14th Street, Manhattan, 2020© Sean Hemmerle 2020 (Contact Press Images)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Vol. 97, No. 3
SPECIAL COLLECTION
The Disruption and Regeneration of Death During the COVID-19 Pandem
INTRODUCTION
Tamara Kohn and Hannah Gould | On Disrupted Death Rites and COVID-19
Leslie Bank | Life After Plastic-Wrapped Bodies: COVID, the State and the Crisis of Social Reproduction in Rural South Africa
Marc-Antoine Berthod, Gaëlle Clavandier, Philippe Charrier, Martin Julier-Costes, Veronica Pagnamenta and Alexandre Pillonel | Waves of Grief: Fluctuating Restrictions, Treatments of Corpses and Experiences of Loss During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Andréia Vicente da Silva | New Technologies in Pentecostal Funeral Rites During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Brazil
PHOTOGRAPHIC ESSAY
Hannah Gould and Samuel Holleran | Concealment and Care in Deathcare During COVID
SOCIAL THOUGHT AND COMMENTARY
Ariel Santikarma and Sarah Wagner | De-Exceptionalizing Pandemic Death in the United States: COVID-19’s Ambiguous and Layered Mourning
John Troyer | On Pandemics Being Productive
Bob Simpson | After Word: After COVID
BOOK REVIEWS
Gil Hizi | Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas’s Genres of Listening: An Ethnography of Psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires
Jerome Whitington | Raquel Rodrigues Machaqueiro’s The Carbon Calculation: Global Climate Policy, Forests, and Transnational Governance in Brazil and Mozambique
Buy issue through PROJECT MUSE, JSTOR or our ONLINE STORE.
© 2020 Kenneth Jarecke (Contact Press Images)
ABSTRACT
Concealment and Care in Deathcare During COVID
Hannah Gould, University of Melbourne and Samuel Holleran, University of Melbourne
During the worst months of the COVID-19 pandemic, photojournalistic depictions of the havoc wreaked by the virus became ubiquitous. Images of physically distanced funerals and large-scale body disposal populated newsfeeds, but the labor and experiences of those working within these images—people handling bodies and guiding bereaved families—remained largely hidden from public view. Even before the pandemic, visibility and public recognition were complicated matters for the “deathcare” sector, as professionals cautiously constructed and defended the line separating the family-facing frontstage and industry-insider backstage. Our engagement with this sector through photography was motivated by a desire to illuminate the experiences of those working in deathcare during COVID outbreaks and lockdowns in Melbourne, Australia. Reflecting on photography as method in the study of death, we think through the complexities of seeing and unseeing, exposure and concealment in contemporary death rituals. The pandemic exposed certain realities of death and dying to the public but obfuscated others. Further, our ethnographic practice of portraiture revealed concealment to be a key element of the caring labors that deathcare workers perform. [Keywords: photography, death, funeral, care, affective labor, Australia]
Life After Plastic-Wrapped Bodies: COVID, the State and the Crisis of Social Reproduction in Rural South Africa
Leslie Bank, Human Sciences Research Council and Walter Sisulu University
This article explores the impact and implications of the South African state’s adoption of a tough militarized, bio-medical, and essentially neo-colonial approach to the management of the COVID pandemic in the rural former Bantustans (“native reserves”) of the country. It argues that, while the “war on COVID” produced new national legislation for all citizens, those living “with custom” in former homelands were said to possess cultural attributes that amplified the risk of infection and death. The paper focuses on how the state constructed measures for these spaces and managed social interaction and burials in the migrant heartlands. The paper suggests that families “living with custom” in the former homelands were treated differently from other citizens, existing in what Giorgio Agamben (2004) might call a “state of (greater) exception.” Villagers used the metaphor of the gate closing on them (ukuvala isango) to describe their experience and exclusion during lockdown as customary practices were banned, local health facilities closed for deep cleaning, and bodies sealed in plastic at state hospitals and mortuaries. The latter measures disturbed rural families much more than police violence or the closure of government clinics because it presented a serious threat to social reproduction. The paper provides evidence of how families fought to restore conviviality by exhuming the bodies wrapped in plastic to allow them to communicate with kin and ancestors. It also shows how, after lockdown, vaccination was often treated as a family matter not an individual choice, and how families moved quickly to fix the spiritual insecurities wrought by COVID. The paper concludes with a harrowing account of the new epidemic of hunger and malnutrition that is stalking these landscapes as conviviality is not enough to secure survival. The paper highlights the limits of narrow bio-medical and individual rights-based approaches in dealing with health, livelihoods, and well-being in communities devastated by COVID in rural southern Africa. [Keywords: death, COVID-19, South Africa, burial]
Life After Plastic-Wrapped Bodies: COVID, the State and the Crisis of Social Reproduction in Rural South Africa
Leslie Bank, Human Sciences Research Council and Walter Sisulu University
