title: Roadside memorials in northeastern Thailand.
abstract: In Thailand spirit houses are often established at places of fatal accidents, but these are generally anonymous. Personalized roadside memorials for accident victims are rare. This article analyses three roadside memorials, located on main roads in northeastern Thailand, in a comparative framework. Like in the contemporary West, such memorials commemorate a suddenly and violently killed person, but manifest a dynamics very different from that of Western roadside memorials: rather than private and temporary, these are permanent shrines, in which the spirit of the deceased is worshipped and supplicated by members of the public. The spirits and their shrines tend to become incorporated into the popular Thai magico-religious complex. While the literature offers a binary distinction between formal public monuments and informal, private and temporary (roadside) memorials, it is suggested that the informal, but public and permanent memorial shrines in Thailand exemplify a third type of edifices to commemorate the deceased in road accidents.
authors.affiliation: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. mserik@mscc.huji.ac.il
authors.forename: Erik
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Cohen
mesh_terms: D000063:Accidents, Traffic; D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D001293:Attitude to Death / Q000208:ethnology*; D001601:Bereavement; D004779:Environment Design; D005195:Family Relations / Q000208:ethnology*; D006801:Humans; D012069:Religion and Psychology; D012938:Social Perception; D012944:Social Support; D029181:Spirituality; D013785:Thailand