What are People in Bali Doing in Pandemic: Understanding the Shape of Health Behavior and the Pitutur Tua

In the early occurrence of the Covid-19 pandemic, Indonesian and the world regarded Bali having a unique mechanism. Balinese or Bali residents are assumed excellently immune or difficulty infected from Covid-19. Interestingly, Balinese do not show overwhelmed panic as occurs in other areas although the Covid-19 cases in Bali are not low. There are various reasons why Balinese's actions to protect their health consider beliefs, religion, and culture. This paper is a survey of the Balinese's distinctive perception and behavior to face Covid-19. The information was gained from comments, opinions, and information about typical behavior posted on mass media and social media. The main source of the information was the WhatsApp groups of Banjar community (60 people), Bali academicians (76 people), Hindu organization alumni (113 people), and Bali medical staff (30 people). This study collected the information and conversations during early months of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 when the Covid-19 cases skyrocketed and the government implemented the Community Activities Restrictions Enforcement (PPKM). This study concludes that the belief in the power of nature makes the sincerity and acceptance more easily appear. Moreover, tradition strengthens the trust. Support in social life also increases cooperative actions to the rules or advices of the Bali government and the custom village assembly to protect society from the pandemic.Copyright © 2021 Muslim OT et al.

The effect of COVID-19 public health guidelines on the funeral traditions and burial rituals among the Baganda, a tribe in Central Uganda

Introduction: Governments across Africa have come up with stringent measures to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. These have caused unprecedented disruptions in the sociocultural fabric and interactions among people. This study aimed at examining the effect of these measures on the funeral and burial rituals among the Baganda. Methods: the study adopted aqualitative approach to collect data from five purposively selected adults of Buganda ethnicity whose relatives had succumbed to COVID-19. Data were analyzed using thematic and document analysis to familiarize with data, generated initial codes and themes, reviewed them, defined and named themes and finally producing the report. Results: the study reports uncultural handling of the dead, mourning in isolation and undignified burials. Conclusion: the bleach of these traditional rituals among have caused psychosocial suffering among the Baganda as a result of restrictions on the social interactions among people. © 2022, Pan African Medical Journal. All rights reserved.

Studying COVID-19 in light of critical approaches to risk and uncertainty: research pathways, conceptual tools, and some magic from Mary Douglas

This editorial is a response to the recent COVID-19 pandemic and underlines the valuable role that critical social science approaches to risk and uncertainty can play in helping us understand how risk is being understood and mitigated. Drawing on Heyman's approach to understanding risk as a configuration of probabilistic knowledge, time-framing, categories and values, I explore COVID-19 risk in relation to each of these features while also emphasising how different features stabilise one another. I suggest lines of inquiry into each of these features and their interrelatedness. I then move to present some important insights from the work of Mary Douglas which are especially germane to studying the risk of COVID-19 and, again, I raise possibilities for future research. Emphasising the centrality of ritual to Douglas's theory, I develop these considerations to encourage an exploration of magic and magical thinking, alongside rational approaches to COVID-19 risk.

Azan Pitu: The Pacification of Plagues rituals during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has spread to the whole world, including Indonesia. People have made various efforts to overcome this outbreak. One of them is through local wisdom, such as in Cirebon-Indonesia. Cirebon people carry out the Azan Pitu ritual to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic that has spread in Cirebon. This study aims to explore the local knowledge system or local wisdom regarding Azan Pitu in overcoming the COVID-19 outbreak. The method used in this research is a qualitative method with observation and in-depth interviews for collecting data. In the analysis process, this study uses Victor Turner's ritual theory and Bronislaw Malinowski's functional analysis theory. The study's results found that people first performed the Azan Pitu ritual to overcome the outbreak of menjangan wulung during the Sunan Gunung Djati era. However, Cirebon people maintain it as a tradition to prevent disease outbreaks, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Azan Pitu ritual to ward off COVID-19 has changed form and function, but it does not diminish its essential meaning: the community's efforts to expel COVID-19. Contribution: This study contributes to broadening insights into ritual studies, especially those related to epidemics and disasters.