This article explores the impact and implications of the South African state’s adoption of a tough militarized, bio-medical, and essentially neo-colonial approach to the management of the COVID pandemic in the rural former Bantustans (“native reserves”) of the country. It argues that, while the “war on COVID” produced new national legislation for all citizens, those living “with custom” in former homelands were said to possess cultural attributes that amplified the risk of infection and death. The paper focuses on how the state constructed measures for these spaces and managed social interaction and burials in the migrant heartlands. The paper suggests that families “living with custom” in the former homelands were treated differently from other citizens, existing in what Giorgio Agamben (2004) might call a “state of (greater) exception.” Villagers used the metaphor of the gate closing on them (ukuvala isango) to describe their experience and exclusion during lockdown as customary practices were banned, local health facilities closed for deep cleaning, and bodies sealed in plastic at state hospitals and mortuaries. The latter measures disturbed rural families much more than police violence or the closure of government clinics because it presented a serious threat to social reproduction. The paper provides evidence of how families fought to restore conviviality by exhuming the bodies wrapped in plastic to allow them to communicate with kin and ancestors. It also shows how, after lockdown, vaccination was often treated as a family matter not an individual choice, and how families moved quickly to fix the spiritual insecurities wrought by COVID. The paper concludes with a harrowing account of the new epidemic of hunger and malnutrition that is stalking these landscapes as conviviality is not enough to secure survival. The paper highlights the limits of narrow bio-medical and individual rights-based approaches in dealing with health, livelihoods, and well-being in communities devastated by COVID in rural southern Africa. [Keywords: death, COVID-19, South Africa, burial]
Waves of Grief: Fluctuating Restrictions, Treatments of Corpses and Experiences of Loss during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Marc-Antoine Berthod, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland (HETSL | HES-SO),
Gaëlle Clavandier, Jean Monnet University St-Etienne and Max Weber Center Lyon,
Philippe Charrier, Nantes Sociology Center, Nantes University,
Martin Julier-Costes, Grenoble Alpes University,
Veronica Pagnamenta, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland (HETSL | HES-SO), and
Alexandre Pillonel, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland (HETSL | HES-SO)
With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, high mortality rates brought to the forefront the importance not only of the gestures performed and practices implemented on and about the deceased, but also, most importantly, of the entire sequence of funeral operations involved. The intensification of the work needed to take care of bodies in their biological component, from a technical point of view, generated uncertainties on the possibility to also adequately take care of the social components relating to families and loved ones. This raises questions about the factors influencing the experience of grief in these circumstances, and the extent to which funerary practices determine the nature and characteristics of grief work. Based on two anthropological research projects conducted in France and Switzerland in the mortuary and funeral realms, as well as with bereaved persons over the first eighteen months of the pandemic, this article aims at answering these questions. It argues that grief trajectories are strongly impacted by the way in which bodies were treated, as well as by whether the funeral was felt to have been conducted in a satisfactory manner. It also sheds new light on a series of factors pertaining to the temporality of the processes involved: dying circumstances; attitudes towards restrictions throughout the entire process of caring for the body, and not merely at the funeral; the period in the pandemic during which a death occurred, i.e., during or between “waves.” In so doing, the article broadens the ways in which we think about temporality and death. [Keywords: funeral practices, grief, social restrictions, COVID-19, Switzerland, France
New Technologies in Pentecostal Funeral Rituals During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Brazil
Andréia Vicente da Silva, Universidade Estadual do Oeste do Paraná
During the coronavirus pandemic in Brazil, death rites were abbreviated. Hospital visits to the sick, collective farewell ceremonies, and coexistence with corpses were made impossible. In this article, by analyzing a Pentecostal funeral live stream that occurred in May 2020, I try to discuss the possibilities of ritual change in a context of exception. I conclude that the mediatization of funeral rites does not depend solely on the existence and access of the mourners to new technologies. The elements at play in these funerals occur in dialogue with symbolic contents—hierarchical, cosmological, doctrinal—and intersect with the properties of the new technologies, producing affectations in the form and content of the rites. [Keywords: Brazil, ritualization, social media, emotions, mourning, death, COVID-19 pandemic]
Concealment and Care in Deathcare During COVID
Hannah Gould, University of Melbourne and
Samuel Holleran, University of Melbourne
During the worst months of the COVID-19 pandemic, photojournalistic depictions of the havoc wreaked by the virus became ubiquitous. Images of physically distanced funerals and large-scale body disposal populated newsfeeds, but the labor and experiences of those working within these images—people handling bodies and guiding bereaved families—remained largely hidden from public view. Even before the pandemic, visibility and public recognition were complicated matters for the “deathcare” sector, as professionals cautiously constructed and defended the line separating the family-facing frontstage and industry-insider backstage. Our engagement with this sector through photography was motivated by a desire to illuminate the experiences of those working in deathcare during COVID outbreaks and lockdowns in Melbourne, Australia. Reflecting on photography as method in the study of death, we think through the complexities of seeing and unseeing, exposure and concealment in contemporary death rituals. The pandemic exposed certain realities of death and dying to the public but obfuscated others. Further, our ethnographic practice of portraiture revealed concealment to be a key element of the caring labors that deathcare workers perform. [Keywords: photography, death, funeral, care, affective labor, Australia.]
