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Epidemics, Xenophobia and Narratives of Propitiousness
Abstract
The heightening of exclusionary practices targeting migrants during epidemics often creates dilemmas for perpetrators whose resolution undermines the foundational structures of xenophobic narratives. For many perpetrators of xenophobic acts, epidemics amplify dilemmas rooted in the chasm between neat dichotomizing exclusionary tropes and messy social realities. Escape efforts involving fabricating categories of special migrants that can be spared maltreatment undermine the homogenization and ossification of communities, and the elision of inter-communal links that are fundament to xenophobic discourses. Exclusionary practices targeting Peul migrants from Guinea in Senegal during the 2013–2016 Ebola epidemic constitutes the arena for this study.
... Cheng , 2019Lan 2017b), particularly the construction and representation of Africanness or Blackness at the intersection of migration, infectious disease transmission, and public health discourse (Hood 2013;Siu 2015;Castillo and Amoah 2020). The study further contributes to the space-place debate in disease emergence and racialization of minority communities (Benton and Dionne 2015;Onoma 2017Onoma , 2020Chung, Xu, and Zhang 2020), also showing the promise of "intersectional geography" (Eaves and Al-Hindi 2020) in pandemics. In doing this, it highlights how historical and sociocultural tendencies, as well as the underacknowledged challenge of racism, influence the discrimination that Black Africans experience within China's pandemic management. ...
... Because breakout diseases are perceived as other people's problems, migrants and people living in distant places are easily framed as disease carriers (Gilles et al. 2013;Hood 2013). Marginalized groups are represented by dominant host societies as dangerous people whose bodies should not only be feared but also avoided, stigmatized, and discriminated against (Onoma 2020). Usually, a population that considers itself as in-group stigmatizes those constructed as a threatening out-group to protect itself, especially when an outbreak is novel (Gilles et al. 2013). ...
... This process, which has been called "collective symbolic coping," is triggered at an ideological level, via representational media reportage, and at an individual level based on the uncertainty associated with information diffusion (Gilles et al. 2013). At other times, where specific diseases emerged from can contribute to the construction of certain people as dangerous, with direct and proximate affiliation to place, race, nationality, and ethnicity featuring as an embodying enabler of disease circulation (Benton and Dionne 2015;Onoma 2017Onoma , 2020Chung, Xu, and Zhang 2020). Here, "ties to a 'disease-ridden' place of origin" (Onoma 2020, 389) become the basis of xenophobia and stigmatization of communities. ...
How do we unpack and make sense of anti-African/Black sentiments in the pandemic control and mitigation practices in China? This article responds to the question by drawing a parallel between the experiences of Africans in China during the Ebola virus disease and COVID-19 outbreaks. Focusing specifically on Nigerians as a subsection of the African community in Guangzhou City, China, it explores how the COVID-19-inspired discrimination against Africans reflects much of the experiences of Africans in China during the Ebola crisis of 2014. The article combines sixteen “Ebola experience” data points, obtained from Nigerians in Guangzhou in 2017, with four COVID-19 experience virtual interviews, media reports, and social media archive and netnographic analysis covering April to June 2020. The experiences of Africans in Guangzhou in the early months of the COVID-19 outbreak reflect a patterned response to Africans and Blackness in the context of pandemic in China. The article contributes to the literature by examining the question of racial discrimination and the construction of African immigrant community in China as dangerous within the new geography of Afro-mobilities in East Asia.
... History is replete with instances in which news media frame racial and ethnic minorities as culprits for blame and responsibility in times of economic and socio-political crises (Lee & Ahn, 2011;Strochlic, 2020;White, 2020). Among others, Jewish people were blamed for the bubonic plague (Cohn, 2012), Chinese residents of New York City were blamed for the 2003 SARS outbreak (Kapiriri & Ross, 2020), Latin Americans for the H1N1 virus outbreak in 2009(McCauley et al., 2013, and West Africans were associated with the Ebola outbreak (Onoma, 2020). Furthermore, researchers have examined how news framing of illnesses such as cancer and obesity is often framed as being caused by individual behaviors rather than structural problems McCauley et al., 2013). ...
