RT Article
T1 Displacement and re-placement: the international friendship bell as a translocative technology of memory
JF Material religion
VO 5
IS 2
SP 180
OP 204
A1 Weiner, Isaac A.
LA English
PB Taylor & Francis
YR 2009
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1667223135
AB The International Friendship Bell is a traditional Japanese bonsho bell that was installed in Oak Ridge, TN, in 1996 to mark the city's fiftieth anniversary. I interpret the bell as a highly ambivalent site of cultural memory, drawing on memory studies theory to analyze its multiple meanings. Its backers represented the bell as an elegant tribute to Oak Ridge's post-World War II scientific legacy, while its detractors interpreted it as offering an unacceptable apology for Oak Ridge's role in constructing "Little Boy," the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Describing the bell as a translocative technology of memory, I argue that the selection of a Japanese Buddhist bell served two important functions. First, despite having appropriated the bell from its original ritual context, its designers used it to sanctify Oak Ridge as sacred space. The bell was thus secularized, precisely as it sacralized civic space. Second, the bell's alien nature enabled it to serve as a screen on which Oak Ridgers could work out their ambivalence and anxieties about their civic identity. The bell thus provides a lens for understanding how religious ritual objects acquire new meanings when displaced from their intended contexts.
K1 Buddhism
K1 International Friendship Bell
K1 Oak Ridge
K1 Bells
K1 cultural memory
K1 Ritual Objects
K1 Sacred Space
DO 10.2752/174322009X12448040551648