I am not an epidemiologist.

Or am I, as an anthropologist concerned with production of human activity and its diffusion?

I start with the assumption that epidemiologists are, or should be, well educated into what anthropologists call “network theory,” particularly as re-imagined by Latour. Network theory is a way of looking as social action through the linkages that bring people together, and particularly on the movement of “information” through human beings, often very distant from each other. “Information” in this context includes about everything that can move through people from viruses to memes, gifts, money and other resources, health care, the knowledge that leads to school success, men and women, etc.

So, in the C19/Corona case, the New York Times taught me that one person, sometimes in 2019, got infected by C19, some place in Wuhan, China. By mid-June eight million people had been infected and 450,000 had died. The virus moved, and continues moving. Within a few weeks governors in Wuhan and Beijing “locked towns down.” Such policies, what I call “Corona,” also traveled around the world though they evolved even faster than the virus (and continue to evolve as various governors “re-open” the worlds on which they have authority).

In my earlier posts, I mostly focused on Corona, that is on the institutional responses that produce orders like “stay home.” Today, I wonder on the movement of the virus as it circulates along human networks and accelerates (air travel) and slows down (distancing) depending of the organization of the people into populations, and populations within populations (cities within states, neighborhood within cities) down to the smallest units: two or three people eating and sleeping together. Searching for renewed understandings of what was classically called “social organization” was the original task of the social sciences and, one hopes, their continuing task. Anthropologists have greatly contributed to this search. And they contributed something original because of their emphasis on conducting this search far from the beaten paths of the cities and states of their birth or adult lives. The anthropological contribution was fundamental precisely because of the limitations of ethnography: the unavoidable focus on small scale organization—where everyday life actually happens and intimate information travels. I mention infections rather than sickness among the infected as the latter is a biological matter (though possibly compounded by earlier life styles events or predispositions like diabetes or obesity).
Somewhat to my professional dismay, all the epidemiological work on C19 infections I have seen quoted proceeds in terms of black boxes aggregating millions of “data points” (e.g. matters like “size of household” or “income” or “race”). At best such research can tell us which black boxes to open. Some of that this kind of research, for example, highlighted that the virus propagates fastest in settings where small number of people are most intimately brought together so that they cannot escape each other’s breath. One of the setting and activity often mentioned is singing in choirs. The C19 aspect of singing in choirs is clear and a narrowly focused epidemiologist may not want to go further than advise governors to issue orders forbidding singing in choirs.

An anthropologist as epidemiologist would want to go further and first, investigate the organization of choirs, and then, second, attempt to generalize what their organization might tell us about other intimate situations. Choirs, anthropologists will tell anyone who will listen, are a particular form of social organization that is anything but universal in the details of the assembling of the choir (recruitment, resources, etc.), or the performance of the activities that constitute a group into a choir (style of singing, audiences, etc.). The correlation between singing in a choir and rate of infection does not tell us anything about who gets to sing, or how they get to sing on that day when one infected person sang. In other words, the issue about choirs is not that people sing, but that people are breathing hard with each other. This opens more general questions about what might also bring people together in close quarters.

Choirs are special settings and involve rather few people. But they are not the only setting where a multiplicity of people assemble together for long periods of time in small spaces where they will breathe hard on each. Funerals are often mentioned, bars, certain type of physical activities, etc. All those can be escaped. But there is one setting from which participants will not be able to escape each other: those that are generally summarized as “the family” at “home.” I said in passing in an earlier post that the order “Stay home (to stay safe)” appeared to imply a black box unit consisting of two adults of about the same age with 1.8 children. The order also appeared to operate in term of the equation: HOME = SAFE. I have not seen that equation challenged though many reports in the NY Times, when discussing why areas of the Bronx have much higher rates of infection than those in other parts of New York City, mentions “crowded households.” As far as infection is concerned many homes are at least as dangerous as choirs. At this point the anthropologist will weigh in to insist that there are many more types of households (homes, hearths, roofs) than there are of choirs. “Home” covers a multiplicity of human arrangements that cannot be imagined, but might be described by focused local research. This might stand as a kind of “definition” of the “family” (a very contentious matter).In my work here, “home” refers to a network of people whose daily activities are most likely to make a difference on each others activities. This set of people may live “under the same roof.” But they may also live under a linked set of roofs.

