RAPID: Funerary Practices, Pandemic Confinement, and the Implications for COVID-19 Transmission

2020年4月，美国疾病控制和预防中心将葬礼确定为COVID-19传播的高风险场所。葬礼对一个社区的社会健康至关重要。他们允许人们一起哀悼并缅怀他们的死者，但当失去亲人的人不被允许聚集在一起时，集体哀悼变得更加复杂。因此，了解适应和接受的虚拟（在线）仪式和纪念活动的形式及其在预防感染传播中的作用，对于应对未来美国各地COVID-19的激增以及未来的流行病至关重要。对宗教领袖和殡仪馆馆长的初步研究表明，中断葬礼、埋葬和纪念活动的社会距离规定遇到了混乱甚至抵制。这项研究将为制定公共卫生计划和指导方针提供关键信息，以解决继续进行面对面仪式的社区所面临的风险。鉴于葬礼的社会重要性和哀悼在这一流行病中的核心作用，社区迫切需要推广既能保持这种仪式的文化和宗教意义，又不会加剧病毒传播的做法。该项目还为研究生和本科生提供严格、科学的数据收集和分析方法方面的培训。这项研究是在COVID-19感染率呈指数级上升的风险和葬礼能力不堪重负的情况下进行的。因此，调查人员试图确定使人们能够或抑制人们遵守中断或违背照顾死者义务的社交距离准则的能力的因素。正如对埃博拉危机的研究所表明的那样，人类学家对悲伤社区的当地视角的关注为减少或增加感染风险的因素提供了至关重要的见解，从而在公共卫生干预措施中发挥了重要作用。这项研究将与不同的宗教社区、葬礼从业者和国家葬礼主持人协会的代表合作，评估宗教传统（或缺乏宗教传统）如何影响葬礼仪式的适应，以及与COVID-19相关的葬礼护理限制如何将组织集体哀悼的负担转移到家庭和虚拟空间。该项目采用了一系列旨在真实的时间捕捉这些适应性过程的方法，包括虚拟参与者观察（例如，同步的宗教仪式，葬礼和追悼会），初始和后续的半结构化访谈，数字媒体的话语分析，以及调查工具。研究人员将特别关注访问虚拟媒体的变化。因为仪式反映了社区（无论是宗教还是世俗）组织物质和象征资源的能力，它们说明了结构性不平等如何造成社区和代际之间的差异。因此，该研究为虚拟空间中标记的死亡的社会分析提供了基础知识，拓宽了我们对媒体、技术和宗教以及危机时期相互关联的角色的理解。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

In April 2020, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified funerals as high-risk sites for COVID-19 transmission. Funerals are vital to the social health of a community. They allow people to grieve together and remember their deceased, but when the bereaved are not permitted to gather physically, communal mourning becomes more complicated. Therefore, understanding forms of adapted, and accepted, virtual (online) rituals and memorials and their role in preventing infection spread is paramount for addressing future surges of COVID-19 across the United States, as well as for future epidemics. Preliminary research with religious leaders and funeral home directors suggests that social distancing mandates that interrupt funeral, burial, and memorial practices have met with confusion and even resistance. This study will provide key information for the development of public health programs and guidelines that address the risks facing communities that continue to conduct in-person rituals. Given the social importance of funerals and the central role of mourning in the pandemic, communities urgently need to promote practices that preserve the cultural and religious significance of such rites but do not exacerbate viral transmission. The project also provides training for graduate and undergraduate students in methods of rigorous, scientific data collection and analysis. The study comes at a time when the rate of COVID-19 infections is at risk of rising exponentially and funeral capacity is being overwhelmed. The investigators thus seek to identify factors that enable or inhibit people’s ability to follow social distancing guidelines that interrupt or run counter to obligations of care for the dead. As research on the Ebola crisis demonstrated, anthropologists’ focus on the local perspectives of grieving communities provided crucial insights into the factors that reduced or heightened the risk of infection, and thus played an important role in public health interventions. In collaboration with diverse religious communities, funeral practitioners, and representatives from the National Funeral Directors Association, the study will assess how religious tradition (or lack thereof) influences the adaptation of funeral rites, and how COVID-19-related constraints on funeral care shift the burden of organizing collective mourning onto the family and into virtual spaces. The project incorporates a range of methodological approaches aimed at capturing in real time these adaptive processes, including virtual participant observation (e.g., synchronous religious rites, and funeral and memorial services), initial and follow-up semi-structured interviews, discourse analysis of digital media, and survey instruments. The researchers will pay special attention to variations in access to virtual media. Because rituals reflect the capacity for communities, whether religious or secular, to marshal material and symbolic resources, they illuminate how structural inequalities create disparities across communities and generations. The study thus contributes foundational knowledge to the social analysis of death marked in virtual space, broadening our understanding of the interconnected roles of media, technology, and religion and during times of crisis.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.