Ritual Memorial Of Disaster And The Maintenance Of Imagined Community

Wenchuan earthquake,a major natural disaster after Tangshan earthquake that new China has experienced,caused a large number of lives and property losses,including mental damages to people,but it also raised our scientific cognition to the earthquake disaster and we started to construct our own earthquake prevention system after this big disaster."5.12" has been set as the Mitigation of Earthquake Disaster's Day by the State Council in 2009.The power people have shown during the earthquake disaster is still touching us.As a scholar said,"collective suffering,experience has become a tool for the cohesion of ethnic identity.The ethnic boundaries are strengthened and maintained through the ceremony of "collective suffering".And collective memory requires a certain form of material(media)to carry,such as newspapers and periodicals,historical museums,monuments,history education which are controlled by elites.The form of the collective memory of Wenchuan earthquake is diverse,like Wenchuan earthquake memorial opened in 2013,literary works about this disaster.Those formed the Wenchuan earthquake collective memory from a variety of angles and levels,while the media,as "history writer",is an indispensable material for the earthquake's collective memory through the "5.12" anniversary reports.By collecting?sorting and analyzing the newspaper reports on the May 15 related to "5.12" Wenchuan earthquake from 2009 to 2016,this study has analyzed the amount of media coverage,the report genre,the subject of the story and the meaning of the key words and high frequency words of the comments.And next based on these findings,this study generalized 4 types of the reports on May 15(2009-2016)about the Wenchuan earthquake:waking up of the memory,personal memories,disaster reflections,future vision.Then under the collective memory theory,this study explored and analyzed the media construction strategy of "5.12" earthquake collective memory from the 4 aspects:ceremony and repetition,symbols of the earthquake heroes,contrast of past and present,comments-the strength of the country's cohesion.Last this study has analyzed the deep meaning of the construction of people's collective memory about the "5.12" Wenchuan earthquake:through the annual reports that commemorate the death and the earthquake,the repeated media reports wake up the mass's memory of the Wenchuan earthquake cyclically,and it constructs the collective memory at the same time to maintain the"imagined community".