Effects of Vaccination and the Spatio-Temporal Diffusion of Covid-19 Incidence in Turkey

This study assesses the spatio-temporal impact of vaccination efforts on Covid-19 incidence growth in Turkey. Incorporating geographical features of SARS-CoV-2 transmission, we adopt a spatial Susceptible–Infected–Recovered (SIR) model that serves as a guide of our empirical specification. Using provincial weekly panel data, we estimate a dynamic spatial autoregressive (SAR) model to elucidate the short- and the long-run impact of vaccination on Covid-19 incidence growth after controlling for temporal and spatio-temporal diffusion, testing capacity, social distancing behavior and unobserved space-varying confounders. Results show that vaccination growth reduces Covid-19 incidence growth rate directly and indirectly by creating a positive externality over space. The significant association between vaccination and Covid-19 incidence is robust to a host of spatial weight matrix specifications. Conspicuous spatial and temporal diffusion effects of Covid-19 incidence growth were found across all specifications: the former being a severer threat to the containment of the pandemic than the latter.     

‘…but not gagged’: Responding to Covid-19 and its control measures in France,Italy and the USA

The beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic was far from the ‘great equalizer’ sometimes described by the media. This article shares themes emerging from research conducted in 2020 in France, Italy and the USA concerning responses to the pandemic and its social effects. The authors analyze how the pandemic elicited varied reactions within the three countries where they conducted anthropological fieldwork. They propose that narratives of the Covid-19 response can shed light on how individuals navigate social and political relationships in each context.     

The Covid-19 app and the fire spirit: Receiving messages in Britain and Siberia

The UK's National Health Service Covid-19 ‘track and trace’ app was designed as a critical public health technology. So why has it encountered so much resistance? The authors compare alerts on the phone regarding exposure to possible Covid-19 infection with messages from a Siberian nomad's domestic fire, which sometimes crackles warnings of potential illnesses or accidents. Though these prediction technologies may seem radically different, they are both instruments for thinking about possible futures and adjusting behaviour. The authors interpret them as forms of divination that differ not so much in their logic as in their embeddedness in wider cosmologies of person, fate and society. The Siberian fire generates meaning as a focal point of coherence within many narrative strands concerning family and landscape; acceptance of its messages is rooted in intimacy and entanglement. This highlights how the Covid-19 app belongs to a state of emergency and exception. Its statistical idiom of risk and its culturally hyper-valued focus on privacy conceal the identities of people caught in the chain of infection, blocking social and narrative coherence and thereby encouraging suspicion and cynicism.     

Life under lockdown: Notes on Covid-19 in Silicon Valley

This article is a preliminary exploration of the effects of Covid-19 in Silicon Valley, one of three pandemic ‘hotspots’ on America’s west coast. In particular, it describes how the crisis has deepened and magnified social and economic inequalities in a region where poverty, homelessness and gentrification are rife. Despite the fact that many technology firms are reaping massive profits in the wake of ‘shelter in place’ orders, many Silicon Valley workers have lost their jobs and are struggling to cope with the consequences of Covid-19. The article also analyzes the different meanings of ‘lockdown’ by comparing examples from China, Brazil, Taiwan and the United States. The authors conclude that anthropologists have a significant role to play in helping to understand how and why communicable diseases emerge, the underlying social and environmental conditions that fuel them and cross-cultural strategies for the effective mitigation of epidemics and pandemics.     

COVID-19: THE ‘INVISIBLE ENEMY’ AND CONTINGENT RACISM: Reflections of an Italian anthropologist conducting fieldwork in Greece

In this article, the author provides a narrative of her experience as an Italian undertaking fieldwork in Greece while the epidemic was in full swing. She reflects on representations of ‘the invisible enemy’: an empty category, she claims, which has been contingently filled and morally loaded, resting on pre-existing categories, such as stereotypical representations of nations. The invisibility of ‘the enemy’ has in fact been rendered visible through what she refers to as contingent racism; this includes the ubiquitous and hence powerful use of irony and satire at the expense of China and Italy, but also expands to the use of banal and convenient tropes of accusation and derision among European Union member states, bringing back to the fore the North-South divide and its power imbalances. The author suggests that the Covid-19 crisis has ultimately provoked a veritable epidemic of contingent racism on multiple levels by stirring stereotypes and cultural prejudices which are rooted in time and rapidly renewed; its effect is all but contingent, and likely to accompany us far beyond the Covid-19 crisis itself.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 36, Number 5. October 2020

