key: cord-0067634-ewzts2hc
authors: Patnaik, Soumendra Mohan
title: Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic
date: 2021-06-12
journal: Am Anthropol
DOI: 10.1111/aman.13582
sha: 1edaf798a332d2284299d9c702b97e31c2005ff2
doc_id: 67634
cord_uid: ewzts2hc

nan

International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences' (IUAES) vision of anthropology visible. As regular readers of this section know, I do not just include anthropologists from the "Global South," nor do I systematically exclude anthropologists from the United States, the United Kingdom, or France. Both the WCAA and the IUAES include anthropologists from many different parts of the world, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. I just do not privilege anthropologists from certain countries over other countries.

We also do not privilege English as a matter of course. I accept manuscripts in languages other than English and then translate them for inclusion in the journal. I admit that the section still privileges English more than I would like, and I hope this will change in due time, but we live in a moment when English often functions as the lingua franca of intellectuals and scientists around the world, and we also need to acknowledge that, for many readers of the journal, English works as a language they can read, even if they do not feel they can write it well.

I cannot end these comments without acknowledging the wisdom and efficiency of my closest collaborator. It has simply been a godsend to work with Emily Metzner all these years, both while she was still a student and in her years since completing her doctorate. As hundreds of anthropologists around the world know, Emily is thoughtful, insightful, knowledgeable, respectful, and efficient as a copyeditor but also as a correspondent, and I know I would have stepped down from these duties had she had not been willing to continue. That she recently got elected to serve the interests of world anthropologists on the AAA committee that now includes representatives of many sorts is a testament to her dedication and the respect many anthropologists have for her both inside and outside the United States.

In this issue, this section offers perspectives on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on anthropology and anthropologists in many different countries. In early December 2020, I invited about two dozen anthropologists (of a variety of sorts) around the world to answer four questions I posed, and this issue includes the answers of the many who responded by mid-late January 2020. I should have done this earlier, at least for the December 2020 issue, but who knew how long we'd experience the pandemic nor what it would do to us and to many others? As the months went by and most of us doing university teaching switched to online teaching, it became clear that the pandemic would last, that sectors of many populations would be seriously affected, that anthropological fieldwork could not continue in its usual face-toface ways, and that we needed to be innovative and flexible, including with our funded projects and those of our students.

I admit that it took us a while to think of the pandemic itself as a theme for a World Anthropologies section, but I am glad we finally did and that it is included here in my final section of AA. Response has been terrific. Every continent is included here, except for Antarctica. Obviously not every country is represented here, but many are: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Israel, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Portugal, Serbia, Sweden, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. Clearly the pandemic has been tragic here in the United States and in quite a few countries around the world, though interestingly not all. Infections, hospitalizations, intubations, deaths, lockdowns, openings and closings, lockdown fatigue, uneven testing, accusations, unemployment, an increase in domestic violence and mental illness, and differential access to the vaccines (which were developed much faster than most people expected) are among the most obvious reasons to call this a tragedy, but it is clear that most anthropologists have been affected personally in a variety of ways and that anthropologists have used their skills and training as anthropologists to spot issues less noted (or at least less stressed) by our many governments and journalists.

It is those issues that I want readers to spot in the comments of so many of our contributors here. Many colleagues are more concerned with inequality, poverty, and other social fractures than with the impact of the pandemic on themselves. Some note that they worry about their students' learning, training, research, and future. Some note that the impact of the pandemic on the poor, the marginal, and the less powerful has been especially bad. Most do not blame the pandemic on any country or anyone, though some blame governments and capitalism for the handling of the pandemic, the testing, and the distribution of resources, including access to medical treatment and to vaccines. Some worry about new forms of governmental power that may be emerging from the pandemic and some about resistance to public health measures brought on by denialism and conspiracy theories. Some wonder about the future of anthropology while simultaneously pointing out some things that anthropology helps them see about the pandemic. Is this the end of fieldwork as we know it? Is anthropology going to have to develop its digital presence more now than ever? Is anthropology having to rethink itself, rethink its value, rethink research, and rethink teaching and training? My guess is that we will. In fact, many of us are doing so already, and my hope is that in rethinking we will move the discipline toward more equitable politics of knowledge production among our colleagues around the world and with the peoples who allow us to study them. I am located in Nigeria, a populous West African country that counts more than four hundred ethnic groups distributed unevenly among its thirty-six states. Initially the COVID-19 situation was not too bad here. Locals even scorned the pandemic as an oyibo disease, "oyibo" meaning "non-African" in Nigerian Pidgin and in Igbo. Four months after the disease had been reported in Wuhan, China, Nigeria had less than five hundred cases among its population of two hundred million people. Nigeria's index case occurred in February 2020, after a European traveling from Italy tested positive here. Soon afterwards the problem snowballed. The president, Muhammadu Buhari, lost his chief of staff, Abba Kyari, to the disease. Kyari had returned from Europe when * https://www.unn.edu.ng/internals/staff/viewProfile/MTUz he came down with the bug. Something approaching panic followed. Eventually nearly all thirty-six states were shut down. In several cases overzealous policemen gunned down those who tried to disobey the order for restricted movement. All schools were closed, as were marketplaces and places of worship. It was difficult to imagine such a scenario in a place where around 98 percent of the population depends on marketplaces for their daily needs. Oyibo-style shops are still few and far between, but even those were also closed. Religious activities are very important here. Experiencing the first peacetime closure of places of worship was previously unthinkable.

Question #2: How has the pandemic affected you, your family, the institution where you work, and your work as an anthropologist?

Low-to middle-cadre bureaucrats in the public sector were mandatorily furloughed. For purposes of this temporary stoppage of work, university workers were considered public-sector workers. This was an enormous challenge for universities, including mine. Students both at the postgraduate and undergraduate levels were ordered to go home.

So far, no member of my family has caught the disease, but an experience that I had trying to help my elderly mother will always remain in my memory. My university is in Nsukka, Enugu State, about 190 kilometers away from my hometown, Okposi, in Ebonyi state. Before the lockdown I would visit the old woman every now and again, especially since traditional social solidarity is no longer as strong as it once was and social services are still rudimentary (Ajibo 2020). My aged mother's food stock ran out. She was facing death from starvation. But at the Ebonyi state boundary, the police would not allow me to pass. After a complex negotiation, I accepted the Hobson's choice of leaving the supply with the police and arranging to have a cousin collect it and deliver it to my mother.

As an anthropologist, the lockdown was an opportunity to catch up on my reading. I took part in online meetings at local and international levels. The Ethnological and Anthropological Society of Nigeria had never held an online meeting previously, but the lockdown compelled us to learn how to do so. I had been scheduled to give a talk at a university in Belgium and to participate in the viva voce (the defense, in the United States) of a PhD candidate in anthropology there. The trip was canceled and both events were held online instead. I was able as well to round off a chapter for a book edited by a Japanese colleague on interethnic conflicts in Africa. No. However, the rapidity with which new viral pathogens emerge these days calls for studies. In the last four decades there have been more than ten epidemics linked to new viruses. This seems like too many, too quickly. Using anthropological knowledge to help in organizing medical assistance is necessary but not enough (Leach 2019). Anthropological methods ought also to be used in investigating the suspicions that some of these viruses are the results of research gone wrong or of deliberately abuse.

Question #4: Are there aspects of the pandemic that anthropology helps you see?

Yes. It seems that racial and ethnic tensions are always present whenever more than one human group interact. It seems also that affective approaches to intergroup relations (like ethnocentrism) usually make understanding our common needs more challenging. When a team of fifteen Chinese medical workers arrived in Nigeria in April 2020, they met an unfriendly public who accused China of inventing the virus in the first place, and of discriminating against Africans that were resident in the Asian nation. While the Chinese authorities were said to have accused the Africans of being purveyors of the disease, the Nigerians accused the Chinese of the same act. In Argentina, the first news about the new SARS COVID-19 virus was released in the months of January and February 2020. A few days after the declaration of the pandemic by the World Health Organization (March 11), the Argentine national government established social, preventive, and mandatory isolation (ASPO in Spanish) to contain the spread of the virus in the country. This implied the closure of all activi-ties in person, except those considered essential. The ASPO managed to contain the advance of the virus, giving the government time to reinforce the health system that was in a very precarious situation, especially after Mauricio Macri's outgoing right-wing government demoted the Ministry of Health of the Nation to a government secretariat. In the first stage of the pandemic, which lasted most of 2020, the most affected area was the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires (AMBA), which includes the capital city and the Conurbano bonaerense (densely populated areas around and up to 40 km from the capital city), where I live and work. The COVID rebound or outbreak that we are currently going through, however, is distributed throughout almost the entire country.

