Category Archives: Culturings

Comments that produce associations and properties for the identification of human beings in terms of race, gender, religion, etc.

powerful representations of a culture

[this was drafted in August 2024 but could not be posted at the time]

« Un spectacle extraordinaire, unique au monde et dans l’histoire des Jeux qui, je crois, a rendu nos compatriotes extrêmement fiers. » Emmanuel Macron ne tarit pas d’éloges sur la cérémonie d’ouverture des Jeux olympiques de Paris 2024, qui s’est déroulée sur la Seine vendredi 26 juillet. Ce samedi, le président de la République s’est réjoui du « formidable spectacle […] que les artistes et les athlètes ont donné ».
(published in various French newspapers in late July 2024)

As many noticed, the opening ceremonies to the Olympic games in Paris have been the occasion for much commentary. They will probably remain one of the most remembered ceremonies. I did not notice any cultural anthropologist weighing in and so, as I prepare to teach my first introductory course in the discipline, I thought I would write something and, given some of my critics who say I am not concerned enough with “power,” I will start with the paradoxes of governmentality.

Continue reading powerful representations of a culture

Barbie and their people

[ORIGINALLY POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 3, 2023]

I would probably not have gone to see Barbie (the movie) if I had not read so much about it over the past few weeks. So, here is another take, including a take on the takes.

In brief, I was entertained by what might have been intended, by movie makers, their financiers, and above all Mattel as a little bit of fluff that would make careers and money. I knew that this was not a movie for most of my sections (the list would be long)—except perhaps for one: after all I am an anthropologist of America and this movie is an event in the history of the United States, a performance that triggered many other performances (particularly by my peers in the American intelligentsia). So, in the spirit of ethnography I will first focus on aspects of the film as object, and then ponder about what future anthropologists might do with this total social fact.

Continue reading Barbie and their people

Race Consciousness, Racism (and race?): Contradictions with consequences (culture!)

From the time when I played “les coboilles et les indiens,” 70 years ago, in the streets of small Southern village, I have experienced something, that is, precisely, a “thing” that stood in my way, that I could play with, or fear. This was called “America” by French politicians (etc) as well as five year old boys. “It” (its armies, myths, festivals) was awe-inspiring and also mysterious. After many years establishing myself as an anthropologists of ‘America,’ I would now say that that which still fascinates me is not exactly the kind of object archaeologist might find in some jungle. America, as any other culture I’d say, is more of a set of dilemmas and contradictions that move conversations-with-practical-consequences—and thus, through their consequences do make things that trigger more conversations and things.

Case in point: The recent conversations about what to do (“ask applicants,” “take into consideration,” and other speech acts) when involved in evaluating students for admission into elite colleges.

Like many in these colleges, I have been reading several documents all written by people born, raised, and schooled in the United States (natives?). I read the “Opinion” (certainly not a description of the actual speech act!) by that most bizarre (cross-culturally) of institutions: the Supreme Court of the United States. I read the Opinion, some of the concurring statements, some of the dissenting statements, and many editorials and such summarizing the Opinion and telling what it “really” meant. And so I am left contemplating the ongoing production/construction of a culture (America) that continues to fascinate me as an emergent, and now someone jaded, Franco-European(-American?).

These documents are ostensibly about, “race,” “race consciousness,” or “racism.” But I am never always sure which.  My own opinion (interpretation with no authority or general consequence), is that all “justices” agree that racism is bad and that something, that is some thing (act with consequences) needs be (not) done. They are all, in the very evidence of their writing, very much “conscious” or “race” but they do not agree on what kind of “race consciousness” is a good or bad thing.  Surprisingly to some observers, they do not seem to care much about “race,” as a concept, category or thing of any sort. And so, most people in the United States, particularly actors in the elite universities, are left to their own devices figuring out what do to next in their various responsibilities as faculty, minor administrator, etc., in one of these universities.

The justices and commentators do agree that racism is bad, but the issue, as argued, is not about philosophy, ideology, genetics and other sciences of the human body. It is about institutional consequences that have direct life-long consequences on people. It is about slavery, segregation and Jim Crow laws, separate but equal schooling, limitations on voting, and such matters of state mandates. It is about what the State may allow or require of institutions and people in general. In that sense, it is about facts that constrain people (Durkheim), things with their separate agency (Latour), inevitable objects. That all these facts, things, objects, are man-made (human productions) do not make them less real. I will sometimes say that such constructions may in fact be more immediately real (to be lived and experienced) than matters like gravity or air-pressure, even if, or particularly if, they are so threatened as to continually need reconstructing.

