This volume, written in a readable and enticing style, is based on a
simple premise, which was to have several exceptional ethnographers
write about their experiences in an evocative way in real time during
the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than an edited volume with dedicated
chapters, this book thus offers a new format wherein authors write
several, distinct dispatches, each short and compact, allowing each
writer's perspectives and stories to grow, in tandem with the pandemic
itself, over the course of the book. Leaving behind the trope of the
lonely anthropologist, these authors come together to form a collective
of ethnographers to ask important questions, such as: What does it mean
to live and write amid an unfolding and unstoppable global health and
economic crisis? What are the intensities of the everyday? How do the
isolated find connection in the face of catastrophe?
Such first-person reflections touch on a plurality of themes brought on
by the pandemic, forces and dynamics of pressing concern to many, such
as contagion, safety, health inequalities, societal injustices, loss and
separation, displacement, phantasmal imaginings and possibilities, the
uncertain arts of calculating risk and protection, limits on movement
and travel, and the biopolitical operations of sovereign powers. The
various writings-spun from diverse situations and global
locations-proceed within a temporal flow, starting in March 2020, with
the first alerts and cases of viral infection, and then move on to
various currents of caution, concern, infection, despair, hope, and
connection that have unfolded since those early days. The writings then
move into 2021, with events and moods associated with the global
distribution of potentially effective vaccines and the promise and hope
these immunizations bring. The written record of these multiform
dispatches involves traces of a series of lives, as the authors of those
lives tried to make do, and write, in trying times.
A timely ethnography of an event that has changed all our lives, this
book is critical reading for students and researchers of medical
anthropology, sociocultural anthropology, contemporary anthropological
theory, and ethnographic writing.
