Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on the lives of workers with occupational diseases during the pandemic in Turkey. It illustrates how for these workers the pandemic's financial, health-related, and bureaucratic uncertainties unfold as embodied experiences, and how they endure the multiple crises of the Covid-19.

Paper long abstract:

When exploring the impact of the pandemic on human health, medical anthropologists tend to focus either on the experiences of patients with chronic illnesses or the experiences of those who are dubbed as “essential workers.” What if somebody is simultaneously a worker and suffers from silicosis, a chronic illness while facing the risk of coronavirus infection amid pandemic uncertainties? Our research with workers who suffer from silicosis due to their occupations in three different cities of Turkey reveals that for these workers, the uncertainties of the pandemic turn into embodied experiences at three levels. First, they develop extreme body consciousness (i.e. wearing masks regularly, daily body care, managing physical distance) due to uncertainties surrounding the risk of infection. Second, there is increased reflection on what household members eat, drink, how they keep their bodies warm, how often they move their bodies, and to what ends. They thus develop awareness about how bodies consume and reproduce at the household level due to economic uncertainties. Third, these workers do not quite know how well their bodies are doing, due to the postponement of visits, assessments, treatments, and prescriptions. Thus they learn to live with an ambiguous illness in the context of bureaucratic, legal, and medical obstacles that are intensified with the pandemic. The embodied uncertainties paradigm demonstrates how vulnerable groups maintain control of their lives against these uncertainties by controlling, regulating, reflecting on the movements and capacities of their body as well as the bodies that surround them.