Angel Patriots

Alexander Riley’s Angel Patriots is an engaging account of the cultural processes through which the meanings, narratives, and memory of United Flight 93 are constructed and reconstructed. He writes about something more than a cultural sociology of an ill-fated airplane that crashed on September 11, 2001 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania as passengers attempted to regain control of their flight from terrorist hijackers. Instead, as Geertz may have characterized the book, Riley is “saying something of something,” namely what Flight 93 and the many narratives that comprise it indicate about the myth of America. In Riley’s words, Flight 93 is “good to think with” because it yields “insights into the much larger object, American culture” (34). Riley’s research strategy is ethnographic, styled after Geertzian thick description and faction, and incorporates photographs he made of his research sites and the cultural artifacts found in these locations “to aid the reader in the journey through the narrative work going on there” (32). In the midst of this descriptive work, he draws effectively from Bellah’s notion of civil religion to offer an explanatory framework and theoretical backdrop for the cultural worlds and work Riley observes around the memorialization of Flight 93. He shows how a particular set of narratives about what it means to be American are produced in and through memorial sites in Shanksville, Pennsylvania (the temporary memorial, the Memorial Chapel, and the permanent memorial), biographies and films about the people and crash of Flight 93, and the ways these stories are consumed—and subsequently reproduced—in the everyday lives of those who come in contact with these memorials and the meanings they contain. The book raises important questions about the cultural glue that holds society together, and how a productive dialogue (one that encourages American society toward its own highest aspirations) may be pursued and maintained in a pluralistic society.

Art · Art history · Ethnography · Literature · Media studies · Memorialization · Mythology · Narrative · Object (grammar) · Political science · Sociology · Anthropology · Classics · History · Law · Military and Defense Studies · Philosophy