And “race” is now something to be reconstructed in general and in the particularities of admission offices.

In very brief, the ongoing conversations start with a general agreement that America, in its State and mandates, constructed many very bad institutions in the past. It should continue to deconstruct these and construct some new ones. This is, and has been, an ongoing process. To appropriate something Lévi-Strauss once said in his usual pithy way: [America] tends to be dismantled like a palace swept away upon the flood, whose parts, through the effect of currents and stagnant waters, obstacles and straits, come[s] to be combined in a manner other than that intended by the architect” ([1962] 1966: 233). What Lévi-Strauss might have added was that this palace is continually being reconstructed—as everyone in the United States was reminded a few weeks ago.

But this reconstruction is not guided by any architect. The significant speakers/actors (the six justices of the Supreme Court who made a difference) just told any architect what NOT to build. All architects of future admission procedures will have to construct things in ongoing uncertainty without relying on any specific consensus, common sense, or tradition. The justices themselves, spectacularly, do not agree with what is exactly at stake. All use the word “race.” But only some wonder about what exactly, for this or any other purposes, is to be meant by the word. All, in their more consequential pro or con moments, appear to take it for granted. I suspect all of them might agree that the word is about a social construct of some sort, and not a thing of nature or a property of people (as it might have been in the 19th century and still lingering). The conversation is about what is to be constructed that is somehow related to race.  It will involve wondering about materials, institutional places, ecological impact on other constructions, and the imagined future use of the constructed things. On one side, six of justices agree that constructing anything with “race” is a bad thing, as it was in the past. On the other side, three justices agree that, when acting with institutional life-long consequences, those with authority may, or indeed must, make themselves “conscious” of race, using whatever definition they wish. All nine then tar each other, more or less explicitly, with “racism.”

So, what is racism at this moment in United States time: being institutionally “conscious” of race or being deliberately and institutionally NOT conscious of race? Is there anything that anthropology, through ethnography, can offer as part of an answer?

I’d say first that the very ongoing conversations demonstrate that about everyone in the United States is, practically, in their everyday life, “conscious of race.” What is less clear is what, in this everyday life of people with very different responsibilities (university presidents, interns helping sort applications), does this consciousness make happen? I suspect, given “America” that many will transform this into questions of states of mind, identity, or the like. But the Court, most interestingly for an observer, is not actually concerned with states of mind. It is concerned with the State and its statutes and mandates in the minute details of its work as it might be experienced in the everyday life of the people affected. In my own academic world, preliminary local conversations have raised such practical issues as: may an institution still ask applicants for admission to check any kind of box about race (in all its variants)? How can people be given preferential treatment on matters like financial aid? How might this preference be phrased and practically implemented by subsidiary administrators? All these are extremely concrete matters that are continually referred to “legal” since the institution does not want to be sued. All  the actors will remain “conscious of race” but that will remain a private matter. My kind of anthropologist will always look, after a cursory glance at the text of a mandate, at what the people will then do with the mandate. This anthropologist will expect that people will resist, play or, as one commentator said, actively “game the system.” As I like to say, it is by looking at such moments that one eventually discovers what is most consequential for a people—that is, for me, not so much “their” culture as the culture they cannot escape.

 

References

Lévi-Strauss, Claude   [1962] 1966/2021     The savage mind/Wild thought. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

 

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The end of Corona

I first mused about the end of the Corona epoch (a.k.a “COVID-19″) two years ago. I did it again a year ago. In both cases I took into account both my (lived?) experience in the various polities I usually and more or less regularly inhabit (family, church, shops, university), as well as what I found out about the evolution of governors’ mandates, including both those I had to live by in New York City or France, and those I read about. My usual examples involved restaurants, their closure, their re-opening, the mandates about masks while sitting or moving in restaurants, etc.

First, some ethnography:
At Teachers College, one could trace various endings over the past two years. The building was reopened to selected personnel, then to all. There shifts in vaccination reporting and checking, etc. And then, on April 20, 2023 we were told that, among related matters:

COVID-19 requirements and campus access:
TC will no longer link any COVID-19 vaccination or testing requirements to campus access.

