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De: Lucrecia Greco <yoandabalindo@gmail.com>

Date: jue., 7 may. 2020 a las 7:28
Subject:
To: Lucrecia Greco <yoandabalindo@gmail.com>

Facing COVID 19: My Land of Neither Hope nor Despair

Veena Das

It was a brutal semester even before the coronavirus struck. Delhi is after all my beloved
city and I had felt immensely grateful for the courage women and children showed as they
came out in Shaheen Bagh day after day, to protest the notorious Citizens Amendment Act,
2019, foisted on the country by an increasingly belligerent BJP. I felt that new forms of
protest were emerging. Glued to the news and the transfers of videos, posters, cartoons,
interviews on WhatsApp groups I found all kinds of resources for my students in a class on
“Conflict and Security” to decipher how new and old media combine to create greater
authoritarianism at the same time that they become resources for so-called leaderless social
movements to rise. There was much excitement among students as they began to research
the different modalities of protest across countries and began to seriously question such
terms as “non-state actors” that many had taken for granted from their International
Relations courses.
It is ironic that at that time the module on biosecurity that followed was met with relative
coolness.  One of the issues we then discussed was the “preparedness” of the US
Government to fight a flu type of lethal epidemic, were it to emerge.  I now recall with an
eerie feeling the apocalyptic tone of the testimony offered by Dr. Michael T. Osterholm on
the state of preparedness of the USA to meet the challenges of a pandemic during the
Congressional hearings in Washington in December 2005. Many students were skeptical of
the scenario building exercise of rapid, uncontrolled transmission of infection, high case
fatality rates, and economic collapse that Dr. Osterholm had built into his testimony.
We read Carlo Caduff’s (2015) compelling work on the controversies within the scientific
community on the imminent threat of a pandemic and the mediatization of scenes of
disaster, as I recall it, with a sense of cool distance as one might discuss a distant
possibility. After all, it was not easy to determine whether such predictions would come
true or when they would come true. The best I could do was to make my students consider
that the problem could be reframed not in terms of a crisis waiting to happen in the future,
but a series of corrosions of health care systems happening in the present, creating
conditions of possibility for viruses that   could morph into major health crises. What
anthropology could do, I had emphasized, was to be there, both before and after the crises.
The students (or some of them) felt that anthropology was very good in critiquing the
language of experts and unmasking ideologically driven pronouncements, but would
anthropologists be able to offer anything if a pandemic struck?  I maintained that I did not
know what the future held, but we could act now by prioritizing the problems of health care
for residents in urban slums, for instance, where the normal practices of unregulated
antibiotic dispensing, delays in diagnosis for such diseases as tuberculosis, frequent use of
injections, created every possibility that new diseases with lethal outcomes will arise.
In one of his articles on pandemic preparedness that we read, Carlo Caduff (2014) wrote: “I
examine how American scientists and public health professionals presented pandemic
influenza as a catastrophic event that seemed to require the construction of a political
community on constant alert.”  Now it has been shown to everybody’s sorrow that the so-
called preparedness was completely dismantled by the Trump administration and that even
when Europe and US were given the time to prepare, they squandered it till the devastation
of the coronavirus was right at their doorsteps and even beyond.  How should we orient our
teaching and research to such issues?   
One issue that this pandemic has brought to the fore is that the experiences of governance
vary enormously across different regions of the world –  indeed, that the same policies such
as the lockdowns will play out very differently for the middle classes and for the poor. 
Most policy makers, bureaucrats and mathematical modelers, it seems, simply don’t know
how the poor live, which is why they cannot take variations in human behavior into
account. Decisions under uncertainty will become the norm in dealing with a virus about
which we know so little but the imperative to produce better and more grounded facts is
never going to be felt with greater urgency than in the next few years to come.
I am an anthropologist and whenever I have been hit by a disaster - personal, national,
professional -  I do what anthropologists of my kind do – I ask, is there any useful
knowledge or action I can produce? I now take the same questions to my students as I
prepare for this year and the next year and then possibly the next. I know that the
undergraduates in my classes are going to bring their experiences of massive social and
personal suffering into classes next year as they did during the economic recession when
incomes declined, marriages fall apart, and alarming incidents of suicides began to occur in
their generation. How will I bring the question of what responsibilities we owe to the
marginalized communities in our societies and yet be mindful that what might have looked
like impersonal neutral questions last year will touch naked wounds that are hidden behind
the clothed bodies and smiling faces of these young adults facing an unprecedented world
for them? How do we fulfill our responsibility to    ensure that they develop the competence
to read and understand complicated and contrary opinions, that they do not let their love for
the subtle and nuanced understating of issues disappear on the grounds of the needs for the
rough and the ready? 
I offer two examples of the calibration of these questions as I prepare for my classes for the
rest of the semester and the next year. Like all others, I have already made the transition to
