6 Recommended Reads on Epidemics and Religious Change
Photo by Jeremy Bezanger on Unsplash Epidemics can turn the world upside down. They kill millions, isolate us and wreak havoc on international trade. But what is their impact on religion?…
Tag: Epidemics
PrEP on Trial: the Future of HIV in Indonesian Policy Worlds
In 2012, the first pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) drugs, billed as a pill a day to prevent HIV, were authorized for use in the United States. Heralded as a…
Book Review: The Anthropology of Epidemics by Ann H. Kelly, Frédéric Keck and Christos Lynteris
In The Anthropology of Epidemics, editors Ann H. Kelly, Frédéric Keck and Christos Lynteris curate a collection that provides insight into how ethnographic studies of epidemics might challenge…
Defining Wellbeing: Tensions in the World Bank’s approach to Universal Health Coverage by Marlee Tichenor
Promotional materials from the global campaign to achieve Universal Health Coverage by the year 2030. Copyright UHC2030 – reproduced here under ‘fair use’ for academic purposes. “Health for…
Who Should Be Concerned? Zika as an Epidemic About Mosquitoes and Women (and some reflections on COVID-19) by Luísa Reis-Castro
For English click here. Quem deve se preocupar? Zika como uma Epidemia de Mosquitos e Mulheres (e algumas reflexões sobre o COVID-19) A nova epidemia de coronavírus, em…
Disasters and capitalism…and COVID-19. by Vincanne Adams
I recently participated in a radio talk show on the topic of disaster capitalism and the current COVID-19 pandemic. Is the COVID-19 pandemic a disaster? If it is, how…
Web Roundup: What Can the Coronavirus Outbreak Tell Us About Capitalism, White Supremacy, and Climate Change? by Anika Jugovic-Spajic
In December 2019, a new respiratory virus outbreak began in the Chinese city of Wuhan, Hubei Province. A new strain of coronavirus, designated COVID-2019, belongs to a large…
The Protective Dualism: Maternal Knowledge Practices of the Zika Crisis in Puerto Rico by Holly Horan
For Spanish click here. “So, we have had other mosquito-borne illnesses for a long time, like dengue and chikungunya, and now all of a sudden we should delay…
Against Forgetting: Telling Stories After Zika by Eliza Williamson
For English click here. Contra o Esquecimento: Contando Histórias após o Zika Dois anos atrás, em um aeroporto, enquanto esperava uma conexão, recebi uma mensagem de WhatsApp de uma…
The limits of medical heroism: reflections on Getting to Zero by Alice Street
Getting to Zero: A Doctor and a Diplomat on the Ebola Frontline By Sinead Walsh and Oliver Johnson Zed Books, 2018. 352 pages. It is midnight and my…
Andrew Lakoff’s Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency by Christos Lynteris
Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency Andrew Lakoff University of California Press, 2017. 240 pages. Let us be frank: it is hard to think preparedness…
The “Good-Enough Anthropologist” by Elizabeth Durham
“Where are all the anthropologists?” The question came from public health worker Douglas Hamilton on the first day of the Princeton-Fung Global Forum on Ebola, held in November…
Messianic Medicine: Treating Disease in the Time that is Left by Janina Kehr
In “The Time that Is Left”, Giorgio Agamben sketches the problem of messianic time. He writes that the messianic is “not the end of time, but the time…
Untimely Ends and the Pandemic Imaginary by Christos Lynteris
It was one of those typical late spring afternoons in Beijing, when the desert sand blowing from the North begins to give way to an electric atmosphere more…
Never Ending Stories: Narrating Frozen Evidence of Infectious Epidemics Past by Joanna Radin
Early Elegy: Smallpox by Claudia Emerson The world has certified itself rid of all but the argument: to eradicate or not the small stock of variola frozen, quarantined—a…
Where Has SARS Gone? The Strange Case of the Disappearing Coronavirus by Robert Peckham
The emergence of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in China’s Guangdong Province in the winter of 2002 was an exemplary spillover event: it marked the passage of a…
After the End of Disease: Rethinking the Epidemic Narrative by Dora Vargha
In conversations with people living with polio in Hungary, I often encountered members of the tight-knit community referring to themselves as “dinosaurs”. We are a breed that is…
Book Forum––Carlo Caduff’s The Pandemic Perhaps by Todd Meyers
Carlo Caduff’s The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger (University of California Press, 2015) is a story of the influenza pandemic that never…
Zika and Microcephaly: Can We Learn from History?
Aedes aegypti, the mosquito capable of transmitting the zika virus. Photo from Wikipedia. Brazil is facing an epidemic of a severe birth defect: microcephaly (abnormally small head size),…
The Financialization of Ebola by Susan L. Erikson
Original Ebola Virus Image by Frederick A. Murphy/CDC; downloaded November 3, 2015. Modification to image by Lukas Henne, November 3, 2015. Far away from the frontlines of the…
Epidemics, Xenophobia and the “Other” Fear Factor
Sharks, contaminated foods, polluted water, heat waves, droughts, floods, tsunamis, rising ocean levels, financial collapse, the police, radical Muslims, young African American men – we live in fearfu…
Epidemics and Xenophobia by A. David Napier
In June 2015 The Bellagio Task Force on Epidemics and Xenophobia met to discuss the resurgence of xenophobia across the globe—one most recently prompted by fearful and unsympathetic…