‘…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.     

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.     

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.     

‘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.     

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.     

Between Georgia and Ohio: Constructing the Covid-19 Disaster in the United States

As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to unfold around the world, governments engage in diverse decision-making processes that shape everyday living patterns, rituals and livelihoods. This article compares and examines state-level governmental influences on the social construction of the Covid-19 disaster in the United States, specifically analyzing the states of Ohio and Georgia. The authors interrogate how governing bodies and officials in these states differentially construct the crisis and reshape social norms during periods of liminality.     

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.     

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 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.     

Khalsa: The Town with a ‘Golden Fountain’: The Rise and Fall of an Arab Town North of the Huleh Valley

This article deals with the history of a frontier Arab town—Khalsa—which was the centre of the Huleh Valley and the connection between Galilee, Southern Lebanon and the Golan Heights during the British Mandate in Palestine (1918–48). This article aims to explore the changes and transformations that occurred in the town and the Huleh Valley in general, and tries to show that, during that period, this remote and peripheral area underwent many social and economic changes. It also demonstrates that these changes not only occurred in the central areas in Palestine but also reached the northern parts. In addition, this article tells the ‘story’ of how this Arab town, which has not been addressed in earlier studies, grew rapidly, and why it collapsed quickly in the 1948 war. It examines what the role of its leader, Kamil Hussein, was and how his relationship with the Bedouin tribes and the Jewish settlements and leaders in the valley affected the results of the war. The story of Khalsa is, to some extent, a case study on the macro-level of what was happening in the Holy Land in the three decades of British rule.     

From automation to Silicon Valley: the automation movement of the 1950s,Arnold Beckman,and William Shockley

Most studies mark the start of silicon electronics in Silicon Valley with William Shockley and Arnold Beckman’s creation of the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. This study details how the automation movement of the 1950s shaped the careers of both Shockley and Beckman, and formed an indispensible context for their creation of Shockley Semiconductor. Shockley was engaged in automation from the early 1950s, promoting his vision of an ‘automatic trainable robot’ to revolutionize manufacturing. Beckman was deeply involved in automation in the mid-1950s, orienting his company to key technologies for the ‘automatic factory:’ instrumentation and computers. Beckman and Shockley’s entrepreneurial involvements with electronics and automation led them to create Shockley Semiconductor to pursue silicon transistors in 1955.     

Messing with the attractiveness algorithm: a response to queering code/space

Responding to the collection of articles, ‘Queering Code/Space,’ this article discusses how algorithms affect the production of online lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) spaces, namely online dating sites. The set of articles is well timed: lesbian bars have closed en masse across the US and many gay male bars have followed suit so that online spaces fill – or perhaps make – a gap in the social production of LGBTQ spaces. I draw on Cindi Katz’s idea of ‘messy’ qualities of social reproduction and the necessity of ‘messing’ with dominant narratives in order to think about the labor, experience, and project of queering code/space.     

For ethnography in political geography: Experiencing and re-imagining Ferghana Valley boundary closures

Political geographers have produced extensive and valuable bodies of knowledge on both international boundaries and geopolitics. However, an emphasis on discourse study means that these literatures are in danger of becoming both repetitious and lopsided, relegating or even erasing people's experiences and everyday understandings of the phenomena under question. This article suggests that ethnographic participant observation, a method largely neglected by political geographers, could be used to address these imbalances and open new research directions. This argument is demonstrated by a study of the impact of the partial closure in 1999–2000 of the Uzbekistan–Kyrgyzstan Ferghana Valley boundary. Post-Soviet time was hyper-accelerated by the belated imposition of the logic of nation–states onto the existing social geographies of kinship practice. The legal–constitutional division of the Valley in 1991 only ‘caught up’ with the lived experiences of borderland dwellers in 1999. The sudden collapse of this ‘political geographical time-lag’ forced upon them the traumatic realisation that Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan really were two separate countries. In this context, using ethnography to highlight discrepancies between elite and everyday political geographical imaginations informs a critique of state violence that is parallel to, but not a replacement of, textual analyses informed by critical social theory.     

