“The Right to Shrine”: Global Celebrity, Colonial Logics, and Local Knowledge in Aspen’s Mountainside Memorials

Abstract

On the mountains surrounding Aspen, Colorado, skiers build shrines dedicated to celebrities, pastimes, and deceased loved ones. Charmed journalists and local promoters describe these shrines as homespun and quaint reminders of the human factor in recreational tourism. As this paper demonstrates, however, these shrines represent a more complex space-marking practice of outdoor alpine culture. Embedded within ski resorts, these Aspen shrines are part of the global spatial products—the banal, familiar, and predictable architectural forms—of a leisure economy that deflect a suspicious gaze. By looking at the shrines as spatial products of a neoliberal global economy, we may come to better understand how materiality creates claims to space. In this capacity the shrines make visible the continuity of settler-colonial logics that facilitate practices of territorial entitlement and accumulation. The shrines challenge us to interrogate the innocence of our objects, and to move beyond surface readings to find what is otherwise obscured.