New Technologies in Pentecostal Funeral Rituals During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Brazil.

This article examines the transformation of Pentecostal funeral rites in Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on a live-streamed funeral as a case study. Due to public health protocols, traditional in-person rituals—such as wakes with physical presence, interaction with the corpse, and communal mourning—were abbreviated or impossible, prompting the use of digital technologies like social media live streams to mediate mourning. The study highlights that while these mediatized rituals allowed some expression of grief and maintained hierarchical and doctrinal elements, they could not fully replicate the embodied, communal, and symbolic aspects essential to Pentecostal funerary practices, particularly the physical evaluation of the deceased's body and face. The article concludes that the efficacy of funeral rites depends not only on technological access but also on the interplay between media properties and deeply rooted cosmological and ritual structures, with digital formats often experienced as insufficient or frustrating by participants.