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- Convenors:
-
Sally Raudon
(University of Cambridge)
Ruth Toulson (Maryland Institute College of Art)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Jeff Maskovsky
(The Graduate Center, CUNY)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 24 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
This panel invites papers focused on death rituals unmade and remade when a traditional funeral ritual could not occur and alternatives had to be accepted. This can include necropolitics, and allows that such undoing can prompt rethinking fundamental processes of kinship, community, and governance.
Long Abstract:
Rituals and practices are constantly made and remade, for the resilience of ritual is crucial to its reproduction. How people deal with their dead has always shown immense cultural variation, and environmental, political, and economic pressures stimulate innovation and improvisation in death rituals. Recent scholarship has insisted on the materiality of the dead, and simultaneously begun decentring individualistic Euro-American hegemonic understandings of dying, dead and mourning; these are not new turns, but part of the discipline’s enduring interest in how people celebrate and manage death.
This panel invites papers focused on death rituals unmade and remade when a traditional funeral ritual could not occur and alternatives had to be accepted. This might include funerals of last resort, whether due to economic need or exhaustion of social relationships, such as potter’s fields and public health funerals; mass graves or recovery projects caused by war, political violence, wrong-doing, epidemic or disaster; state reforms of traditional practices; people lost or disappeared; or when the deceased refuses a funeral. Throughout we attend to Mbembe’s necropolitics and ‘the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not’ (2003: 27), while also allowing that undoing death rituals can trigger reordering in community and create new understandings of society, politics, and religious norms, prompting us to rethink fundamental processes of kinship, community, and governance.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 24 July, 2024, -Saila Kivilahti (Tampere University)
Paper short abstract:
The paper analyzes how undocumented migrants cope with the death of their travel companions while attempting to cross to Spain by sea. It focuses on the situational, environmental, and political conditions that reshape both the rituals of death and the burial of the deceased person’s body.
Paper long abstract:
Dying at sea, especially through drowning, is a common occurrence in undocumented migration to Europe by sea (IOM 2024). Besides drowning, migrants often face death in boats for various reasons, such as dehydration, hypothermia, or disease. This compels those left behind to address the death of their travel companions while still in motion. In this paper, I analyze how Western African migrants manage the deaths of their fellow travelers during the sea crossing to Spain.
My research data suggests that the handling of the deceased person’s body is influenced by two types of urgencies and dangers posed to the other travelers on the boat, connected to the materiality of the deceased person’s body (e.g., Fontein 2018). In a boat at sea, there is no temporary place to store the body, and it needs to be dealt with quickly before it poses a sanitary and political threat to others.
Burial at sea has historically been a customary practice, especially in many seafaring communities (e.g., Steward 2001). However, in the context of undocumented migration, the necessity for such an act arises from the situational, environmental, and political conditions surrounding the death, compelling those left behind to take immediate action. The undocumented status of the travelers is then not only connected to the death itself but also reshapes both the rituals of death and the burial of the deceased person’s body.
Maria Hagan (University of Amsterdam)
Paper short abstract:
As migrant people continue to die at the France/UK border, activists are engaged in both calling out these deaths and "dealing with" them (identification, burial). I conceptualise their practices as “reluctant” rituals, that care for victims of the border while refusing to banalise their deaths.
Paper long abstract:
When a migrating person loses their life at the northern French border, a gathering is systematically held the following evening on a public square in the center of Calais. At a border where necropolitical violence is widespread, the ritual gathering of activists, citizens and migrating people refuses to let border deaths go unnoticed. The ritual can however give rise to discomfort or tension: for some it is a moment of political protest, for others one of commemoration or grieving - all of which spark different emotions and situated rituals. Departing from several ethnographic moments of participation in these gatherings between 2016 and 2023, this paper explores how people collectively create and negotiate death rituals in a context marked by state violence. It discusses how the labour of dealing with the dead (identification, communication with the family of the deceased, burial/repatriation, commemoration) has in large part fallen to activists (along with the dead’s peers in migration), who express discomfort elaborating procedures and rituals for coping with border deaths, in establishing infrastructures which take for granted that more deaths will come. Conceptualising these as “reluctant” rituals that have emerged through the violent repetition of border deaths, I explore dynamics of collective struggle that emerge at the intersection of caring for victims of the border and resisting the banalisation of border deaths.
Sally Raudon (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
In New York City, Hart Island’s massed grave is not the result of war, violence or disaster. Nor was it prompted by Covid. It is simply what happens in NYC to anyone who cannot afford a funeral. Can a massed grave ever be ordinary?
Paper long abstract:
In New York City, Hart Island’s massed grave for Covid dead symbolised long-standing inequalities among the living. Footage of the burials attracted international attention, and many New Yorkers learned about Hart Island through these images. But, unusually for a massed grave, Hart Island is not the result of war, violence or disaster. Nor was it prompted by Covid’s soaring death toll. It is simply what happens in New York to anyone who cannot afford a funeral. As one funeral director told me, nothing different happened on Hart Island during Covid, except that it was busier.
In this paper I ask, can a massed grave ever be ordinary? Further, if massed graves are usually prompted by the exceptional, is it partly Hart Island’s ordinariness that distresses people?
Olof Ohlson (The Federal University of Sao Carlos)
Paper short abstract:
In normal cases, Mexico's Day of the Dead helps transforming grief into a cheerful feast. But the nation also has tens of thousands of disappeared: where do they belong? This presentation shows how the disappeared come with contentious necrotaboos, a new material culture, and their own rites.
Paper long abstract:
Based on field work with relatives of disappeared people in Mexico and social movements campaigning for their rights, I seek to show in this presentation that Mexico's cheerful and celebrated ritual festivity the Day of the Dead come with certain forms of exclusion and necrotaboos. In normal circumstances, the Day of the Dead is part of transforming grief into a cheerful feast, but this is different in cases of those who have not been burried properly. Their surviving family have ambiguous and conflicting attitudes to whether or not their missing should be included in the celebration or not, since the disappeared are often held to still be alive by their family members. This is especially so with well-known cases of disappeared people who might be included in the holiday's public and often politically spicy altars or poems by others. There is no Day of the Disappeared, after all, so where do they belong in Mexico's otherwise rich necro-sociality? As it turns out, a new material culture is being created at new subversive and often informal memorial sites outside of the Day of the Dead, often ritualized around the International Day of the Disappeared or other dates of importance. The disappeared demand their own rites, material culture, and places, devoteed only to them and their unique predicaments, and where their political afterlives can better thrive.
Miranda Tuckett (The New School for Social Research)
Paper short abstract:
Examining the role of gift exchange in maintaining relations with the dead, this paper explores creative practices which emerge in the absence of established rites of passage for secular deaths.
Paper long abstract:
“Beneath all rituals is an ultimate danger…. The possibility that we will encounter ourselves making up our conceptions of the world”, wrote Moore and Myerhoff (1977, 8). But what if this danger were subverted into creativity? Shortly after returning from Switzerland where I witnessed the death of a woman I had been working with for the past eight months, I received a package in the mail. Theresa had sent me a small glass ornament with an accompanying note that read “The stars are very beautiful tonight. Much love, Theresa”. Unlike other gifts that Theresa had distributed while planning her assisted death, these gifts were scheduled to arrive, dramatically, after her death – as if from the afterlife. In this paper I argue that faced with dying a secular death dominated by bureaucratic and techno-medical understandings of dying, Theresa turned to gift exchange to experience her death as something other than technical mastery. Gifts became materials which blurred the boundary between the living and the dead. Over the course of fieldwork, I was repeatedly told: “there’s no instruction manual for this”. This signified not only the clandestine nature of organizing an assisted death in Switzerland and the necessary travel and logistical details, but also a broader ambivalence over how to face a secular death. I argue, therefore, that gifts had multiple purposes in Theresa’s death, chief among them, offering a formula through which to approach death from within a milieu where, due to secularization, no rite of passage has been established.
Cate Morley (Princeton University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the role of death in the unraveling and refashioning of political and spiritual belief in contemporary Ireland. I explore continued public contestations over a mass grave, discovered in 2014, behind an institution that incarcerated unmarried mothers.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the role of death in the unraveling and refashioning of political and spiritual belief in contemporary Ireland. Ethnographers working in contexts of mass grave exhumations and missing dead have long argued that uncertainty about whether the disappeared are dead or alive, and the absence of human remains, complicates traditional death practices and mourning rituals. I extend that argument by considering how that ambiguity becomes the grounds for staking out new political claims.
In 2014 a mass grave was discovered in a disused sewage tank in Tuam, Ireland. The remains are believed to belong to some of the 796 infants and children who died at an institution that incarcerated unmarried mothers between the 1920s and 1960s, and to have been buried clandestinely by nuns working in the service of the State. The formal investigation that the discovery prompted is only the most recent in the Irish government’s response to a series of Church-State abuse scandals. The Commission’s report, which largely dismissed survivor testimonies, the religious orders’ refusal to make a financial contribution to redress, and the decade-long delay in exhumation of the mass grave has inflamed public distrust in the institutions that have long organized Irish society. Drawing upon my ethnographic fieldwork, I explore the way that survivors and relatives of those disappeared profess distrust in both the word of the Church and the word of the law, while appealing to notions of divine and democratic justice that transcend or bypass the authority of Church and State.
Sreemoyee Paul (Rutgers University - New Brunswick, New Jersey)
Paper short abstract:
The paper looks at the non-ritualistic disposal of Covid-infected dead bodies as ‘waste' in landfills by the state in Kolkata during first wave, and examines its moral and symbolic implications for the bereaved, by primarily focusing on Hindu and Muslim populations that are majoritarian in Bengal.
Paper long abstract:
My paper focuses on the COVID-19 first-wave (2020) situation in India, particularly Kolkata, the epicenter of the pandemic in West Bengal. In Kolkata, the COVID-19-infected dead bodies, irrespective of religion or caste, were wrapped up in plastic and non-ritualistically disposed of by the state in landfills. As a then Kolkata resident, I witnessed, the media circulate images of the piled-up bodies in trash bags but whether these bodies were cremated or buried, was left to the assumptions of the public. Moreover, families were not allowed to identify the dead and had to wait for months to receive the death certificate, leading to confusion about whether a person had died, or not.