This was justified as [resulting] “from the ending of the COVID-19 Federal Health Emergency declaration and decreasing COVID-19 cases among TC community members and across New York City.”

All this is to happen on May 12, 2023, thereby closing the epoch that started sometimes in early March 2020 (the actual starting point could be considered either the first message about the “coronavirus” [it had not yet been named “COVID-19], or the actual physical closing of the buildings when “do not enter” signs were pasted over the doors).

The TC announcement went to every one in the “community” (faculty, staff, students, etc.) and did not cause much of a ripple. When I mentioned it in class someone retorted that she got the message on the same day one of our her friend tested positive. To persist on my theme, governors can re-open restaurants, the virus continues its life career—if viruses are “alive.” something that appears to be controversial among the authoritative scientific experts. As these same experts do tell us: whether alive or not, the virus is with us for the foreseeable future.

So “SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the Covid-19 disease” was noticed by human beings in the Fall 2019 and remains with us while “Corona” (as culture epoch) started in February or March 2020 and has been ending to the point when many now use the past tense when talking about “COVID-19,” the current, common, and apparently uncontroversial, label.

And now, to play at anthropology:
• Given that Corona has obviously been a (social) construction (by and for about the whole 9 billion human beings).
• And given that Corona will continue to evolve in narratives and other forms of discourse (art, policy, science, etc.).
Can we also say that the virus was constructed?

Both current speculations about the origin of the virus involve human activity and complex, though quite different, actor-networks. As some tell it, perhaps a worker in the local lab did not clean up quite well and carried the virus out of the lab. This leads to question about why the lab was making viruses, why it was located where it was, who funded it, etc…. Alternatively, perhaps a merchant bought an infected animal from some hunter and then sold it to some customer. This hypothesis would then lead to investigations into the traditions (cultures) that make some wild animals edibles “there and then” (though they might not be “elsewhere and elsewhen”). And then, in either case, the spread of the virus depended on much that is human (airplanes, policies, etc.).

And yet … the virus itself is not human. Humans cannot talk to it, threaten it, regulate it, teach it—or any of the other acts that human can perform on each other. At most humans can attempt to control each other in the hope that, in that fashion, they might control the virus. And this brings us back to governors issuing mandates on partially resistant populations.

In other words, human beings, when confronted to the dangerous “thing-ness” of an object in their experience will do something (culture) but the thing remains, possibly hidden but always susceptible to re-emergence … as the next virus will do.

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Experiencing life and constructing a local “next”

If a “lived experience” is one that one has, personally, experienced, then I have never experienced COVID (the virus). I have experienced Corona (the cultural epoch) but, to the extent that I have never been sick from the virus, and have not even ever tested positive (so far?), then the virus is something I only know through conversational and textual means: I have talked a lot about it with many people. I have read a lot about it. And I have written about it. I have experienced the pressure to explain myself when (not) wearing a mask. In contrast, these past few months I (lived) experienced open heart surgery or, more precisely, the weeks leading up to it, and the recuperation after it: anesthesia does make it impossible to experience the surgery itself!

Various authorities requested that I be tested and this has happened such a number of times that I have lost count. Those requests (actually orders) concern, in my analysis, Corona as cultural fact. As for the virus, I’d say that my experience is, at most, “vicarious” or, in jargon, “entextualized.” I do know people who had close relatives who died. I do know people who were seriously sickened. I also know people who tested positive and showed (“experienced”?) no symptoms. But this “knowledge” is conversational—that is I was told about these cases but did not have to deal with them personally
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“Lived experience”: mind and words

In recent years, students have heard me wince when they talk about “lived experienced.” “Could there be ‘dead experiences’?” I quipped. But they persisted as they are well aware of the terms one must use to pass as a well-educated participant in current academic intellectual life.

For a full philosophical argument that is said to have inspired Derrida, Ricoeur and Latour, see Bachelard on fire (1949) or closets (in [1957] 1964).
Still, perhaps I am wrong in dismissing something that appeared late in my career. Maybe it is about the mystery that, after eating a banana (living the experience of pealing a banana, putting it in my mouth, chewing it, wondering whether it is under ripe or over ripe, etc.) I can talk about the eating (as I am doing now) but cannot actually tell anyone who has never eaten a banana what it tastes like. Try explaining the difference between blue and green to someone who is color blind, or the difference between velvet and silk (or the various types of silk) to someone who has never touched any of them.

