What a “Safe and Dignified” Burial Means During a Pandemic
Bamileke community members typically mourn the deaths of loved ones through drumming, singing, and other collective rituals. Bobyphoto/Wikimedia Commons A few months into the pandemic, a …
Tag: Death
COVID-19 measures and industrial workplaces
The obsession that media has had with small businesses has hidden the most aggressive public health measures are missing the biggest driver of the pandemic: large industrial workplaces.
Facing COVID-19 as an Undocumented Essential Worker
Many immigrants in the U.S. continue working in agriculture and other essential sectors amid new pandemic safety protocols. Brent Stirton/Getty Images One afternoon in mid-April, I was si…
What’s Left Unsaid When a Language Dies
“Transition” by Papua New Guinean artist Philemon Yalamu. From Papua New Guinea: A New Dawn by Fondazione Imago Mundi/Luciano Benetton Collection. A Death in the Rainforest: How a Languag…
The Networked Animita: Transgender Remembrance on Social Media
Tomorrow, November 20th, the world will commemorate Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day to collectively mourn and remember those who have died as a result of transphobia. Started…
The Cookout (and All Other Manners of Heavenly Black Things)
[no-caption] Manny Rodriguez As a poet and an anthropologist, I often write about the cycles of Black grief, death, celebration, and life. As a Black queer descendant of…
The Human Cost of Border Enforcement Policies
A participatory pop-up exhibition breaks down traditional disciplinary boundaries between art and anthropology to inform wider audiences about the humanitarian crisis occurring at the United States–Me…
Mourning while fighting for justice: The first months of the NOI DENUNCEREMO association, Bergamo, Italy by Chiara Alfieri
This post was co-authored by members of CoMeSCov program who contributed to the development of research questions, data collection tools and data analysis: Firmin Kra, Francesca Mininel, Fleur…
Call for reviews: Anthropology of Death and Mourning
The global pandemic has brought death uncomfortably near for many of us. The way our governments, economists, scientists, and fellow citizens have reacted and tried to govern over…
Roundup: Waste & COVID-19
What do we know about the relationships between waste and COVID-19? Some figures and insights are emerging, but given that we’re in the thick of the pandemic and…
The Public Problem With Counterterrorism
A British army helicopter flies over Estonian forests during a massive annual military training exercise. NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization/Flickr The terrorist attacks on Septem…
How Do We Listen to the Living?
I opened my twitter on June 15, to read a non-Black person describe the murder of Oluwatoyin “Toyin” Salau as an “act of god.” They quote retweeted a…
The Dead Must Be Counted
Crosses bear the names of the dead and the missing along a migrant trail connecting Mexico to Arizona. Christina Felschen In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, disputes…
Being Clear-Eyed About Citizen Science in the Age of COVID-19
In March 2011, one of the strongest earthquakes on record struck the Fukushima Dai’ichi Nuclear Power Plant in northeastern Japan. Combined with a subsequent tsunami, the disasters triggered…
Haitian Deportees Face an Unconscionable Crisis During the Pandemic
The Trump administration has deported more than 240 Haitian nationals from the U.S. back to Haiti—a country that has a weak health care system and few resources to…
Hush-Hush, a Pale-Horse Cometh: Mirabilis Manducat
[no-caption] PhotoTalk/Getty Images “O res mirabilis! Manducat Dominum …” —Saint Thomas Aquinas, 13th Century I did not know well my Uncle-Cousin Ron. He was my mother’s cousin. He…
Pandemic, Democratic Death, and Antifragility in Contemporary Italy: A Personal Reflection (#WitnessingCorona)
Hide Press Release (2 Less Words) Annamaria Fantauzzi This article aims to reflect on how dying and the perception of death in the COVID-19 pandemic have changed…
Can Archaeology Dogs Smell Ancient Time?
Dax is a trained archaeology dog, seen here at work in southwest Montana. Lauri Travis On a sunny, cloudless afternoon in Croatia, a fierce wind known as a…
What Pandemics Leave Behind
[no-caption] Angus Greig At some time in the future, the novel coronavirus pandemic will fade. What will this globally traumatic contagion leave in its wake? In this episode…
Police Violence and the Pandemic
[no-caption] Angus Greig SAPIENS host Jen Shannon interviews Laurence Ralph, a professor of anthropology at Princeton University. Ralph is also a co-director of Princeton’s Center on Tran…
How Elders Make Us Human
[no-caption] Matthias Zomer/Pexels On March 23, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick sparked controversy and outrage by suggesting that older people in the United States might be willing to…
Is Celebrity Attention Helping or Hurting Amazonian Peoples?
Indigenous peoples in Brazil are dying from COVID-19 at twice the rate of the rest of the country’s population. Here, Indigenous nurses accompany an elderly woman for testing…
Turkish Cemeteries for the “Unknown” — #Afterlives
I first heard about the Cemetery for the Unknown from a friend, Ceyda, while returning from the funeral of her friend, Sibel. Sibel was a trans woman sex…
Venice’s Black Death and the Dawn of Quarantine
The island of Lazzaretto Nuovo, shown here, was one of the isles where the city of Venice quarantined plague-stricken individuals. Archeoclub d’Italia Sede di Venezia Just beyond th…