ACADEMIA Letters Pandemic death as a mirror of social life Andreia VICENTE DA SILVA, Universidade Estadual do Oeste do Paraná Since the pandemic was recognaized by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020, the daily averages of deaths worldwide have increased significantly, just as the practices associated with the occurrence of deaths have been transformed. In fact, there is no denying that the pandemic context has changed the procedures related to illness and funerals and imposed on all survivors a terrain of insecurities and fears that began to populate imaginaries related to finitude. If, on the one hand, the amazement caused by the constant threat to life in the context of the spread of the disease motivated preventive attitudes, such as social isolation, the use of masks and alcohol gel and hand washing - indicated to avoid infection - on the other hand, it was not always possible to identify or treat the infected body so that the experience of death was the destiny of thousands of people. Classic anthropology authors have already demonstrated that death rites synthesize collective, socially shared patterns, such as the notions of person and life in force in scenarios (Hertz, 1907). According to this guideline, I point the transformations in practices related to death in this specific context in this short text, understanding them as part of a broader process.The elements will be indicated throughout the text with the aim of generating future reflections at a time when deepening is possible. The impacts of the pandemic on the death system constitute here the starting point for reflecting on social conditions and trajectories underlined by the crisis. From these assumptions, I pose the following question: how does the covid-19 pandemic enable reflections about human finitude, and what are the social relations triggered by the new reality? At the middle of the 20th century, Geoffrey Gorer (1965) conducted a study in England, from which he stated that death became pornographic in contemporary times. Although the thesis of the interdiction of death has been recovered and defended with developments in different contexts (Ariés, 1975; Elias, 1985), in the first two decades of the 21st century, it has Academia Letters, November 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Andreia VICENTE DA SILVA, deiavicente@gmail.com Citation: Vicente Da Silva, A. (2021). Pandemic death as a mirror of social life. Academia Letters, Article 4011. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4011. 1 been increasingly criticized and contested (Walter, 1994; Vicente da Silva, 2018). Transformations in the experience of dying are inevitable and evident, mainly when we refer to the capitalist, individualistic, and secularized contemporaneity. However, as the pandemic context clarifies, finitude continues to occupy a central place in people’s social experience, with repercussions in families, institutions, and communities, especially regarding shared rites. However, as soon as the various national governments released the protocols for handling the sick and dead bodies from the pandemic, biosanitary norms imposed limits and obstacles to the execution of the rituals with social standards that organize this experience. The sick were isolated, the corpses were bagged in sealed coffins, and the farewell ceremonies were restricted (WHO, 2020). These changes have also affected the institutional performance of the professionals who care for the sick and the bodies and restricted the participation of individuals, families, and communities in the course of the social process of construction of illness and death. If the health protocols rigidity prevented or abbreviated the traditional death rites, adaptations and innovations were made to allow the ritualization of this experience by the mourners in a context of invisibilization of the bodies of the deceased. For example, biosafety protocols isolated the infected in hospitals, distancing them from their families, which intensified the revival of the “medicalised death” model (Seymour, 1999), whose emphasis is on the treatment of the body, to the detriment of the affective and relational status with family members, so criticized in times before the twenty-first century (Kubler-Ross, 1970). Actions directed at reversing this impulse of the biopolitical control of bodies were carried out. Some terminally ill patients received messages, and mourners were informed of their relatives’ health status by phone calls or video calls. Many health professionals were willing to mediate these meetings or even to develop new care techniques. The search for treatment alternatives was requested, encouraged, and executed with varying degrees and in different locations. Such a movement evidences the search for an intervention based on the principles of humanization of death in the context of a viral outbreak (Cussó, Navarro, and Galvez, 2020). One may ask: are we facing a new frontier in which the care of convalescents has incorporated the possibility of more balance between the survival of the body and the dignity of the dead and the bereaved relatives? On the other hand, the exponential worldwide growth in the number of deaths has demanded a funeral structure incompatible with the capacity of the different countries and regions. Health risk situations were experienced in all five continents. In Europe, this phenomenon was initially mediatized in 2020 in Spain and Italy, countries that released images of bodies bagged in refrigerated trucks and sealed coffins lined up in churches and public buildings. In South America, the health chaos was intense in Venezuela, with decomposing bodies inside homes and in the streets of Caracas, due to the inability of funeral services to Academia Letters, November 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Andreia VICENTE DA SILVA, deiavicente@gmail.com Citation: Vicente Da Silva, A. (2021). Pandemic death as a mirror of social life. Academia Letters, Article 4011. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4011. 2 cope with a scenario of mass deaths. In 2021, in India, images show large areas occupied for the cremation of bodies. Because of the inability to provide care and ritualization, many bodies were thrown into the Ganges River. The health chaos drew attention to the centrality of public and private investment in the funeral sector and alternatives for burial. At the same time, with the overcrowding of funeral homes and cemeteries, the previously invisible and marginalized “death workers” gained visibility. The importance of the work related to death, the dying process, and the remains, both regarding the dignity and health perspective, began to occupy space in public debates. Whether in the crowded cemeteries of Manaus (Brazil) or the crematoria of New Delhi (India), exhausted gravediggers were required to care for and provide without personal protective equipment and access to essential assistance for a massive number of bodies. The overflow of dead was responsible for the construction of mass graves (for example, in New York, USA), with individual headstones used to mark the position of each corpse. The collapsed death system illuminated the everyday disfavor of workers dedicated to funeral services, those who enable dignified farewells for dead and bereaved alike. To what extent can the visibility acquired by these death workers during the pandemic bring about changes in the landscape of invisibility and devaluation to which they are subjected? Will governments take the initiative to invest in the structure and revision of burial practices from the funerary chaos produced by the pandemic? Pandemic health protocols were responsible for fundamental changes in procedures associated with dead bodies and ceremonials. Specific care of corpses was restricted or rendered unfeasible. Although the notion of contamination varied to a greater or lesser degree due to specific cultural issues, the practice of the pandemic funeral rite in an urban Western context was marked by the rapid inhumation of the corpse in a sealed coffin. The traditional universal care of corpse preparation, which includes washing, cleaning, beautification, and dressing, was not performed. Mourners resented with the incomplete rites, and incredulous about the death of their relatives, went through frustrating burial processes.1 One of the main consequences of not having access to the dead bodies is the possibility of denial of death. From an individual point of view, the probability of a process of “complicated mourning” has increased - at the moment, in 2021, considered to be an epidemic, given the number of cases referred to by specialists in mourning assistance - while “successive mourning” has become part of the daily life of communities. In traditional, indigenous, quilombola, and aboriginal cultures, in addition to evidence of 1 Collins (2004) explained that emotions are constituted throughout ritual interactions. In these encounters, there is a sharing of symbols, emotional energy, group solidarity, and feelings of morality through the physical union of people. Considering this theoretical reference, it can be argued that the non-performance of traditional rites would leave mourners the feeling of frustration. Academia Letters, November 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Andreia VICENTE DA SILVA, deiavicente@gmail.com Citation: Vicente Da Silva, A. (2021). Pandemic death as a mirror of social life. Academia Letters, Article 4011. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4011. 3 greater risk of death, the impossibility of caring for their dead consisted in a factor of collective consternation. In many scenarios, traditional funerary rites occur in the coexistence with the deceased, including during the process of deterioration of the corpse or the ingestion of parts of the remains (Hertz, 1907; Vilaça, 2005). In Brazil, for example, there was intense commotion from a group of Sanöma mothers of the Yanomami ethnicity, whose infected children’s bodies were buried in an urban cemetery in Roraima (Vicente da Silva, Rodrigues and Aisengart, 2021). The radical alterity made a linguistic and cultural understanding of such a determination impossible and even subsequently led to the hiding of the sick by relatives in the villages, which led to further infection and death. As a counterpoint to the centrality of corpses, the advance of new technologies - a process underway since at least the last quarter of the 20th century in countries in the northern hemisphere, and more recently, as of the first decade of the 21st century in countries south of the equator, notably in the Americas and Africa - proved central to the experience of pandemic death. Cell phones were used to minimally break the physical isolation of the infected in hospitals, allowing a less lonely experience of death. Photos and films of the dead were alternatives to the presence of the dead at their funerals. Through the use of new technologies, the deceased can be visualized, not only as a paralyzed corpse but also as an interactive agent. Whether in front of a sealed coffin or virtual meetings between mourners for the wake, Covid’s dead body was metamorphosed through new forms of materialization. Do the cultural and political disputes around the dead bodies refer to the continuity of the centrality of the dead in the performance of the rites, or are we facing a context of subversion of this position of materiality by its “media bios”? What changes does the media escalation bring to the social process of transforming the dead into ancestors? What are the effects of the use of technological supports for the experience of finitude or even for pandemic and post-pandemic mourning? With the impediments and limitations of funeral ceremonies, eulogies for the dead or expressions of solidarity among mourners were adapted. Informal and personalized funeral ritualizations (Bell, 2009) populated the pandemic death experiences. Much of these ritualizations were inspired by previously existing models, which have undergone intensification: domestic altars, solitary visits to headstones, blogs honoring loved ones, digital funeral ceremonies, and collective memorials to victims. With the prohibition or reduction of the use of funeral institutions, forms of sharing the emotions associated with mourning have been reinvented, which has minimally ensured the mediation of death by popular cultures (Hutching, 2012). Attention should be drawn to the process of loosening the boundaries between public and private, especially from the interference of new media, making these environments more interchangeable (Lowe, Rumbold and Aoun, 2020). The process is now towards more Academia Letters, November 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Andreia VICENTE DA SILVA, deiavicente@gmail.com Citation: Vicente Da Silva, A. (2021). Pandemic death as a mirror of social life. Academia Letters, Article 4011. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4011. 4 informal and personalized funeral ceremonies (Gibbs et al., 2015), performed through social media (Nansen et al., 2017) and attended from inside residences. Are we facing a new frontier in which death rites express these tensions and intersections of social domains in transition? Is ritualization a new mode of performance in contemporary funerary cultures? Covid deaths affected individuals from the most diverse backgrounds, social classes, genders, races, or ethnicities. In this sense, it is possible to think that the sharing of the experience of death and the dismay inherent in a context of successive mourning became a constant in most countries. The pandemic environment was favorable to the mutual recognition of human vulnerabilities, fostering initiatives of sharing and care. Contradictorily, one cannot fail to emphasize that these empathic actions occurred in unequal settings, many of them structured from necropolitics (Mbembe, 2019). Thus, the effects of the syndemic (Singer, 1994) coronavirus had a substantial impact on minorities, and these effects are limited to biological death. Traditional populations, such as indigenous people and quilombolas, and the poorest, such as slum dwellers or street dwellers, were the most affected, either in mortality rates or damage to their means of existence. The action of denialist and genocidal governments, with their death policies, continues to provide regions with high mortality rates, environments conducive to the emergence of variants of the virus, where social death is already part of the daily lives of entire populations. Among the examples practiced by those governments are the refusal to invest in public policies to help the poorest, now expressed in the inefficiency of health policies, the absence of research, and the delay in purchasing vaccines. Differences in access to treatment, equipment, vaccines, and technology are striking evidence of the global inequalities created by the neoliberal system. To what extent is the pandemic able to raise debates regarding implementing political actions generating justice and equity since there can be no global control of the disease while the virus circulates and generates variants in peripheral and poor regions? footnote An example is to think that in the first months that the vaccine was made available, countries like the United States, England, and Japan have already vaccinated more than 80% of their populations, while African or Central American countries have not yet reached the 20% level. The vaccine distribution data from the COVAX consortium by the World Health Organization also reinforce the inequalities in the distribution of the inputs to fight the pandemic. Finally, it should be noted that in some contexts, especially in countries with a proliferation of denialist policies, there was a questioning of the diagnosis of Covid deaths or even cogitation around the possibility of people disappearing. The operators of pandemic denialism made extensive use of the determination to seal coffins to spread feelings of doubt and question the veracity of the disease and the real reason for the deaths. In China, in Wuhan, Academia Letters, November 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Andreia VICENTE DA SILVA, deiavicente@gmail.com Citation: Vicente Da Silva, A. (2021). Pandemic death as a mirror of social life. Academia Letters, Article 4011. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4011. 5 Li Wenliang, the doctor who first reported the outbreak,2 was investigated by the government on charges of spreading false news. Unfortunately, he became one of those killed by the virus and the denialism of the pandemic. Images of empty coffins or exchanges of the dead began to circulate widely on social media, especially in WhatsApp groups, causing outrage and sadness in mourning families. Our mediatized daily life allowed political uses of the pandemic, hiding the number of deaths, refusing alternatives to face the crisis. The pandemic has taught us daily that the experience of death, although part of life, can be amplified. However, the crisis context must be a time-space of reflection and care from which solidarity is the fundamental path for constructing possibilities for a better social life in the future to come. 2 Wuhan is still considered the city where the first outbreak occurred in December 2019. Many of the first patients were vendors, workers, or regular visitors to the local fish market. In January 2020, the market was closed for disinfection. Academia Letters, November 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Andreia VICENTE DA SILVA, deiavicente@gmail.com Citation: Vicente Da Silva, A. (2021). Pandemic death as a mirror of social life. 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Academia Letters, November 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Andreia VICENTE DA SILVA, deiavicente@gmail.com Citation: Vicente Da Silva, A. (2021). Pandemic death as a mirror of social life. Academia Letters, Article 4011. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4011. 8