How to Overcome the Secretiveness of a Group: Opportunities of Online Interviews

In a pandemic, qualitative methodologies and in-person interviews, the key to understanding the experiences lived by participants in social phenomena, proved to be ill-suited. As a result of the restrictions imposed during this period, the challenge was even more considerable in the research of groups and practices marked by secretiveness and self-closing, in that our presence in the field, always marked by hurdles, was impracticable. In this text, we propose a reflection on the experience of conducting online interviews with university students (Porto, Portugal) involved in praxe (hazing), a complex and multidimensional social phenomenon that profoundly shapes academic life in Portuguese universities. We will discuss the differences between holding in-person interviews before the pandemic and online interviews during the lockdown. We draw attention to practical, methodological, and ethical considerations in adapting research to an online context and conclude that, despite the challenges, online interviews opened up surprising opportunities for collecting these students' experiences. © The Author(s) 2023.

Party in The Bardo by Laurie Anderson and Jason Moran (review)

Numerous new social rituals have appeared during the global pandemic over the past two years, and while the few shows that have been staged during this time have been forced to utilize or adapt to these rituals (among other things: masks, six-foot distances between audience groups, Plexiglas barriers, temperature checks, ubiquitous hand sanitizer), only recently have we begun to see live productions created specifically to engage with the unprecedented era of COVID. The sequence includes video of animals and natural landscapes, her dog, Reed, images barely glimpsed through raindrop-covered windows, security in airports, and more, some of it looped, moving at odd speeds, or backwards. The next two stations featured Tai Chi artists Master Ren Guangyi (Reed's longtime Tai Chi teacher) and Haobu Zhao practicing Chen-style tai chi in pools of light underneath constantly falling flower petals;one wore red, the other white. There was something exhilarating about being at this relatively small event in such a massive space, able to see and hear everything: the Drill Hall became a cathedral of sorts, and we became celebrants at a special ritual available only to five small groups of people, which would take place only during this one week.

The show must go on(line): Livestreamed concerts and the hyper-ritualisation of genre conventions

This paper examines audience engagement at livestreamed concerts, a form of mediatised cultural consumption that saw an immense growth in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Concerts, as events that draw large groups of people with similar intentions, are the perfect location for the establishment of large-scale interaction rituals – moments of group behaviour characterised by a highly intense collective emotion. Furthermore, as social occasions, concerts are organised around a set of routine interactions that construct and define the collective experience. We argue that in moving online, the definition of the (concert) situation is highly impaired due to a context collapse. In comparing two distinct audiences (classical and Dutch popular music), the first aim of this research is to explore how these differing audiences adapt their cultural behaviour to the virtual sphere. Secondly, by adopting a microsociological perspective, we aim to broaden the theoretical understanding of virtual large-scale interaction rituals, an area becoming increasingly important due to the growth in online communication. This paper uses discourse analysis of the synchronised comments, left on livestreamed concerts on Facebook Live (n = 2,075), to examine the interaction between audience members. We find that both classical and Dutch popular music audiences use a form of hyper-ritualised interaction. In an attempt to combat the plurality of meanings online, they explicitly refer back to the central conventions of the face-to-face concert. This emphasises not only the significance of genre conventions, but also presents a form of virtual interaction distinct form interpersonal interaction.

Ritual-based redesign of routines: an experimental approach in the restaurant industry

PurposeThis study aims to investigate the impact of the innovative ritual-based redesign of a routine in the challenging context of the dining-out sector, characterized by low employee commitment and high turnover.Design/methodology/approachThis study adopts a mixed methods experimental design. This study focuses on a field experiment in a real restaurant centered on the restaurant's welcome entrée routine. The routine is first observed as it happens, after which it is redesigned as a ritual.FindingsThe ritual-based redesign of the routine enhances employee sharing of the purpose of the routine and reduces the variability of the execution time of the routine, which increases group cohesion among the restaurant staff. Besides the positive impact on the routine's participants, the ritual-based redesign has a beneficial effect on the performance of the routine by increasing the enjoyment of the end-consumers at the restaurant.Research limitations/implicationsThe ritual-based redesign of routines is a powerful managerial tool that bonds workers into a solidary community characterized by strong and shared values. This allows guidance of the behavior of new and existing employees in a more efficient and less time-consuming way.Originality/valueRituals have been traditionally analyzed from the customer perspective as marketing tools. This research investigates the employees' perspective, leveraging ritual-based redesign as a managerial tool for increasing cohesion among workers.