Question #2: How has the pandemic affected you, your family, the institution where you work, and your work as an anthropologist?

Some of the first face-to-face activities that were suspended were classes, from kindergarten to higher education. This clearly affected the family dynamics of millions of Argentines, among whom I find myself, and the work dynamics of others, also myself included. The classes in the National Universities in which I work as a lecturer were virtualized from one day to the next. The ASPO was declared on Sunday, March 15, and on Monday the 16th we had to teach via virtual campus. Forced virtualization is a challenge for any university, even those whose student bodies have the socioeconomic resources to meet the challenge. But for others, whose students come from sectors that do not have those resources, it can be a great obstacle. So virtualization demanded a lot of creativity from teachers and from students. The possibility of continuing with anthropological fieldwork was also affected, although in cases where the field was already defined and ongoing, it was possible to continue by appealing to social networks and virtual platforms. Again, imagination and creativity were brought into play. I don't know if "blame" is the word, but I do understand that there are responsibilities. The complex of animal-industrial breeding with the consequent destruction of the natural habitat of wild animals-typical of the capitalist production system-leads them to become vectors of potentially deadly viruses that can proliferate among human beings. Argentina is on alert at present about the possibility of the arrival of Chinese investments in industrial pig farms for the exportation of pork back to China. I consider this within the framework of the advance of the agricultural frontier, the use and abuse of fertilizers and pesticides, and water contamination, all of which causes the destruction of the environment with a negative impact on the lives of millions. And all of these are consequences of the mechanisms of the capitalist system. Question #4: Are there aspects of the pandemic that anthropology helps you see?

Anthropology, from its very own definition, allows us to seek or generate explanations that go beyond common sense, including scientific, academic, and disciplinary common sense. It also enables amazement at the everyday. During the pandemic and ASPO, the everyday mutated, the "normal" was reconfigured. However, this reconfiguration responded to deeply rooted structures in our societies.

In Argentina, although the coronavirus "arrived" with those who traveled abroad for vacations (middle and upper classes), social panic at the possibility of an increase in infections was built around the popular sectors, constituted not only by the most poor, but also by the "brown" people. Built upon the myth of "white Argentina," this country blames those who, due to skin color, customs, roots, income, and cultural consumption, do not reach the ideal of the purportedly white nation for all its ills, including the pandemic.

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Question 1: Where are you located, and how bad is, or was, the pandemic in your location, region, or country? I count myself lucky to be have spent 2020 in Taiwan, where I have lived and worked for the past fifteen years. Taiwan has roughly the same population as Florida, but only had 834 COVID-19 cases and seven deaths in 2020 compared to Florida's over 1.5 million cases and 23,226 deaths (The New York Times 2021). As of this writing, Florida is still reporting nearly sixteen thousand cases a day, whereas the big news in Taiwan is that a doctor working with COVID patients got sick and transmitted the disease to a nurse who lives with him, thus marking one of only two recorded cases of local coronavirus transmission since April. The government made the announcement after having already tested all 464 contacts the couple had made since they had first got-ten sick (Chang, Yeh, and Mazzetta 2021) . All of them were negative. That the government was able to leverage personal information such as cell tower signals, traffic cameras, credit card data, and CCTV camera footage to trace the contacts made by the two infected individuals is something that people in other nations might not feel comfortable with, but most Taiwanese consider it a small price to pay (Schee 2021) . As a result of these measures, as well as widespread mask wearing and a mandatory fourteen-day quarantine for new arrivals, life in Taiwan has been essentially normal for most of the past year.

Question 2: How has the pandemic affected you, your family, the institution where you work, and your work as an anthropologist?

In Taiwan we have face-to-face classes, eat in restaurants with friends, go to crowded bars, and work out at the gym. Classes were delayed for two weeks at the start of the spring 2020 semester while new policies were put in place. These included daily disinfection of classrooms, socially distanced seating, taking photographs of student seating arrangements each day (to facilitate contact tracing if anyone got sick), and leaving windows open while also turning on fans and air conditioning to encourage ventilation. (Thanks to Japanese research on the topic, Taiwan was aware months before the United States of the risks of aerosol transmission.) Mask use was normal in the classroom before the pandemic, so it was no big deal to ask everyone to wear a mask.

With classes everywhere else going online, Taiwan attracted a sizable population of academics who realized early that if they were going to be taking or teaching classes online anyway, life would be much more comfortable in Taiwan. These are mostly members of the Taiwanese diaspora and their families, most of whom have family here that they normally only see for the holidays. As lucky as we are to be living in this COVID-free bubble, however, it has also been frustrating to watch family and friends struggle from afar, and to be unable to provide the kind of support we would have liked to give them. This has caused us a tremendous amount of stress and anxiety.

It has also been frustrating to watch the rest of the world screw up their response so badly. So many treat the disease as a fait accompli akin to a natural disaster or an act of god. Knowing it doesn't have to be this way has made it especially maddening. Yet I have seen people dismiss the successful public health measures Taiwan has implemented by attributing our success to "Confucian values." Is COVID-free New Zealand a Confucian society? Others point out that Taiwan is an island. What about Vietnam (which isn't an island but did well), or Great Britain (which is, but still did poorly)? Still others attribute it to "authoritarianism," perhaps not realizing that Taiwan is one of the world's most vibrant democracies.

If there is a single reason why Taiwan's government has handled COVID-19 so well in 2020, it is perhaps because it had handled the SARS epidemic so badly in 2003. The man who was Taiwan's vice-president when COVID-19 broke out (he has since gone back to civilian life) is a leading epidemiologist who had firsthand experience fighting SARS and had personally helped craft Taiwan's pandemic-response playbook. The entire country remembered the Hoping Hospital incident when, in a desperate effort to contain the SARS virus, the government sealed one thousand people inside the hospital, resulting in thirty-one deaths (one by suicide) (Cheung 2020) . Ironically, it was America's expertise to which Taiwan turned to after that horrible experience. But then in 2018 Trump disbanded the widely respected National Security Council pandemic-response unit, and, in 2020, his White House ignored the playbook created by that unit (Lippman 2020; Riechmann 2020) . Taiwan gives us a glimpse at what life could have been like if America had listened to its own experts.

Question 4: Are there aspects of the pandemic that anthropology helps you see?

Taiwan's exemplary response to the pandemic does not mean that the pandemic here has been free of politics, and my research on Taiwanese nationalism and identity politics has made me particularly sensitive to these issues. What is unusual is that the politicization of disease may have worked in Taiwan's favor. Distrust of official reports coming out of China (and of the WHO, which excludes Taiwan), led Taiwan to take swifter action than many other countries, and it is likely that those few weeks made a huge difference in controlling the pandemic. But it has also meant that foreign workers, many of whom are from Southeast Asia, have been disproportionately affected by the disease. One worker was fined more than four times the average monthly wage for having violated his quarantine for eight seconds in an empty corridor (Hioe 2020)! Nor is Taiwan free of conspiracy theories. One older woman I know from the dog park-a critic of the ruling party-was explaining to me that the disease was actually widespread in Taiwan. When I asked her why nobody was dying, she told me that it was because the Taiwanese diet gave people natural protection. To its credit, the government has been swift to respond to misinformation with the deft use of humor and even internet memes-a practice that was initially implemented to respond to foreign-sponsored online disinformation campaigns during the last election, long before the start of the pandemic. 

