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We develop questions for a COVID-19 research agenda from the anthropology of disasters to study the production of pandemic as a feature of the normatively accepted societal state of affairs. We encourage an applied study of the pandemic that recognizes it as the product of connections between people, with their social systems, nonhumans, and the material world more broadly, with attention to root causes, (post)colonialism and capitalism, multispecies networks, the politics of knowledge, gifts and mutual aid, and the work of recovery.
Key words: colonialism, multi-species ethnography, epidemics, politics of knowledge, reciprocity, mutual aid, otherwise
Introduction: Why We Write
In this short article, we present several questions for a COV-ID-19 research agenda from the anthropology of disasters, a field that developed to make sense of society's role in transforming hazards and viruses into disasters and pandemics and giving them form and magnitude. Over time, we have come to understand the production of disasters as an outcome of the normatively accepted societal state of affairs-an effect of routine, not an anomaly. Much as we might endeavor to confront the coronavirus as a monster that emerged from a nature that lies outside society and into which it only crossed because of a transgression of boundaries, we encourage a reframing that recognizes the pandemic as the product of connections (and disconnections) between people, with their political economic systems and technologies, nonhumans, discourses, and the material world more broadly. This, as we see it, is the first step to operationalizing a set of critical research questions rooted in abiding and emergent themes in disaster anthropology.
As we draw the pathogen into society, we must also undergo a process of off-centering by recognizing that the misfortunes and incoherencies we see unfolding are not proper to "elsewhere" and accidents, exceptions, or invasions of a center of an otherwise well-functioning system. We take seriously that the devastation, ruination, and shifting assemblages of the state, modernity, and the capitalist world system are not accidents but predictable consequences. But we are mindful also that we have entered space-times at once familiar and strange. As disaster researchers, we are witnessing so many dynamics, dramas, and tragedies unfold that we recognize as eternal returns but which are forever misrecog-nized and forgotten as extraordinary. For this,...