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列为新冠肺炎传播的高危场所。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纪念他们的逝者，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，了解改编和接受的虚拟(在线)仪式和纪念的形式及其在防止感染传播方面的作用，对于应对未来新冠肺炎在美国各地的激增以及未来的流行病至关重要。对宗教领袖和殡仪馆负责人的初步研究表明，中断葬礼、葬礼和纪念活动的社会距离命令遇到了困惑，甚至抵制。这项研究将为制定公共卫生计划和指南提供关键信息，以解决继续进行面对面仪式的社区面临的风险。鉴于葬礼的社会重要性和哀悼在大流行中的中心作用，社区迫切需要促进既保留此类仪式的文化和宗教意义，又不加剧病毒传播的做法。该项目还为研究生和本科生提供了严格、科学的数据收集和分析方法方面的培训。这项研究发布之际，新冠肺炎的感染率正面临指数级上升的风险，殡葬能力正在不堪重负。因此，调查人员试图找出能够或抑制人们遵守社会疏远准则的因素，这些准则中断或违背了照顾死者的义务。正如对埃博拉危机的研究表明的那样，人类学家对悲痛社区的当地视角的关注为降低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中发挥了重要作用。这项研究将与不同的宗教社区、殡葬从业者和全国殡仪师协会的代表合作，评估宗教传统(或缺乏宗教传统)如何影响葬礼仪式的适应，以及与新冠肺炎相关的殡葬护理约束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实时捕捉这些适应过程的方法，包括虚拟参与者观察(例如，同步宗教仪式、葬礼和追悼会)、初始和后续半结构化访谈、数字媒体的话语分析和调查工具。研究人员将特别关注使用虚拟媒体的不同情况。因为仪式反映了社区，无论是宗教的还是世俗的，集结物质和象征资源的能力，它们阐明了结构性不平等如何在社区和世代之间造成差异。因此，这项研究为虚拟空间中标记的死亡的社会分析贡献了基础知识，拓宽了我们对媒体、技术和宗教在危机时期相互关联的作用的理解。这一奖项反映了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.