About every human being on earth is involved in such complex arrangements of other people they cannot escape. Understanding the details of these arrangements is essential when any attempt is made to interfere with what is traveling through these intimate networks whether it is viruses or, not so distantly related, that which helps with achieving school success. Anthropologists, particularly those of my generation’s teachers, made their career documenting the complexity of “home.” This documentation appeared in their debates as “kinship” and should not be ignored even if, somewhat to my surprise, many in my cohorts moved away from this kind of research, perhaps  because they misunderstood one of my teachers’ critique (Schneider 1984). And yet, at about the same time, sociologists of class reproduction rediscovered birth privilege, that is the huge effect of “family” on school success and adult career (Coleman 1966; Bourdieu and Passeron [1970] 1977). This privilege, like the virus, moves through linkages among intimately related persons. Much of this has been brought back to life as part of the discussion of “white privilege.” There is a risk that such recent refocus will reproduce, through the aggregation of “big data” used as proof, the caricaturing of the “white” vs. the “black” family that led, in earlier years, to awful or wonderful research on the multiplicities of familial arrangements and, most importantly, the complexity of the narrowed or expanded networks of significant others whose activities impacted on one’s own by either helping or hindering them (see bibliographic footnote below).

The important thing, for an anthropologically inclined epidemiologist, should not be to classify or to model in terms of aggregations by purported types. It should be to fine tune one’s analyses and face the real complexity of any attempt to rely on “home” to mitigate the effects of traveling information.  Given what we know about “homes,” then relying on home to mitigate certain things (viruses) risks increasing other (birth privilege). In many cases, “home” is dangerous, physically and in terms of one’s future economic success. And yet it is inescapable because it is, also, where one will get the care that is also something that travels best through intimate linkages.

One question for consideration: “does continuing home base learning for public school children augment the familial privilege that comes through the organization of the home?”

Bibliographic footnote

A while ago, I wrote a summary of the anthropological literature on the linkages between “family” and “education” (mostly school achievement) in Families, education and the state in America (1977).  Among the early anthropological works on “the Black family” those that stand out are by Carol Stack (1975) and Holloman & Lewis (1978).  It is important however to take great care when generalizing about the organization of categorically “similar” families.  Even the family next door could be quite different.  And half-a-century has passed since the original fieldwork.  And yet, this work can be useful as guide to the study of familial networks, and broaden our sense of the matters that can travel across these networks.

To recapitulate: A question like “What time is it?” or an order like “Do no enter!” are to be taken as an imposition on those who are caught by the statement, whatever the motivation for the statement, or its position into any sequence (for example, street vs. school vs. Corona). The pessimists might say that questions, orders, or any kinds of statements are forms of not so symbolic “violence” (Bourdieu [1972] 1977) or even instances of “micro-aggression” (Sue 2010), Optimists might see them as “gifts” (Mauss [1923-4] 1967).

In any event, the question is whether a statement (speech act) is to be considered a trigger for an unpredictable response rather than a cause with predictable effect.

Take a case now familiar to readers of this blog: Imagine a university professor planning a lecture tour. This “plan” involved starting several conversations with colleagues across the country and, in some cases, their staff. Imagine that the professor, as he is driving, is told that the university where he was to speak now forbade all public events. Those who are telling are apologetic even though the cancellation (an aspect of the “Do not enter” speech act) is not something they performed. All they are doing is passing the act along.

What is the professor to do next?

Quite predictably, the planned lectures did not take place: cause led to effect.

The professor also “decided” to continue driving west, away from home: statement triggered response.

That there will be a response is predictable. What this response will be is not predictable, not even by those initiating the responses. The response will involve a series of circumstances each of which will participate in shaping but not in determining the response. In the case of our professor, he was already a third of the way across the country. He had no other responsibilities anywhere. Things were said to be bad in New York. He had a good car and the means to continue traveling. The weather was good. The governors were not forbidding travel. The professor’s response made sense—even though some did question its wisdom. The professor drove another 1,000 miles west. Two weeks later the professor was given the choice: leave or isolate yourself in your hotel room for the next 30 days. He dove back home. That also made sense, as it might also have made sense to stay put.