Front and back cover caption, volume 36 issue 5 Front cover Covid-19 symbolism: Amabie in Japan The Japanese yōkai Amabie (アマビエ) was a forgotten chimeric figure from the Japanese history of disaster and epidemics until the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, when a few manga artists and Kyoto University Library brought her back to public attention and gave her global fame on social media. A drawing contest with the hashtag #AmabieChallenge started in earnest, crossing the borders of Japan to reach and captivate an enthusiastic global audience. Her body is an assemblage of human, fish and bird characteristics, with three fish tails/legs and long, dark hair. The front cover picture on this issue of AT was taken in September 2020 at the annual Scarecrow Competition in Tokyo, which this year elected to have Amabie as its theme. In this issue, Claudia Merli explores how this yōkai's resurgence from pre-modern Japan intersects with some central ecological and political discourses in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, especially those associated with culinary practices, human rights and relations with other historical epidemics. Reasons for Amabie's sudden celebrity hark back to the culture of representation of historical epidemics via woodblock prints and the special place occupied by ningyo (mermaids and mermen) in Japan. Presented by some commentators as a pandemic mascot, this uncanny yokai from southern Japan addresses our contemporary lives as they are caught in a suspension of our usual temporal and spatial dimensions. We could even say that as we entered the pandemic, Amabie came to reinhabit a world she previously belonged to, one of unfathomable disasters and global intersections. The article follows some of these serendipitous connections to make sense of a phenomenon that should be analyzed in terms of the polysemic capacity of an icon of protection, whose beaky features recall all too well the spectral appearance of a plague doctor in Renaissance Europe. Back cover COVID-19 SYMBOLISM: TEDDY BEARS IN NZ On the day that Aotearoa/New Zealand started its unprecedented nationwide lockdown, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that despite the order to ‘stay home’, walking locally was not prohibited and that children, in particular, were welcome to stroll through their neighbourhoods in search of teddy bears in windows. She then added, ‘And if you're in Wellington and you're walking in a local neighbourhood, you might see one in my window’. Within days, across the country a multitude of teddy bears, as well as other stuffed animals and plastic toys, appeared in residential windows, tied on top of letterboxes or, like this one, affixed onto lamp posts. Inspired by the popular children's book, We're going on a bear hunt, wellknown for its refrain, ‘we're not scared’, the bears were widely understood to inspire ‘hope’ and ‘care’ and were just one of the ways that New Zealanders affectively invested in the Covid-19 lockdown. While scholarly work on national crises has frequently focused on the misuse of emergency measures to expand state power, much less has been said of the ways that citizens help constitute states of emergency. During the first Covid-19 lockdown (March-May 2020), New Zealanders set up community roadblocks to seal off neighbourhoods deemed to be under threat, ‘dobbed in’ perceived rule breakers or engaged in acts of vigilante justice against them, and called on the nation to recast the lockdown as a rahui or Maori protective prohibition. They also displayed a seemingly endless array of teddy bears, including the occasional bear engaged in acts that contravened lockdown regulations. Examining these and similar acts of collective responsibility, care and blame is a vital step in widening our understanding of the variety of dynamics that create and sustain states of emergency in democratic nations as well as their potential long-term implications.     

MY COVID-19 DIARY,PART 2

Written in weekly instalments, Michelle Munyikwa's Covid-19 diary reflects upon the experience of an unfolding pandemic from her dual role as a medical trainee and anthropologist living in the United States. In this second instalment of her diary Covid-19 dairy, the author reflects upon ethics, risk, pandemic futures and the murder of George Floyd as the crisis continues in the United States.     

‘We have so many challenges’: Small-scale mining,Covid-19 and constant interruptions in West Africa

Currently, the impacts of Covid-19 are receiving significant global attention. This also applies to the extractive industries, where this global crisis is directing the gaze of policymakers, donors and academics alike. Covid-19 is seen as having far-reaching and disruptive consequences, especially in the case of artisanal and small-scale mining. While the authors consider this attention important, their work on artisanal and small-scale mining in Ghana – and West Africa more broadly – reveals that for many miners, Covid-19 is ‘just’ another interruption to their lives and lifeworlds which are chronically affected by interruptions of different scales, magnitudes and temporalities. As anthropologists have shown, foregrounding this structural condition – which is emblematic for the lives of many people, especially in the Global South – is key to questioning, understanding and contextualizing the current moment of ‘global’ crisis and must be an element of any policy and research emerging from it.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 36, Number 3. June 2020

