International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC): Cemetery planning, preparation and management during COVID-19: A quick guide to proper documentation and disposition of the dead.

Based on its forensic capacity and experience gained worldwide from the management of the dead in emergencies, including epidemics, the International Committee of the Red Cross has been asked by the authorities and other relevant stakeholders in some of its operational contexts to advise on the planning, preparation and management of cemeteries during COVID19. The management of the dead process includes proper documentation and appropriate disposition, including temporary burials. If there is a sudden and significant increase in the number of deaths, local capacities can quickly become overwhelmed. This guidance, prepared for the COVID19 pandemic, can be applied to any incident involving mass fatalities when the local capacity to provide safe, appropriate and dignified burials is overwhelmed. Specifications on size, spacing, excavation depths, and information about other important considerations are provided. In addition, it provides recommendations on how to correctly map graves while ensuring the traceability and correct management of bodies in a cemetery. Procedures for receiving bodies, as well as measures to ensure the health and safety of relatives and cemetery staff are also covered in this guidance.

No place, new places: death and its rituals in urban Asia.

In many land-scarce Asian cities, planning agencies have sought to reduce space for the dead to release land for the living, encouraging conversion from burial to cremation over several decades. This has caused secular principles privileging efficient land use to conflict with symbolic values invested in burial spaces. Over time, not only has cremation become more accepted, even columbaria have become overcrowded, and new forms of burials (sea and woodland burials) have emerged. As burial methods change, so too do commemorative rituals, including new on-line and mobile phone rituals. This paper traces the ways in which physical spaces for the dead in several east Asian cities have diminished and changed over time, the growth of virtual space for them, the accompanying discourses that influence these dynamics and the new rituals that emerge concomitantly with the contraction of land space.

Osteological proofs of torture and cruelty: forensic findings form a secret cemetery in Tirana, Albania.

Two decades after the fall of the communism in Albania, documenting the human rights violations and proving torture and cruelties suffered from ex-politically persecuted and dissidents of the regime, is still a societal priority. Due to several reasons, the judicial way toward redressing the historical injustices has been slowed down. This is mainly because of the lack of proper documentation of torture, mass executions and extrajudicial ill-treatment. Several governmental and civil society organizations have tried to define the issue, but perpetrators have rarely, if ever, been brought to court. Secret cemeteries and mass graves have recently been found in different zones of Albania, and victims exhumed; thus proofs of torture and ill-treatments are being made widely known, potentially creating the necessary legal conditions for punishing the perpetrators and for identifying victims. In the present paper, authors describe osteological forensic findings from Linza secret cemetery in Tirana, where several ante mortem fractures prove the severe and cruel ill-treatment the victims suffered before the execution that was usually by bullet shot in the posterior region of the skull.

"The last thing that tells our story": the Roodepoort West Cemetery, 1958-2008.

This article attempts to capture some of the complexity in the way that memory, meaning and agenda interact in the history of the cemetery of Roodepoort West. Roodepoort West was the 'old location' where Africans and others lived until 1955, after which a gradual process of removals took place until 1967, when it was finally destroyed. However, not everything was lost of the old location. The cemetery remained, after unrest caused by the proposed removal of the local cemetery during the late 1950s persuaded the authorities to leave it alone. More recently, the cemetery has played a part in land restitution, becoming both a site of tension and remembrance. This article explores the many meanings attached to the old cemetery, and funerals more broadly, over a period of time beginning from the 1950s to 2005. By looking at the history of funerals, and the cemetery, new insights and an alternative understanding of what it meant to live in an urban area in Apartheid South Africa can be gained.

Confessions of a Wannabe (American Folklore Society Presidential Invited Plenary Address, October 2009).

This paper is a written rendering of a plenary address delivered at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society. Drawing on materials from his forthcoming book Confessions of a Wannabe, the author provides a personal account of the deeply emotional sense of responsibility, obligation, and reciprocity involved in long-term ethnographic research among Native American communities, particularly the Omaha and Pawnee tribes of Nebraska. The author details the ways in which personal relations with the people and communities he has observed have shaped his personal and professional life, and he calls into question the ideal of purportedly neutral or distanced ethnography. Details are provided of the author's experiences in converting his farm into an appropriate reburial site for repatriated Pawnee remains recovered under the aegis of the Native American Graves Repatriation and Protection Act (NAGPRA).

[Ideas and projects for Napoleonic Naples burial reform]. / Idee e progetti per la riforma cimiteriale nella Napoli Napoleonica: tra riflessione medica ed esperienze tecniche.

This article aims to describe the attempts made by Napoleonic administrators in Naples to reforming the urban burials system, paying attention, firstly, on medical theories at the basis of the new cemetery projects, secondarily on people involved in the reform, especially technicians. The article deals also with the origins of the European need for burial reform in 18th century and its following establishment by the Napoleonic laws, through an hard compromise between traditional practices and hygienic principles.