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Every May, for more than a decade, an ever-increasing number of motorcyclists have made the “Run for the Wall,” a cross-country journey from Southern California to the “Wall,” the Vietnam war memorial in Washington, D.C. While the journey’s avowed purpose is political - to increase public awareness about those who remain either prisoners of war or missing in action in Southeast Asia - it also serves as a healing pilgrimage for its participants and as a “welcome-home” ritual many veterans feel they never received.Run for the Wall is a highly readable ethnographic account of this remarkable American ritual. The authors, themselves motorcyclists as well as Run participants, demonstrate that the event is a form of secular pilgrimage. Here key concepts in American culture- “freedom,” and “brotherhood,” for example-are constructed and deployed in a variety of rituals and symbols to enable participants to come to terms with the consequences of the Vietnam war. While the focus is the journey itself, the book also explores other themes related to American culture and history, including the nature of community, the Vietnam war, and the creation of American secular ritual.In moving, first-hand accounts, the book tells how participation in the POW-MIA social movement helps individuals find personal and collective meaning in America’s longest and most divisive conflict. Above all, this is a story of a uniquely American form of political action, ritual, pilgrimage, and the social construction of memory.
Raymond Michalowski is a sociologist and the chair of the department of criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University. He is the author of Order law and Crime, and Radical Criminology: Critical Perspectives on Crime, Power, and Identity.Jill Dubisch is Regents' Professor of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine.
Preface and Acknowledgments``I Thought I was Just Going for a Ride'': IntroductionThe Parade They Never Had: Chronicle of a Cross-Country Pilgrimage``We Will Leave No One Behind'': The Politics of Remembering an Uneasy War``We're Not Motorcycle Enthusiasts. We're Bikers!'': Veterans, Bikers, and American Popular Culture``Pilgrims for America'': The Power of RitualAll-The-Way Women and their Warriors: Gender on the Run``I've Said My Piece'': Individualism and Community in a Folk OrganizationForgetting and Remembering: The Pathway Toward HealingNotesReferencesIndex
Although we have chosen to write about the Run for the Wall from our porspoctives as social analysis, our interest in the Run is not merely intellectual.... Because our participation was so deep, and so personally meaningful, we hope to tell our story with a fundamental respect for all those who have ridden across the country in one another's company with the purpose of remembering - in many different ways - what the Vietnam War did to us and for us as people, and as a nation. - from Run for the Wall