Special issue introduction: burial and the politics of dead bodies in times of COVID-19

Abstract

The year 2020 was marked by a pandemic that produced exceptional situations. It may still be too early for a comprehensive understanding of its implications, but with this special issue of Human Remains and Violence we seek to explore one particular phenomenon associated with the pandemic: the sudden surge in the number of dead bodies to be processed in the forensic and funerary systems in pandemic hotspots. Excess mortality rates give us an indication of proportion and of the challenge to these systems. In various countries, excess mortality rates for 2020 reached peaks of y to one hundred per cent1 or even more.2 These numbers are based on uncertain and highly uneven statistics, and, since they are national averages, it is reasonable to assume that the extra numbers of dead bodies to deal with in urban hotspots during peak times have been considerably higher. Numbers from New York con rm this assumption. There the number of deaths in 2020 was four times the average over the three preceding years.3 A more ne-grained analysis, based on weekly numbers from Italian municipalities in March–April 2020, suggests that the number of people who died in peak weeks in Bergamo was eight times higher than in previous years, surging from around 25 to close to 200 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants per week.4 Taking our cue from Gilpin Faust, we ask what the ‘work of death’ is in the COVID-19 pandemic.5 Or, in other words, how material, symbolic and political economies of the management and disposal of dead bodies have been a ected by the surplus of dead bodies in the rst year of the pandemic. Starting our introduction with a look at cemeteries – the most visible site in the trajectory of dead bodies – and continuing with re ections on the shi ing relations between death, politics and society, we will suggest that what seems exceptional is actually interwoven with, and in many cases reveals, the ‘norm’. In the following pages we point to some of the questions that emerge from this special issue, namely whether the COVID-19 pandemic reveals a changing relationship between state and capital in the government of dead bodies; how we can develop an analysis of death and the economies of dead bodies to take on board local and global perspectives simultaneously; and in which