Front and back cover caption, volume 36 issue 3 Front cover COVID-19 IN ITALY An elderly man steps outside, a bag in his hand and a mask covering his face. He stares at the wet pavement as he goes. He is wondering whether to take that onward step. His shadow on the wall magnifies his uncertainty. He is alone. It has been raining. The sun spells help. Maybe. Uncertainty and loneliness are among the emotions that we now associate with Covid-19. By 9 May, the death toll among those who had tested positive for the virus in Italy surpassed 30,000, the highest in Europe. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the paramount need has been to protect those in the most ‘vulnerable categories’, the aged and those with pre-existing conditions. Italy, as the country with the highest percentage of elderly people in Europe, has failed them. At the outbreak of the pandemic, the rushed and short-sighted resolution to transfer Covid-19 patients to nursing homes resulted in a massacre, whose scar will get deeper with time. Yet, how vital ‘the elderly’ are to society cannot be stressed enough, particularly when state family support policies are insufficient, a gap that grandparents have long been filling by taking care of their grandchildren. If uncertainty is ahead of us, so is the void left by all those ‘elderly’ men and women who will be deeply missed. In this issue, Manuela Pellegrino provides a narrative of her experience as an Italian doing fieldwork in Greece while the epidemic was in full swing. Back cover Covid-19 Rear Admiral Timothy Weber, commander of US Naval Medical Forces Pacific, speaks to members of the press moments before the hospital ship USNS Mercy departs from its base near San Diego, California, 23 March 2020. The vessel, which can host up to 1,200 medical personnel, is being deployed in support of US Covid-19 response efforts. It will serve as a referral hospital for up to a 1,000 non-Covid-19 patients should shore-based hospitals prove unable to adequately serve them. The Mercy's deployment illustrates how grave the situation has become in the US. It also reveals something about how, after decades of neglect, the country's public health infrastructures have come to rely heavily on support from military and corporate institutions. The pandemic brings to light a host of global issues, ranging from food scarcity and insecurity, mass unemployment and economic crisis, the crucial roles played by elderly people, the fate of education and schooling, the unplanned release of prisoners, the long-term consequences of ‘distancing’ directives and much more. Underlying all of these topics is a sobering observation made by medical anthropologists more than two decades ago: locally and globally, it is the poor who are most likely to contract – and die from – infectious diseases. In Salento and Silicon Valley, in Rio de Janeiro and Wuhan, the pattern has been strikingly similar – the most economically vulnerable members of society suffer disproportionately. Anthropology contributes to a fuller understanding of Covid-19 and its aftermath. Recent research has developed a more complete cross-cultural picture of recent epidemics like AIDS, SARS, Ebola and Zika. When combined with archaeological and biological knowledge of pandemics stretching back to the Black Death and earlier, the discipline adds critical historical and cross-cultural perspectives. Anthropologists have much to say about how and why communicable diseases emerge, the underlying social and environmental conditions that fuel them, and potential strategies for their effective mitigation.     

Einzelhandel als Katalysator für nachhaltige urbane Radlogistik? – WüLivery,ein Fallbeispiel aus Würzburg

Standort - Die Covid-19-Pandemie gilt in vielen gesellschaftlichen Teilbereichen als Beschleuniger für Transformationsprozesse. Auch im Bereich der Organisation urbaner Logistik und...     

From lockdown to rāhui and teddy bears in windows: Initial responses to Covid-19 in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Scholarly examinations of states of emergency frequently underscore how the crisis imaginary is employed to rapidly and unjustifiably expand state power. This line of analysis affords great insight into the misuse of state power. It also, however, tends to depict the citizenry as either weak and overwhelmed or at best, duped by the workings of the state, and thus ignores the possibility of democratic processes continuing within a state of emergency. Aotearoa/New Zealand’s response to Covid-19 reveals a collaborative dynamic in which the citizenry actively engaged in constituting the state of emergency, and suggests the need for a broader examination of how collective responsibility, care and blame are envisioned and enacted, not only by governments but by (neo-liberal) citizenries during times of national crisis.     

Walking the Dog in Madrid During the Pandemic

The relationships we humans form with our pets condition the spaces we inhabit and how we move around in them. This article discusses relations between humans and their dogs in the city of Madrid during the Covid-19 lockdown. As an emergency ethnography, this article shows how, in this context, dogs can become the centre of relations between neighbours, facilitating or worsening them, creating new problems and simplifying others.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 37, Number 6. December 2021

Front and back cover caption, volume 37 issue 6 COVID-19 DIVINATION Front cover: Domestic fire makes human life possible in the Siberian Arctic. The fire also communicates warnings and predictions to those who can listen and understand it, like this Nenets woman. Back cover: The UK National Health Service (NHS) designed its Covid-19 (‘track and trace’) app to avoid ambiguities like those of Siberian fire interpretation, but in doing so, it creates a climate of detachment and cynicism. This app serves as a critical public health technology by warning users that they have been near someone who has subsequently turned out to be infected. So why has it encountered so much resistance and non-cooperation? In this issue, Roza Laptander and Piers Vitebsky look for an answer by comparing these on-screen phone alerts with messages from the domestic fire of nomadic Siberian reindeer herders as it crackles alerts about potential illnesses or accidents. Though these prediction technologies may seem radically different, they are both instruments for thinking about possible futures and adjusting behaviour. They are both forms of divination that differ not so much in their logic as in their embeddedness in wider cosmologies of person, fate and society. The Siberian fire generates meaning as a focal point within many narrative strands concerning family, landscape and the movement of animals; its properties contribute to local ideas of normality, and acceptance of its messages is rooted in intimacy and entanglement. This highlights how the Covid-19 app belongs to a state of emergency and exception. Its statistical idiom of risk and its culturally hyper-valued focus on privacy deliberately conceal the identities of people caught in the chain of infection, thereby blocking social and narrative coherence.     