Introduction: Narratives of Belonging-The Interrelation between Ontological-Epistemological Observations and Narrative Methodology

In a recent editorial, the Lancet reported that one of the consequences of pandemics is the detrimental impact "on the mental health of affected populations," and the current COVID-19 one is no different. Since its out-break at the end of 2019, "depressed mood, anxiety, impaired memory, and insomnia" are constant companions of people around the world. Many even experience "stress, burnout, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder." Amongst its concerns, the Lancet notes the rising "misuse of substances" as a consequence of these mental health problems.1 One of the reasons for this global mental health crisis is the way the pandemic affects peoples' practices of community building and rituals of belonging. Having to wear masks, being required to keep at least 1.5 meters apart, not being able to meet (vulnerable) friends and family members, and even more drastic measures like weeklong lockdowns fundamentally disrupted everyday lives and reduced opportunities to socialize. What is normally taken for granted is being challenged. Around the world, these measures have been met by increasing demonstrations, often based on conspiracy theories and against commonsense precautions for preventing a potentially lethal disease. This conflict between reasonable precaution and emotional stress and pressure suggests disruptions of common narratives of belonging.

Old and new rituals throughout the covid-19 pandemic

This chapter shows how rituals are places, hubs of communication and negotiation, but they are also sources of monetary exchange as soon as a ritual is tamed and transformed by the market system. The transhumanist movements have seized upon the particular ritual of death with a philosophical idea derived from religion, which is to establish immortality by making the most perfect copy of a human possible and tofight the idea of death. The decline of traditional rituals seems to be essentially a permanent human search for freedom from taboos and constraints, from everything that seems established, unchangeable and outdated in order to achieve greater individual freedom. Rituals are constantly being reinvented through technology. In contemporary society, there is a desire - sometimes rather clumsy - to create new rituals. The rational, rationalist, Cartesian dominance of our industrial societies seems to favor laws and regulations to the detriment of rituals. © ISTE Ltd 2022.

Humans, digital technology and the sars-cov-2 health crisis

Lockdown and quarantine measures related to the pandemic cut us off from the physical world, making us avoid points of contact, which have become points of contagion, through a sudden semantic shift. Complementary to physical communication, the experience of lockdown has exceptionally accelerated the shift to digital communication, dematerializing encounters. Anthropology, behavioral sciences, medicine, psychiatry, neuroscience - each of these disciplines has contributed to the fascinating observation of human communication over more than a century. A mass of real-time information around the SARS-CoV-2 communication has often lost individuals in infobesity, in a communitagion of a non-coherent conglomeration of information. The "human factor" has an inescapable place in the event of a crisis, because humans are the heart of crises and their management process. Remote control technologies have made it possible to relay certain social rituals through new techniques developed by their users. © ISTE Ltd 2022.

Grief and mourning in Covid-19 pandemic and delayed business as a new concept

The measures, restrictions, and death-related rituals in the COVID-19 pandemic have affected the mourning-related routines of individuals. Moreover, mourning processes have been affected by the restriction of death-related cultural rituals, funeral ceremonies performed only by the officials, and the prohibition of visiting graves. This study aims to investigate the experiences of individuals who lost their loved ones in Turkey during the COVID-19 pandemic. For that purpose, the phenomenological method is employed in the design of the study. Individual interviews were conducted with nine participants who lost their relatives during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were collected through semi-structured interview forms prepared by the researchers. The study participants described the various factors contributing to the grief and mourning process in the COVID-19 pandemic. These factors were categorized into three following main categories: grief and mourning responses of the individuals lost loved ones, including cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses;risk factors including the expectation of harm, unfinished business, and restriction of death-related religious-cultural rituals;and protective factors including relative support (i.e., family, spouse, friend, partner), tele-support (i.e., mobile phone, internet, social media), positive coping strategies (cognitive, behavioral, and religious-spiritual), and delayed business. The "delayed business” concept was also addressed within protective factors and explained in general terms. Finally, the findings were discussed considering the literature and presented some theoretical and practical implications.