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Question #1: Where are you located, and how bad is, or was, the pandemic in your location, region, or country?

Although I have an adjunct position at the University of Indonesia, I have been living in Malaysia during the pandemic. Malaysia had managed to stay on top of the first two virus waves that hit the country by imposing a series of partial lockdowns. However, a severe third wave has spread from the epicenter of the Borneo state of Sabah, and since October 2020, Malaysia has been struggling to break the chain of transmission despite ongoing lockdowns. By the end of 2020, confirmed cases nationwide crossed the 100,000 mark, with a death rate of 0.4 percent of total cases. I have been fortunate living in Georgetown, Penang, as it has fewer cases than other states, although it also recorded its highest increase in daily cases during the third wave. As elsewhere, this pandemic is at once a public health calamity and a social-economic crisis in Malaysia. With over two million documented migrant workers (undocumented numbers remain unknown) in the construction and agriculture and plantation sectors, the pandemic has cast a harsh light on inequalities between citizens and migrants. As overcrowded migrant workers' dormitories, construction sites, and immigration detention depots become hotbeds of infections in this pandemic, Malaysians have displayed the full spectrum of attitudes towards migrants, with those who vilify as well as those who step up to help foreign workers.

Question #2: How has the pandemic affected you, your family, the institution where you work, and your work as an anthropologist?

Since I am retired, I have been less affected than many. Only my collaborative projects with the University of Indonesia have been affected. Nonetheless, Zoom has facilitated some level of virtual academic exchange with Indonesian colleagues and students. Other than that, together with my spouse, who is also retired, we have spent this year mostly in self-isolation at home. Email and social media have become our main vehicles for keeping in touch with family and friends. Blame often shifts responsibility and accountability to others. The only way we can safely exit this pandemic, and better cope with the next, is if the burden of responsibility and accountability is taken both collectively and individually. Collectively, all countries, from the strongest/richest to the weakest/poorest, should recognize that they can only better protect their citizens' health and economies by embracing international cooperation rather than prioritizing nationalist interests. An integrated global system of pandemic prevention, warning, research, and response is needed to better prepare for the future. Individually, we all need to learn that our actions have consequences for others. We need to learn that self-protection alone will not guarantee our preservation, but collective protection will. Even with vaccines, if the virus is not eradicated in all corners of the world, the risk of infection remains for everyone in the world, no matter who we are and where we live.

Question #4: Are there aspects of the pandemic that anthropology helps you see?

In recent years, I have been interested in anthropological and critical debates on alternative ethical imaginaries for forging a more equitable, convivial, and sustainable human future. And I have urged that these ethical imaginaries require us to rethink cultural differences in interdependent, mutual, and complementary terms. To me, the virus has laid bare the inextricable web of human interdependency to which we have not been privy, at least in a fully conscious way. That we have all to varying degrees been made housebound by a global pandemic, and that the level of risk in our immediate neighborhoods is intricately and inextricably linked to the rate of virus spread not just within our own countries but also everywhere in the world, only brings home the interwoven nature of human lives and physical environments. The intimate lattice of human mutuality revealed by this pandemic should inspire us to look for complementarity and affinity across seemingly disparate, even warring and/or unrelated worlds, to expand possibilities for a more inclusive, amiable, and viable human future.

Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada Question #1: Where are you located, and how bad is, or was, the pandemic in your location, region, or country?

Canada went into lockdown on March 19, 2020, announcing wide economic and financial support programs. Only essential services were open; the streets were empty. Phased reopenings began in late April 2020, but cases began rising as predicted when autumn brought people indoors. On January 14, 2021, when the death toll worldwide passed two million, more than 689,000 Canadians had been infected with SARS-Cov-2, and Canada ranked fifty-third in worldwide COVID mortalities, with 17,500 deaths in a population of nearly thirty-eight million. Provincial medical officers of health determine when infection rates warrant limitations to the operation of businesses, schools, restaurants, bars, and gyms. In Toronto, racialized groups have higher rates; in Alberta, meatpacking plants with a large migrant workforce were most heavily affected. Indigenous communities with poor infrastructure and overcrowded housing have been particularly vulnerable. The Atlantic East Coast, with a population of 2.44 million people, has been relatively spared, with eighty-one deaths to date. In Nova Scotia, where I live, sixtyfive people have died, mostly seniors living in long-term and residential care facilities. The national disgrace is that some 80 percent of all COVID-19 deaths have been among elderly Canadians in congregate residential care. Conditions in those facilities got so bad that the army was called in to assist with their day-to-day operations. Quebec, Alberta, and Ontario have had much higher rates of COVID and less success in tracing community infections. Almost all infections in the East Coast area are related to travel from other provinces. An "Atlantic bubble" created on July 3, 2020, requires travelers to socially isolate for two weeks upon arrival. Air, train, and bus transportation have significantly declined in this region.

Question #2: How has the pandemic affected you, your family, the institution where you work, and your work as an anthropologist?

Used to traveling for work and pleasure, I mostly explored my neighborhood and went hiking within an hour's drive. My family is 1,500 km away, outside the Atlantic bubble. I saw them in the early fall and had to quarantine for two weeks when I returned home. Those fortunate to be employed full-time, for example, by government and universities, work from home. Office buildings sit empty, replaced by countless Zoom meetings. Stores and service work continue, with mandatory masking, social distancing, and crowd avoidance rules. Household gatherings are currently restricted from five to ten people within the same social bubble, depending on the region. A few US-inspired protests for individual "freedoms" occurred in the West and Ontario, but public health practices remain respected by most. I make daily excursions outside to walk, hike, row, and now cross-country ski with friends. As a medical anthropologist studying vaccine development, work has been endless; rapid-research funding calls, working-group meetings, webinars, writing, analyzing, trying to stay current while a ship is being built at sea. What we thought yesterday is incorrect today. An emerging cadre of experts is designing the new normal that will prepare us for future pandemics.

Forty years of market fundamentalism have fractured, hollowed out, and privatized public health worldwide. Governments abandoned their commitment to pandemic preparedness after the first SARS pandemic in 2002-2004. They ignored the International Health Regulations that 192 member states agreed upon in 2005 "to prevent, protect against, control, and provide a public health response to the international spread of disease in ways that are commensurate with and restricted to public health risks and that avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade." Unfettered capitalism, including the climate change it has wrought, created the tinder that COVID has ignited.

Question #4: Are there aspects of the pandemic that anthropology helps you see?

Anthropology provides the conceptual tools and real-world evidence to engage locally with the complex biological, historical, social, and economic elements of a global pandemic. Structural conditions and community cultural values differentiate between health systems that protect or neglect. Worldwide, anthropologists are being deployed to engage with communities in the broadest sense across expert and civil societies in correcting the pervasive structural, social, biological, and economic inequities; such has always been the work of anthropologists. SARS-Cov-2 is not an equal-opportunity disease. Emergent anthropological approaches are best suited to recognize these holes in existing structures and through applying meaningful local ecological knowledges, to build post-pandemic paths forward.

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Stockholm University, Sweden

Question #1: Where are you located, and how bad is, or was, the pandemic in your location, region, or country?

My country, Sweden, has had more cases than neighboring countries, leading to some bad international publicity and to worried messages from colleagues elsewhere asking how I was doing. This seems to have had much to do with the decentralized organization of the welfare state, with complicated decision-making and uneven distribution of expertise. Many of the early deaths were in homes for the aged, which of course had many inhabitants already in poor health, and some staff who may themselves have carried the virus. In an early phase, there were notably many deaths among elderly Somali refugees in one outlying Stockholm suburb, long the point of arrival of transnational migrants. Public information had probably not reached them well, and their families were in overcrowded apartments-not much chance of distancing there. The Swedish-Somali Medical Society was quick in drawing attention to this-and I was pleased to find that there was such an organization and that some members of the community are evidently leading successful careers in Sweden.

Question #2: How has the pandemic affected you, your family, the institution where you work, and your work as an anthropologist?