From spirits to conspiracy? Nomadic perceptions of climate change,pandemics and disease

This article illustrates how the Yamal-Nenets, a group of reindeer pastoralists in West Siberia, perceive a series of recent natural disasters to be connected to one another through a conspiracy – i.e. caused by the agency of malevolent human forces which are beyond the pastoralists’ control. Recent fieldwork during the peak of the global Covid-19 epidemic served as a trigger for this observation. Their self-confidence in the robustness of their lifestyle and their embeddedness within their natural environment is so strong that Yamal-Nenets nomads believe only evil forces – not nature – can stop them from being mobile. Alongside Covid-19, they interpret the severe consequences of natural disasters, such as iced pastures, related reindeer starvation and the outbreak of anthrax as man-made attempts to reduce the number of people and animals in the tundra. The blame they place on humans for these disasters takes place in the context of hitherto unseen gas industry developments in the area. Such interpretations may become a general pattern for changing perceptions of the world by remote indigenous populations when deprived of their once customary shamanic dialogue with the spirits.     

MY COVID-19 DIARY

Written in weekly instalments, Michelle Munyikwa's Covid-19 diary reflects upon the experience of an unfolding pandemic from her dual role as a medical trainee and anthropologist living in the United States. Her observations centre on everyday encounters with scenes or objects that reflect the growing crisis, from the absence of masks outside patient rooms to emergent forms of care through telemedicine. The diary follows the author as she experiences grief, ambivalence and disorientation in the first weeks of the pandemic.     

COVID-19 PANDEMIC AND SOCIAL DISTANCING IN PRISONS

In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, how can the early release of prisoners, requested by the World Health Organization, members of civil society and non-governmental organizations, be considered a ‘humane’ decision? In this article, the author examines the Portuguese context, discussing the ways that the urgency and fear of contagion highlighted, once more, the inability of prisons to cope with the needs of both those they confine and those they intend to protect.     

A chimeric being from Kyushu,Japan: Amabie's revival during Covid-19

This article explores how the resurgence of a forgotten chimeric figure from the Japanese history of disasters and epidemics intersects with some central ecological and political discourses in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, especially those associated with culinary practices, human rights and relations with other historical epidemics. Presented as a mascot but viewed as an icon of protection, this uncanny little yōkai from southern Japan in the pre-modern Edo period addresses our lives as they are caught in a suspension of our usual temporal and spatial dimensions. A monster, a hyperobject and an art effigy of our pandemic present.     

城市化下的“卫生”困境与突破--论19世纪后半期美国城市公共卫生改革

19世纪后半期迅猛发展的美国城市化,使美国社会经济生活出现全方位的变化。同时,人口高度密集的城市环境导致公共卫生问题恶化,出现所谓的卫生危机,从而促发了城市公共卫生改革。此后,在美国城市的环境治理和疫病防治方面都出现系列性变化,城市公共卫生开始走上正轨。在此过程中,政府开始直接干预公共卫生,大众卫生意识得以强化,为美国城市卫生事业留下了宝贵遗产。     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 37, Number 5. October 2021

Front and back cover caption, volume 37 issue 5 Front cover FOOD STALL AT BRICK LANE MARKET Brick Lane is one of London's most iconic streets. Over the centuries, it has served as a refuge for Huguenots and east European Jews fleeing religious persecution, as well as Irish fleeing the famine. More recently, Bengalis, predominantly from the Sylhet area, moved to the UK because of political and economic instability at the time of Bangladesh's independence in 1971. Many settled along Brick Lane and its surrounding streets. Because of the lane's social, cultural, and economic importance to the Bangladeshi diaspora – it played a pivotal role in the renaming of the neighbourhood as Spitalfields and Banglatown in 2001, for example – some first-generation British Bangladeshis still say, ‘There are three Bengals: west Bengal, east Bengal, and Brick Lane’. Nonetheless, this inner-city area's working-class identity and employment patterns are threatened by super-gentrification in the housing, office development, and hotel and catering sectors. The effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are amplifying these trends. In this issue, Seán Carey looks at some of the trials and tribulations of the Bangladeshi community in and around Brick Lane. Back cover BANGLADESH IN BRICK LANE Street art on the shutters of a restaurant in Brick Lane.