Huddled Masses: Death and Citizenship in New York City

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Sally Raudon is a social anthropologist who studies what people do with their dead. She researches Hart Island, where more than a million New Yorkers - from stillborn babies to people who died of AIDS, the homeless and Covid dead - are buried in trenches on a one-mile island off the Bronx. Since 1869, Hart Island has been used as a 'potter's field,' where New York's destitute and unclaimed have been buried in large collective trenches without ceremony or memorials to mark them. Mass graves usually signal social collapse, where war, violence or natural disaster has caused a lot of death very quickly. But New York's Hart Island is in some ways just an ordinary, bureaucratic system, despite being so unusual and, for many people, so distressing. For decades this island of trees, wildlife and derelict buildings has been uninhabited except for the visits of gravedigging inmates from nearby Rikers Island jail, along with grieving families granted monthly visits to their relative's grave. Trips there were more like a visit to a prison than to a cemetery. Initially, Sally thought she would be studying Hart Island's transfer from the Department of Correction to NYC Parks. But halfway through her fieldwork, the pandemic hit. New York City swiftly became an early epicentre of the disease, and Hart Island fell under the international media spotlight - surprising the many New Yorkers who had never heard of it. The onset of Covid-19 during Sally's research meant many practical challenges, but also meant the resulting study of deathcare radically transformed during crisis has a profound relevant edge. The fellowship will enable Sally to return to New York to collect material which the pandemic had made inaccessible, and disseminate this research through publications and conference papers. Sally's publications examine death, space, and society in American urban capitalism from this curious and unstudied place: in and around one death-island at the edge of New York City. Sally asks fundamental questions about the place of death in contemporary society: how do inequality and family breakdown shape how the dead can be remembered? In what ways do individuality and citizenship persist after death? How does the treatment of excluded and marginalised others in death trouble modern myths of inclusion, cosmopolitanism and global citizenship? What is the social significance of the Hart Island dead - and what can they tell us that would otherwise be left unsaid? Covid19 prompted a reckoning for many New Yorkers about whether Hart Island was an acceptable way to care for the dead, and led some to ask, what does it mean to treat your fellow New Yorkers with dignity and respect after death? By examining stigma and marginalization in burial and deathcare ethnographically, Sally aims to make an original contribution to the anthropology of death and death work, of space and place, and to the understanding of the relationship between citizenship and memorialisation. She analyses the remarkable contrast between the sociality of the spectacular - 9/11 and both its memorialisation (including a microscopic search to identify remains) and its use (to support an international war-making project) - and the trudging mundanity of unmarked graves sited at the edge of the city. The fellowship will also enable Sally to lay the bases of a new research network which can scale up her research to an international exploration of funerals of last resort. Consisting of an international group of researchers with whom Sally has already established initial contacts, this new research network aims to provide a broad comparative study which can also serve crucial aims for practitioners and policymakers dealing with necessary innovations in deathcare during disaster and crisis.