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- Convenors:
-
Clara Saraiva
(ICS, University of Lisbon)
Charles Briggs (University of California, Berkeley)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Health and Medicine
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 22 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
COVID-19 has shown us how it is important to develop ethnographic sensibilities, and that this requires collaboration. This session is designed to draw together participants' unfolding inquiries on pandemics, beyond Medical Anthropology, joining scholars from various fields and perspectives.
Long Abstract:
Even as we attempt to keep SARS-CoV-2 viruses away, we are all infected by viral waves of naturalcultural forms that seek to make COVID-19 feel frighteningly close or comfortingly far away, to amplify or disappear its effects on space, relations with humans and nonhumans, psyches, etc. Given their scale, heterogeneity, and global dispersion, developing ethnographic sensibilities adequate to pandemic encounters requires collaboration, and this session is designed to draw together participants' unfolding inquiries. Like the epidemiological contours of the disease, it is impossible to determine in advance the subjects and objects, technologies and infrastructures that will form the crucial foci of attention in June, 2021, but our present projections include (but are not limited to) the following: complex entanglements of forms of political and scientific-medical performance, including politicians' voicings of anti-science and anti-state discourses; attempts by public health "experts" to dominate narrative production and circulation by suppressing proliferating forms of popular knowledge deemed conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and myths; COVID-19 vaccines as loci of salvation, anti-vax fears, and pharmaceutical windfalls; ludic and artistic responses to pandemic angst; shifting regimentations of lives and spaces through COVID-19 metrics and statistical imaginaries; processes and effects of the virtualization of communication, sociability, and education, including Zoom bombing and fatigue; complex relations between journalism and social media; and intersections between epidemiological recognition of racialized differences in COVID-19 infection and death rates and widespread demands to confront racism and racialized forms of violence. The organizers seek to maximize the range of geographic, disciplinary, and analytic perspectives included.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 22 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Consumption habits tend to witness drastic changes that say a lot about each crisis. How has COVID-19 changed our relationship with aesthetics? How have zooming and working from home impacted the cosmetic surgery and injectables industry and the DIY treatments?
Paper long abstract:
The beauty industry has largely been considered recession-proof. The phenomenon of increased desire for, and use of, appearance-enhancing items during times of economic recession has been called "the lipstick effect". The lockdown has brought huge changes to our self-care routines. How is COVID-19 changing our relationship with aesthetics? How Covid-19 is enhancing the beauty and cosmetics industry? How zooming and working from home are impacting the cosmetic surgery and injectables industry and the DIY treatments? How personal care and beauty categories are performing during and after the lockdown? Is the self-care effect the new lipstick effect? Is aesthetic surgery perceived by consumers as a strategy to cope with anxiety, to enhance lives inside and out, to increase dignity, happiness and self-esteem? How do we want to look aesthetically beyond the lockdown? Are the specific conditions of the present moment - isolation, an interest in health, massive joblessness extreme anxiety and possibly prolonged economic pain - linked to the prospect of increased competition? Do people invest in their appearance to increase their social and professional opportunities in the economic meltdown triggered by the Coronavirus outbreak? While it is vital to survive today, are people already positioning themselves to win the counterattack phase and be ready to win the post-COVID claim? Personal anxieties, motives and desires resist simple quantification and are often dismissed or overlooked in economic literature. Ethnography provides a possibility for a different approach, creating a better understanding of consumers' emotional and behavioral responses to the Coronavirus outbreak.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines perceptions and decision-making related to holiday travel during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. In particular, through ethnographic storytelling this paper will complicate typical sociodemographic divisions purported to determine infection control behaviors throughout the pandemic.
Paper long abstract:
Almost a year after SARS-CoV-2 began to spread, millions of Americans descended on airports in time for the Thanksgiving rush. Once a classic, humor-filled movie trope, now bustle of traveling for the holidays is fraught with risk, contagion, and the specter of death. For some. This paper aims to explore the risk perception and decision-making of individuals during a global pandemic. While media portrayals of infection control adherence tend to divide the population by geographic region, political affiliation, religious background, and education level, anthropologists and public health researchers have observed that there are deeper cultural dynamics at play (e.g., understandings of cleanliness, microbes, and threat). These cultural dynamics are not so easily divided into neat sociodemographic groups. Two PhD-educated women flying Chicago-Dallas, reuniting to care for a friend in her first days out of the hospital. A businessman flying roundtrip Miami-New York in 72 hours, returning to his house where his elderly mother also lives. A public health researcher relocating 9-hours away for a new job, paid movers and children mingling about the new house. Altogether, this paper combines grounded ethnographic storytelling with a cultural analysis of perceptions and decision-making related to travel and hygiene during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
Paper short abstract:
We ask how are Dagestani medical landscapes (re)shaped by a powerful non-human actor - Sars-Cov-2? What is the role of social media in (re)shaping them? To answer, we reflect on the relationships between the state, religion (Islam), humans and other-than-human beings e.g. virus and medicinal plants.