At the same time, half-way around the world, tens of thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) were similarly told to “go home” from New Delhi and other major cities in India. Whatever they did next made sense even as many died of deprivation as they trundled on foot towards far away villages. Billions of other human beings were faced with similar moments. Most of these moments were not as tragic as they must have been for the poor of New Delhi. Few were as privileged as the professor’s response could be. All of them were caught by Corona speech acts they then had to translate into the further speech acts that would actually move them. The most powerful of those further acts must have been the answer people gave to the question begged by the order “Stay Home!” Where they had to establish, practically, is home? Who is going to be there? Who will have authority over what there? Are there alternatives? Small collectives then must have gotten someone among them to say “This is home for you” and “these are the people who can reside here (be fed, taken care of if ill, etc.).” I suspect that most of those who performed the initial triggering “Stay Home!” act did not linger too much on what “home” would be. In Euro-America at least, somewhat confirmed by preliminary discourse analyses of media, I image governors imagined a smallish separate residence, with two adults of about the same age, and 1.8 children. That the “home” might be a large compound with extended kin, servants, etc. does not seem to have been imagined. Nor, the possibility that the “home” is a small space inhabited by only one elderly sickly person. Nor the possibility that the home would be a “second” home in the country side that well-to-do city residents might escape to.

In brief, and analytically, the statement “Stay Home!” may have caused much that noone could escape (not entering a building, not giving a lecture) but it also triggered much much more. The statement is less a cause than a condition and a constraint on future action. More on this in a post to come.
Most importantly from a public policy point of view is the reality that one could predict further action would be taken but not what this action would involve—particularly when the trigger has no precedent so that no policy could be “evidence-based.”

Our department decided to improvise a graduation Zoom event. I was asked to say something about “COVID-19” (as it appears to have gotten to be labeled) and developments in anthropology. The audience was to be mostly non-anthropologists and perhaps some significant others. The setting was both a classical ritual moment in the history of humanity in its American version, even though the staging had never been done this way. And I had to keep the comments to less than three minutes. I interpreted this charge as follows:

Clearly, a challenge and not a time to be overly didactic. So I said a version of what I have been saying all my anthropological life about “culture” and “life.” I have said it in many different ways (including in my April 8 2020 post). Today, I mostly want to annotate the statement for those who may not catch the references I was making. The first sentences are direct echo of a very classical statement— and a favorite of mine. They are also an echo of what was said by an about forgotten American anthropologist I just discovered:

I am not going to quote the many versions of the critique I refer to. My sense is that this critique emphasize the outcome of the process of cultivation: that under which human beings live is something created (Bidney), a synthesis of a higher order (Lévi-Strauss).

Event though it may not be quite couched in this way, I take Latour’s insistence that objects have “agency” as the beginning of a return to something that must have been self-evident to both Bidney and Lévi-Strauss. Both of them (and Marx and many others before them) did say that human beings live by what they have made. But they insist that they do not make that which they then I emphasize ‘then’ to index one of my most recent themes that much of anthropology should be rewritten in terms of sequentiality: this THEN that. More on this elsewhere.
transform. Human beings do not create “ex nihilo” (as the Christian God is said to have done). They “create” with other stuff, some that they trip over, most of which they inherit, and some they have recently made.

All this is obvious to me, and perhaps to most of colleagues in anthropology.  It may appear unnecessary to find new ways of stating it.  I do not think so.  The fundamental puzzles remain.  One is the relationship between what any of us inherit, the words which we borrow (Bakhtin [1965] 1981), and that which we then say (Merleau-Ponty [1969] 1973  ). But working out this puzzle should not make us lose sight of the more fundamental puzzle: the relationship between objects (even some other humans have constructed in our past) and the work that we then have to do with these objects to make them fit in our lives. This the fundamental question that the C19/Corona event must make us, anthropologists, face again. The virus (even if it was made in a laboratory and “escaped”) is a real object that kills some of us. Orders to “Stay Home” are cultural productions that become, for most of us another real object that trips us and requires something, in some future next step.  That which is done by a local collectivity may then become another “synthesis of a higher order,” a “culture.”