De-Exceptionalizing Pandemic Death in the United States: COVID-19’s Ambiguous and Layered Mourning
Ariel Santikarma, Yale University and
Sarah Wagner, George Washington University
In the spring and early summer of 2020, mainstream media in the United States announced the “death of ritual” as public officials limited communities from gathering to care for their deceased—whether COVID-19 victims or people who happened to die during this first wave of pandemic restriction. From backlogged funeral homes and crematoria to bodies stacked in refrigerated trucks and families scrambling to find their deceased, headlines seemed to augur an unprecedented condition of interrupted or derailed mourning. But how singular was this moment? On the one hand, funeral directors were telling a different story, reminding us that they’d been here before when the stigma of HIV/AIDS robbed the deceased and their loved ones of expected ritual care. On the other, as scholars of post-conflict societies and missing migrants can attest, COVID-19 was by no means unique in disrupting the pace and order of mourning. This piece challenges the characterization of pandemic death in the United States, especially in the first waves of infection, as exceptional because of what it glosses over: the predictability of which bodies and whose lives routinely pay the highest tolls. Instead, we reflect on the temporality of incomplete and curtailed care by juxtaposing the pandemic’s seemingly singular chronotope—born from the politicized bodies of the living as much as the dead—with the exigencies of uncertain death that surround missing persons of conflicts and borders. Seemingly punctuated events like wars and pandemics that give rise to aberrant death throw timelines into disarray; they also expose what underlies and endures: longstanding inequities to conditions that secure life in the first place. Thus, challenging this notion of presumed exceptionalism, we argue that the US experience of pandemic death and mourning throws into relief—at least temporarily—its systems of domination and invites a closer look at the intertwining projects of memory and political transformation. [Key words: pandemic death, memorialization, ritual, mourning, necropolitics, incarceration, exceptionalism]
De-Exceptionalizing Pandemic Death in the United States: COVID-19’s Ambiguous and Layered Mourning
Ariel Santikarma, Yale University and
Sarah Wagner, George Washington University
In the spring and early summer of 2020, mainstream media in the United States announced the “death of ritual” as public officials limited communities from gathering to care for their deceased—whether COVID-19 victims or people who happened to die during this first wave of pandemic restriction. From backlogged funeral homes and crematoria to bodies stacked in refrigerated trucks and families scrambling to find their deceased, headlines seemed to augur an unprecedented condition of interrupted or derailed mourning. But how singular was this moment? On the one hand, funeral directors were telling a different story, reminding us that they’d been here before when the stigma of HIV/AIDS robbed the deceased and their loved ones of expected ritual care. On the other, as scholars of post-conflict societies and missing migrants can attest, COVID-19 was by no means unique in disrupting the pace and order of mourning. This piece challenges the characterization of pandemic death in the United States, especially in the first waves of infection, as exceptional because of what it glosses over: the predictability of which bodies and whose lives routinely pay the highest tolls. Instead, we reflect on the temporality of incomplete and curtailed care by juxtaposing the pandemic’s seemingly singular chronotope—born from the politicized bodies of the living as much as the dead—with the exigencies of uncertain death that surround missing persons of conflicts and borders. Seemingly punctuated events like wars and pandemics that give rise to aberrant death throw timelines into disarray; they also expose what underlies and endures: longstanding inequities to conditions that secure life in the first place. Thus, challenging this notion of presumed exceptionalism, we argue that the US experience of pandemic death and mourning throws into relief—at least temporarily—its systems of domination and invites a closer look at the intertwining projects of memory and political transformation. [Key words: pandemic death, memorialization, ritual, mourning, necropolitics, incarceration, exceptionalism]
On Pandemics Being Productive
John Troyer, Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath
How can and do pandemic events become productive for everyday human experiences of death and dying? This social thought and commentary piece’s central argument examines the productive potential of pandemics, specifically COVID-19, by focusing on the early impact of the coronavirus in 2020 and its longer-term ripple effects. By grounding this personal essay in these early reflections on an extremely intense period of both personal and global chaos, it is possible to begin discussing what future historians, anthropologists, and academics in related fields might glimpse when looking backward. It is also important to begin understanding how future pandemic response plans will emerge, building on the failures of 2020, in order to manage yet unknown global pandemics. One key takeaway for this planning work is to avoid defaulting into the essay’s core theoretical point, a concept I call virological determinism, where societal inequalities amplifying pandemic-related effects are entirely blamed on a virus and not the underlying social conditions caused by government negligence. By reflecting on the productive possibilities created by pandemics, it is also then possible to begin understanding how many more people died during the early years of COVID-19 than ever needed to. [Keywords: death, dying, COVID-19, coronavirus, virological determinism, global pandemic, AIDS.]