Since I am retired, I was less affected than many. I spent half the year in a village in Skåne, the southernmost province, where I have family roots, and I could hardly have been safer anywhere. On my walks on village roads and paths, I would often meet only wild ducks in pairs and trios. Back in Stockholm for the winter half of the year, in an inner-city neighborhood, my life is pedestrian, as unnecessary use of public transport is discouraged due to the pandemic. My spouse, an anthropology professor at Stockholm University, has been doing all her teaching digitally. I guess the campus, on the outskirts, is pretty much a ghost town. It has been a year mostly without conferences. In the spring, the annual meeting of the Swedish Anthropological Association took the form of a minimal Internet encounter. The biennial meeting of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), which should have taken place in Lisbon, worked out remarkably well on the net, with some 1,800 participants. And then the AAA meeting in St. Louis was canceled. Had I had the chance to go, it would have been my first visit to that city since 1973, when I was there for a side event of the world congress of anthropology in Chicago that summer.

It has been very satisfying to maintain email contacts with friends and colleagues all over the world, mostly in reasonably comfortable circumstances, adapting in similar ways, waiting for a vaccine-perhaps finding a bit more time to read.

My sense is that things first went wrong in Hunan; in the center-periphery order of an authoritarian state, local authorities were anxious not to displease Beijing, so time was lost. Then following US news on CNN, devoted in equal parts to the pandemic and the presidential election campaign and its aftermath, I could see that the American situation was worse than in many countries. I learned that Donald Trump had been aware of upcoming risks quite early, but did not want to raise a public awareness that would be "bad for business"-I suppose the pandemic dramatized to Americans what kind of president they had. But again, decentralized government played a part here as well. And apart from that, a great many ordinary people, in the United States, in Sweden, and elsewhere, should not have taken the easygoing attitude that "it won't happen to me." Question #4: Are there aspects of the pandemic that anthropology helps you see?

I have long been inclined to network thinking, since its beginnings in anthropology. It seems useful in understanding the social aspects of the pandemic in many ways. As network concepts spread to other disciplines half a century ago, one of the early classics became an article by the sociologist Mark Granovetter on "the strength of weak ties." This is the idea that you can reach a lot of people in a few steps, if you are in touch with people of many kinds who are also in touch with people of many kinds. You can make leaps between groups. In the pandemic, I suppose we are seeing "the weakness of weak ties." With that kind of network of weak ties, there may be a greater risk that the virus reaches you. Generally, that would seem to make cities riskier places, with their concentrations of diversity. More specifically, it shows how people in service occupations are vulnerable, with their brief face-to-face contacts with a great many people of all kinds.

James Cook University, Australia Question #1: Where are you located, and how bad is, or was, the pandemic in your location, region, or country?

Comparatively speaking, I feel I am living in paradise. The city of Cairns in the tropical north of Australia, where I live and work, to date has had no deaths at all from COVID-19. We have had only fifty-five recorded cases in our region. Yet, in spite of these low numbers, the pandemic has been at the forefront of our lives, impacting work conditions, employment prospects, and social relations. As we increasingly went online, social media began to dominate our lives. On the one hand, social media is a truly wonderful way to keep in touch with family and friends, while on the other hand, it has torn people apart. Conspiracy theories have spread faster than the virus, and friendships have disintegrated due to conflicts about who to blame for the pandemic and what to do about it, based on research individuals conduct via their social media bubbles. Anyone and no one can lay claim to expertise.

Question #2: How has the pandemic affected you, your family, the institution where you work, and your work as an anthropologist?

Since March 2020, when my institution ordered all staff to work from home, my colleagues and I have been on a steep learning curve, making ourselves proficient in the use of technologies to assist the delivery of our online lectures, tutorials, workshops, and seminars. Initially we rose to the challenge and worked collaboratively in good faith, but after a while some began to suspect that the virus was being used as an excuse to implement permanent changes to our working conditions that would not be acceptable outside of pandemic conditions. At the same time as staff were working above and beyond the call of duty and making personal sacrifices to ensure obligations to our students were met during this crisis situation, a new workload model was developed and pushed forward-a model that is suspected to result in the reduction of teaching positions (and therefore job opportunities for graduate students and early career academics). One of the first casualties of the pandemic has been "the precariat"-staff who rely for their survival on casual teaching or research work. Such staff are easily terminated because they do not have the safety net of continuing contracts, but staff in continuing positions are also vulnerable. A culture of fear is pervasive among academics across the coun-try that there will be further redundancies in our sector in 2021.

My work as an academic (teaching and research) anthropologist has been impacted in that I am not able to teach face to face in a way that I consider essential to turn out a future generation of anthropologists. In terms of my research, I am currently unable to do any fieldwork. Additionally, I cannot take my students to Papua New Guinea for the ethnographic field school that I used to run there. Travel restrictions and the risk of virus transmission have made the field school impossible. At the same time, I worry for our current crop of doctoral students who are not able to do the fieldwork projects they had originally planned. Some of them were precipitously recalled from the field last year and have had to adapt their projects.

Question #3: Do you blame anyone for the pandemic, and, if so, who or what, and why? I do not "blame" any particular person, group, country, institution, or agency for the pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic is an effect of a globally connected, economically and environmentally "overheated" world that humanity as a whole has created. Leaders and governments with the power and authority to have instituted effective measures to prevent the spread of a virus that has killed so many, must be held accountable, if they failed to act. However, there is no point in attributing blame to the country where the virus first mutated, as it could potentially have developed anywhere. From an interspecies perspective, the virus is us and we are it, which also means that we are not helpless against it.

Question #4: Are there aspects of the pandemic that anthropology helps you see?

An anthropological lens helps me to critically observe and understand the different ways that states across the world and their citizens have responded to the pandemic. Anthropology allows me to see beyond the virus, as something affecting the individual body, to the pandemic, as something affecting the social body and as an effect of the body politic. Anthropology leads me to see the virus not only as a problem for medical science but also a problem for the humanities and social sciences. Ironically, at the very time in human history that the humanities and social sciences appear to be most needed, they are under attack, with legislation in Australia passed to increase student fees for majors in our disciplines, in tandem with reduced government funding to universities.

Seoul National University, South Korea Question #1: Where are you located, and how bad is, or was, the pandemic in your location, region, or country? I am located in Seoul, South Korea. The country has been managing the pandemic to the extent that we have not gone into a lockdown situation. Yet, with extended social distancing followed by a recent upsurge during the winter, many people, those in small businesses in particular, are expressing discontent about the government's measures to control the spread of the virus.

Question #2: How has the pandemic affected you, your family, the institution where you work, and your work as an anthropologist?

It hasn't affected me much, except that I had to teach online through Zoom. My classes were relatively small (under twenty), and it turned out that the Zoom class has certain benefits for student engagement. The pandemic forced me to come up with ways to adapt to the distancing rule and still have students do interesting projects, including team projects. For my research, I continued to do a small number of interviews, but the pandemic really affected research among my students who need to do in-person participant observation. Some curtailed or postponed fieldwork research. Those whose research involves school children or seniors were hit hardest. In my department, the challenge is not lack of funding, as a big government grant supporting our graduate program has recently been renewed. The challenge is to spend the budget for students' research activities amid the pandemic. In the case of South Korea, the pandemic has provided an unwitting opportunity to starkly face and grapple with internal heterogeneity, along with inequalities, in a society usually thought of as culturally very homogeneous. When a Christian-based religious sect became an epicenter of the pandemic in early 2020, the sect and the city of Daegu, which recorded the largest number of COVID-19 cases related to the sect, were strongly stigmatized, becoming targets of mostly online hate speech, even as volunteers and comfort packages poured into the near-lockdown city. Cases in Daegu subsided, the sect became more cooperative in containment efforts, and the pandemic came under control nationwide more or less by mid-year. Hate speech faded.

