Introduction to Series: COVID-19 voices from Latin America and the Caribbean

ABRIL SALDANA By August 2020, Latin America and the Caribbean has become the epicentre of the pandemic with more than 5.4 million COVID-19 cases confirmed and 210,000 fatalities. Coronavirus cases keep rising sharply, especially in Brazil, with more than 3 million confirmed cases, followed by Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Peru. As under testing seems to…

Something Old, Something New

Embodied Practices and Production of Mobility in Moscow Public Transport during Covid-19 YANA BAGINA “… then I realized it is not hysteria, it’s just reality” (description of the pandemic from an interview with a 45 y.o. woman) The COVID-19 pandemic brought attention to the moving body that has been perceived as a source of the…

Subway: a silver lining of the COVID-19 quarantine in Moscow

VARVARA KOBYSHCHA AND KSENIA SHEPETINA The text is based on the data collected within the project “Everyday practices of public health: (Non)Following sanitary rules at Moscow public transport during the coronavirus pandemic” funded by Russian Foundation for Basic Research and the bachelor thesis of Ksenia Shepetina defended at the Faculty of Social Sciences of HSE…

On the tendency to periodise capitalism through the event of the global pandemic

JAKUB CRCHA & SHACHI MOKASHI The coronavirus, by the virtue of its novelty, sudden unexpected appearance, and the scale of consequent disruption, has been easily incorporated into the pervasive tendency of mythologising what seems too ungraspable to theorise. The virus’ emergence has captured the theoretical imagination of many political projects; in fact, there is a…

The Pandemic Push to Rethink the Field Site

New Intimacies and De-Masking in Medical Anthropology and Global Health. A Reflective Blog CLAIRE SOMERVILLE The concept of fieldwork, and its’ physical manifestation, the “field site”, has been described historically as ‘the single most significant factor determining whether a piece of research will be accepted as “anthropological”’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Its primary purpose delineates…