ABSTRACT
War memorials are significant components of commemorative landscapes in urban, suburban and rural contexts. Though their prescriptive intent is usually evident, they achieve meaning in complex ways, sometimes intended and in other cases, not. Like many objects of material culture, war memorials possess biographies whose social networks and shifting cultural resonances are layered and multi-vocal (Kopytoff 1986). The appearance and location of memorials, the texts inscribed upon them (see Chapter 11), and the speeches conducted at the ceremonies that take place around them all contribute to their existence as distinctive sensory environments. Importantly, each spectator’s engagement, at different times and in changing contexts, involves an experience that might be spatial, iconographic, literary, performative or a combination of all these. While commemorative intent might be clearly visual, for example by the use of particular kinds of materials from which memorials are constructed, other factors were less evident and were bound up in the very processes by which memorials were made – the designing, transforming and placing of matter in post-war landscapes.