Paper long abstract:
We aim to show the results of our explorations of the medical landscapes in Dagestan during the Covid-19 epidemic. Although it is not reflected in the statistics, this predominantly Muslim republic in the Russian Federation, have suffered severely during the spring outbreak (the autumn outbreak has only started). In spring hospitals were overflown with patients suffering from pneumonia-like symptoms, morgues run out of space, several mountainous villages have lost all their elders. The religious authorities took over the role of the state authorities and ask people to eat healthy foods and shelter in place.
To cope with the virus, fear and uncertainty many turned to the practices aiming at enhancing the capacity of immune system e.g. herbal medicine, hijama (cupping) or body cleansing. Others shut down their villages and decided to rely on self-subsistence focusing on cattle herding and plant gathering.
An outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic was a trigger for us to ask how are Dagestani medical landscapes (re)shaped by a powerful non-human actor - Sars-Cov-2? What is the role of social media in (re)shaping them? The deep ethnographic reflection on the relationships between the state, religion (Islam), humans and other-than-human beings is crucial for understanding medical landscapes there. We apply more-than-human approach that allows for a broad and multi-aspect understanding of significance of such actors as viruses or plant species used for self-medication, local and non-local plants and botanicals used in Islamic medicine. We will show their new entanglements in local medical landscapes occurring due to the epidemic.
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic research on a clinical trial study for a mRNA-based vaccine against SarsCov2, I inquire ‘how culture gets under the skin’. Tracing the everday practices of testing, screening, and vaccinating, this paper will disentangle the sociotechnical assemblages of immunity.
Paper long abstract:
mRNA-based vaccines are envisioned as the promise of salvation: ‘healing information’ is introduced in bodies to stimulate the production of the bodies’ ‘own medicine’. Based on my ethnographic research on a clinical trial study for a mRNA-based vaccine against SarsCov2 this paper inquires ‘how culture gets under the skin’ (Beck et al.). In case of vaccination, it does so by help of a syringe. However, the content of this syringe, its administration, and its efficacy are product of and embedded in complex sociotechnical assemblages of knowledge production. This paper traces the practices and regimes of screening, testing, and vaccinating. It unfolds the interaction and entanglement of viral RNA and antibodies, (bio)technology and bodies, bodily fluid and testing kits, medical staff and test subjects, ‘healthy’ bodies and (serious) adverse events. While the concept of “immunity” is laden with modern notions of autonomy, agency, and self-empowerment, I will - drawing on theories of Esposito and Haraway - propose a different reading: In this clinical trial study, that both surveils and engenders immunogenicity, the immune system becomes manifest as a) the effect of sociotechnical assemblages, and b) as a sociotechnical assemblage itself: as the locus where binary categories – such as: subject/object, culture/nature, biology/technology, individual/environment, self/non-self etc. – are simultaneously constituted and disintegrated.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I will argue that key theories of action like Maussian one of techniques of the body could help us to think about our pandemic experience, in particular in what concerns contamination.
Paper long abstract:
As an anthropologist who specializes in the theory of action, I have frequently questioned myself since the beginning of the pandemic. My questions regard how much some key anthropological concepts, such as Maussian techniques of the body, could play a key role not only in our daily lives in this pandemic. Also – more specifically – I think about how we could apply these concepts to contamination.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have been encouraged to disassemble our embodied sequences of action. We had to create new separation from other people, both through physical distance and specific materiality (masks). We had to face a big challenge in disembodying old routines, such as hugging or shaking hands, insofar as not abiding by these new rules would open the way of contamination. Transgressing could invite the virus to pass through our bodies and contaminate ourselves and other people.
Rather than proposing a strictly ethnographic-based ongoing research, I will instead suggest a reflexive experience on these aspects of daily life during the pandemic. I will argue that key theories of action like Marcel Mauss, Jean-Pierre Warnier and Bruno Latour could help us to think about our pandemic experience, and maybe to prevent us from further contamination.