Burial and the politics of dead bodies in times of COVID-19: Part 2

This is the second of a double special issue which documents the experience and politics around dead bodies during the first year of the Pandemic. In hotspots, the weekly numbers of new dead bodies were up to eight times the normal. This situation was stress-testing institutions that deal with dead bodies. Usually, these institutions live a quiet life, outside the public spotlight, but the pandemic exposed this part of the infrastructure of life & death. More than that, many kinds of questions emerge around dead bodies in a situation with ‘surplus dead’: Who between the public and private institutions in the burial sector are responsible for dealing with the overload? Who decides if normal procedures of identification should be dispensed with due to the risk of infection? What happens when authorities, due to the same risk, hinder what people consider a dignified farewell?
The contributions to the special issues show how such questions suddenly became pressing; how negligence, injustice and state reason blended with care in the responsible institutions; and how their personnel – the ‘last responders’ – had to improvise while dealing with overload, stress, and emotions without enjoying the same heroic status as the ‘first responders’ did for a moment. Taken together, the contributions document and reflect on a historic moment and the kind of societies that emerged with the crisis, uncertainty, and presence of death that the pandemic provoked.