Why conventional wisdom on radicalization fails: the persistence of a failed discourse

Politicians, the media, and some academics are getting it wrong about radicalization. Relying on simple narratives to explain how an individual departs from point a (‘a good Muslim boy’) to point b (‘a suicide bomber’), too many recent contributions to academia rely on assumptions and ‘conventional wisdom’ rather than testable and falsifiable empirical research and methods. Through specific cases, this article seeks to demonstrate how the over‐simplification of ‘conventional wisdom’ privileges convenient political narratives over the complex realities of such situations. In light of this failure to account for reality, this article seeks to challenge current thinking on radicalization by exposing its limitations, as currently being used, as a meaningful basis and departure point for rigorous social science research. The article concludes by showing how the current persistence of this ‘conventional wisdom’ approach to radicalization ultimately betrays the normative political assumptions of those who insist on using this term, and how this adherence to ‘conventional wisdom’ now deprives radicalization from being a relevant and useful academic or policy discourse. This is because radicalization as an area for study has been corrupted by its instrumental political application.     

‘Beautiful but tough terrain’: the uneasy geographies of same-sex parenting

To date, many geographical analyses on and around family have relied on heteronormative social constructions and expectations of parenting within a nuclear family. There is, thus, considerable scope to investigate the geographies of those who are parenting outside heteronormative relationships; first to broaden this relatively limited understanding of contemporary geographies of family and, second, to recognise how some families must actively negotiate their ‘fit’ into material and symbolic space, primarily shaped for and by heterosexual parented families. Drawing on a research project that examined geographies of parenting from the perspective of 19 female same-sex parented families, this paper focuses on some of the ways these families negotiate their ‘fit’ (or otherwise) into spaces of parenting, and how such negotiations can be complex, even awkward. Focusing on Australian families and family geographies, this paper also shows how recent shifts in federal and state policy and legislation on families and parenting impact these ‘uneasy’ geographies of those parenting within same-sex relationships, adding complexity to already-challenging situations concerning the status and recognition of same-sex parented families.     

“凡事都有可能”——美国硅谷文化探幽

硅谷文化的中心思想,是一种"凡事都有可能"的态度,硅谷的全部文化归纳为两个字:变化.具体内容包括:创新是美国硅谷的首要战略;平等宽松的理念是硅谷文化的重要组成部分;鼓励冒险、宽容失败的硅谷文化激发了员工勇于探索的创新热情;竞争、开放的环境是硅谷成功的重要因素;相互作用、相互影响的经济生态系统是硅谷企业成功奥秘之所在.硅谷的发展模式虽然不能完全复制,但可以借鉴.     

Post COVID-19 ecological and social reset: moving away from capitalist growth models towards tourism as Buen Vivir

Abstract

Tourism has been one of the industries most highly affected by COVID-19. The COVID-19 global pandemic is an ‘unprecedented crisis’ and has exposed the pitfalls of a hyper consumption model of economic growth and development. The scale of immediate economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic has shattered the myth of ‘catch up development’ and ‘perpetual growth’. The Crisis has brought unintended degrowth, presenting opportunities for an economic and social ‘reset’. In terms of long-term thinking post COVID-19, it is time to change the parameters of how we imagine a trajectory going forward, to prefigure possibilities for contesting capitalist imperatives that ‘there is no alternative’. In relation to tourism, the pandemic provides an opportunity for reimaging tourism otherwise, away from exploitative models that disregard people, places, and the natural environment, and towards a tourism that has positive impacts. Non-western alternatives to neo-colonial and neoliberal capitalism, such the South American concept of ‘Buen Vivir’, can help us to shift priorities away from economic growth, towards greater social and environmental wellbeing, and meaningful human connections. Taking a Buen Vivir approach to tourism will continue the degrowth momentum, for transformative change in society within the earth’s physical limits. Yet Buen Vivir also redefines the parameters of how we understand ‘limits’. In limiting unsustainable practices in development and tourism, a focus on Buen Vivir actually creates growth in other areas, such as social and environmental wellbeing, and meaningful human connection. Buen Vivir can reorient the tourism industry towards localised tourism, and slow tourism because the principles of Buen Vivir require these alternatives to be small-scale, local and benefiting host communities as well as tourists to increase the wellbeing for all.