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On Tuesday morning, November 2, 2004, shortly after 9 AM, my husband called me at work to tell me that the radio news had just reported the shooting of a man on the Linnaeusstraat in Amsterdam, and that the victim was probably Theo van Gogh. It was as yet uncertain whether or not Van Gogh, if the announcement indeed concerned him, had survived the attack. Within an hour, all uncertainty was gone: Van Gogh, a well-known Dutch film director and provocative publicist on the issue of Islam and immigration, was dead. The killer, a man in Muslim attire, was arrested after a brief exchange of gunfire with the police in nearby Oosterpark.
As a researcher in the areas of mourning and public ritual, I cancelled all of my appointments for the day and the days to come, to leave right away for the scene of the catastrophe. I had no doubt that the spot where Van Gogh had died would become the nation’s focus of attention for days, and that a large ephemeral memorial would appear there. Whenever there is an incident that leads to a death nowadays – whether it is a murder, a work-related accident or a traffic accident – in the Netherlands, as in many other places around the world, it almost inevitably provokes various public responses of grief and mourning, of which, more often than not, the creation of a temporary memorial will be part. Within this setting, people generally follow certain scripts from a shared ritual repertoire, which requires no formal influence or instruction. These public commemorative practices therefore develop in accordance to general expectations and within a given framework (Doss 2006, 2008; Kear, A. and D.L. Steinberg 1999; Santino 2006; Stengs 2007, 2009a; Walter 1999).[2] Indeed, in response to Theo van Gogh’s death, a high-profile death with significant political impact, a large ephemeral memorial did take shape on the Linnaeusstraat. In addition, albeit on a more modest scale, Van Gogh's house also became a site of commemoration and protest.
Taking the Linnaeusstraat Theo van Gogh memorial as its empirical focus, this contribution argues that ephemeral memorials may be considered as ritualised sites that not only ‘are’ but at the same time ‘act’ and interact with the social reality through which they are constituted. In other words, ephemeral memorials are performative practices. Hence, we should not think of ‘the’ Theo van Gogh memorial as just a material structure that existed for a certain period of time, but as a site that passed through a continuous sequence of varying forms, intentions and interpretations. It is my objective to highlight the interdependency between specific practices of mourning, the sites that evolve from them and the media. The media, in this perspective, do not appear as independent channels that broadcast ‘news’ by reporting on ‘current events’. Instead, they may be seen as mediating sites and practices that impinge on and are an intrinsic part of the politics of mourning, thus creating the social spaces in which such sites may be located.
Nick Couldry’s concepts of ‘ritual space of the media’ and ‘media rituals’ constitute the important theoretical tools in my analysis of the Theo van Gogh memorial. To grasp how the media mediate and co-create the social world, we need to ask questions about power. Couldry’s objective is to deconstruct ‘the belief or assumption that there is a centre to the social world, and that, in some sense, the media speaks “for” that centre,’ i.e., ‘the myth of the mediated centre’ (Couldry 2003, 2). The naturalness of this assumption reveals the high concentration of symbolic power with which media institutions are generally invested. In order to move beyond a narrow perception of media rituals to particular actions at particular moments in particular places, Couldry emphasises that ritual actions happen in a social space, the construction of which should be the main topic of investigation, thus promoting the study of ritualization rather than of rituals (Couldry 2003, 12, 29-30). In contemporary society, the media are essential in defining social space: ‘[W]e can only grasp how some media-related actions make sense as ritual actions, if we analyse a wider space which I call the ritual space of the media (Couldry 2003, 13).’ Media make social space into ritual space because they define power and the way power is dealt with, while obscuring the nature of power and its very existence. This wider space encompasses all social life in which, from everyday practices to more condensed forms of actions, ‘media-related categories’ and ‘media-related values’ are reproduced (Couldry 2003, 14, 29-30). The most important categorical differentiation made by the actors in this social space is the difference between things (persons, actions, events) ‘in’ (on, or associated with) the media and things not ‘in’ the media. The attribution of a more intense degree of reality to things ‘in’ the media than to things not ‘in’ the media (Couldry 2003, 27, 48), leads to the former being placed above the latter in a hierarchical relationship.
At first glance, one would expect the murder of Van Gogh to evoke a nationwide-shared response of shock and abhorrence. Yet, the murder, itself already a culmination of societal conflicts about immigration issues, acted as a catalyst that intensified these conflicts and allowed them to be played out in the open, in the consequential memorial practices. I would argue that these conflicts were for a large part precisely about access to the media, existing power relations and established opinions. I will follow Eyerman in using Victor Turner’s model of social drama to understand the events that followed the murder (Eyerman 2008, 4, 14-16). Social dramas are, in Turner’s words, ‘units of harmonic or disharmonic social process, arising in conflict situations.’ (Turner 1987, 4) Turner distinguishes four phases: ‘breach, crisis, redress, and either reintegration or recognition of schism’ (Turner 1982, 69, italics in original). A social drama unfolds after a severe breach of a norm (the murder, in our case), followed by a mounting social crisis: ‘a momentous juncture or turning point in the relations between components of a social field’ (Turner 1982, 70). Next, adjustive and redressive mechanisms appear that counter the widening of the crisis. In the aftermath of Van Gogh’s murder, as I will show, the two phases of ‘crisis’ and ‘redress’ occurred in the period between the actual murder and Van Gogh’s funeral. ‘Crisis’ and ‘redress’ have a strong potential to reveal, because of their liminal characteristics: they are interjacencies (or interjacent phases) linking more stable periods of the social order (Turner 1987, 4). During these phases, antagonisms and fissures that underlie and structure day-to-day interactions and power relationships may suddenly come to the surface. I have therefore chosen to limit myself to the ten-day period between the murder and the funeral. Here my approach differs from that of Eyerman, who also seeks to assess the murder’s long-term effects on Dutch society, and considers the phase of ‘redress’ to be much longer (cf. Eyerman 2008, 15-16).
My ethnographic research on the genesis of the Van Gogh memorial started with my departure for the Linnaeusstraat that Tuesday morning around 10 AM, and ended nine days later with the memorial’s removal at 8 AM on Wednesday morning, November 10th. Van Gogh was killed a mere five minutes by bicycle from my home, which meant I could stay in the Linnaeusstraat almost all the time.[3] Since an ethnography encompassing the entire period of the memorial’s existence would be too detailed for the purpose of this article, I have selected certain moments, situations and practices that I consider the most enlightening.[4]