Exhuming Bodies
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23403430 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Leslie Bank (0000-0002-8506-7401), Vuyokazi Nelly Sharpley (0000-0001-7657-4033), Nelly Sharpley |
| Year | 2022 |
| Pages | 175-206 |
| Publication date | 2022-09-15 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Covid and Custom in Rural South Africa (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/oso/9780197659618.003.0007 |
| OpenAlex | W4317410173 |
| ISBN | 9780197659618 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 90 |
The tightening of Covid restrictions in relation to the management of bodies and burial practices created great consternation in rural areas. Covid bodies were managed by mortuaries and funeral parlors which required that bodies be wrapped in multiple layers of plastic to avoid infection. Families of the deceased thus had very little access to the bodies of their loved ones prior to burial and could not wash them or communicate with them before they were buried in the ground. This challenged families whose belief system was based on direct communication with the dead to usher them safely into the afterlife and the cult of ancestors and spirits. Covid burials proved to be hopelessly inadequate vehicles for such rites of passage and social reproduction. As a result, many residents and returning migrants, tormented by dreams of their suffering deceased relatives sweating in plastic bags, exhumed dead bodies and instituted illegal reburials. Others reinitiated banned customary practices to begin to repair the spiritual wounds left by the pandemic. The chapter provides a detailed account of rural struggles to restore dignity and spiritual security in the time of Covid.
Afterlife · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) · Criminology · Cult · Dead body · Dignity · Political science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · History · Law · Medicine
Capitalism and cheap labour-power in South Africa
Gender and sexuality
Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa
Black politics in South Africa since 1945
Wives for cattle
Whatever happened to householding?
Race, class and power
From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age
Reading and Writing the Mpondo Revolts
Colonial Survey and Native Landscapes in Rural South Africa, 1850 - 1913
The Ama-Xosa
Economy and Ritual
The House of Tshatshu
Aftershock
The Cambridge History of South Africa
Contingent Citizens
The Political Economy of Pondoland 1860–1930
Striving against adversity
The demographic impact of HIV and Aids across the family and household life-cycle
Gender Trouble
From revolution to rights in South Africa
Biomedicine in an unstable place
Rural–urban inequalities amplified by Covid-19
Innovative reworkings of ancestor ritual as a response to forced villagisation
Challenges of reverse migration in India
Unimagined Community
Gendered Patterns of Migration in Rural South Africa
When Bodies Remember
Policing Culture, Cultural Policing
On the articulation of modes of production
Consumption in Africa
Living Together, Moving Apart
Beyond ‘Homelands’
Modernity and Its Malcontents
Pauper, Percentile, Precarity
Understanding Social Resistance to the Ebola Response in the Forest Region of the Republic of Guinea
The Materiality of Everyday Sex
Death and Dying in the History of Africa Since 1800
The social meanings of death from HIV/Aids
The Central Beliefs of the Xhosa Cattle-Killing
Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth-Century South Africa
Divided Sisterhood
Burial and Mortuary Rites of the Nuer
Political Theology and Covid-19
"Agricultural involution" and its critics
Politics, Policy, and Inequality in South Africa Under Covid-19
City Slums, Rural Homesteads
The Expansion of a Pseudo-Ethnicity in the Eastern Cape
Keeping Land for Their Children
Youth organisations and the construction of masculine identities in the Ciskei and Transkei, 1945-1960
Conflict in Qumbu
Zulu Masculinities, Warrior Culture and Stick Fighting
Real Men Reawaken Their Fathers' Homesteads, the Educated Leave Them in Ruins
Migrancy, crime and faction fighting
The poverty of Neo-Marxism
Of boys and men
Seeing Through Dreams
The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry
Starving on a Full Stomach
The Transkei
The House of Phalo
The disappointment of nostalgia
Xhosa Co-operative Agricultural Work Groups
Kinship and Access to Land in the Eastern Cape
Making empire
Real Men Reawaken Their Fathers' Homesteads, the Educated Leave Them in Ruins
Kinship, Locality, and Association
Heroes, villains and the state in South Africa's witchcraft zone
Going Home? Belonging and Burial in the Era of Aids
The Person and the Life Cycle in African Social Life and Thought
South Africa's Transkei
Seeing like a State
From "Rights" to "Ritual
The Cultural Topography of Wealth
The "Xhosa" In Town, Revisited Urban Social Anthropology
Gender-Based Violence, Twin Pandemic to Covid-19
Graves, ruins, and belonging
Rights and responsibilities in rural South Africa
South Africa
The economistic fallacy and forms of integration under and after socialism
The government of poverty and the arts of survival
Critical Nostalgias in Democratic South Africa
The Standard of Dying
Virginity Testing and the Politics of Sexual Responsibility
Inventing Social Categories Through Place
People refusing to be wealth
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |