A transcultural approach to disease

Abstract

First paragraph: In their spatiotemporal approach to understanding the experiential and ontological dimensions of COVID-19, Avishek Parui and Merin Simi Raj underline that the virus is both matter and metaphor. While attention focused on the biochemical nature of the growing and mutating coronavirus in the very initial stages of what became the pandemic, the repercussions of COVID-19 meant that it quickly emerged ‘as a metaphor for global contagion, crisis and panic, connecting as well as disconnecting subjects and objects while defamiliarizing standard notions and erstwhile experiences of time and space’. A complex ambiguity thus emerged: while the World Health Organisation (WHO) would repeatedly remind us that ‘the virus knows no borders and […] no one is safe until everyone is safe’, life in 2020-22 became fundamentally bordered as contact between nations, communities, families, and friends was severely restricted. Those infected were subjected to quarantine measures; but every human body – every human being – was told to maintain as much isolation as possible, or as prescribed by the law, from others outside their immediate ‘bubble’. We might have been ‘all in this together’, to reprise one of the linguistic hallmarks of the pandemic, but social distancing and enforced isolation led inexorably to alienation, disconnectedness, and thereby multiple temporalities. As Parui and Raj thus argue, the globality of the COVID-19 pandemic ironically undercut ‘the ontology and experience of global time’, giving way to an ‘ambivalence of compressed spatiotemporal connectedness and existential disconnect’, in which subjects would ‘share an infected time and space which also necessitates a distance which is defined as a social norm, avoidance of touch and only partially visible self’.