The tests of religious tolerance and civic responsibility in Korean society did not end then and there, however. Soon an evangelical Christian church in Seoul defied government measures and insisted on in-person service and outdoor antigovernment rallies, resulting in clusters of cases, large and small. An organization of Protestant churches then made a collective statement against the "coronavirus politics" of the government. The general public, including many Christians, seemed rather perplexed by why certain Protestant churches felt their religious freedom was being infringed upon by the government. The situation again led to online hate speech, this time against Protestant Christians. South Korea is certainly not known for being multicultural, but has long been multireligious. For the South Korean public, the pandemic has then served as an anthropological testing ground for relativism and universalism within the society, most notably in its religious landscape. How do we engage in mutual dialogues in a time of crisis? How can we as a society be inclusive and respectful, yet civically responsible? These are the critical questions the pandemic posed to us and we need to continue to work on in the time ahead.

Question #1: Where are you located, and how bad is, or was, the pandemic in your location, region, or country? I live in Jerusalem, but am chair of the Anthropology Department at Haifa University. We have had three major waves of coronavirus, and although we have had a relatively low number of deaths, during waves we have had a very high rate of cases per million in our population. We have been in full lockdown during the peak of each of our waves. We are currently in our third lockdown. In between lockdowns, schools and small businesses have been closed as well, for the better part of the past year. The university has been on Zoom since the beginning of our spring semester last year. Many small business owners have gone out of business and our economy is a major concern, as is political instability and a sense of disenfranchisement. However, despite the great challenge to emotional well-being considering the very profound changes in everyday familial and professional lives and the perpetual experience of precarity, we seem to be extremely resilient.

Question #2: How has the pandemic affected you, your family, the institution where you work, and your work as an anthropologist?

Although the first month of the pandemic was frightening, with great concern for one's loved ones and apocalyptic associations abounding, a bizarre sense of routine eventually took over. Although I did not consider myself someone that required a lot of personal space, being at home required setting up boundaries. At the same time, as department chair, there was a sense of urgency and responsibility and an enormous amount of new challenges, for instance to set up longdistance learning, frequent departmental Zoom meetings, and new ways to keep in touch with students, not to mention the retention of new candidates. Our graduate students have been forced to either redesign their research projects or put their projects on hold. My own research, which entails observation and interviews in interlocutors' homes, has been brought to a halt. I have postponed fieldwork in Cambodia and had to freeze my Israel Science Foundation Grant on domestic commemoration.

Coronavirus in Israel, as in many places, has been politicized. Existing cleavages in Israeli politics have been intensified, and some are on the verge of major rupture. It is difficult to en-force COVID regulations in two traditional sectors-the ultraorthodox Jewish populations and, to a lesser extent, in some Arab-Israeli populations. The government's politically motivated ignoring of ultraorthodox behavior (key players in our unstable government) has been infuriating. On a more positive note, mass involvement in demonstrations against government corruption in Israel point to hope regarding a more democratic future. Question #4: Are there aspects of the pandemic that anthropology helps you see?

Much has been said about risk and surveillance. In this short response, I prefer to relate to phenomenological micro-anthropological observations regarding interactions on Zoom and offline interactions. Compared to our first months of awkward Zoom interactions, an interesting form of intimacy has emerged that is entirely absent in face-to-face classroom interaction. For lecturers sensitive to face work, the experience of observing the reactions of twenty students (close up) in a four-hour-long seminar is exhausting. However, at some point, in the comfort of their homes with family members appearing and disappearing in the background, students began to share fascinating and more personal and confident readings of course material. Interaction between students also became more casual and intimate, triggering more group interaction outside of class on WhatsApp. I myself allowed students to stray from the planned itinerary and discuss ways they can apply theory to their fieldwork. Outside of the classroom, in between lockdowns, it seems that despite or due to social distancing, more efforts are made with facework and eyework when meeting friends and acquaintances, and there is a newfound appreciation of the importance of sociality. I would also add that it has been fascinating to observe the many transitions and embodied responses of disbelief, fear, and panic morph gradually into bizarre normalcy and, now, with the vaccine, false or premature complacency. The body remains a central site of selfmanagement, not only of physical and emotional health and wellness but also of creatively negotiating new forms of expression and interaction that buffer the self and others during the pandemic. As a psychological anthropologist, it appears to me that in Israel there is less person-centered discourse surrounding depression and anxiety than in other societies. After Israel's shift toward late modern individualism, there seems to be a recursive move to empowerment through more traditional familial sociality and the maintenance of (online) friendships. Emotional distress is related primarily to the temporary isolation of aging grandparents and parents and economic uncertainty.

Professor of Medical Anthropology, University of Bristol,

Question #1: Where are you located, and how bad is, or was, the pandemic in your location, region, or country?

The United Kingdom has been badly hit by the pandemic, though COVID-19 is less common in Bristol and southwest England, where I live, than in most of the United Kingdom. At the time of writing (January 2021), we're in our third nationwide lockdown, with around 48,000 cases daily, have the highest number of deaths in Europe (more than 86,000), and the NHS is again overstretched.

We moved to working from home when the first UK lockdown started in mid-March 2020. This has not felt like a deprivation (given the privilege of a lovely home and garden), though I find long hours in virtual meetings enervating. My old life of frequent travel for research work and meetings seems unimaginable-all that rushing around! My collaborative research program on antibiotic resistance in China was affected early on; one of my research staff abandoned plans to travel home for the Chinese Spring Festival in late January at the last minute, while another ended up locked down in Shanghai for three months. All our fieldwork went on hold as campuses closed and colleagues in China moved to working from home.

Then it was our turn. Moving to online teaching has been taxing, but as a medical anthropologist working in global health, the biggest effect of the pandemic on my work has been in the volume, pace, and visibility of new research on COVID-19 itself. In early February 2020, I was pulled into a rapid study at the request of colleagues in Public Health England to investigate responses to their public health advice among international travelers, and by April 2020, we had acquired funding to look at adherence to COVID-19 self-isolation measures in the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, in January 2020, I had coincidentally begun a half-time secondment as, of all things, Challenge Leader for Global Health at UK Research & Innovation (UKRI, which represents the UK national research councils). My secondment replacement post then fell victim to my university's emergency financial measures-suspension of all new appointments and termination of temporary contracts-so for a year now I have been covering both roles. The workload has been over-whelming. At UKRI, rapid funding initiatives launched to support COVID-19 research in low-and middle-income countries have taken precedence, with countless hours spent on virtual panels deliberating with colleagues across the world over research proposals addressing diverse aspects of the pandemic. Working on a situation as it has unfolded in real time while managing the evolving consequences of the pandemic for my own research in Asia has been grueling but at times exhilarating.

Meanwhile my younger son turned eighteen in lockdown, had his A levels (final high school exams) and summer travel plans canceled, and, after accepting a place at his chosen university, had a dreadful first semester in lockeddown Scotland. He has now suspended his studies and is back at home. My older son was just settling into university life after overcoming long-term anxiety issues when the pandemic hit, the campus went into lockdown, and he was sent home. This autumn he returned to university to start his second year, but having returned to Bristol for Christmas, is stranded here during our third lockdown. We've also acquired a long-term house guest due to the pandemic: the grandson of an Indian friend and patron from my 1980s fieldwork in Rajasthan, who found himself with nowhere to live after completing a master's degree at Warwick Business School. He had hoped to gain professional experience before returning to India but has ended up doing shift work at an Amazon warehouse. I have not seen my siblings or my ninety-three-year-old mother since the summer of 2020, although she has just received the vaccine.

I don't blame anyone for the pandemic. I do blame the UK government for the appalling toll of death, distress, and pressure on health-care staff occasioned by their mismanagement of this crisis; for repeated failures to take timely action; for doling out massive procurement contracts to favored insiders; and, most shamefully, for the assignment of crucial managerial roles (such as organizing a national test and trace program that, had it worked when it was finally launched last summer, would have prevented the current wave of cases) to unqualified cronies and friends.

Question #4: Are there aspects of the pandemic that anthropology helps you see?

Anthropology made the inequitable effects of both pandemic and public health measures to manage it entirely predictable; likewise, the reversion to nationalist self-interest in the organization of pandemic responses. Anthropology helps me to see the fallacies in media and political narratives that blame individual behavior for COVID-19 transmission rather than recognizing adherence to isolation and distancing measures as a logical but difficult balancing act between its economic and social costs and a generalized public good. In the United Kingdom, economic support measures have been relatively generous, but people cannot be expected to self-isolate if they are forced to choose between that and their livelihoods.

