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

Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences - 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.