Changes in Home-Centered Religious Practices and Relational Wellbeing following the Initial Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic

We explored associations between changes in the frequency of home-centered religious practices and family relational conflict, emotional closeness, and the perceived long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on relationships. The panel survey of 1,510 adult individuals in the United States, was administered during the summer of 2020. Given our interest in understanding changes in religious practices following the COVID-19 related closures of religious institutions, the panel included an intentional oversampling of religious individuals from diverse religious affiliations. We employed a mixed methods approach (integrated quantitative and qualitative measures). Controlling for a large group of demographic variables (e.g., age, gender, race/ethnicity) and other factors (e.g., religiosity, stage of COVID-19 closures), OLS and logistic regressions found some significant associations between retrospectively reported changes in the frequency of religious practices and emotional closeness and perceived lasting impact of the pandemic on family well-being. Qualitative data from a subsample of survey participants (n = 624) suggested that family prayer, scripture study, shared sacred rituals, and home-based worship helped foster positive family interactions.

from Ignition Chronicles

The somatic poetry ritual is discussed. The ritual has nine different ingredients, one of them involves interspecies communication. He has been in an apartment in Seattle WA during COVID lockdown for nearly a year. Crows rule this city. They are fearless, travel in large groups, chasing eagles out into the bay and divebombing cats who dare to show their faces. "Poet" is the name of one of the many crows who visit him each day, and they often bring him gifts. The latest is the shiny piece of round gold foil in the center.

‘The Jews are our Misfortune!' Contemporary antisemitism as a hydra-headed phenomenon

Antisemitism has once again proven itself to be an international phenomenon, crossing borders and cultures with ease and adept at finding major issues in the public square, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, upon which to hang its claims. This article argues that antisemitism currently takes four major forms: Anti-Zionist antisemitism, which targets the State of Israel as a Jewish collectivity;Neo-Traditionalism, which revives pre-modern anti-Judaic notions in contemporary guise;Holocaust relativisation, which involves instrumentalizing and distorting the nature of the Holocaust without denying it outright;and anti-Judaism, which manifests in efforts to ban circumcision, kosher slaughter and other core Jewish rituals. The article concludes by examining whether the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism is an adequate tool for engaging with a growing problem, suggesting ways in which the definition might be amended to make it more effective.

Mourning and the capacity to be alone: Cultural and existential rituals in loss

When I began writing this paper, I was amid coping with several losses. I had lost a beloved friend and a family member to COVID-19, and though it seemed that we were coming out of the woods in the US, the juggernaut virus was burning through my native country of India, where most of my family lives. As a candidate starting analytic training in 2020, Freud's Mourning and Melancholia was particularly poignant as it lays the foundation for object relations borne out of a process of coping with loss. Freud described mourning as an agonizing process of identification, disinvestment and reinvestment. He emphasized the role of intrapsychic factors in the capacity to mourn. Since then, analysts have countered by writing about the highly social nature of the task of mourning and the importance in grieving of a loving communal embrace. In this paper, I explore one's early experiences with Winnicott's holding environment and transitional phenomena as an explanation of the capacity to mourn. I will extend mourning to another form of loss, namely, transience, i.e., temporariness of time and experience. Finally, I will consider how the developmental achievement of the capacity to be alone is inherent in specific intrapsychic modes of mourning transience and could be extended to intrapsychic capacity to mourn in bereavement. I will explore these ideas with a backdrop of traditional Indian rituals and spiritual practices, which embody and uniquely elaborate other essential Winnicottian features, including paradox, dialectics and the third area. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

