The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past

Abstract

The problem of commemoration is an important aspect of the sociology of culture because it bears on the way society conceives its past. Current approaches to this problem draw on Emile Durkheim and emphasize the way commemorative objects celebrate society's former glories. This article on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial deals with the way society assimilates past events that are less than glorious and whose memory induces controversy instead of consensus. The Vietnam War differed from other wars because it was politically controversial and morally questionable and resulted in defeat; it resembled other wars because it called out in participants the traditional virtues of courage, self-sacrifice, and honor. The task of representing these contrasting aspects of the war in a single monument was framed by the tension between contrasting memorial genres. Focusing on the discursive field out of which the Vietnam Veterans Memorial emerged, this analysis shows how opposing social constituencies articulated the ambi...