CONFINARIA – Ethnographies in Times of Pandemic | Project
Abstract: “CONFINARIA – Ethnographies in Times of Pandemic is a science communication initiative by CRIA, consisting of a collective blog where reflections and experiences from the period of the COVID-19 pandemic are shared. It aims to serve as both a future memory and a retrospective appreciation of these exceptional times.
These are different times — daily routines altered and renewed; lives, in a way, suspended in fear of a pandemic virus that disrupted social order, personal relationships, and the most regular forms of communication and interaction — from work to family, including circles of friends and other collectives we belong to.
Long ago, Donna Haraway (and others like Eben Kirksey, Stefan Helmreich, and Anna Tsing) proposed broadening the scope of biotic others we must relate to when conducting ethnography—through their multispecies ethnographies. They spoke of the social life of bacteria and fungi (as living beings), and now we face a virus that literally needs us—and other living beings—to exist. And all lives seem to depend on it.
We have become — or are — different since March 16, 2020. Have we changed? How do we respond to fear and imposed restrictions? How do we behave in light of medical-scientific and socio-political warnings? How do we now relate to our children, partners, siblings, neighbors, friends, or the local shopkeepers on our streets? How do we care for the elderly? What precautions do we take with clothes, handwashing, and other health etiquettes that we are now urged to adopt? Are we more attentive — in both senses of the word? Do we care more and better? How do we deal with this confinement, with “these days that seem always the same”? Through ethnography of the streets, residential areas, homes, and lives, the goal is to create a diary of an exceptional time — of a time that, inevitably, makes us other.
The records can take many forms: impressionistic, reflective, theoretical, or more artistic—attempting to convey an anthropology of immediacy, an ethnography of urgency. What matters is what affects us and what affects those we are able to accompany, observe, hear, and feel. These are new terrains, made different by (self-)imposed limitations. We open the doors of our homes (including ourselves in our responses) and walk the streets and spaces we are allowed to frequent. We look at ourselves and see those around us — surely producing records that, in the future and in retrospect, will offer a more complete, complex (because made from multiple perspectives), and necessarily plural understanding of these days.”
Photo: www.vperemen.com (CC-BY-SA 4.0)
ANO
2020 - 2022
AUTORES
CRIA
EDITORES
CRIA