online learning by trying to put my readings of the difficult texts available on power-point
presentations with my comments on audio recordings I have inserted. I reasoned that
students are probably so distracted with various kinds of demands on them that they might
be helped to take in my lecture slowly and in small doses. I try to insert within my lectures
small notes of regret that some of the material for the class readings is going to hurt and
why we need to develop the ability to withstand that hurt.  So, the first example of the kinds
of dilemmas I will face in a course on “Anthropology of Epidemics” I am preparing for, is
how to discuss questions of fairness, and how to avoid a slippage into moralism?  In one of
my classes on kinship, where I discussed the changes in the slave family in the 18th century
in Virginia as a consequence of the development of local trade in slaves and the demand for
young children as slaves, we read such testimonies as of a mother who had lost her two
children because the master sold them to other plantations, saying defiantly to the master
that she was glad her baby died because this is “one less child you will be able to sell.”  I
juxtaposed this discussion with the searing examples from Death Without Weeping –
Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s (1992) masterpiece- particularly the words of a woman who had a
miscarriage saying “he can make me pregnant, but he cannot make me keep his child” or
words to that effect. These students have learnt, then, that the abstract ideas of mother-love,
or the horror at the triage of children occurs in families in the everyday, that this is
knowledge the poor bear, which I have called in my own work “inordinate knowledge” as
opposed to knowledge that is bare, pale, or merely filed and such knowledge will also mark
how they learn and what they learn. 
Back to the question of fairness in my course on epidemics. We will read both historical
and ethnographic materials on triage during scarcity and two papers from political
philosophy that argue, contra Rawls, that neutral principles such as that of freedom of
choice and veil of ignorance to ensure fairness do not work. Instead, societies would have
to weigh into   questions of fairness by asking how they value different moral goals, say,
statistically produced fairness versus fairness to individuals? They will have to ask, how
does particularity in ethics matter? If ventilators are scarce how should priority be
determined? Should old people with preconditions just be allowed to die rather than take up
resources that could be used for health care workers, or those with greater chances of
survival? Is it possible to think of ethics as not simply a decision but a plethora of other
infra-decisions – I must be mindful that among those who were denied ventilators might
have been grandparents who died because they could not get access to hospitals or because
of scarcity of ventilators. I think I must add ways of relating these terrible experiences of
triage during this emergency to the burden of small decisions made by mothers living in
favelas and slums to let die a child while investing time and emotional resources in children
they judge as more likely to survive.  Should we not, as well, find ways of talking about
grief, death, regret - even when, and especially when, decisions seem fair and just? 
The second example I might want to develop, is to bring the work on urban poverty and
health infrastructure to show the connections between everyday experiences of health
delivery and management of a crisis such as the COVID 19 pandemic. As a concrete
example, let us take the case of the sudden announcement of the lockdown of three weeks
announced in Delhi on March 24th., and now its extension till the month of May.    As
became evident within a day of the announcement of the lockdown that the Government
had made no preparation on how they would implement the lockdown, nor was there any
sharing of information on how the lockdown might be used for preparing for the kinds of
issues other countries had faced relating to lack of sufficient hospital beds, or locating
hotspots in which testing might be intensified. The contradictions in Government policy
became evident when the Government responded to media reports of migrants setting out to
walk hundreds of miles to reach their villages since they had no ways of making provisions
for food under the lockdown (see Das 2020). The Chief Minister of the adjoining state of
Uttar Pradesh announced that free buses would ply migrants back home and in response
massive crowds (estimated to be 40,000 to 100,000) of migrants gathered at a bus stop on
the city border, not only defeating the whole idea behind the lockdown but also taking the
spread of the virus to villages on which the Government would have no information.   At
the same time, videos of police patrols roaming around in the slums and low income
localities in Delhi circulated showing the way people were being cornered and beaten up.
How could the government not see that the policy of lockdown was directly contradicted by
the offer of free buses to ply migrants across the border? And that, not only would the
crowds gathered there pose immediate risks of transmission of infection among themselves,
but also that as these migrants spread out in villages, it would become impossible to trace
contacts?  Why did the higher ups in the police administration neither think that policemen
on patrol needed masks and gloves, that one stern order to the effect that anyone found
using lathis to beat up people would be suspended, or a one day tour of affected areas by
senior police officers to reign in the lower level policemen might have constrained them
from using their sticks so freely?  No wonder that some economists such as Jishnu Das
(2020), are calling it the epidemic of ignorance in which epi-models fail to incorporate how
human beings under different circumstances behave, and what impact this has on modeling
and predictions? I want to equip my students to read the emerging literature on the
pandemic critically and to generate more knowledge about the variations in social
