In their article, “The Anthropology of Infectious Disease,” Inhorn and Brown (1990, p. 90) lay out a succinct truth: “Infectious disease problems are both biological and cultural, historical and contemporary, theoretical and practical.” Infectious agents with the potential for parasitism are ubiquitous and have complex evolutionary and behavioural relationships with humans. Inhorn and Brown state…
Category: Special Issue on Anthropology of Infectious Disease
Preservation Through Inaction: Eugenics and the COVID-19 Pandemic
Public health initiatives have historically been shaped by institutional prejudice regarding what ‘kinds’ of people should be included in the ‘public’ when in pursuit of the public good (Pernick, 1997). The eugenics movement is often discussed as if it is a by-gone historical phenomenon, and the activities of eugenicists are remembered as being limited to…
Neoliberalism and False Perceptions of Ideological Homogeneity in the American South During the Early COVID-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed many flaws in North American health care systems and sparked widespread discussion on public health reform. Here, I consider pandemic experiences under fee-for-service medicine in the United States within the global context of Western neoliberalism. When considering the media coverage of COVID-19, scholars often consider the impact of “misinformation” being circulated…
The Human Experience of Pandemics in Times of Political Unrest
It is well understood, cross-contextually, that environment shapes human experience. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has been characterized in some contexts as a global collective experience: one of shared fear, fight, control, and unity over a novel infectious disease (Stanley et al., 2021). The notion of a collective experience can, however, subsume individual experience, such that…
Scapegoats and Social Norms: The Influence of COVID-19 on Human-Animal Relations
Human relationships with animals have changed as technologies and stigma have shifted over time. The two basic forms of human-animal relations, present in both modern and historical/archaeological contexts, are domestication for consumption or domestication for companionship (Trut et al., 2009; Zeder, 2012). Animals that do not easily fit into these two categories of human-animal relations…
Using Anthropology to Problematize Definitions of Health
In a contemporary global environment plagued by a pandemic and its associated social and mental health ramifications, ‘health’ as a concept needs to be problematized to address the diverse needs of the global community. Within the holistic field of anthropology, two subfields, medical anthropology and bioarchaeology, provide lessons and a framework to understand health and…