In the Journals – Prisons and Pandemics
Prisoners’ Round by Vincent Van Gogh via wikimedia Welcome back to In the Journals! My name is Ally, I am a graduate student beginning a Master’s in Anthropology at…
Tag: pandemic
Pandemic Time by Barclay Bram
I was sitting at my computer when we got the call. My father in his chair, my mother on the sofa. Two days earlier we had found out…
Caring in the times of Corona
PARAS ARORA How does one write about social isolation, mental health issues, and care work-induced fatigue in a local context already scarred with abandonment, loneliness and chronic caregiving?…
Ten Film Scenes Every Stay-At-Home Cinephile Should Know
Ted Gideonse is a medical anthropologist who studies the effects of public health discourses about HIV and drugs. As people with more than a passing understanding of biology…
Imagining Rural Immunity
Political myth-making about America’s rural “heartland” is doubly pernicious, increasing rural vulnerability to COVID-19 and ignoring the disintegration of rural health services. In March 2020, Fair…
How to Start a Meditation Practice
I came to meditation because my brain is always running. The part of an academic’s job that requires me to think and theorize sometimes grows much larger than the…
Saving Anthropology from COVID-19
Higher education is at a crossroads. Can we adapt to the ongoing challenges and create transformative educational courses for an uncertain future? As colleges and universities started shutting…
Sign Languages as Disaster Entertainment
Sign language interpreters have become social media celebrities of our coronavirus moment. But signing is not a form of light entertainment; it should be lifesaving information. Dutch health…
The Funny Wrath of Italy’s Viral Mayors
In March 2020, a video of Italian mayors scolding citizens for failing to stay at home went viral. Only ostensibly insignificant, these clickable white men reveal new forms…
Coloring for Anthropologists
Get creative with our coloring page produced in collaboration with March Mammal Madness. Image description: A gorilla stands in mid-stride. Charon Henning March Mammal Madness is a bracket-based tourn…
Social Inequality in Times of Pandemics
We should not expect COVID-19 to behave in the same way as historical pandemics of plague. But both show how inequalities exacerbate mortality outcomes. It’s a gorgeous, warm…
On Living through Plagues and Wars in Lebanon
In much of the Global North COVID-19 is wreaking existential havoc. For the war-seasoned Lebanese in the throes of an economic meltdown and ongoing protests, it is yet…
Engaging the Pandemic
How one medical anthropologist is boosting our capacity to understand and contend with COVID-19. In late February 2020, I traveled back to the United States from India and…
The Pandemic: Indigenous Perspectives on Survival, Adaptation, Rebuilding, and Preparedness
Statement released by Chief Ricardo Bharath Hernandez, Santa Rosa First Peoples Community, Arima, Trinidad & Tobago, June 16, 2020. As Amerindians/Indigenous Peoples in the Caribbean, we are hist…
Mao Mollona: Fully Exterminated Communism, or Anthropology in the Time of Cholera
Mao Mollona, Goldsmiths College, London One thing is sure. If just briefly, the pandemic struck at the heart of capitalism. It paralysed the economy, broke the bureaucratic machine…
Pandemic Ruminations
Pamela Runestad Allegheny College Now that courses have come to an end, I’ve had time to breathe a little. I have been able to mourn some of the…
Practices, knowledge, and the next pandemic: a lesson from a failed participatory public health intervention by Alejandro Cerón
My time doing public health work in Guatemala in the 1990s and early 2000s has shaped how I think about emergencies. Working for an underresourced health system, my…
Don Kalb: Covid, Crisis, and the Coming Contestations
Don Kalb, University of Bergen At some point in late January I told my family over WhatsApp with the Marxist bluster they usually enjoy from me that if…
Medical anthropology weekly: COVID-19 – Issue 3 by Eugene Raikhel
May 13 -19, 2020 “Medical anthropology weekly: COVID-19” is a weekly compilation of COVID-19-related materials across text, audio, and video formats focused on medical anthropology and neighboring…
Long Read Review: Avian Reservoirs: Virus Hunters and Birdwatchers in Chinese Sentinel Posts by Frédéric Keck
In Avian Reservoirs: Virus Hunters and Birdwatchers in Chinese Sentinel Posts, Frédéric Keck offers a new ethnographic study of how human and animal relations are being reshaped in…
Go Suppress Yourself | A Chronicle by Anthony Stavrianakis
In December 2019, reports emerged of a pneumonia of unknown origin in the city of Wuhan, China. A week into 2020, a novel pathogen was identified–– “severe acute…
Medical anthropology weekly: COVID-19 – Issue 2 by Eugene Raikhel
May 5 -12, 2020 “Medical anthropology weekly: COVID-19” is a weekly compilation of COVID-19-related materials across text, audio, and video formats focused on medical anthropology and neighboring …
COVID-19 Forum III – Introduction by Christos Lynteris
Thirty-eight days have passed since the publication of Somatosphere’s COVID-19 Forum II. In the course of these days the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 across the globe…
“La gente tiene que comer”: Food and COVID-19
Lisa Grabinsky Oregon State University “La gente tiene que comer.” (“People have to eat”), my mother replied when I decided to study Nutrition and Food Science, believing that…