Screaming not silence: Grief as a protest and as manifestation of loyalty

Abstract

Anthropologist Jack Santino and his followers believe that people make a commemorative and political statement with their participation in the creation of a spontaneous memorial - by the very fact of bringing there a toy or photograph. On March 25-26, 2018, 60 people died in a fire in a shopping mall in Kemerovo. After the tragedy in Kemerovo, according to our database, 335 memorials arose in at least 246 settlements. We believe this is not only a symptom of people wanting to publicly mourn the victims of a terrible tragedy, but also of severe social tension. Our field studies show that the resulting memorials were not uniform in nature. We distinguish between grassroots memorials (created prior to the official announcement of mourning) and memorials created at the direction of the authorities and often only imitating vernacular statements. We had conducted a quantitative and qualitative analysis, which showed that memorials created by grassroots activists more often appeared in the center of a city or district, next to a sign connected with Kemerovo or at the site of the tragedy, at the monuments to mothers, children, family. This message tells us that the tragedy affects everyone - ourselves, our children and parents: “We are all Kemerovo”. Memorials organized by the mayor’s office more often appeared near administrative buildings, and they used the “historical-heroic” semantic paradigm, placing the dead among the “sacred victims” of World War II.