Remembering loss and sharing grief

Citation

(2002), "Remembering loss and sharing grief", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 11 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/dpm.2002.07311dab.005

Remembering loss and sharing grief

Remembering loss and sharing grief

In October 1998 a fire at the Macedonian Association's premises in Gothenburg, where a discotheque had been organised, claimed the lives of 63 young people and more than 200 were injured. The challenge facing the bereaved in this catastrophe, is in finding a means of expression which outwardly signifies the profundity and pain of their shared experiences. In her research project, Docent Abby Peterson at the University of Gothenburg is studying these means not as therapeutic practices for assuaging grief, but as expressive practices through which highly individual and personal feelings are collectively constructed and demonstrated. Death is an emotional experience, and the ways bereavement is ritually organised relates to the performative aspects of collective mourning and remembrance as well as the shared experiences of grief and loss. Subsequently, the study will focus upon how these ritual performances act as ways of constructing and reconstructing a sense of community. The very idea of performance implies that all memorial practice is bound to a rhetoric of participation. The study will analyse those actions of individuals and groups intended to invoke memories of the tragic event and the individuals who lost their lives in the fire. Ritualised performances of deep personal and societal loss are often carried out in a specific setting which serves as a frame for the performances. The settings of memorial performances, together with the stage and "props" for these performances, i.e. the "artefacts of loss", will be analysed. And while the symbolic context of the memorial site itself will be analysed, emphasis will be placed upon the logic of performance, which governs the encounters between a will-to- remember and the claims on the site. The study is explorative and will rely upon empirical sources. Interviews will be conducted among members of the Fire Victim Relatives' Association and among young people who survived the fire or participated in the memorial events. Empirical materials will be collected through participant observations of memorial events and through various documents produced by survivors and relatives of victims in conjunction with these memorial events; for example, song texts, poems, and articles. Artefacts from the fire and its aftermath are another source together with a collation of the media coverage of these memorial events. Further information: Docent Abby Peterson, Dept of Sociology, Goteborg University.

E-mail: abby.peterson@sociology.gu.se