un/predictable environments
A space for conversation, analysis, and inquiry following the Un/Predictable Environments Conference, May 20-21, 2021
One of the central issues concerning the COVID-19 pandemic is death. How can we make sense of dying in a pandemic? What meaning can be given to death? It is a reality and we know that it will happen to all living creatures on earth. Still human beings have ritualized and symbolized death in several way across different cultures. Functional interpretation of death suggests that death performs a very crucial function to maintain the society as a whole. By replacing old members in the society, it gives opportunities to the new members to enter into the shoes of their elders and take responsibilities of households and families (Srivastava and Srivastava, 1997). Within the French Structuralism one similarity among all cultures symbolizing death is that they all have some or the other ritual associated with it. This is the underlying similarity amidst the surface ritual differences related to death and dying. Robert Hertz (1960) has suggested that differences exist in terms of rituals and beliefs related to death in different cultures but there is a similarity in the underlying logic. This logic is patterned on a triangular principle where the dead body, the survivors and the place where the dead is supposed to have gone after death form three points of a triangle. It is this triangular model of death that seems to be disturbed in this pandemic. Although people are still quite sure about the place where their dead relatives have gone but their relations with the corpse underwent a change. People were not allowed to see their dead ones for the one last time. They got apprehensive about the COVID infection that might be transmitted from the dead to the living. This resulted in a total institutional takeover of the disposal of the dead body. (click read more to continue) The pandemic has also altered and dented our conception about ‘good death.’ A ‘good death’ has been conceptualized in a number of ways, from a biomedical conception that envisages the age at which a person dies to a more personal conceptions of painless death. Good death has always been celebrated especially in the Indian context. This is actually an integrated conception of the biomedical and the personal. A good death is conceptualized as one where a person dies only after completing all his/her duties towards family, friends and relatives and then dies a painless death. In the pandemic however, people died at ages when they were not supposed to and also, they died painful deaths- both physically and socially. Once diagnosed with the disease, many were hospitalized to never return again and not to be seen by any member of their families. Besides this, death has never been a subject of overt discussion in houses, especially not in front of children who are considered to be too young to grasp the whole idea. There was a certain amount of decorum maintained while talking about death and the dead-both in linguistic terms where we never say that a person died but only say that he/she passed away and in our body language (Green, 2008). However, the pandemic has brought the discussion of death and the dead in a very new and crude way to our discussions about it. A new kind of language, one which is also numerical and statistical in nature suddenly emerged in our discussions. Death has always been a ‘process’ cross-culturally (Hertz, 1960). There are elaborate rituals and ritual specialists that try to rationalize death and convert it into a process sharing the grief. However, in the case of the pandemic, death has come to be known more as an event. An event that is guided from beginning till end by the biomedical and state norms and rules. Intrusion of state has never been so much as in the case of this pandemic vis-à-vis death and dying. Mass deaths and limited capacities of health care systems has led to a lot of confusion. Cases have been reported where people got the mortal remains of dead people not related to them in any ways. The pandemic pushed the health care systems to its limits and therefore influenced the experience of people whose loved ones have died. From the perspective of depth psychology of heroism, Becker (1973) has argued that “we strive to be heroic because that is the only reasonable response to the terrible truth of mortality (Green, 2008, pp-11).” A paradoxical discourse is what we heard and saw in the context of the pandemic. There were actually two groups of people generating different discourses around death. One the one hand there were people mostly the celebrities who said that being fearful is actually being heroic and then there were people who were actually working at the ground zero- in hospitals, in ambulances, as paramedics and others labelled as frontline workers who were doing heroic deeds in the midst of the pandemic. There is actually a conflict seen between the ‘cultural-hero-system (CHS)’ and the ‘mythical-hero-system (MHS).’ Within the MHS people try to serve the humanity in order to gain cosmic specialness. Becker (1973) has seen this within the context of living in a creative illusion without knowing for sure about your permanent place in the cosmos. Again, within those religious philosophies where re-birth is an important theme, deeds in the present birth becomes important to secure a better place in the future births. Also, good deeds are believed to be leading unto salvation.
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