COVID-19 and the Biopolitics of Global Health – Introduction
The set of essays in this series approach the COVID-19 pandemic as an unfinished event, where debates and discussions must continue to explore and illuminate our stakes in the contemporary. The forum for which they were written, a project involving three workshops in three continents over 18 months, sought a conjunction of two disciplinary perspectives: social anthropology and philosophy. The intent was to reframe, respond to, and question once again the relationship of social anthropology with philosophy in the context of the pandemic. With that intent, we invited philosophers and anthropologists to share their observations about the pandemic and ask how a common ground might emerge. We did not want to reignite the friction between the two disciplines, one that was on display throughout the pandemic, nor did we want to reinstate or rehearse how philosophy has classically informed social anthropology. Rather, we acknowledge that the genealogy of conceptual work in anthropology has been about finding resonance between philosophical insight and empirical epistemologies. Philosophy, on its own terms, will find emerging human conditions a foil to abstract enduring meaning. The common ground was about, on one hand, finding a way through the impasse that ensued when, during the pandemic, universal proclamations in the medical sciences, zoonotics, and human biology began to be renewed against persistent particulars of localized bodies and human ecologies. On the other, it was observing how local economies, power structures, and political wills challenged the principles of good governance and administrative adequacy in responding to this planetary event. Keeping these axes as an outline, we wanted to shed the certainty of our theories and philosophies, while paying heed to the granularity of the ethnographic ground. It would, we hoped, be an opportunity for recognizing ground detail with theoretical clarity.
A biopolitical orientation seemed the most appropriate way to do this, not as a limit but as an initial assumption that the pandemic drew on the model of governance during a species event involving an unknown virus that impacted all human life. In the ensuing management of life and death, responses from across the globe overwhelmed the registers of the political, the economic, and the juridical. The entanglement of medical science and biotechnologies in these registers was obvious. At the same time, anthropological and ethnographic detail was necessary to stage the ordinary and spotlight the particular – especially to bring back the social into a conceptual framing. The biopolitical and the ethnographic pandemic thus were the two specific vectors that informed this meeting of epistemologies while also shaping the possible questions that could be pursued.
If we are to provide a fuller accounting of the pandemic we must look where its effects were manifest most directly: on the social. To that end, we asked two key questions: first, how did ethnographies of the pandemic change perceptions of illness, health, science, care, and medical ethics; and second, how were relationalities reconfigured between doctors and patients, institutions and subjects, among friends, neighbors and communities, and between state and citizen? When these queries are embedded in biopolitical reflection, one able to hold and account for geographical spread, emphasis on a set of common parameters emerges. For example: how does the pandemic alter conceptions of what qualifies as health and illness? How did the pandemic normalize modes of life indebted to practices of social immunity? How did changing public health structures renew perspectives on forging communities that rely less on exclusion and more on inclusion? The dialogue between the biopolitical and the social could respond once more to reiterated questions, such as the meaning of the global in “global health,” or how we use a vocabulary of the universal and the particular in terms of local and global. And given that the COVID-19 pandemic was a global event involving life and death, questions of how living and dying were experienced during the pandemic become key. How does the language of medical death interact with the language of social loss?[1]
In our view, the pandemic showed that one cannot separate philosophical thinking from the reality of lived human experience, which too often was the case during the event. (On this score see the widely discussed writings of Giorgio Agamben and his response[2] to the Italian lockdown in the early months of the pandemic). As an initial discussion, questions of civil liberties and of bodily sovereignty emerged immediately, as did scientific and statistical certainty in governmentality. And of course medical anthropologists have been attending to the ethnographic for decades, witnessed by an immense body of literature that critically reexamines the totalizing assignations, for example, of the “Global South – Global North” division, as well as the ambiguities of culture, the social determinants of health inequalities, the political economies of medical aid, the distributions of vulnerability and so forth. These themes too are at the backdrop of the essays here.
Insomuch that a connection is forged after suggesting a distinction between the ethnographic and the philosophical, it is fundamentally a kind of ploy to seek out and state how they relate to each other. The collection of four essays and the workshop report in this series is that part of the connection that was discussed in Delhi[3] where young scholars were invited to speak of their work following the broad parameters of the conceptual and empirical as articulated through this brief introduction. Emphasizing the anchoring project’s temporal and spatial complexity as well as its interdisciplinary nature, these contributions come from early career researchers from the social sciences, the humanities, and public health.
