Updated: 220804
CV01. Protection: Hungry Rats, CV02. Humor: Hedley Tweets, CV03. Information: Medical Anthropology Weekly, CV06. Linguistics: Hunger-20, Grammar Nazi, CV06.1. Bengali Lockdown, CV15. Death: Venezuelan Body Collectors in Peru, CV15.1. Counting Instead of Mourning, CV16. Consequences, Social Change: What Does Mask Mean, CV16.1. Hidden Panic, CV23. Polemic, Nocuous: Fatal Metaphor, CV24. Norms: Pandemic Hegemony, CV28. Logistics: Lockdown Hunger in Africa, CV30. Methodology: Dangerous Participant Observation, Life Online, CV30.1. Accurate Forecast Blinders, Murphy's Laws of Social Science, China Pandemic Plan, CV31. Futuring: Zika Aftermath of CV
PDN Introduction, Glossary
CV01. Protection: Beware of ‘Aggressive’ Rats on the Hunt for Food During Coronavirus Pandemic, CDC Says. They are furry and they are furious – and they may be the most desperate of diners to yearn for restaurants to unlock from shutdown. CV26.
-A. MORE: CDC Warns of Aggressive Rats Scavenging for Food CV02. The Effect of Covid19 Pandemic Restrictions on an Urban Rodent Population. Rats and the Covid-19 Pandemic: Considering the Influence of Social Distancing on a Global Commensal Pest. ‘Rodents, Rodents, Rodents’: Experts Say Rat Population in Ct Is Increasing; Pandemic Conditions Sent Them to Homes. New York Rodents Thrive in Time of Covid. Australia’s Plague of Mice Is Devastating and Could Get a Lot Worse, drought and extreme rainfall led to an infestation in the nation’s farming areas. Mar 2022 It's Time to Talk about California's Rat Problem. May 2022 America's 50 Most Rat Infested Cities, Ranked.
-B. POST COLLECTIO: In Jul 2022 had a personal CV12 connection with this. My son who lives with his family in SoCal is one of the areas that is known for antivax and waves of Covid and heat, had a large enough rat population explosion in his neighborhood that rat turds cover areas and people are concerned about children being bitten.
CV02. Humor: Hedley Tweets [Strip] CV04.
CV03. Information: Medical Anthropology Weekly: Covid-19 – Issue 3. A weekly compilation of Covid-19 related focused on medical anthropology and neighboring disciplines.
-A. POST COLLECTIO: Aug 2022 reviewed this. Like news media academic journals tend to focus on what is getting attention (and possible grant funding) at the time. By this time most had stopped taking submissions or went off line. Still there are some interesting articles and if this is not closed down will be a time capsule of some aspects of Anthropology at the time of CV.
CV06. Linguistics: Covid-19 and HUNGER-20: Another Grammar Intervention CV28↓. Scores of people are of the opinion that if they don’t die of the pandemic, they just might ultimately succumb to the pangs of hunger. Unsurprisingly, this is not an appropriate time to enlighten anyone that “foodstuff” should be written as a single word, as opposed to two words (food stuff), the next question you are likely to hear is: “Will I get some from you after writing it as one word”.
-CV06.1. The Meaning of Lockdown in Bangladesh. Terms such as “lockdown,” “quarantine,” “social distancing,” and “isolation” became ubiquitous during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, these were not familiar to the people of many non Western countries like Bangladesh (30 languages, Bengali being official), and were often misunderstood or at least not understood accordingly. For Bangladeshi people, it should be “safe distance” or “physical distance” rather than social distance.
CV15. Death: As Virus Swamps Peru, Venezuelan Migrants Collect the Dead. 200505-CV23A. 200501-CV05A.
CV15.1. Covid-19 Death Trackers Replace National Mourning. Regular followers of this data long ago noticed the distinctive decline during weekends, when reporting is stalled or delayed as some offices close, then the rise in the early part of each new week – often peaking Wednesday or Thursday – before falling off again.
-A. Some of the nation’s leading brains study these numbers for what they reveal about our ongoing public health disaster. Epidemiologists look for hints of transmission dynamics. Demographers try to understand the scale of mortality. Political CV04 hacks look for data that can be weaponized in the coming campaigns.