... By sampling a group of Asian Americans of various geographical origins (e.g., Filipinos, Chinese, etc.), we intentionally centered this study around the unique experiences of these individuals amid the various uncertainties of the pandemic. This focus allows us to raise awareness about the challenges these individuals faced while also echoing past work suggesting that mediated perceptions of blame can lead to adverse psychological outcomes for all minorities (Saleem & Ramasubramanian, 2019;Salerno et al., 2020), particularly during health crises such as the 2003 SARS outbreak (Kapiriri & Ross, 2020), the 2009 H1N1 outbreak (McCauley et al., 2013), and the Ebola outbreak (Onoma, 2020). ...
... It is perhaps not surprising that processes of othering often take place during crises situations, such as global health crises, including for example smallpox, cholera and tuberculosis, as well as more recent infectious diseases such as AIDS, SARS, Middle East Breathing Syndrome, H1N1 Swine flu, Ebola, and Zika (Dionne & Seay, 2015;Eichelberger, 2007;Kam, 2019;Monson, 2017;Murdocca, 2003;Onoma, 2020;Petros, Airhihenbuwa, Simbayi, Ramlagan & Brown, 2006). Moreover, processes of othering often orient to (perceived) geographical, cultural or religious differentiations, but also intersect with other social categorisations such as class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality etc. (e.g., Camus, 2012;Spivak, 1985;Tanyas, 2016). ...
... For example, in a study on cholera, Briggs and Mantini-Briggs (2003) observed how public health authorities and the media racialised the profiles of cholera patients in Venezuela in public statements and news reportings by portraying them as the other and blaming them for the origin and spread of the disease. This tendency for scapegoating minority groups during epidemics was also observed during the Ebola outbreak in 2014 where scholars described a similar racialisation or othering trend (e.g., Dionne & Seay, 2020;Monson, 2017;Murdocca, 2003;Onoma, 2020). For instance, Monson (2017) found that in many media reports Ebola was framed as other and often described as an African disease, with the effect of triggering fear among the American public. ...
Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, there has been an upsurge of anti-Chinese racism. This paper investigates the socio-pragmatic processes through which Chinese international students in Belgium discursively deal with othering processes in the stories they tell about racist incidents during semi-structured research interviews. These processes are closely linked to various identities which are sometimes projected upon them and often take the form of the Standardised Relational Pair of victim and perpetrator. Our analysis illustrates the complexities of these multi-directional othering processes which span a continuum from merely acknowledging to challenging and rejecting. Findings not only contribute to current conceptualisations of othering, but also give a voice to those who are othered and demonstrate that they can be powerful agents who may find ways of speaking up and re-claiming agency rather than silently accepting the victim identities that are often assigned to them.
... Anthropologists are quickly contributing to insights related to fear and COVID-19 (e.g. Manderson and Levine 2020), following a history of social science engagement with political, economic, and cultural dimensions of epidemics and pandemics (see Abramowitz 2017;Farmer 1992;Onoma 2020). An anthropology of health and risk informs interpretations of fears of contagion and political demise (Panter-Brick 2014). ...
... Blame in conspiracies of COVID-19 is distributed differently across beliefs. Some question actions of the Chinese government and/or mention relationships with, for instance, people from Wuhan, China, reflecting xenophobic ideologies (Onoma 2020). Others focus more directly on the Trump administration's lack of empathy and support for life-saving interventions as the biggest threat to health and life. ...
Anthropologists have long known how perceptions of contagion play out
along the lines of xenophobia and racism. Months after the beginning of the
global Cover-19 pandemic, predictions by anthropologists of xenophobic
ideologies and actions have come to pass. In the United States people
understand the global pandemic not as biology, but as the manifestation
of political affiliation, difference, connection, and disconnection. COVID-19 is,
according to public perception, dangerous because it maliciously mutates to
attack. It is “a guy we don’t know.” Relationships between the mysteriousness
of the virus and heightened visibility of longstanding inequality in the United
States form new contexts for existing social tensions. These dynamics provide a backdrop against which the ongoing commitment to uprisings connected to the Black Lives Matter movement unfold. Here I draw on analysis of
50 semi-structured interviews we conducted from March to August of 2020
demonstrating how understandings of the biology of a virus are woven into
perceptions of politics, inequality, and the fractures of a divided nation. To
understand social and political responses to the global pandemic it is essential that we continue to investigate xenophobia, inequality, and racism
alongside the biological impact of SARS-CoV-2.
