The toilet paper panic: coronavirus and reflections from confinement by Abril Saldaña
The video shows two women coming to blows over a packet of loo rolls; the manager intervenes, trying to calm them down. One of the women has a…
Tag: COVID-19
Humankind Crowned – Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Virus
BERND BRABEC DE MORI To put it up front, this essay is not about relativization. I am sitting in my flat, trying to make ends meet between supervising…
Viral solidarity and the reinvention of a welfare state: Reflections from Denmark
KLAUS HOEYER, AMY CLOTWORTHY, AND NAJA HULVEJ ROD Anthropology has long been preoccupied with comparisons between societies and between social actors. And, seemingly out of nowhere, the Covid-19…
Capitalism and the Coronavirus Conspiracy
In France, like many other places, social confinement due to the Coronavirus unfolded quickly. On March 12, President Emmanuel Macron addressed the country to announce the first nation-wide…
Don’t Fight the Future by Matthew Wolf-Meyer
For the last few years, I’ve been teaching a class called “Human Futures.” I designed it because I was struck by the increasing pessimism among the undergraduates I…
“When the Cherry Blossoms, we will meet again in Wuhan”: A Nurse’s Reflections
CORALINE CUI YA PING On 9th February 2020, Coralline, a nurse from Nanjing, volunteered to go to Wuhan to help attend patients in the Coronavirus pandemic. She will…
“When the Cherry Blossoms, we will meet again in Wuhan”:A COVID-19 Photo Essay
CORALINE CUI YA PING Coralline is a nurse from Nanjing, China. On 9th February 2020, she volunteered to go to Wuhan to help attend patients in the Coronavirus…
Epidemic Philosophy by Warwick Anderson
Can a virus ever prompt good philosophy? Within weeks of its emergence, the SARS-CoV-2 virus was galvanizing celebrity European philosophers and social theorists, most of them men in…
Demaskiert: Covid-19 und die kulturelle Dimension der Debatten um die Maskenpflicht
Im Kontext der Corona-Pandemie wird debattiert, ob der Gebrauch von Masken dazu beitragen könnte, die Verbreitung des Virus einzudämmen. Wenig beachtet wird, dass diese Kontroverse ihre Wurzeln im…
Unmasked: Covid-19 and the Cultural Dimensions of the Debate on Mandatory Face Masks
In the context of the covid-19 pandemic, Germany witnesses debates on whether masks could help contain the spread of the virus. This article argues the controversy may be…
Our COVID Museum: Notes from Physician-Anthropologists on the Frontlines of an Evolving Pandemic in Seattle and New York City by Kimberly Sue
As the pandemic of SARS-CoV2 (the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19) unfolds it continues to impact contemporary forms of sociality and community, health, care, governance, and global interconne…
Latin America and the outbreak of COVID-19: a chronicle of multiple crises (II)
MARIA JOSE ROMERO, JASMINE GIDEON, PATRICIA MIRANDA, VERONICA SERAFINI This is the second in a series of articles on the outbreak of COVID-19 and the impact on Latin…
Latin America and the outbreak of COVID-19: a chronicle of multiple crises (I)
MARIA JOSE ROMERO, JASMINE GIDEON, PATRICIA MIRANDA, VERONICA SERAFINI The outbreak of COVID-19 is a global health emergency that is likely to trigger a global economic crisis, impacting…
The militarization of life under war, “post-conflict,” and the COVID-19 crisis
Overlapping experiences of confinement Like many others in Colombia, Nairys[1] is a campesina for whom the experience of confinement has been one of dramatic disruption. Marked by restricted…
COVID-19 Forum II: Introduction by Christos Lynteris
Since the first installation of Somatosphere’s COVID-19 Forum was published on March 6, the cases of confirmed COVID-19 have risen more than ten times, from 100,000 to over…
El Virus: A Contagion of Racism & How Networks of Care Can Stop It by Argenis Hurtado Moreno
My mother FaceTimed me a month ago and asked if I needed her to ship me hand sanitizer from Phoenix to Oregon. I thought it a silly question,…
Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things: Eldercare in Wuhan under COVID-19 by Zhe Yan
When the pernicious effects of COVID-19 manifested clearly first in Wuhan, the entire city and the whole of Hubei Province came to a standstill. The lockdown of Wuhan…
Populist Pharmakons by Juan Carlos Gabaldon
On March 22, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro delivered a long cadena– an impromptu speech carried live by public and regime-controlled TV stations – dedicated exclusively to COVID-19. Wearin…
Epidemic Times by Helge Jordheim
Epidemics like Covid-19 fundamentally change the order of time. The present moves faster, the past seems further removed, and the future appears completely unpredictable. Everyday homogenous time spl…
Covid-19: scales of pandemics and scales of anthropology by Jean Segata
Outbreak, epidemics, and pandemics are technical terms from epidemiology. They are used for temporal, geographical, and quantitative classification of infectious diseases. These terms are fundamental…
Coronavirus and Carcerality by Ian Whitmarsh
A friend of mine works as a psychotherapist in a northern California prison. Three weeks ago, he and I were talking about coronavirus in prisons as we stood watching…
Vor, in und nach der Krise
Wir sind mitten in der Krise. Die drastischen Anordnungen zur Eindämmung der Covid-19-Pandemie haben wir fast klaglos akzeptiert. Weist das darauf hin, dass wir sie heimlich mögen, die…
When Crisis Brings Us Closer: Reflecting on Family, Fieldwork, and Faraway Homes in the COVID-19 Pandemic by Sophie Chao
As the COVID-19 pandemic gains momentum, various forms and scales of lockdown and self-quarantine are being imposed across the world to halt the spread of the virus. With…
We urgently need to understand the medication histories of COVID-19 victims by Stefan Ecks
On March 18, 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Howard Bauchner discussed a possible link between common hypertension medications and a heightened risk of dying with a coronavirus…