CV16. Consequences, Social Change: What’s in a Mask. No matter the intensity of discourse about mask performance as a function of material, fit, and construction, it must be understood alongside mask performance as a sign of deference to social order. CV19. MORE: The Truth about Masks, [Cartoon].
CV16.1. Inner Panic During the Pandemic. I cannot describe the conditions of the Martian like PPE that we are required to use for our personal safety. Masks, as many of us know, are very difficult to breathe in and wearing glasses does not help because they fog up with each exhale. The gowns are incredibly stifling, and we must remember to stay hydrated. Washing hands is common health care practice, but after a 12 hour shift my hands are on fire and hurt from repeated scrubbing. The lack of PPE CV28 in many medical facilities adds to anxieties among health care workers. Staff are calling in absent from fear of catching the Coronavirus or passing it to a loved one at home but will taking the day off to prevent the spread of this virus help or are we just prolonging the inevitable. 201022-CV20.
-A. MORE: Jun 2022 Videos Show Chinese Covid Workers Allegedly Harassing and Beating Residents. Big Whites: A Nickname Shows Beijing’s Efforts to Sugar Coat its Pandemic Powers, Anger Erupts at Xi’s ‘Big White’ Army of Lockdown Enforcers, hazmat workers seen beating pets, locking people in homes. Public turn anger on Big Whites as Shanghai lockdown persists 201230-CV22.1B. Bio and Hazmat suits are scary as they imply lethal conditions. These become even scarier when they become iconic with anonymous faceless =2= =3= =4= =5= =6= =7= thugs imposing the will CV23 of gubergenic, secret organizations, symbols or Death CV15 and/or vigilantes.
CV23. Polemic, Nocuous: Acting Fatally on the Strength of the Martial Metaphor. It goes without saying that language is limited in its ability to reflect reality CV06. We seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something else, a metaphor. We all get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them. Metaphors do things in the world: they delimit as much as they expand; they make things thinkable and actionable, and vice versa; they have material histories that effect material consequences.
-A. A statement such as “Covid-19 is war and it needs a war time plan to fight it”, registers immediately for most individuals; it is a scaled up version of “giving you something to help your immune system fight off this sinus infection”. A metaphor becomes rhetoric becomes argument becomes logic and becomes naturalized to the point where we no longer think of it as metaphor, and we uncritically invite all the connotative and historical baggage it carries. A metaphor then becomes inseparable from the thinking itself, and we become “fated” to not being able tell the difference or even consider how we got here. This is certainly the kind of conceptual closure that the martial metaphor lends itself to. But it is not just a matter of figure; it is also fatal in a more literal sense – a metaphor we live, cure, and kill by.
-B. The continued uncritical use of the metaphor: The fact that it has been forgotten to be a metaphor, and that it has delimited other ways of imagining and experiencing health, disease, and medicine. The metaphor, then, has a number of discursive and material consequences. It enables xenophobic, racist rhetoric that incites violence and geographies of blame, where certain bodies’ movements are assumed dangerous while others are “presumed natural in the global order of things”. It lends itself to promoting eugenic thinking and eliding negative social determinants of health for marginalized populations. The metaphor can be used to justify coercive, unethical political actions under medical auspices, condoning states of exception in the logic of nationalism. It abets heroic measures in extremis. In terms of treatments and technology, the martial metaphor facilitates a tunnel vision, focusing on moments of medical crises and their singular technofixes – “magic bullets” or pharmacological “torpedoes” – rather than the structures that catalyze them. The metaphor was central to promoting the expanseless industrialization and over prescription of antibiotics, leading to resistance.
-C. ADDED: The Problem with Comparing Health Care Workers to Soldiers on Memorial Day.
CV24. Norms: It Could Happen Here. The hegemonic power of a pandemic then spills over to politics and economics and our everyday lives. Teachers, economists, business owners, politicians, bankers, workers, journalists, and the stories we tell all reoriented to the pandemic. We feed it with the attention and adaptation to our lives. The hegemony reaches every aspect of our lives long after lockdowns are lifted, until another threat comes along to counter it.