During the “culture is text” Derrida moment in my anthropological career, I ranted against those who appeared to say that all is words, that there is no “center” behind the words, and so on. When eating the banana we are not eating the word even if the word is all we have to communicate with other human beings about the eating.  There is something about the world that is not constructed (at least not by the experiencing human who had nothing to do with a construction).

Continue reading “Lived experience”: mind and words

Local controls of mask (not) wearing

Nurse to other nurses (in a health care setting where nurses and patients must wear masks, but where the “office” staff, also nurses, do not consistently do);

“I do not put my mask on when I get into a store and it is not crowded. If it is crowded, then I put it on”

The other nurses gave their own stories, and moved on to other topics.

Vignette #1

As many have noted one can sort areas in the United States in terms of the ratio of masked/unmasked—whatever the local governor’s mandates. And, as mentioned everywhere, these mandates vary a lot from state to state, and from nation to nation.

I have written earlier about governor’s mandates in constituting the Corona epoch as a cultural fact (for some people) that local action by these people must take into account, whatever their opinion of the wisdom of the mandate. I will today focus further of this local action in settings where there are no immediate representative from the State to enforce mandates (or where governors have relinquished control).

That there are many such settings is well-established and regularly mentioned by epidemiologists wondering about the movement of the virus even in the most governor restricted areas. In my experience, such settings involve family gatherings, shops, offices, church services. In New York State, it is well known that people in New York City are much more likely to wear masks even after the mandates have been lifted while people “upstate” were more likely NOT to wear their masks, even when the mandates were on. Even in New York City, the people from mid-Manhattan may experience different constraints from people in the Bronx.
Continue reading Local controls of mask (not) wearing

Modeling acting bureaucracies

Balzac was one of the first writers to make bureaucracy the subject of serious fiction, notably …, where he takes the un-Kafkaesque delight in its lumbering procedures. As he shows in these bureaucratic dramas which are still enlightening today, the monster was not so much malevolent as driven by almost random interference by its futile overactivity. (Robb 1994: 106)

As I like to say, only human beings can close, and then reopen, restaurants. So far I have mostly pointed at “governors” as the humans who act. One does not have to read much Latour to realize that this sketches a reality in much too broad a stroke. In real life, governors may order restaurants closed but the one person who will tell the manager that she must close her restaurant is probably a very minor employee of a local health administration. As I told it in March 2020, my first direct encounter with the virus-as-humanized was in a busy diner, by an interstate highway somewhere in North Dakota, when I witnessed an overly self-satisfied lady telling another lady and her staff around her that the county officials might order her to close the diner following orders from higher officials. Bourdieu reminded all of us, anthropologists, to note marks of distinction. And so I admired the distinction between the well dressed, coiffed, fed official who was not losing her job, and the harassed, not so well-dressed manager, server, cook who were going to lose theirs.

As usual, I am not saying anything as to whether restaurants should have been closed (or re-opened). What I am doing is pursuing the theme I introduced in my last post about “governmentality” as a label for something anthropologists must now take into account anywhere in the world, and as a dangerous concept if it leads to gross generalizations. “The State made me do it” is not an analysis even when the State, that is some governor, set the stage (animated it, directed it, etc.) for whatever everyday encounter an anthropologist may be “participantly observing.”

What I am proposing, and suggesting to the students in their quest for research topics, is a more determined investigation of “speech acts” as they reverberate, as well as the emergence of alternate governors as a major speech act does reverberate.

“Speech act theory” was a major advance in sociolinguistics, and in fact in all the social sciences as it emphasizes that about all human activity proceeds through speaking and not simply through symbolizing, classifying, imagining. Language is also the main tool through which some people get some other people to do what must/may (or must/may not) be done—or at least try to get them to (not) do it. However, the statement by a governor (president of a country, or university) “Get vaccinated, or else” is, ethnographically, an Ur-statement .  It is the first in what can be a very long chain of such statements.  Even so, it must must have occurred within an interaction between the Over-governor and some subordinate.  Anthropologists can only very rarely be allowed to observe such interactions but we can imagine that this statement actually had the form “tell the minister to tell the under-minister to tell” ….. an employee in some Human Resources to e-mail other employees to “get vaccinated or else” and then to report to her supervisor that she had accomplished the task (who then reported it back to her supervisor…).

