Scott MacLochlainn

SCOTT A. MacLOCHLAINN, Johns Hopkins U., Baltimore, Maryland, was awarded funding in October 2018 to aid research on “Rituals of Evidence: Media, Faith, and Death in the Philippines.” This research examines how the rituals, logistics, and adjudication of death have increasingly become sites of transformation in the Philippines. Having seen a remarkable surge in extra-judicial killings (commonly known as EJK) in 2016, death has assumed a newly foregrounded and highly mediatized space throughout the Philippines. Exploring how forms of evidentiary authority permeate not only the data produced on death, but its attending ethics and circulatory modes, this research moves among a number of Philippine contexts in which the very concept and experiential formations of death come under scrutiny. While this project encompasses multi-year and multi-sited ethnographic research, this funded study foregrounded its archival foundations, interwoven with different ethnographic spaces, including the shifting bureaucracies of indigenous death, the mediatization of EJK, histories of data in biodiversity, extinction, and natural disasters, as well as the labor and economies of urban burial and death.