A cycle of commitment: The organizational consequences of rituals

From the Walmart Cheer to the Cold Stone Creamery Tip Song, many groups engage in their own rituals (i.e., predefined sequences of symbolic actions). Despite the prevalence of rituals in group settings, the consequences of group rituals have rarely been studied by organizational researchers. This is surprising, given the potential for rituals to influence meaningful organizational outcomes. In this dissertation I develop a comprehensive theory of group rituals, including offering a more refined definition of rituals as compared to similar constructs such as norms, identifying how group rituals influence the key group construct of member commitment, and shedding light on a collateral influence that has not been considered before, the outsiders' perceptions of the group. I aim to show that group rituals physically represent the group's most important values and can consequently influence behavior in group settings. In particular, I examine the relationship between group rituals and group commitment among existing members and prospective members.Among existing group members, I consider the bi-directional relationship between group rituals and group commitment. I suggest that engagement in rituals increases member commitment because rituals stand for the group's values, such that the enactment of rituals makes the group appear as a cohesive entity to members. Furthermore, I suggest that more (vs. less) committed members will be more likely to protect the group's rituals (e.g., punish those who attempt to alter the rituals), ensuring that rituals are faithfully executed over time within the group. In this way, rituals and commitment to the group reinforce each other in a recursive cycle, such that (a) rituals promote member commitment and (b) higher levels of member commitment promote adherence to rituals (yielding a "cycle of commitment").Among prospective group members, I consider how observing the enactment of rituals influences prospective members' own willingness to commit to the group. I suggest that, because group rituals physically represent the group's values, they signal that the group has committed members to outsiders. I propose that perceptions that members are committed to a group can signal an elevated capacity to reach group goals, which will have a positive impact on own willingness to commit among those who share the values of the group (i.e., subjective value congruence) but a weaker or even negative impact among those who do not share the values of the group (i.e., subjective value incongruence). In this way, I theorize rituals promote commitment because rituals attract prospective members who are willing to be committed to the group. This indicates that potential new members who perceive themselves as value-incongruent (such as demographically underrepresented individuals) will be less willing to commit to a group that engages in rituals.The theory of group rituals and group commitment that I propose in this dissertation suggests that rituals promote commitment among existing members and prospective members with congruent values, which can often be beneficial, but, that a somewhat hidden cost is that they can also exclude prospective members who perceive themselves as value-incongruent with the group (such as demographically underrepresented individuals). I conducted eight studies that test the relationship between group rituals and member commitment using a mix of experimental and observational (e.g., longitudinal survey) research. Studies 1 and 2 tested the effect of workgroup rituals on employee commitment among U.S. workers in the context of the COVID- 19 pandemic. Studies 3 and 4 examined national and cultural rituals, investigating whether more (vs. less) committed group members are most likely to protect the group's rituals from people who attempt to alter them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Local Perceptions of COVID-19 in Pakistan's Sindh Province: "Political Game", Supernatural Test, or Western Conspiracy?

OBJECTIVE: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has received various distinct perspectives and responses at the local as well as global levels. The current study pays attention to local perspectives, which have appeared in the Sindh Province of Pakistan. METHODS: Given the constraints of the pandemic, and using convenience sampling, we conducted 10 online group discussions, 7 one-on-one interviews, and 30 cellphone discussions from a small town of Sindh Province. We made every effort to make our sampling inclusive in terms of decisive sociocultural factors: gender, religion, level of formal education, and occupation/job. We obtained data from women, men, Muslims and non-Muslims, the formally educated and noneducated, government employees, and daily wage laborers. Moreover, to perform content analysis, we used social media such as WhatsApp and Facebook. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS: We have found that some people consider COVID-19 a "political" game, "supernatural test" or "Western plot". The given perceptions then guide further actions: either ignore or adopt the preventive measures or take supernatural preventive measures. Considering it as a test of God, Muslims perform prayers, while the Bagrri community who practice Hinduism are taking cow urine to deal with the virus. This study brings these perspectives to the center stage; yet, the results cannot be generalized across the country, or within the province. Moreover, the study situates these perspectives within the global and socio-cultural, economic, and political contexts and invites more in-depth studies to inquire why such perspectives emerge. CONCLUSIONS: We discuss different narratives concerning COVID-19 in a small town of Sindh Province. We maintain that documenting these various perspectives and analyzing their impacts on the preparedness programs is essential, yet understanding the causes behind the stated standpoints is equally essential, if not more so.

Pandemic-induced deathscapes: end-of-life, funerary and bereavement challenges for British-Bangladeshi Muslims

Following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK, end-of-life rituals and funerals across groups of all faiths and none took on a new character due to government-imposed measures to control disease transmission. This article aims to explore the challenges faced by British-Bangladeshi Muslims in relation to performing end-of-life, funeral, and mourning rituals during the first pandemic wave, underpinned by the perception of a ‘good death'. This group was among those disproportionately affected by Covid-19-related mortality and morbidity. Contextualising the study within a review of the literature on deathscapes and shifting policy responses to multicultural populations in the UK, and using an in-depth qualitative research approach, the article highlights the ways in which pre-existing challenges facing individuals seeking Islamic end-of-life, funeral and bereavement rituals have been exacerbated by Covid-19. The article offers new empirical and conceptual insights into the spatio-temporal dimension of end-of-life and funerary practices performed by British-Bangladeshi Muslims to achieve a good death and the changing nature of embodied and virtual deathscapes triggered by the pandemic.