-A. Hegemonic power becomes an excuse for a lack of political agency. It is too unforeseen and all consuming for anything to be done differently. It is not the fault of the politician but forces beyond individual control. To which the answer is clear: viruses may not be socially constructed, but health emergencies are, they become hegemonic through a series of political decisions and agency. Viruses can be contained and controlled. The social and economic impact of pandemics can be anticipated and thus accounted and planned for. Politicians can do something. To suggest otherwise hides a myriad of truths and obscures the trauma of people who have lived through these experiences.
CV28. Logistics: Hunger-20: Covid-19 Logistics in West Africa. In Nigeria, as the lockdown began to bite, social media users began tweeting on the hashtag #hunger20 CV06↑. For West Africans, as for many people around the world, hunger closely shadowed the outbreak of Covid-19. While death rates in West Africa remain low, the virus is an abstract threat compared to the hunger that can so quickly overwhelm food insecure households. Hunger does not just force people out into the streets and into public transport, it underpins the rhythms, frequencies and intensities of interactions. Understanding this close relationship between eating, sociality and public risk, governments have rolled out food aid programmes, both to offer some basic protection to households that have lost their income and to enforce compliance with norms of social distancing. The distribution of food is beginning to play an important role in generating consent and in symbolically underlining the pastoral nature of epidemic control*. 201224-CV05.
-*A. Unsure what is meant by “Pastoral Care” CV06. Is it the relation of a religious leader or harder to their flock, protecting, but with the implication of being unable to care for themselves. The meaning was not clear from the provided reference, but the gist may be: When people receive food on regular basis, they are more willing to cooperate and engage. In some areas, medical response teams have been struggling to gain the trust and cooperation of local communities, who had felt abandoned during years of conflict. Food assistance makes communities more inclined to receiving medical care. When people receive food on regular basis, they are more willing to cooperate and engage in the vaccination process. The medical monitoring during distributions also creates a climate of trust and credibility.
-B. Hunger-20 or lockdown hunger may be a new experience that travels with novel, globally circulating arguments about entitlement and protection, but there is of course nothing unusual about hunger. One of the signal trends of the past five years is an increase in both chronic and acute hunger, linked to global insecurity, humanitarian crisis, and the rolling impacts of fluctuations in the price of food. In West Africa the pandemic is unfolding against the backdrop of a food crisis of exceptional magnitude, and people with expertise in the region’s history and politics have repeatedly warned that we need to understand Covid-19 locking together with existing vulnerability and to analyse vulnerability as the cumulative effect of concurrent crises CV21.
CV30. Methodology: Ethnographic Disruption in the Time of Covid-19. In recent decades, anthropologists have been thinking critically about non face to face encounters; in an era of increased internet connectivity the world over, debates around familiar anthropological concepts such as the public and the private have gained new currency. However, unless one’s ethnography is conducted only in and through the virtual world, much of ethnographic practice still heavily relies upon on the ground, in person encounters and observations. During a pandemic where we go when a fundamental aspect of doing anthropological research is no longer feasible, and we’re unsure of when and how it might resume. We are always treading the thin line between certainty and uncertainty by the sheer nature of our discipline, the uncertainty of the future has never been more stark.
-A. Back to the Future in Milan. Due to social distancing, people’s social lives have drastically moved online. Practices of care, communication, and group activities are now feasible (almost) only in the digital world through social media and video calls. In response to this new context, we reimagined our commitment to public anthropology by launching the blog The Right Distance (La Giusta Distanza*B): A small ethnographic observatory on isolation as a way to foster an anthropological debate on the effects of the Covid-19 outbreak. The success of the call for contributions has highlighted a wide-spread need to grasp the radical change that is under way. The medical emergency goes hand in hand with the urgency to collectively make sense of the sudden upside down turn of habits, expectations, and ways of connecting. Reflecting on the “pandemic present” also holds an orientation for the future.
