ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the usefulness of the concept of heterotopia to comprehending roadside shrines and considers how the notion of absence-presence has extended thinking on sites of memory. The memorials share the iconography of private remembrance in a way that problematises the borders separating interior from exterior. As spaces that are transformed by death, they introduce a sacred landscape into the mundane and act as thresholds for the communication between the living and the dead. The chapter expresses that while the sites may represent a gentle critique of traditional forms of memorialising, they do not negate them entirely. In fact, the significance of roadside memorials comes from the way they are in dialogue with, and incorporate aspects of, other memorial spaces that they exist alongside. The chapter also expresses that roadside shrines are charged with many of the heterotopic qualities outlined by Foucault that explain their role and status, and their simultaneous centrality and marginality in the culture.