I have asked students to keep journals about their personal experience with Corona and I will ask them, next Fall, to pay attention to the culture that they, along with their significant others, made with what Corona has given them (orders about not entering, distancing, etc.) even as it evolves. I hope that few of those I teach will have had direct experience with C19 itself—though, as the anthropologists of science and medicine will tell them—even that experience will have been mediated by a particular medical machinery enforcing this or that advice in this or that language.

Note also, in my statement above, the sentence about “those for whom we may be responsible.” Given that I teach in a professional school, in a program in anthropology of education approached as a form of applied anthropology, my responsibility and that of our students is something that keeps concerning me: what advice would I, would you, give to a governor or mayor about allowing people to sun bathe on a beach? What advice would we give about what human beings do with orders to (not) enter this or that space? What would you say to the governor if its staff told you anthropologists are not public health experts and need not be consulted? What would you do if your understanding of collective human action was used better to control human beings?

April 24, 2020

I like to quote Rousseau’s origin myth for humanity:

And again:

For Durkheim ([1918] 1966), and then Lévi-Strauss ([1960] 1976), these statements introduce the fundamental problematics of sociology and anthropology: there is the making of an arbitrary mark among a population, and then obedience, and then duty. I tend to agree with this, but not with the exact phrasing, or its development into the more particular problematics of the social “contract” apparently entered into by adults meeting in some neutral place who come to an agreement that this would be the grounds of their relationships. And then, it is imagined, they arrange for this contract to be enforced (for example by hiring teachers to drill students into the way a language should be spoken or written).

Marx and Lenin, Bourdieu and Foucault, like many others developed this argument by pointing out that many such agreements are not quite voluntary and many among the “simple people” have to be to be convinced, often in devious ways (say by priests or, again, teachers), that they should not believe their “lying eyes.” Jargonized as “socialization” or “enculturation,” most social scientists proceed with the assumption that people consent to social contracts (social constructions, imagined communities) even when these contracts, now downsized to “habits,” hurt them. The assumption that people consent is all too rarely examined assumption as if the answer was obvious: people consent because there is something wrong with them. Rousseau started this by qualifying the people for being “assez simple,” a not-so-polite way to say, particularly in the 18th century “naive, idiot, retarded.” Too many anthropologists fell for that when they were asked what to do about poverty in the 1960s: “culture of poverty” (having encultured oneself into what keeps one in poverty). As has been argued many times, this went against everything anthropologists might observe among the poor, but it preserved the tradition that started with Rousseau.

What I keep of Rousseau is the interactional sequence: 1) someone puts a fence and says something about it (“speech acts”) while 2) others watch and 3) take the fence and the speech into account in their own future interaction with the first person. What is the exact nature of their response (consent or resistance) is what should have remained the fundamental problematics. Poetically, the best alternate take to the making of arbitrary (not functionally necessary) walls is Frost’s. Frost who understood that “good fences make good neighbors” but that they have to be rebuilt again and again because “something there is that doesn’t love a wall” even as the absence of the wall might lead to further violence. In the poem there are at least four protagonists, three of them human: the narrator who doubts even as he complies in the rebuilding, the neighbor who appears to threaten him, and the hunters who disarrange the wall. There is also one non-human actor: the frost.

Rousseau was wrong: people are never “simple enough” as to believe someone who puts up a wall. And, for many, fear of raw power is a sensible response particularly when the mysterious unknown non-human (a virus) is compounded by a sign (wall) saying “STOP! Do not enter!” because “Stay home! Save lives!” (good distancing makes good neighbors).

My earlier posts were mostly about ways to analyze the evolution and spread of Corona as what Mauss called a “total social fact” ([1923] 1967).

I will now focus on the moments of encounter with Corona that are but an instance of any encounter requiring further action by those made to participate. What is it that can happen, next?

