Huddled Masses: Death and Citizenship in New York City

萨莉·罗顿是一位社会人类学家，研究人们如何处理死者。她研究了哈特岛，那里有100多万纽约人--从死产婴儿到死于艾滋病的人、无家可归者和Covid死者--被埋在布朗克斯附近一英里长的小岛上的战壕里。自1869年以来，哈特岛一直被用作“波特的田野”，纽约的穷人和无人认领的人被埋在大型集体战壕中，没有仪式或纪念碑来纪念他们。乱葬岗通常标志着社会的崩溃，战争、暴力或自然灾害很快就造成了大量死亡。但纽约的哈特岛在某些方面只是一个普通的官僚系统，尽管它是如此不同寻常，对许多人来说，是如此令人苦恼。几十年来，这座满是树木、野生动物和废弃建筑的岛屿一直没有人居住，除了附近莱克斯岛监狱的挖墓囚犯的探望，以及每月获准前往亲人坟墓的悲痛家庭。那里的旅行更像是去监狱，而不是去墓地。起初，萨莉认为她会研究哈特岛从惩教部到纽约市公园的转移。但在她的田野工作进行到一半时，疫情来袭了。纽约市迅速成为这种疾病的早期震中，哈特岛也成为国际媒体关注的焦点--这让许多从未听说过它的纽约人感到惊讶。在萨利的研究期间，新冠肺炎的出现意味着许多现实挑战，但也意味着由此产生的关于危机期间发生根本性转变的临终关怀研究具有深刻的相关优势。这笔奖学金将使Sally能够返回纽约，收集大流行使其无法获取的材料，并通过出版物和会议论文传播这项研究。萨利的出版物从这个奇怪而未经研究的地方--纽约市边缘的一个死亡岛及其周围--审视了美国城市资本主义中的死亡、空间和社会。萨莉对当代社会中死亡的位置提出了一些基本问题：不平等和家庭破裂如何影响人们对死者的记忆？个性和公民权在死后以什么方式保存下来？在死亡中被排挤和边缘化的人的待遇如何困扰着现代关于包容、世界主义和全球公民身份的神话？哈特岛事件的社会意义是什么--他们能告诉我们什么，否则我们就不会说出来了？Covid19促使许多纽约人思考哈特岛是否是一种可以接受的照顾死者的方式，并促使一些人问，死后以尊严和尊重对待你的纽约同胞意味着什么？通过研究埋葬和死亡护理中的耻辱和边缘化，萨利旨在为死亡和死亡工作、空间和地点的人类学，以及对公民身份和纪念之间的关系的理解做出原创性的贡献。她分析了壮观的9/11事件的社会性与其纪念性(包括识别遗骸的微观搜索)和它的使用(支持一个国际战争制造项目)之间的显著对比，以及位于城市边缘的无标记坟墓的艰难世俗。这笔奖学金还将使Sally能够为一个新的研究网络奠定基础，该网络可以将她的研究扩大到对最后葬礼的国际探索。这个新的研究网络由一个国际研究小组组成，Sally已经与他们建立了初步联系，这个新的研究网络旨在提供一个广泛的比较研究，这也可以为在灾难和危机期间处理必要的死亡护理创新的从业者和政策制定者服务于关键目标。

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.