Consciously quarantined: a review of the early anthropological response to the global COVID-19 lockdown

Abstract

Whilst quarantine has been experienced in a multitude of ways around the world, for some anthropologists the quietening of public movement was met with a flurry of attentive typing. For those who were consciously quarantined, a social science response to COVID-19 was sought at University College London through a call for posts as part of the UCL Medical Anthropology blog; capturing the real-time observations and scholarly reflections on the unfolding pandemic situation as it reached its height across the globe. The global flow of coronavirus – both as a literal microbial agent and as an idea – has played out on the ‘coronascape’ in multiple ways since it exploded onto worldwide consciousness in early 2020. From an anthropological perspective, concerns have oscillated around a number of crucial themes, from (micro)biopolitics, governance, and sovereignty; the defence of borders from foreign bodies and post-colonial Others; a strengthening of medical pluralism and the global biomedical hegemony, and concerns over where to go from here as second-waves and the social consequences of such loom large. Such themes have often interrelated and tangoed with one another as individuals have reflected upon their significance. In this review we provide a critical overview of the first fifty-seven posts that were sent to the blog in the initial months of the pandemic; with contributors exploring the developing pandemic in over twenty countries, and with posts visited daily by over two thousand visitors from across the world during the months of the UK lockdown (March-May).

Keywords:

• COVID-19
• coronavirus
• biopolitics
• biosocial medical anthropology
• medical pluralism

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the UCL Anthropology department, IAS and the of Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences for supporting the Medical Anthropology blog and the Covid-19 series in particular.

Ethical Approval

No ethical approval is required for this article.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflict of interest.

Notes

1 In fact, it was later reported that the Camorra and Cosa Nostra were handing out food parcels to poor families who were struggling financially during quarantine (Tondo, 2020).