Abstract

VISACOVSKY, Sergio E.. The gaze of Lot’s wife or what anthropology has helped to understand the COVID-19 pandemic (and what it can help to problematize anthropology). Cuad. antropol. soc. [online]. 2023, n.57, pp.7-23.  Epub May 01, 2023. ISSN 1850-275X.  http://dx.doi.org/10.34096/cas.i57.12764.

My intention is to discuss how the exceptional conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic enabled both a better understanding of reality through the analytical resources of anthropology and the problematization of approaches and methods of our discipline that we take for granted. Based on fieldwork from a distance on different aspects of the pandemic, I analyze three topics that are closely related: 1. the use of different concepts of crisis and its consequences to understand the pandemic; 2. as a consequence of the pandemic crisis and the difficulties in carrying out ethnographic research in its classical form, the opportunity not only to imagine new modes of empirical inquiry, but also to problematize accepted ways of thinking and research; 3. the validity of the anthropological problem about thought, rationality, universalism and relativism, underlying the controversies about the existence and nature of the virus, the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other health policy measures.

Keywords : Anthropology; Ethnography; Crisis; COVID-19 pandemic; Rationality.

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