conditions. Does this mean that as teachers we are forced to abandon our other interests,
say in religion, art, or kinship? I think this is a question that we will need to think about
more concretely but consider that there are already new forms of literature and art arising,
the demands to understand domestic violence has intensified, the literature on the ethics of
care and the transformation of the everyday, or the understanding of planetary extinction
and even the reflections on Gandhi by some political philosophers take on new urgency.
The only question is how we might learn to see what is happening before us? I hope to do
this kind of learning with the students as we all discover our blind spots and our areas of
ignorance.
I come to the graduate students. What should we tell them? Shall we say to them that their
interests in kinship, or religion, or art, do not count anymore? In my own university, there
was quite a buzz last year about “non-academic” jobs. The ill thought out and completely
Eurocentric articles on academic precarity had created just the right atmosphere to claim
that only instrumental knowledge, one where immediate relevance can be shown, counted.
COVID-19 has shown, tragically, that it is not possible to know in advance what kind of
knowledge is to be characterized as “academic” and what kind as  “non-academic” or
“instrumental”? If policy makers were paying more attention to the work done by social
scientists on the impact of everyday forms of governance on vulnerable communities, we
might have avoided the temptation to assume that if one model worked in one place, it
would work equally well in all others.  The lockdown worked in China because once the
government realized the massive failure resulting from suppression of information, they
used what infrastructural capacities they had to mitigate the harshness of the lockdown in
Wuhan – it seems that apartments lying vacant as result of the boom in construction
industry were used to house those under quarantine, ability to organize local level party
workers to reach food and medicines systematically to those quarantined or in isolation
mitigated some of the harshness of the measures, though systematic studies are still
awaited.  In India implementing the lockdown without the requisite infrastructure created
hardships that we are yet to assess fully. So, I want to say to the graduate students, don’t get
lured by the idea that some “non-academic jobs” are just waiting around the corner to grab.
Instead, try to reorient your work to speak to the demand for more knowledge that the
pandemic has generated in terms of local level variations, the false assumptions behind
models that we need to not just criticize but also learn to understand as forms of decision
making under uncertainty.  When in the late eighties and early nineties, many
anthropologists realized that the new forms of warfare, the genocides, the silences around
domestic violence were a sign that they had been blinded in their work by the apparent
peaceful or harmonious picture of social relations that what was then known as the
“consensus” theory of society had painted, they had to reinvent how to do anthropology. I
remember how difficult it was to shift from speaking of social conflict to speaking about
violence. But anthropology changed, its assumptions about the social changed, and its
methods changed. I would say to the graduate students this is a moment of thinking anew
and the challenge is worth taking.
We all need to learn how to read the works of others such as data scientists or mathematical
modelers who are often outside our comfort zone. In turn we might want to ask ourselves,
how shall we make our work accessible to them?  This is going to be my project with the
graduate students – to help devise methods that will allow new way of addressing whatever
issues they want to research, to open themselves to the work in other disciplines and not to
think of anthropology as their jagir, something they own. Through my own ongoing
collaborations on tuberculosis in India, I have leant that we are able to best collaborate
when we have concrete problems before us that require us to collaborate – that without the
knowledge different disciplines brings to the situation, we will be imprisoned in our
cocoons. Sometimes our questions are immediate –  so in the case of tuberculosis we have
asked something as concrete as, when this new diagnostic technology is free why are
doctors not prescribing it? Sometimes these questions are more abstract – is there a
different way of speaking of the human when human existence is put in jeopardy? Is there a
relation between the human and a human, which we must think anew? 
I am a realist. I know that I belong to one of the “vulnerable” groups and indeed, in cases of
shortage of hospital beds or ventilators, I would rather that a younger person with more life
to live gets priority over me. Yet, I will do what I can to survive. I know that in these times
the young will have to face issues of job precarity, familial losses, some shrinking of the
world – I say, keep the fire burning in you – remember that you can make your labor and
your love for learning count for you in many different ways. In my generation, we survived
different kinds of catastrophes in our lives – partitions, displacements, untimely deaths,
suicides, political emergency, addictions, sexual abuse- your catastrophes are different. But
small acts of fidelity to yourselves done everyday will sustain the ability to care and to live
in a way that truly matters for you. I have to believe that. 
References
Caduff, Carlo. 2014 "Pandemic prophecy, or how to have faith in reason." Current
Anthropology 55.3 (2014): 296-315

Caduff, Carlo. 2015. The pandemic perhaps: dramatic events in a public culture of danger.
Univ of California Press, 2015.

Das, Jishnu, 2020. “India’s response to coronavirus can’t be based on existing

epidemiological models” The Print, April 6

Das, Veena. 2020. “ Charity alone can’t win this war against the poor” Deccan Chronicle,
April 6.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Death without weeping: The violence of everyday life in Brazil.
Univ of California Press, 1992.