-*B. The ability to translate foreign language articles on line is a boon for social research, but hinders actually learning the language and its modes of thought, i.e. perception, interpretation and meaning, from different cultural perspectives that may define problems, root causes and negative consequence differently.
-C. The problem of how to collect data in the middle of a disaster that could kill the observer is part of the genesis of parademic. With the problems of pandemic and extreme weather being more social than medical (the bioagent, trauma). Social were the consequences of events and problems that needed to be dealt with and have. Unfortunately, historical records are incomplete, infrequent, and were not sufficiently analogous to contemporary circumstances. The needed data for planning and preparation is not available. The answer was to conduct contemporary ethnography, demographic and area studies, informed by history of human behavior in nearly analogous circumstances. There was a problem though, how to collect data when it was not safe to do so. Remote ethnography, using observations done of others, taking advantage of the Internet, are a partial solution. Building a network of people to observe, collect, analyze and share information would be the optimal, but implementing that is unlikely.
-CV30.1. Missing the Revolution with Covid-19: On Hindsight and Ethnographic Expertise. If anyone should have seen this disaster coming, it should have been me. That I somehow did not, and further, that I publicly demonstrated this failure in International Overreaction to the Coronavirus Is More Dangerous than the Virus Itself, has been a source of embarrassment and confusion. As I hunkered down with my children, calmed my students, and hoarded my toilet paper, I kept asking myself: how could I have gotten it so wrong.
-A. I did get a lot right. I spoke out early and often about the xenophobia and blame that I was certain would emerge against China and Chinese people in the United States and Europe; I warned that cases of Coronavirus in Wuhan were heavily under reported and explained how the reporting of disease numbers at the local level in China actually worked; and I raised alarms that locking down massive numbers of people for an indefinite period of time would be catastrophic in ways we could not and would not entirely anticipate in advance. All of these things, unfortunately, did come to pass.
-B. And yet, I got one thing very, very wrong. I did not think the world needed to panic. I did not think that Covid-19 was the “Big One”. I thought that this outbreak would not be as bad as everyone at first feared. Somehow, in digging so deeply into the world of pandemic preparedness in China, I had missed the revolution. In hindsight this probably was due in large part to the commitment I had made over the years to counteracting Orientalizing and disparaging narratives about the emergence of viruses in China.
-C. The beginning of this outbreak followed a familiar pattern: a mysterious disease arises in China. Scientists raise the alarm that this could be the Big One. The threatened apocalypse is blamed on Chinese people’s supposedly unnatural and irresponsible habit of consuming wild animals. Accusations of a cover up merge with demands for China to utilize its authoritarian powers to contain the virus before it “escapes” China and spreads to other countries. Xenophobic reactions in Western countries target Asians and Asian Americans. I questioned why the media reported with such glee on grotesque imagery from Chinese wet markets. And I had refused to blame the public health professionals I had gotten to know in China for occasionally failing to keep China’s germs to itself. So I drew conclusions that I should not have drawn.
-D. Murphy's Laws: 4) If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. 4A) If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then. 4B) Stewart's Corollary to Murphy's Law: Murphy's Law may be delayed or suspended for an indefinite period of time, provided that such delay or suspension will result in a greater catastrophe at a later date. 5) If anything simply cannot go wrong, it will anyway. 6) If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which a procedure can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop. 7) Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse. 8) If everything seems to be going well, you have overlooked something. 9) Nature always sides with the hidden flaw. 9A) Mother nature is a bitch. 11) It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious. 13) Every solution breeds new problems. 14) If anything can't go wrong on its own, someone will make it go wrong.
-E. China Publishes Plan for Dealing With Future Pandemics. Appears to focus on early warning and grater surge capacity, something that should be done in other countries and internationally.
CV31. Futuring: What Comes After Covid-19. Much has been said about the effects of Covid-19 itself on bodies, populations, and health systems, but we are only beginning to think through the impacts of the response. The lockdowns and near economic standstill that characterize the “full stop” will have aftershocks for years to come, and those aftershocks will surely, not to say inevitably, be unevenly distributed. What comes after – not Covid – but the Zika virus (ZIKV) and children with Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome (CZVS) CV21.
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