We can summarize them this way. First, they show that anthropological heft can be made stronger by increasing the ethnographic spread not only between the Global North and South, but also in the attention to a range of observations that do not necessarily follow the dominant paradigms of exclusion or of relationalities circulating in the pandemic literature, for instance. Second, the significance of localized practice of the social emerged as a sustained critique of global health institutions. The papers highlight the outsized role explicit invocations of the social played during the pandemic (in lockdowns, in “social” distancing, in frontline work, in varying forms of community aid, in collective attempts at healthcare). The concerns raised in the essays here show the myriad ways in which interdisciplinarity, ethnography and philosophical thinking can hone in and interact on the ground of the event to illuminate newer insight.
A brief outline of the essays are as follows. Tanuj Luthra’s contribution explores how residents of a squatter settlement in post-pandemic Delhi contested dominant narratives of COVID-19’s severity, asserting that the virus primarily affected the city’s elite. Through careful listening, Luthra argues that these beliefs reflected lived experiences of state neglect and chronic precarity rather than irrational denialism. Drawing on articulations shaped by located experience, his discussion engages two significant discursive threads. One, he engages with the political hues of denialism that found shape across the globe. And two, his essay also reflects the diverse somatic experiences of the body that were much too quickly converged onto racialized categories in wider debates – for example, the notion that BAME (Black, American, Middle Eastern) can dominate notions of experienced vulnerabilities in the UK environment.
Fartein Hauan Nilsen examines the normalization of AI chatbots as emotional support systems during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in California, the paper critically assesses how the crisis accelerated the integration of large language model-based chatbots, reshaping experiences of care and social connection, especially when proximal care was precarious. The attention to social isolation is carried forward in Shobha John’s essay as well, where she explores how narratives of isolation during the pandemic reconfigured notions of marginality in India, with class, caste, and gender shaping access to care. Through an analysis of state-enforced confinement, the paper critiques the denial of the “right to isolation” to marginalized populations, highlighting the entanglement of protection, contagion, and control. Between the two essays, the notion of lockdown and the ensuing isolation and social “distancing” finds two distinct articulations. Both show what two diverse locations of discussion can bring to the discursive gaps in understanding the social imaginations of connection, care, and isolation.
Finally, Esca van Blarikom’s essay focuses on the politics of the category of “essential work” as it emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, exploring its ambiguities through the lens of Zupančič’s notion of disavowal. Gender and work, while being conventional tropes in examining inequities and social burden, achieve further elaboration here with the concept of “essential” and what that implies in this medical event. Her essay shows how essential work during the pandemic did not just map onto persistent inequities in gendered work, but also took further shape. Taken together, the essays provide different entry-points into the analysis of our post-pandemic world, from transformed care infrastructures and somatic experiences to the exclusionary effects of pandemic governance. None of these are without debate or remain undocumented, yet their proximity in a series suggests that disciplinary separations, conceptual silos or regional boundaries can limit rather than expand understanding. As an event yet to have completed its horizon, these perspectives remind once again that such epistemological entanglements enable the necessary critical reflection on how our concepts engage an understanding of a lived present.
[1] Over 18 months, spanning across 2024-2025, a group of philosophers and anthropologists met over three different locations, Salerno, Italy; Delhi, India; and Ithaca, USA. The three workshops were able to address these broad vectors in remarkable and rigorous ways. The Salerno and Cornell workshops followed the structure of paper presentations followed by engaged discussions with an invited audience. The Delhi workshop hosted two structured Round Table discussions, directed by pre-formulated queries that privileged both a locational discussion as well as a philosophical discussion. The Cornell workshop also included a round table session on One Health with invited participants from across disciplines at Cornell. Cornell also hosted Judith Cutchin, the First Vice President of the New York State Nurses Association who, along with her colleagues, spoke in a public lecture about their compelling experience as first responders in the various phases of the pandemic. The Delhi workshop too had invited non-academic participants and professionals like a medical doctor, lawyer, and an architect to bring in insights from the ground during and in the lingering aftermath of the pandemic. The last piece in this series will offer a report of the Delhi Workshop in more detail.
[2] Agamben, Giorgio. 2020. Social Distancing. Autonomies, April 7. https://autonomies.org/2020/04/giorgio-agamben-social-distancing/.
[3] At the Delhi workshop, which was supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation, the workshop included two “travelling classrooms” in which graduate students presented papers, selected through a competitive call, on pandemic biopolitics. Each paper was discussed by faculty present at the workshop. Roundtable discussions followed each.