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic Helen Macdonald *

Question #1: Where are you located, and how bad is, or was, the pandemic in your location, region, or country?

The universities in South Africa shut their doors weeks before the South African government formally announced a national state of disaster and locked down the country for five weeks, commencing March 23, 2020. South Africa, with its hard lockdown, was praised globally and used by the WHO as an exemplar for dealing with the growing pandemic. Yet the violence of racial capitalism wrought destruction on everyday lives. Businesses closed their doors or laid off staff. While the wealthy made sandwiches and boiled eggs for the less fortunate, people still ring doorbells beseeching homeowners for food. There is an increase in the appearance of car guards, people who offer to find parking and deter theft in informal employment arrangements. And people are begging at every street intersection. After riding out the first wave, South Africa is currently being ravaged by a second wave with a new strain that is infinitely more infectious. Everyone knows dozens of people who have contracted COVID and others who have died. As I write, the builder working on my home failed to arrive because his close friend had just died. We are currently three weeks into "level 3 lockdown" with a month to go as we potentially reach the peak of this second wave.

Question #2: How has the pandemic affected you, your family, the institution where you work, and your work as an anthropologist?

Initially I sat at home bewildered, as we were urged by the media and university to be productive with our unexpected free time. While colleagues pumped out commentaries, radio interviews, newspaper articles, set up blog sites (www.coronatimes.net/), and attended endless workshops/webinars, and my wealthy friends baked bread and * http://www.anthropology.uct.ac.za/san/people/academic/macdonald Email: helen.macdonald@uct.ac.za posted pictures on Facebook, I buried my head in the sand by responding to editorial demands for an upcoming publication and drinking whiskey, for which I have developed a liking. Then came homeschooling and emergency remote teaching. I hurled myself into teaching as South Africa's severe inequalities made the goal of "no student left behind" impossibly unobtainable. The University of Cape Town delivered five thousand laptops and provided free data to students. We cut back on the number of readings required, slashed assignments, used voiced-over PowerPoint presentations of fifteen minutes to cater to the lowest bandwidth, and offered extra Whatsapp tutorials stretching into the night. As the eldest daughter of an African family, one student could only study between the hours of 1:00 a.m. and 7:00 a.m. Another was living in her car. Still another was learning by candlelight because of rolling blackouts and was too scared to leave his shack for groceries owing to roaming gangs of unmasked men. George Floyd's murder and the Black Lives Matter movement overshadowed their academic difficulties, and conversations were diverted to cope with the visceral pain that impacts South African Black bodies. Students begged to return to campus residences.

Social isolation, the material blurring of personal and occupational boundaries, and the exhaustion of online teaching eventually hit home. Fabulous colleagues, who occupy what is colloquially known as "the corridor," are the mainstay for stabilizing my mental health. Our offices are often likened to a train station, as students pop in for cups of tea, academic and personal advice, or lively gossip. I suffered a swift and brutal breakdown. The university's mental health helpline is ill equipped for the mounting mental health crisis among students and staff, while simultaneously the university's chief executive advocates glowingly for "new ways of communicating and socializing." The same executive exhorts us to use our "spare time" for writing and research yet refuses to refund us for services we have paid for but can't use, like expensive university parking. An extra burden is thrust upon academics with young children, homeschooling, extra domestic duties, limited space with which to establish an office, and extra costs of data and buying computing hardware. I was relieved to have eventually written an article comparing the religious responses to the current pandemic to those of the cholera epidemic in India during the 1800s.

Despite these difficulties, the year 2020 was hailed by South African universities as a "great success" and the year ahead is imagined to provide even more research time for academics as they simply roll out existing teaching videos, ignoring the imperative of anthropology to teach to the present moment.

Question #3: Do you blame anyone for the pandemic, and, if so, who or what, and why?

Quite simply, no.

Question #4: Are there aspects of the pandemic that anthropology helps you see?

As anthropologists from the South, my colleagues and I are seldom surprised by global, national, or individual responses to the pandemic. The conspiracy theories, religious and political denialism, nationalism, centralization of power, racial violence-none of it catches us off guard. The vaccine has caused consternation and further split open the fault lines of global inequalities among nations and people. Predictably, the universities see the opportunity of online learning to cut costs and cast their tentacles into global education. I'm troubled by it all, but not at all bewildered.

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

The Cooperative University of Kenya Question #1: Where are you located, and how bad is, or was, the pandemic in your location, region, or country?

When news of the novel coronavirus broke out, those of us in Kenya, where I'm located, thought it would go away without ever causing the havoc we have seen. After all, Africa has had its own share of viral outbreaks, such as Ebola, in its bag of mixed fortune, but it emerged out of these outbreaks. In any case, previous outbreaks of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) had left Africa unscathed. We were wrong! As of January 10, 2021, Africa as a continent had cumulatively 3,037,007 COVID-19 cases and 72,216 deaths, while Kenya's confirmed cases stood at 98,184 with 1,704 deaths. The first case of COVID-19 was reported in Kenya on March 13, 2020, not from a traveler from China, the virus's epicenter, but a Kenyan returning home from the United States through London. Immediately the government pronounced a raft of measures, including the invocation of the Public Health Act (1986 ( Rev. 2012 , which allowed health authorities to prescribe and enforce measures to stem the virus's spread. A day after, the government imposed a travel ban from high-risk countries, effectively shutting down passenger air transport, and an order to close all learning institutions was also issued. These measures were tightened further with the closure of businesses and offices, the declaration of a countrywide dusk-to-dawn curfew (7 p.m. to 5 a.m.) and a ban on any form of public gathering, including funerals, religious, and political meetings. The net effect of these measures soon became apparent almost in every sector of the economy.

Question #2: How has the pandemic affected you, your family, the institution where you work, and your work as an anthropologist?

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted activities at various levels: personal, family, community, and institutional. At the personal level, individuals had to deal with fear of the unknown. One of the issues with COVID-19 is that you cannot tell who is infected, especially if they are asymptomatic. My own schedules were altered as I could no longer, for example, go for my exercise. The problem was compounded by the fact that compliance with issued guidelines was low. The second challenge was at the family level. COVID-19 disrupted (extended) family meetings. These meetings often involve several generations, which put at greater risk the senior members of the extended family. Therefore, we had to limit these meetings as a way of curbing potential spread of the virus. The restrictions in place prohibited church attendance, weddings, and limited attendance at burial functions. These are important functions that guarantee continued connection within the community.

There have been three major effects of the pandemic at my institution. First, as an early containment measure, the government ordered closure of all learning institutions in the country. Universities that relied on tuition fees paid by students were denied a source of revenue to support their operations. Second, the closure of universities also had another, positive, effect on university operations. Kenyan universities have been slow to adopt online learning, but closure and the pressure to pay staff and meet other statutory obligations accelerated, although rather haphazardly at first, the movement of learning and administration of examinations to online platforms. Third, a declaration of cessation of movement also halted field-based research activities. Even after the relaxation of the measures, anthropological approaches to data collection, such as participant observation and focus group discussion, became an immediate source of concern as potentially increasing the risk for spreading the virus. When teams restarted field research, they changed data-collection procedures and also incurred additional costs for personal protective equipment like hand sanitizers and face masks.

Question #3: Do you blame anyone for the pandemic, and, if so, who or what, and why?

I have had a keen interest in research focusing on zoonoses. A topic of discussion central to zoonoses is how disease, such as Ebola, cross the animal-human boundary and our role as humans in aiding that cross-over. I believe COVID-19 crossed over because of our own actions-whether from the Chinese wet markets driven by our culinary preferences or through some other way. I do not, for now, believe that there was a deliberate human effort to introduce the virus nor accidental release of the same. Our very actions, and our insatiable appetite to tinker with nature, have led us to where we are as a human race.