So that one may not simply make fun of France for its famous overactive bureaucracy, here is a text specifying when/where masks must/may be worn in an American, “Research One,” university.

This chain may be what the word “bureaucracy” indexes but, noticing this chain as chain opens all sorts of possible investigation about the many ways that chain might be broken, or by passed, or produce ever more complex sub-mandates (as happens in France as some middle governors get to specify categories, exceptions, etc.). The media of course is an alternate chain that partially short-circuits the bureaucracy so that the last human in the bureaucratic chain (say, the HR employee) may never have to utter the order: the employee may already have complied for whatever reason—or have initiated a protest.

But there are other chains.

I have been in a small village in Southern France for the past few weeks. Here, as probably everywhere else in the world, the politics of “Covid” (what I refer as the “Corona” epoch) are a major topic of conversation both idle (“do you know what ‘they’ said?!!”) and consequential (“how do I get that pass?”). In the village, and to my surprise, at least half of the people I met asserted with vigor that they were not vaccinated, did not want to get vaccinated, and were going to resist the latest order from the over-governor of France. Many of the non-vaccinators were “young” but I met one lady well into her 70s who was not going to get vaccinated even as her husband, standing by her, said he had been. One can imagine the conversations between the two… A vaccinated of the same generation told that he would not have gotten vaccinated if his daughter-in-law had not acted as a local governor and speech-acted: “Get vaccinated or get banned from family reunions.” One can also imagine the conversations between grand-father, son and daughter-in-law (and probably many more in the kin group)! As I also like to teach local “communities of practice” are not only cozy settings for learning but also fraught settings for political conflict and domination.

In other words I imagine (not to say “I hypothesize”) that local conversations that lead to (not) getting vaccinated parallel the conversations that led the President of France (or the Mayor of New York City as of August 4, 2021) to mandate showing a pass to enter various settings. The President or Mayor, with their police powers, certainly have more power than daughters-in-law. But the power of daughters-in-law (or the lack of power of a son/husband) cannot be underestimated.

Thus the chain from Over-governors to local enactments is “fractal” in the sense that, in any setting, the relationship between however local a governor and their subordinate is going to be the trigger of a chain of sub-mandates each of which susceptible to being expanded or resisted in imaginative ways the initial governor could not … imagine.  This model of bureaucratic “overactivity” will have to be merged with Lave’s model of movement through social structural positions also must involve such speech acts as a “full” member tell another (possibly not so full member…) “let this person work in our shop as an apprentice” and so that persons becomes, analytically, a “legitimate peripheral participant.”

References

Robb, Graham   1994     Balzac: a biography. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

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A coda on Corona and governmentality

A while ago I mused about the ending of the Corona epoch. Many parts of the world are now in transition towards this ending. As usual various governments, and subgovernments, are moving in different ways. Some remove various mandates, keep others, and make it necessary for the governed to figure out what is allowed where and when. In all cases one can observe “governmentality” at work and ponder the responses.

Continuing with my concern with sociability as sequences of triggers and responses that make conditions (facts) for the future, I keep wondering today on what people do after governors have acted to declare the end of this or that mandate. Most responses to such declarations occur behind doors that are not easily opened. But one thing is quite public: the wearing of masks. As many keep noticing, many many people continue to wear masks even after the mandates that they be worn here or there have been lifted. Walking down Broadway on June 10th, one could see people with masks, people with masks that did not cover their nose or with masks around their chins, or with no masks at all. One grocery store had a sign that “under further notices masks are required.” Down the street another store had a sign saying “those fully vaccinated to not need to wear masks.” And another had no signs at all. In another store a sign about the order to wear masks was on the door, most of the employees were not wearing masks, a customer asked, in a joking tone, “where is your mask?” to which another employee responded “it’s not required by the State anymore, we have forgotten to take the sign down.” A month later, the New York Times mused about the distinction between workers in restaurants (who wear masks) and patrons (who do not).

What is a social scientist to next? I imagine, and I may be caricaturing, that a sociologist or social psychologist would look for the “causes” of what appears a personal decisions and ask: “why do you (not) wear a mask here and now?” In designing the study one would first pick up from the literature various matters that are usually “causes” for variations in individual behavior. One could imagine that one does (not) wear a mask “because”:
. of lack of faith in governments
. to make a political statement about government mandates
. for fear of the unvaccinated
. PTSD
. of peer or familial pressure
. of fesistance to peer or familial pressure
. of habit
. Etc.
One might then design a questionaire. The questionaire would include the usual demographic information about the individual responder (sex, gender, race, ethnicity, location, education, age, language spoken at home, etc.) that would eventually allow for various forms of regression analyses. I imagine that the “findings” of such studies would be reported in the New York Times under a title like “White liberal men and women in Manhattan will continue to wear masks while others in the South refuse to wear them.”