Most simply, to any statement requesting action the response can be:

• . Yes!
• . No!
• . Let me think about it! (Play with it, dissemble about it, undermine it or build it up outside the box set up by the statement)

The classical case I generally use when teaching about what makes a classroom a classroom (building on Mehan 1979) involves the question “what time is it?” To this question, human beings have been documented to respond with such statements as:

• . “it’s 5 o’clock”
• . “it’s my watch, man!”
• . “it’s not time yet.”
• . “time to go to bed”

These responses are themselves statements allowing for, or requiring, a further response. All sorts of these second responses (in a third step) have been documented. Famously, the first response can lead, in a third step, to such statements as “Thank you!” or “Good (for being able to read a watch)!” In each case, the statement reveals and constitutes broader constraints, whether polite encounters with strangers in the street, routine encounters between teacher and student in a classroom, or possibly tense interactions when some decide that one has “screwed around” and need specific “instruction” (Garfinkel 2002: 257).

Yes/No/Perhaps to a request for action can be considered here as a model that can guide further investigation into what can happen when one is told “close your restaurant”

Three ethnographic vignettes (about closing restaurants):

March 16, 2020: I drove off US2 in North Dakota for lunch. Near the highway, I found the kind of dinner in which parking lot pick-up trucks predominate. I had the usual meal. I overhead men talking about Corona: “I heard that they did in … “ “Trump said….” “I read somewhere ….” As I was getting ready to leave, a lady entered the restaurant whom I recognized not only phenotypically, but through dress, hair style, etc., as a “nice” professional woman of the American Middle West. She started explaining to the dinner’s manager what changes needed to be made to the tables, what steps needed to be taken to sanitize the restaurant, and other matters related to the “virus.” She was pleasant, smiled, while the manager, the servers, and the cook, looked worried. Eventually the manager asked “are they going to close us?” To which the woman responded “not yet but we expect the decision to close to be made later today. We take our orders from above.”

[comments: what I overheard triggered what I eventually wrote in my post about education into Corona]
[comments: note the ‘they’ and the ‘we’]

March 17, 2020: Lunch in Montana: restaurants are open but, at some point during the meal, I heard a conversation between a worried manager and someone on the phone. She was explaining that she had spread out the tables and was leaving one empty table between the people she seated.

[comments: this conversation implies earlier conversations about steps to take]

March 18th, 2020: I entered Jackson, Wyoming, and found that all restaurants had been closed.

[comments; If the same decision had been taken in North Dakota and Montana, then all the people I saw were laid off and had lost their salary.]

In middle March, Corona was spreading through the Middle West. People worried as they had to face a radically transformed economic landscape. They had to sort out what to do next and particularly whether to consent or resist (perhaps, in the United States by asking a judge whether the order to close was constitutional).

I have not interviewed any one about the sequences of what conversation analysts might call “turns” that might be investigated as “life histories” of encounters with Corona. I have participated in conversations. Some about what to do next (“Is it really necessary to wear a mask in this particular situation?”). Many were interpretative (“what do you think of this newly published statistic?” “Aren’t you sick of this shit that’s going on”). On this basis, I’d say that my main interlocutors (via email and some Zoom) appear to consent to the restrictions. They say ‘yes’ to confinement. Almost all of them, particularly university professors, are secure financially, as well as their kin. I do have some kin whose response might be summarized as “Yes, but … maybe things are not so bad as ‘they’ say…” or “closing cemeteries is strange.” In recent days, it has been reported that there may be many people who say “no” publicly. This public resistance may even lead to further responses by governors. It may also lead to some who said ‘Yes’ to move to ‘No’.

We need many more reports and I hope anthropologists will soon start reporting more systematically what some people, here or there, did, with what resources, and with what consequences on themselves, their kin, and others around them. I imagine that both consent and resistance took many forms and keep evolving as the people face new information, new instructions, new forms of discipline.

In brief, all encounters with a constraint (statement, decree, remnant of earlier statements and decrees) will involve some sort of bricolage.

This post is an exercise in imagining what social scientists need to do in order to learn about the spread of Corona, from the point of view of an anthropology steeped in the epistemology of ethnography. The appearance of Corona in all our lives is also an opportunity to understand better how real (not imagined) worlds are constructed by human beings, as well as what are the consequences of the particular worlds actually constructed on the everyday lives of people in the populations caught in that world, whether they bend to the new constraints, resist them, or (deep) play with them. In other words, for those who work off Foucault: how does governmentality actually work?

