Manderson L., Burke N.J., Wahlberg A. (eds.) Viral Loads: Anthropologies of Urgency in the Time of COVID-19

UCL Press, 2021. — 478 p. — ISBN: 978-1-80008-024-9.The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted some lives more than others. While more than half the world’s population experienced physical restrictions in the wake of the virus, Viral Loads reveals how the international response placed disparate burdens on exploited communities across the globe. Contributors from six continents situate the pandemic within a highly connected yet exceedingly unequal world marked by fragmented communities, austere economies, and unstable governments. Ambitious in its scope, Viral Loads insists that medical anthropology must be part of any future efforts to build a new post-pandemic world.Introduction: stratified livability and pandemic effects.
The power of the state
Care in the time of COVID-19: surveillance, creativity, and socialism in Cuba.
Militarising the pandemic: lockdown in South Africa.
Rights, responsibilities, and revelations: COVID-19 conspiracy theories and the state.
Exclusion and blame
The 2020 Los Angeles uprisings: fighting for Black lives in the midst of COVID-19.
The biopolitics of COVID-19 in the UK: racism, nationalism and the afterlife of colonialism.
The shroud stealers: coronavirus and the viral vagility of prejudice.
Unprecedented times? Romanian Roma and discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Turkey’s Diyanet and political Islam during the pandemic.
Citizen vector: scapegoating within communal boundaries in Senegal during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Unequal burdens
Pandemic policy responses and embodied realities among ‘waste-pickers’ in India.
The amplification effect: impacts of COVID-19 on sexual and reproductive health and rights in Indonesia.
Vulnerabilities within and beyond the pandemic: disability in COVID-19 Brazil.
‘You are putting my health at risk’: genes, diets and bioethics under COVID-19 in Mexico.
Scarcity and resilience in the slums of Dhaka city, Bangladesh.
The reach of care
Making do: COVID-19 and the improvisation of care in the UK and US.
Carescapes unsettled: COVID-19 and the reworking of ‘stable illnesses’ in welfare state Denmark.
Care within or out of reach: fantasies of care and connectivity in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pandemic times in a WhatsApp-ed nation: gender ideologies in India during COVID-19.
Purity’s dangers: at the interstices of religion and public health in Israel.
Lessons for a future
Fracturing the pandemic: the logic of separation and infectious disease in Tanzania.
Living together in precarious times: COVID-19 in the Philippines.
COVID-19 in Italy: a new culture of healthcare for future preparedness.