All this will interest many and confirm much that is generally known. But those who analyze, critique, and contribute to government should notice that it does not actually tell us much about that to which individuals respond. (Not) wearing a mask only makes sense in a world where governments mandate such things and so social scientists must also investigate governments, their relationships to the governed, and all mechanisms through which “orders” (as acts) produce (dis-)orders (as historical conditions). As I like to say, the virus does not care what humans do. But those humans in government (and in all ordering positions), let’s call them “governors,” do—whatever they end up doing (and that is very diverse indeed!). Some of us, say “applied anthropologists,” might want to help. What might we point out?

To develop something I mentioned earlier, a governor (and that could be a 10 year old…) can put up a sign on a door stating “Do Not Enter!” with a guard or warden enforcing the order so that the governor can be about sure that the order will do what it is expected to do (as long as back doors are also locked or guarded). However, when the same governor puts a sign stating “Do Enter!” (get vaccinated, eat healthy foods) this governor may not get the expected results as people continue not to enter, get vaccinated, or eat unhealthy foods.

The observable difficulties governors have in enforcing what might be labeled “positive” mandates is worth exploring as a possibly fundamental limit on governmentality. It may even be more fundamental than the impossibility of governors to prevent people from resisting negative mandates (whether the people are or are not successful in their resistance).  James Scott has kept emphasizing this limit on negative mandates (2009).   The very need to post guards or wardens (school administrators, nurses, social workers) is testimony to the governors’ awareness of this limit. But the other limit may be more difficult to overcome.

Going back to mask wearing can help us notice further matters that are usually hidden by a simple reference to “governmentality” as sketched by Foucault and others. In the United States, it is well known, governing is quite divided. Simplified, on matters like mask wearing, the Federal government advises (and possibly dangles sticks and carrots), State Governors get emergency powers allowing to mandate and enforce negative mandates. These can be trumped, challenged, or amplified by local governments and also, very significantly, by non-governmental entities like, say, a private university, or a church that may require behaviors (like wearing masks or getting tested) even after the governmental mandates have been lifted. There is more: self-organizing groups within these institutions may themselves act out, if not mandate, a behavior otherwise allowed. In a church I know, about everyone continued to wear masks even after all other governmental and non-governmental entities announced that they were not necessary. Strictly speaking, in such a setting, there is no actual governor but the effect is about the same as if someone had mandated masks. I also know of extended families that remain consequential to each other even as various sub-parts impose on themselves various mandates about vaccines, masks, meetings, etc—and dispute among them what to do next

In abstract terms, I’d say that governmentality, as a aspect of sociability, is fractal rather than hierarchical. More on that another time.

References

Scott, James   2009     The art of not being governed: An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Constructing the virus and the defense against it in the Corona epoch

On March 5 2020, I left New York City headed for California. I was to give a series of lectures along the way. I had recently read about a virus that was agitating the media. My university announced that “nonessential events … would be cancelled.” Three days later I did lecture at Indiana University, and then at Wisconsin and at a college in Minneapolis. And then I was told that all other lectures had been cancelled. I continued driving West, noticing how various governors were responding. On March 29th, as I was threatened with having to spend 30 days in my hotel room, I drove back home where I locked myself up in my house. I was by then fully caught into what I will keep calling the “Corona” epoch officially known, in American Corona speech, “the Covid pandemic.”

A year later to the day, I received the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. In one year, the world population went from “discovering” (experiencing for the first time, bumping into…) something new to finding a way to live with that which was discovered so that it does not hurt too many people any more. But, of course, to talk about “world population” is to beg all questions about who did what when for me (and now hundreds of millions of humans) to get vaccinated. Who would do what had to be distributed on the basis of earlier distributions. Sorting out this distribution and its synchronization, is something that should not be guessed or assumed. It must be investigated, in details.

So let’s play at modeling as a guide for future research:

Continue reading Constructing the virus and the defense against it in the Corona epoch