Changes in funeral rituals during the Covid 19 Pandemic in Ecuador

Abstract

Nancy Scheper Hughes maintains that when a human being dies, his space, his place diez with him. Conversely, the space and the place that the individual inhabited lose the being who lived in those spaces and places. 

To study the death of an individual, one must consider their history and socioeconmic conditions, the power they achieved in life, their symbolic system, their beliefs, and their cosmovision. In the case of physicians, their power, curiously, is based on how they confront the inevitability of death.

Los mortuarial rituals that all cultures practice serve to provide some meaning to death. When a person dies, a memory remains. This memory has little to do with how the person “actually” lived, Rather it is a tacit agreement among the living about how they wish to establish a memory of the deceased person.

But what happens in societies when these rituals are suspended? What happens when the peak of the COVID-19  pandemic and the closeness of death transform the equatorial people?

This reflection ponders the management of the human condition with regard to birth and death in western societies with an emphasis on the modern western medical model. The question under study focuses on describing how the high mortality and the suspensión of funeral rituals changed the  culture and social relations in the mestizo world.