Anthropology
Bailey’s models for describing and analyzing sociocultural conflict and contradiction in Tribe, Caste and Nation (1960) influenced work in Yugoslavia and Croatia during two distinct periods of research. The chapter first describes family, gender, and household life in Yugoslavia in the years following Tito’s death. Bailey’s rich understanding of the ways in which people invoke competing, but overlapping models for the ways things should be, and his attention to everyday life, described in case studies, provided an approach that uncovered subtle but meaningful changes in household patterns and in gender roles and relationships. Women learned to use bridge-actions to achieve greater autonomy. The chapter shifts focus to a second period of work, the early 1990s, a period marked by economic and political tensions that eventually led to war. Again, drawing on Bailey as a theoretician and scholar, the chapter describes changes in understandings tied to ethnicity and nationalism at a local level. In both cases, overlapping systems and contradictions among them provided space for shifts in behavior, and ultimately thought, about gender, families, ethnicity, and more.
As a result of the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic, in 2020 forensic institutions in Mexico began using extreme measures in the treatment of bodies of confirmed or suspected cases, due to possible infection. A series of national protocols on how to deal with the virus were announced, yet forensic personnel have struggled to apply these, demonstrating the country’s forensics crisis. This article aims to reflect on two points: (1) the impact that COVID-19 protocols have had on how bodies confirmed as or suspected of being infected with the virus are handled in the forensic medical system; and (2) the particular treatment in cases where the body of the victim is unidentified, and the different effects the pandemic has had in terms of the relationship between the institutional environment and the family members of those who have died as a result of infection, or suspected infection, from COVID-19.
When drone footage emerged of New York City’s COVID-19 casualties being buried by inmates in trenches on Hart Island, the images became a key symbol for the pandemic: the suddenly soaring death toll, authorities’ struggle to deal with overwhelming mortality and widespread fear of anonymous, isolated death. The images shocked New Yorkers, most of whom were unaware of Hart Island, though its cemetery operations are largely unchanged since it opened over 150 years ago, and about one million New Yorkers are buried there. How does Hart Island slip in and out of public knowledge for New Yorkers in a cycle of remembering and forgetting – and why is its rediscovery shocking? Perhaps the pandemic, understood as a spectacular event, reveals what has been there, though unrecognised, all along.
Based on the anthropological classification of death into ‘good deaths’, ‘beautiful deaths’ and ‘evil deaths’, and using the methodology of screen ethnography, this article focuses on mourning in Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially the extreme cases of deaths in Manaus and among the Yanomami people. The article ‘follows the virus’, from its first role in a death in the country, that of a domestic worker, to hurriedly dug mass graveyards. I consider how the treatment of bodies in the epidemiological context sheds light on the meanings of separation by death when mourning rituals are not performed according to prevailing cultural imperatives. Parallels are drawn with other moments of sudden deaths and the absence of bodies, as during the South American dictatorships, when many victims were declared ‘missing’. To conclude, the article focuses on new funerary rituals, such as Zoom funerals and online support groups, created to overcome the impossibility of mourning as had been practised in the pre-pandemic world.
Research into the governance of dead bodies, primarily focused on post-conflict contexts, has often focused on the aspects of the management of dead bodies that involve routinisation, bureaucratisation and order. Less attention has been paid to the governance of the dead in times of relative peace and, in particular, to the aspects of such work that are less bureaucratised and controlled. This article explores the governance of dead bodies in pandemic times – times which although extraordinary, put stress on ordinary systems in ways that are revealing of power and politics. Observations for this article come from over fifteen years of ethnographic research at a medical examiner’s office in Arizona, along with ten focused interviews in 2020 with medico-legal authorities and funeral directors specifically about the COVID-19 pandemic. The author argues that the pandemic revealed the ways in which the deathcare industry in the United States is an unregulated, decentralised and ambiguous space.
This article sets forth a theoretical framework that first argues that necropolitical power and sovereignty should be understood as existing on a spectrum that ultimately produces the phenomenon of surplus death – such as pandemic deaths or those disappeared by the state. We then expound this framework by juxtaposing the necropolitical negligence of the COVID-19 pandemic with the violence of forced disappearances to argue that the surplus dead have the unique capacity to create political change and reckonings, due to their embodied power and agency. Victims of political killings and disappearance may not seem to have much in common with victims of disease, yet focusing on the mistreatment of the dead in both instances reveals uncanny patterns and similarities. We demonstrate that this overlap, which aligns in key ways that are particularly open to use by social actors, provides an entry to comprehend the agency of the dead to incite political reckonings with the violence of state action and inaction.
Chapter 1 explains the initiation of the anthropological research in 2017, when the MSF programme in Amman entered its tenth year. Multiple questions about the patients’ wellbeing both in the hospital and after they returned home required answers. Simultaneously, the concept of a “patient-centred approach” was flourishing at MSF, and the RSP had declared it one of its main preoccupations. The chapter details the qualitative-research methodology used in my research. In-depth interviews with ninety-nine MSF staff members and seventy-four patients from Syria and Iraq were transcribed, coded, and analysed using a thematic-analysis approach. Furthermore, extended observations of participants both inside the MSF hospital and in patients’ homes, and internal MSF documents provided information used in the process of triangulation. I describe how my observations over the six months I spent in the RSP hospital grew out of my integrated position, embedded in the hospital microcosm. My constant presence there facilitated my formal and informal interaction with staff. The chapter concludes with reports from my fieldwork in Jordan and Iraq. My vantage point – inside the home countries and literally inside patients’ homes – gave me the unique opportunity to observe the intimate physical and social environments of my participants.
In Chapter 2, I follow patients and staff through their daily routines in the hospital. I describe the spectrum of emotions experienced by members of hospital staff, ranging from their personal motivation to the emotional impact on them of the daily support they provide to the victims of war. The hospital routine is marked by mutual informal interactions between patients and staff, lending a general sense of informality and friendliness to the institutional relationships. Nevertheless, providing a “healing environment” and remaining steady under the visual impact of deformed limbs carries a certain price. Interviews with staff suggest feelings of sadness, guilt, and generalized emotional distress. These overwhelming emotions are linked to the staff’s perceptions of patients. Patients are predominantly viewed as victims, lacking their own agency, and patronizing attitudes are sometimes imposed to justify the social order in the hospital. An enduring hospital culture of stereotyping is widespread. This became obvious through positive descriptions of Iraqi patients in contrast to derogatory portrayals of Yemeni patients, who are viewed as lacking proper hygiene practices, for example, or not understanding the Jordanian dialect of Arabic. Despite all of this, the hospital appears to be a successful melting pot, where cultures blend and transformation takes place. It becomes a place where a patient’s sense of self is gradually altered.