I introduced what I am exploring here in my earlier post about the speech acts which, as I drove west, closed restaurants (March 28, 2020). These speech acts traveled down pathways from some source to a local establishment where it will be experienced, say by a restaurant manager, and then lead to some response, or, rather, many responses. I first “felt” Corona on March 9, when it was announced that classes at Teachers College would be “online” only starting two days later. By the 12th, I, along with everyone else at Teachers College received a message from our president, forwarding the message that the president of Columbia had sent to all on some enormous mailing list (the “Columbia community” as it was deemed). I know less about the Corona pathways in France, I imagine that university presidents there did not have to deal with trustees, lawyers or insurers. What they had to deal with, and how they had to announce local decrees is worth investigating, particularly for those still interested in the culturing of human action
The message mentioned the World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control and it made it appear as if the “University” was the acting subject. No mention of any internal mechanism was indicated in the key sentence “we now need to take further steps.” Who is “we” here, ethnographically? Given that the conversations that led to the decision are “privileged” (i.e. secret except to a few), I imagine that the participants included trustees, lawyers, insurers. I imagine conversations among the presidents of New York University, Cornell and perhaps others. And I imagine calls to the state governor or his staff.

The conversations that led to the announcement of what “we” would do next will remain secret for 30 years at least. But they must have been all the more intense that the WHO or CDC or NY state suggestions and decrees left some matter to local interpretation and improvisation on the overall Corona theme. It is a matter of public information that universities of Columbia’s standing did speech act with different consequences for their students. On March 9th, talking with some colleagues at Indiana University we wondered about Harvard’s decision to abruptly close all student residences, with apparently little concern with whether students actually had a “home” to go back to. Eventually Columbia went a different way, “strongly urging” students to go home, but accommodating those who could not (for example the many students from China).

Ethnographers will rarely be given permission to take notes when speech acts affecting millions if not billions are being performed. Few of us can study “up” so we will have to find settings that will allow us to observe, collect, take notes, etc. among people relatively “down” from our status. In particular anthropologists will be able to document what some people did as they responded to decrees by governors (presidents, first ministers, superintendents, chiefs—whatever they may be called in this or that world). For a few days for example, some of us at Teachers College imagined (hoped?) that the “closure” was not an absolute one. We exchanged e-mails about whether someone could water the plants in my office. As we did, we came to understand the depth of the closure and the not-at-all symbolic strength of Corona. I do not know whether my plants are surviving though it may be that one of the few human beings who can still enter the building is watering them.

As with all ethnography, this little vignette does not seem to mean much. And yet it can be the grounds on which one can model the Corona pathways and the activity of human beings when caught anywhere in what is essentially a daedalus.

So, in summary, and in a very preliminary fashion:

— A consists of some human beings who can decree what B, C, D, n…. must do or else some punishment may ensue. The people of A meet, deliberate and then they decree.

— B (C, D, n…. ) consists of some other human beings who receive the decree and translate it so that it makes sense for them. In the process, after meetings, deliberations, etc. they come up with further decrees to those over which they have more focused authority Ba, Bb, Bc, Bn….

–Ba (Bb, Bc, Bn…) then, meet, translate, deliberate and, perhaps come up with still further specific decrees on Ba1, Ba2, Ban…

Thus:

— (A) the governor of NY state decrees that all non-essential businesses should close;

— (B) university presidents decree that all teaching would be online using Zoom (rather than Skype)

— (Ba) individual faculty members on sabbatical and traveling to give lectures must decide whether to continue driving, etc. This response is made in collaboration with children, in-laws, etc.

(Ba) is where ethnographers will be enter to the world of Corona and give evidence as to what people who had no voice in the making of some policy do as they translate the particular mandate they received into their own lives among their most significant others.

The point is that people, everywhere and everywhen, when the recipient of a decree that makes a very real world for them, will make something else with the decree that those who made the decree cannot predict or control. As I argued in Educating in Life (2019), building on Rancière, a powerful event in one’s life will lead to a whole set of “next” steps sensitive to the actual practical character of the event, the resources available, the more or less significant others with whom one will try to construct a next, and then the response to the responses by those who produced the event in the first place.

Remember Alice and the flamingo!