South America, Africa, and Europe. Keywords: ritual , religion , prehistoric society , early historic society , North American monuments , South American monuments , African monuments , European monuments. Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.
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Oxford Handbooks Online. Through these topics the course will discuss broader issues of the archaeology of ritual space and practices, and the relationships between landscapes, architecture, beliefs, deathways and social change in Europe from the 6th to the 3rd millennium BC. Learning and Teaching activities Further Info. Assessment Further Info. Adams, R. The social life of tombs in West Sumba, Indonesia.
Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 20 1 , Bloch, M. Bradley, The significance of monuments. London: Routledge. Lewis-Williams, D. Midgley, M. The monumental cemeteries of prehistoric Europe.
Stroud: Tempus. Reilly, S. Processing the dead in Neolithic Orkney. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 22 2 , Today, Estonians have engaged in a debate on whether the memorial should be demolished as a symbol of an oppressive regime or kept as an architectural and cultural milestone.
Some people have also proposed to simply change the meaning of the memorial. In an ongoing protest against police brutality and racial inequality in the United States, football players—most notably Colin Kaepernick—have kneeled during the pre-game playing of the national anthem, in defiance of the custom of standing with hand over heart.
What all these actions, gestures, performances, and everyday occurrences tell us is that monuments, against all odds, against their solid, enduring, unyielding materials, might not be as static as we tend to believe. They tell us that monuments can be brought to life again—or were they ever alive? Sacralised memory is also an authoritarian memory. If the public is intended not to add, define, or counter the meaning of a monument, does the role of the visitor become a passive receiving of meaning, paying respect, and leaving?
What then is the purpose of visiting monuments? Visitation can be defined as an act of ritual. Ritual enshrines meaning through repeated empty acts, adding to the sacralisation and impenetrability of a monument. Counter-ritual, then, can be defined as a series of acts that un-enshrines meaning, desacralises a monument, and builds up new or different meaning.
Counter-ritual can be performed by anyone with or without authority, and by its dependence on human acts and human presence, can never be static or permanent but infinitely variable and contestable. Counter-ritual acknowledges that no static visual language or form can or should carry fixed meaning.
By allowing for a multiplicity of authors, intentions, actions, and durations, counter-ritual defies the authoritarianism of the monument and reclaims it for the public sphere as something living, active, mutable, and contestable. The examples mentioned at the beginning of this text function as counter-rituals that have actualised monuments in several different ways.
From corporal and performative actions that bring attention to problematic events in our society, to artistic gestures that comment on the problematics of history and memory, these all prove that monuments are not static, or that they should not be static. When we engage with a monument—when we decide that the act of remembering is our own responsibility, and not that of a stone—we are able to contest the meaning of history, to debate what it means for us today, and accept that its meaning will always be in an ever-changing state of metamorphosis.
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