Rituals of Containment: Many Pandemics, Body Politics, and Social Dramas During COVID-19 in Pakistan

Abstract

Infecting millions of people, causing around two million deaths, and affecting billions of people worldwide during January 2021, the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is not merely one pandemic but many. These many pandemics, which I identify herein, have revealed the overt and subtle entanglements among religion, science, and politics around COVID-19. Building on my current ethnographic research on COVID-19 using purposive sampling and interview guide in Pakistan, and borrowing from various anthropological concepts such as “social drama,” proposed by Victor Turner, and ritual, I have developed a concept that I call rituals of containment. With this concept, I extend my previous argument regarding “symbolic ownership” to show a visible “body politics” by demonstrating how religion, science, and politics around COVID-19 are entangled at individual and government levels. This has become observable through the rituals of the Pakistani government of containment to deal with COVID-19. Such entanglements are visible in the case of strategies to tackle infected “viral bodies,” as the government has enacted its authority: (1) to bury what I am terming the dead viral body without its beloved ones present; (2) to return or not to return this body to family members in a coffin; (3) or to provide the grieving family with a symbolic empty coffin. These Covidian politics have led to the question: Who in actuality owns the body? In conclusion, I argue that the problem lies in the discriminatory and contradictory rituals of containment of the government, not in using scientific evidence and guidelines.

Community-Level Experiences, Understandings, and Responses to COVID-19 in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: A Systematic Review of Qualitative and Ethnographic Studies

“…Mental distress took many forms in these studies, including worry and concern about the future, anxiety about finances, guilt, depression, grief, fear, loneliness, and mistrust. The fear of contagion and death figured prominently in these studies, made more pronounced by social isolation and exaggerated media reports that spurred anxieties among the respondents [57,58,60,63,67,68,78,80]. Fear of the future was illustrated by a spectrum of concerns, as reported by researchers in Pakistan, centered on anxieties about the pandemic's effects on children, the nature of the post-COVID-19 world, and how many deaths would scar the future [59].…”

“…Most studies in this review observed the psychosocial and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in LMIC communities around the world [57][58][59][60]63,64,[66][67][68]71,78,80]. The public health literature on pandemics and epidemics of infectious origin is rife with accounts of how these catastrophic disruptions to ordinary life are met by disarray and uncertainty, spawning fear and heightened anxiety [19,20] and often resulting in marginalization and stigma, as communities grapple with unknowns and avoid risks [8,[100][101][102][103][104].…”

“…Grief and feelings of loss accompanied alterations in tradition, particularly around restrictions in burial practices associated with deceased COVID-19 victims. Inayat Ali described a sense of cultural transience in the way that the state has transformed deceased family members into "viral bodies" to be controlled and regulated, negating the community's need for closure and ritual as the dead depart [58]. Death, paralleling COVID-19 itself, is a complex socio-cultural, economic, and political event, beyond simply a biological cessation.…”

An Ethnography Study of a Viral YouTube Educational Video in Ecuador: Dealing With Death and Grief in Times of COVID-19

“…This is important because the taboo of death also extends to "words taboo" and strongly contributes to grief stigmatization and disenfranchised grief symptoms. Also, although death rituals and mourning practices are highly dependent on the cultural context (5,36), the COVID-19 pandemic has created a global scenario with commonalities for people in all nations [i.e., (19,(37)(38)(39)(40)(41)(42)]. The most important commonalities are the psychological burden associated with confinement (43), the inability to say goodbye or to perform rituals according to believes and culture, and the measures of physical distancing, all of them considered risk factors for traumatic and disenfranchised grief in people with low resistance or resilience (19,35,44,45).…”

COVID-19 in Pakistan and Papua New Guinea: reflections on mass testing and challenges

“…By January 2021, COVID-19 had already caused around 102 million cases and 2.19 million deaths worldwide (Johns Hopkins University, 2021). Yet from 2019 to 2021, differing forms of the pandemicor differing pandemicshave emerged (see Ali, 2021). James (2020) has rightly argued that 'the COVID-19 pandemic has morphed into what is now, in many ways, a new disease (COVID-20), even though resulting from the same agent, SARSCoV-2 [severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2]', thus, 'a vaccine, even an effective one, may not be the silver bullet'.…”