Clara Han’s Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War (Fordham University Press, 2021) describes war’s dispersal into everyday life, intimacy and the domestic. Departing from genres of testimony, as well as auto-ethnography, Han seeks to write from a child’s perspective, both as the daughter of parents displaced by the war and who migrate to the United States, as well …
How does one tell the story of a world under the reign of terror of the coronavirus? While authoritative accounts are yet to congeal, a curious genre of storytelling is emerging.
This is one that (probably unwittingly) mimics that of the self-consciously self-reflexive anthropologist. It begins with a declaration of the subject position – I am an upper-caste, middle-class, cisgender …
George Eliot’s narrator in The Mill on the Floss (1860) reminds us that it is lamentable “that intelligence so rarely shows itself in speech without metaphor – that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something else.”
But accuracy is not really the problem; it goes without saying that language is limited in …
This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
Mild
‘[A] large portion won’t notice that they have it’. ‘Another substantial portion will have very, very mild symptoms’. ‘A small portion will have a very significant reaction’. So runs UK’s Home Officer Deputy Science Advisor Rupert Shute’s assessment, in April 2020, of what the 80% of the UK public he says are predicted to get Covid-19 will experience (Ahmed, 2020).…
Twenty-first century epidemiological and Global Health narratives are saturated by pronouncements of and reflections on “the lessons of this” or “the lessons of that” historical outbreak. As soon as an epidemic is resolved, our screens, newspapers, and journals begin to be populated by talks, articles, and editorials proclaiming the “lessons of SARS” or “the lessons of Ebola”. These narratives are …
The first scene of the 2011 film, Contagion, opens with a black screen and ambient airport noise. A woman coughs. As the screen fades from black to reveal a darkened airport bar, a caption in red, located at the bottom of the screen, reads “Day 2.” Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) shoves shelled peanuts into her mouth and wipes the …