Focusing on Hindu and Muslim populations that are majoritarian in Bengal, I ask, in situations like epi/pandemic, when there is no proper closure about the deaths and when bodies get equated to 'waste,' how do the families and the larger communities to which the dead(s) belonged, perceive and grieve the loss? How do they symbolize the exclusionary rites on the inanimate bodies? In India, which still practices caste-based and religion-based untouchability, how is the mixing up of bodies in the garbage pile, seen by the respective religious communities? By in-depth-interviewing of fifteen Hindu and fifteen Muslim families who have lost their kin(s) to COVID, and five priests from the respective communities, over five months in 2023, I explore how the afterlives of these bodies are imagined, whether or not these bodies are memorialized, and if memorialized, in what ways.
Kristina Kovalskaya (GSRL-EPHE)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses the funeral practices of Chechen and Ingoush living in France. The families are involved into a complex process of repatriation which combines medical actions with the body, mandatory documents allowing the transfer and Muslim funerals split between different spaces and actors.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyses the funarel practices of Vaynakh people (Chechen and Ingoush) living in France. Many of them came to Europe as political refugees after years of war and political repressions in Chechnya and a generation of their children has grew up abroad. The link that these people maintain with their land is very strong and the majority of them want to be buried in their native village. After someone's death, their family is involved into a complex process of repatriation which needs numerous documents mandatory for the transfer of a dead body, including medical certificates regarding necessary vaccination. My ethnographic fieldwork held in Nice, Strasbourg and Paris from December 2022 to November 2023 showed that the families are often helped by local religious authorities as imams or other religious leaders to accomplish administrative actions. The Vaynakh imams are also responsible for the religious part of this process and they do the Muslim prayer (janaza), often in special rooms at the morgues. If the family pays a funeral assurance to a funeral agency (mostly always Turkish), the washing of the body and the prayer may be organized by the agency itself. How do people choice between different funeral specialists? Who is authorized to make the funeral prayer? Are all Muslims equal for Chechen and Ingoush in this situation? How do they negociate time limits with the French state? All these questions will be analysed in my paper based on my ethnography of Vaynakh religious practices in France.
Inge Fiedler (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper findings from organ donation events in Germany are presented. It will be discussed, how these events react to the particular grief, hope and worry of donor kin about the living remains of their loved ones. The focus is laid on facilitated meetings with (proxy) organ recipients.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will present findings from fieldwork in Germany at organ donation events and from interviews with those involved. It will trace, how involved institutions have reacted to particular needs of the next of kin of organ donors, or "donor kin". The death of organ donors is a temporally fragmented dying, beginning with the moment of the first brain death diagnosis, the interim period of waiting for the organ removal and a time for the funeral. (Sharp 2006; Lock 2002) It can also be experienced by next of kin as physically fragmented dying. (Kalitzkus 2004) The loved one's dying is followed by a period of hoping that the transplanted organs will live as long as possible. Parents often contact the coordinating institution trying to find out more about recipients and whether they are handling their child's organ well. Some report renewed grief when they learn that an organ, especially the heart, has been rejected by the recipient body or that the recipient has died. This continued worry and care remains absent in public debates on organ donation and in state campaigns, but is central at events where donor kin meet (unrelated) organ recipients and involved health care professionals. These proxy meetings have become an established part in grief counselling for donor kin, that have influence on how death is understood and mourning enacted.
Cleonardo Mauricio Junior (Nacional Museum - UFRJ)
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects on the ways people bereaved by COVID-19 in Brazil have been reframing rituals of remembrance and grief consolation in everyday life, in the wake of the specificities of pandemic losses, especially the moral economy of contamination and the absence of death conventional rituals.
Paper long abstract:
This paper reflects on how people bereaved by COVID-19 have been reshaping ways of coping with grief in Brazil. I intend to address how the specificities of pandemic losses, especially the moral economy of pandemic deaths and the absence of proper traditional rituals during lockdown bear on the ways people are creating or remaking rituals of remembrance and consolation.
By the moral economy of COVID-19 deaths, I refer to the moral implications mainly related to the contagion of the disease, such as blaming the victims themselves for not having respected the lockdown and other protocols, or for having comorbidities that placed them at risk groups, producing categories of people more worthy of mourning than others.
The impossibility of holding funerals, or even opening coffins to see the body one last time, and the prohibition of visiting those infected with COVID-19 in hospitals during the pandemic were some of the factors that prevented people from saying goodbye to their loved ones properly, considering traditional rituals.
What have mourners done, then, to remember their dead? How can they produce consolation in the face of the deprivation of the community sharing of their pain in the absence of public rituals of remembrance and consolation?
To answer this question, I follow a group of people who lost loved ones during the pandemic in the city of Recife, northeastern Brazil. Finally, I add an autoethnographic perspective to this data, since I lost my father to Covid-19 in April 2022, shortly before vaccination began in Brazil.