Question #4: Are there aspects of the pandemic that anthropology helps you see? Anthropology helps me ask questions. One of the issues with the implementation of the containment measures relates to how human remains are treated. At the start of the pandemic, the health authorities took control of burials of suspected COVID-19 cases, often doing so even in the dead of night and with little to no involvement of families of the deceased. So increasingly I am asking, within a public health space, what rights and rites do the deceased claim? Are there cross-cultural differences in how these rights and rites are perceived, practiced, and dispensed?

Question #1: Where are you located, and how bad is, or was, the pandemic in your location, region, or country?

Until recently, I was the vice-chancellor of Utkal University at Bhubaneswar, the capital city of Odisha, on the east coast of India. The government of Odisha promptly declared the closure of all educational institutions of the state on March 14, 2020, before the rest of the country did so on March 25, 2020. Anticipating a complete shutdown of the city, including the market and other civic amenities, I ensured that the students on the campus vacated their hostels and joined their families. University administration counseled various stakeholders of the university about their newfound responsibilities during the pandemic. A climate of uncertainty and anxiety was palpable for many months. Efforts to follow the COVID protocols and allaying fear were a challenge.

Most of the laborers in Odisha work in the textile industry of Surat in Gujurat on the west coast of India. With the indefinite closure of these industries, and without a source of income, many laborers were either stranded or had no choice but to move out of Surat and return home, nearly 1,900 kilometers away. In penury, they suffered immensely in the process of return in the absence of suitable transportation. The Odisha state government organized logistics for their smooth return through digitized web-based registration for buses and trains, turning village and town schools into quarantine centers, and empowering the village councils with more administrative power through a special ordinance to enforce COVID protocols.

Most migrant laborers, however, were not accustomed to the simple vegetarian food and the minimal facilities in the quarantine centers. This created problems of adjustment, and people ran away, violating COVID protocols. This led to widespread infection, especially in the southern part of Odisha, from where the majority of laborers migrate. They also suffered a lot of hardship during the long journey back home.

Question #2: How has the pandemic affected you, your family, the institution where you work, and your work as an anthropologist?

My wife (Professor Nilika Mehrotra of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi), happened to be with me at Bhubaneswar during the lockdown and later. We stopped the entry of house helps and started doing the domestic work ourselves, an experience we enjoyed after many years. We did it with greater parity than before and a reasoned-out division of labor. We connected more with the house garden and campus greenery and discovered many rare plant species and enjoyed the flowers. Daily walks became regular and we were able to pay some attention to our neglected health. Though social visits with extended family were severely restricted, connecting with old friends and colleagues online was exciting. Unfortunately, many close relatives and professional colleagues were consumed by COVID-19. Inability to participate in the funeral rituals and to be with the bereaved families were difficult moments.

There is a lot of responsibility to go around. The neoliberal world economy with highly mobile citizens contributed to its acceleration. The timely administrative decisions imposing restrictions on international travel immediately after the detection of the first COVID case in India on January 27, 2020, could have reduced the magnitude of the crisis. Instead, restrictions on international flights started on March 22, 2020. Most Indian citizens are averse to the COVID protocol of wearing masks and maintaining social distance, especially in the rural areas.

Question #4: Are there aspects of the pandemic that anthropology helps you to see?

The pandemic has brought about a number of changes to the social fabric. Family emerged as a strong functional group, playing the role of the most important anchor in the wider social space. The erstwhile separation between domestic and professional space started overlapping with one another and became more perceptible in the absence of online etiquette. Women, no longer able to leave the home for the office, were particularly affected. During the pandemic, women had to negotiate for uninterrupted time and space within the domestic domain, where they still bear the larger burden of household chores and child and elder care. Abridgement of the death rituals and emergence of new virtual grieving communities ascribed new meanings to mourning and dealing with loss.

Politics of a different order surfaced. City life shrunk, if not crumbled; the whole urban space came to a standstill, including the markets. The poor became further marginalized, and inequalities became accentuated during the pandemic. Laborers' massive loss of livelihoods made their lives precarious, and the state took on a greater role in creating welfare provisions. State governments, however, came up with excuses to exercise greater control over the citizens in the name of pandemic. During the initial part of the pandemic, the Epidemic Disease Act of 1897 was used for curtailing the individual freedom to assemble and protest. In April 2020, the Epidemic Disease (Amendment) Ordinance was passed, and in September 2020, the act was passed by both the houses of parliament. The National Disaster Management Act of 2005 was also used to curb the spread of the disease. The increased governmentality of the nation-state is perceivable.

Question #1: Where are you located, and how bad is, or was, the pandemic in your location, region, or country?

We are in Florianópolis, in southern Brazil, a country that is in especially bad shape with about 10 percent of the world's COVID-19 deaths and still no plan for vaccinations.

We have Jair Bolsonaro as our president. He is a far-right denialist, who followed Donald Trump for several months in minimizing the dangers of this pandemic. His declaration in March 2020 that COVID-19 was a "simple flu" became famous. It is well-known now that the virus entered Brazil through white elites who contracted the virus on international trips. Disagreements between federal, state, and municipal governments have led to different ways of facing the pandemic in Brazil.

We are lucky that we are in the state of Santa Catarina. In March/April 2020, we were at the forefront of prevention policies informed by science, with lockdowns affecting businesses, schools, and public transport. Scientists and doctors linked to the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) and the Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science (SBPC/SC) were at first asked to work in councils and produce epidemiological data about the pandemic in the city, but pressure from economic and business groups in the state quashed this. But by April 2021, it was the south of Brazil that had the worse situation, with a collapse of the health system. Question #2: How has the pandemic affected you, your family, the institution where you work, and your work as an anthropologist?

The pandemic has hardly affected us personally, except for the pain of seeing chaos in our country, with about 10 percent of the world's COVID-19 deaths and few vaccines. Living in a large house in the woods and being able to walk daily on the banks of a lagoon, doing yoga classes on the internet, and cooking our own meals, we created a protective bubble around ourselves. We had relatives who had COVID-19, but they had access to the private health system here and were not at risk of losing their lives. UFSC (our university) was one of the first in Brazil to suspend face-to-face classes. It did so on March 16, 2020. Our work continued through Zoom-classes and meetings, defenses, and interviews. At the beginning, many of us thought we were saving time and that we could work harder.

But soon the online commitments multiplied, and the separation between work and personal life, which was never very deep, vanished. We blame Bolsonaro for the lack of control of the pandemic. He disseminated fake news-"hydroxychloroquine will cure it," "masks are useless," "China voluntarily created the virus." He participated in protests against protective measures and defended the miners who illegally entered reserves in the Amazon and spread the virus among Amazonian Indians. He cut grants for science and fired two ministers of health. He then appointed a general, Eduardo Pazuello, who had no scientific training, unlike the physicians who preceded him, to be our minister of health overseeing the pandemic. And Pazuello just obeys Bolsonaro's orders.

Question #4: Are there aspects of the pandemic that anthropology helps you see?

Anthropology shows that pandemics have happened all throughout human history (the Black Death, the Spanish flu, smallpox and measles in the Americas, TB, syphilis, typhoid, and smallpox to Hawaii). Anthropology shows that the pandemic can be used as a weapon of biopower. Moreover, anthropology reveals that death does not strike all humans alike, and, in Brazil, we see this well. COVID's first death in Brazil was of a domestic worker from Rio de Janeiro who was infected by her bosses, who had returned from Italy in February 2020. Slum dwellers, unable to maintain social distancing while living in dense shacks and using overcrowded public transport, have contracted the disease and died disproportionately. So have Indians and quilombolas (maroons).

Anthropology has also taught us that death involves rituals and specific technical handling of the dead body. For instance, a Yanomami body should not be buried-a terrible offense to the dead and a danger to the living. But public health protocols mandate that corpses of people who died with COVID must be buried, leading to even deeper grief and torment for the Yanomami communities mourning their dead. Images of backhoes opening pits for collective burials in Manaus have been shocking. There is something symbolically inhuman-indeed dehumanizing-about a collective burial. But people grieving their lost loved ones have been resilient, and anthropologists notice this as well. People have put crosses on graves and subverted the government's ban on more than three people in the cemetery for each corpse. They stand outside the walls of the cemeteries and mourn.

