Natural deaths in extraordinary times: Governing COVID dead in southern Arizona
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 a...
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Veröffentlicht in: | Human remains and violence : an interdisciplinary journal 2022-04, Vol.8 (1), p.67-83 |
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Format: | Artikel |
Sprache: | eng |
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Zusammenfassung: | 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. |
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ISSN: | 2054-2240 2054-2240 |
DOI: | 10.7227/HRV.8.1.5 |