Anthropology also predicts that pandemics will probably become worse and more frequent in the future with climate change, deforestation, and intermingling of animals and humans.

Question #1: Where are you located, and how bad is, or was, the pandemic in your location, region, or country? I am located in Lisbon, Portugal. In March 2020, Portugal went into a strong lockdown quite early, when the situation was getting bad in Italy, Spain (our closest neighbors, whom we were constantly looking at to have an idea of what could happen here), and elsewhere in Europe and the world over. As a consequence, the numbers in the first wave were not bad, and we could (at the time) say we were one of the best countries in the world. In fact, everyone was terrified of this "new terrible disease," and people really complied with the rules. The streets were totally empty, nothing was open, there were no tourists, and people stayed home, confined. In the middle of May, the lockdown was lifted and people started going back to their activities (although many continued to work remotely). Restaurants and shops opened. I remember the pleasure of the first night when I told my kids and my boyfriend to join me for a beer in a bar by the river.

The summer came, and everything went almost back to normal. The Portuguese (myself included) enjoyed our summer holidays at the beaches, as always. The big exceptions were the smaller number of seats in the restaurants, and the fact that everyone wore masks inside closed spaces and tried to disinfect their hands all the time. As autumn came, the situation became a bit worse. But it was December that brought the chaos again, and especially the fact that, although there were partial lockdowns (half day on weekends and the interdiction to move between municipalities during the Portuguese December national holidays weekends, December 5 and December 10), over Christmas there was no curfew at all. It was stated by the national authorities that "we had to save Christmas." As a consequence, we are now (as of January 16, 2021) in a dramatic situation, as the news media state that Portugal is one of the worst countries in the world, if we think of the relation of the number of infected per million inhabitants. Furthermore, the hospitals are full of sick people, there are long lines of ambulances waiting to be attended to, and the situation is chaotic.

Question #2: How has the pandemic affected you, your family, the institution where you work, and your work as an anthropologist?

The pandemic has forced us to go into "telework," that is, we moved everything to digital. In the first lockdown, my two kids were with me, and that actually provided an (agreeable) situation, which I had not had in a long while. Sara, my daughter, was twenty-four, and came back from four years studying in Amsterdam (where she did her BA) two years ago. Afonso is twenty-nine, is doing his PhD, and had not been living with me for almost three years now. So, the terrible pandemic situation actually allowed me to have both my two kids at home for two months.

As far as the university where I work is concerned, everything became digital. Seminars, classes, conferences, and even entrance to the building were forbidden. My research center organized a few (very few) online (Zoom) seminars, and we had a department meeting with the same format (only one, since March 2020 to the present date). In April we had to submit research projects to the Portuguese National Funding Agency, and it was very difficult to gather teams and do all the preparation work all online. The research projects I was working on are basically on standby, as they require face-to-face interaction.

Question #3: Do you blame anyone for the pandemic, and, if so, who or what, and why?

No, I do not blame anyone or any country in particular. I do blame human greed and the lack of capacity to realize that we are destroying the world we live in. I firmly believe pandemics like this will probably be more frequent, as humans are destroying the balance between humanity and nature, forcing other species to move from their habitats to new territories, and therefore blurring frontiers that should be kept. And I also blame governments (and dictators) that did not do much to help people in their own countries (for instance, Trump in the United States and Bolsonaro in Brazil).

Question #4: Are there aspects of the pandemic that anthropology helps you see?

Yes, although I think many of them can be seen by anyone that has some common sense, empathy with other fellow humans all over the world, and a sense of respect for this world and for nature. But definitely, insights from medical anthropology and the anthropology of emotions have really been helpful to understand how the world is coping (or not coping) with this crisis. Furthermore, anthropology definitely gives us (and me) the tools to better understand how people in different environments, cultures, and socioeconomic positions are handling it. And how inequalities are stressed in this current pandemic situation-who is able to keep "social distance" if you live in a favela (slum)?

Question #1: Where are you located, and how bad is, or was, the pandemic in your location, region, or country?

On March 10, 2020, four days after the first case was reported in Serbia, the government announced that the COVID-19 epidemic was within our national borders and pronounced a state of emergency starting on March 15. This meant closure of all institutions and businesses except for food stores and pharmacies, a ban on use of the parks, the total prohibition of movement for people over sixty-five, and a partial movement ban for everyone else (on weeknights and weekends). Intercity transport was shut down and national borders were closed. But on May 6, measures were abruptly relaxed, and this led to a second wave of infections. In the late summer, when the level of infection was on the decline, people vacationed in the mountain regions of Serbia and the coasts of neighboring Montenegro and Croatia. Then the third and most seri-ous wave hit Serbia the second week of October and is presently in decline. At this time, schools have operated on hybrid schedules, distance work has been encouraged, and wearing masks became mandatory in all enclosed public spaces.

The number of daily infections in Serbia (with a population of seven million) peaked at 445 on April 16, and 467 on July 26, but it peaked much higher-at 7,780on November 28. The overall number of COVID-19 cases at the national level is 374,111 with a 1.01% death rate. Serbia began vaccinating its citizens on December 24. The Pfizer-BionTech vaccine came in first, followed by the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine and the Russian Sputnik V vaccine. Citizens are categorized in three priority groups now and are able to choose among five producers, including AstraZeneca and Moderna.

Clearly Eastern Europe has coped with the pandemic much more effectively than has Western Europe. The early introduction of restrictive measures coupled with the wellpreserved socialist-era health-care system may help explain this discrepancy. Question #2: How has the pandemic affected you, your family, the institution where you work, and your work as an anthropologist?

The pandemic brought significant changes to Serbia's universities. The University of Belgrade determined in spring 2020 that it would pursue varied modes of teaching. We actually had to revert to online classes. Members of our department engaged in a project called "Individual and Society in the Time of Crisis," and a few of them joined the University College London (UCL) digital ethnography project "Collecting COVID 19." I think online classes proved very productive. When adapting my courses, I reconceived them as seminars and had lots of presentations and discussions. In a way, the missing live contact in a real classroom was substituted by an equally (although different) direct contact in virtual space, with our heads in front of the computer screens. Interestingly, this seems to have made students more relaxed and open to discussion. In my course Urban Culture and Society in China, besides the usual literature on various modes of urban life in Chinese cities, I set up a mini-research project named "China and the World: Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Assistance in the Corona Times." Students analyzed media, social media, and diplomatic narratives of China's relations with major world regions and countries within them. This approach enabled us to rethink the value of the anthropology of diplomacy as well as details of China's relations with the world during this pandemic.

Analysis of the large pandemics throughout history shows that their commonly accepted names have not conformed to the true origin of a virus causing the disease, but were a product of geostrategic competition, underlined by Orientalist and even racist stereotypes. We will probably never learn where this particular virus originated. It may have happened at different places around the same time. Each country's decision-making on how to deal with the pandemic has been a result of a complex set of specific factors, including political economy, general health system features, and assessment of danger made by the leading epidemiologists and any task force that country has to deal with such national crises.

Question #4: Are there aspects of the pandemic that anthropology helps you see?

Yes, of course. My urban anthropology course, which this year was devoted to Urban Life of Serbia in the Time of Corona Virus, unveiled many aspects of human life that the pandemic brought about. We discussed the first reactions to the presence of coronavirus and the lockdown, the conditions of study, work, housekeeping, food and hygiene, social life, family relations, public behavior, mask wearing, holiday destinations, theories about the origin of the virus, and about the preferable choice of vaccine in Serbia. Students created online photo exhibitions illustrating the changes of everyday life during this pandemic.

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Re: contact tracing. It's clear that several measures have been used this time. CECC @MOHW_Taiwan -credit card transaction data -cell tower triangulation Law enforcement -CCTV footage -SkyDragon system (license plate recognition) -eTag/ETC (highway tolling)