... In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, for example, perpetrators enacted violent hate crimes against people of Asian descent. Some people, including powerful leaders, began to blame China and Chinese people for the pandemic in a way that mirrored blame for illness in the past (Hardy et al., 2021;Onoma, 2020). These damaging stories of a people continue to render violence through individual and systemic oppression by sustaining justifications for differences in health and in life. ...
... 2020; Eriksen 2020; Ecks 2020;Appleton et al. 2020;Davis-Floyd, Gutschow, and Schwartz 2020;Kasstan 2020), the insights from historical comparisons with other epidemics (Jain 2020;Berlivet and Löwy 2020;Onoma 2020), the significance of the affective tones and states associated with the pandemic at the personal or institutional level (Hardy 2020;Ali 2020;Raffaetà 2020;Trnka 2020, Trnka et al. 2021, Einboden 2020) along with militarised responses to the risk of contagion (Parker, MacGregor, and Akello 2020), dystopic and conspiratorial responses (Sturm and Albrecht 2020) and the social exclusions and responsibilities created by pandemics (Cohen 2020;Iskander 2020;Manderson and Wahlberg 2020;Oyarzun 2020). ...
Restrictions implemented during the COViD-19 pandemic lockdown in Aotearoa New Zealand changed the space and sociality of supermarkets significantly. Personal management strategies such as handwashing, social distancing, and the use of facemasks transformed the lived experience of supermarket workers, making them a part of the emergency infrastructure of Aotearoa New Zealand's public health response. This small qualitative study uses interviews and observation to explore the changing experience of work and self for five Dunedin supermarket workers as they performed their jobs, engaged in public health measures, and experienced the vulnerability of being understood as infection vectors within their homes and objects of heightened risk within their workspace. We use this data to discuss the social meanings of personal management strategies as efface work, the experience of solidarity within a community of fate, and as an alternative window on the 'conquest' of COViD-19, including the development of 'techne' of professional caregiving under duress and without public health training.
... Racism and blame have long accompanied pandemics [36,37]. Cultural essentialism is the practice of viewing "culture" as a static and exclusive descriptive category used to develop perceptions about other people based on small and often untrue interpretations of culture. ...
Background
Political ideologies drove public actions and health behaviors in the first year of the global pandemic. Different ideas about contagion, health behaviors, and the actions of governing bodies impacted the spread of the virus and health and life. Researchers used an immediate, mixed methods design to explore sociocultural responses to the virus and identified differences and similarities in anxiety, fear, blame, and perceptions of nation across political divides.
Methods
Researchers conducted 60 in-depth, semi-structured interviews and administered over 1,000 questionnaires with people living in the United States. The team analyzed data through an exploratory and confirmatory sequential mixed methods design.
Results
In the first months of the pandemic interviewees cited economic inequality, untrustworthy corporations and other entities, and the federal government as threats to life and pandemic control. Participants invoked ideas about others to determine blame. Findings reveal heavy associations between lack of safety during a public health crisis and blame of “culture” and government power across the political spectrum.
Conclusion
Data indicate anxiety across political differences related to ideas of contagion and the maleficence of a powerful elite. Findings on how people understand the nation, politics, and pandemic management contribute to understanding dimensions of health behaviors and underlying connections between anxiety and the uptake of conspiracy theories in public health. The article ends with recommendations drawn from project findings for future pandemic response.
... 30 History shows that exclusionary and xenophobic sentiments emerge at the time of pandemics, and these can be as damaging as the virus by exposing and deepening divisions and inequality. 31 Clinical ethnography and broader social sciences approaches such as critical anthropology can challenge the narrow biomedical and structurally bereft lens through which we continue to make mistakes of the past at the levels of policy and practice. 32 ...
Ethnic inequalities in the experiences and outcomes of severe mental illness are well established. These include a higher incidence of severe mental illnesses (psychoses), adverse pathways into and through care, including crisis care, police and criminal justice systems involvement, and care under the powers of the Mental Health Act. The situation persists despite awareness and is driven by a mixture of the social determinants of poor health, societal disadvantage and structural racism, as well as conflictual interactions with care systems, which themselves are configured in ways that sustain or deepen these inequalities. Although training and education are often proposed, this is not shown to have sustained effects. Clinical processes (interviewing/assessment/formulation/intervention) need to address systemic influences and improve the cultural precision with which care is delivered, organised and commissioned. We discuss clinical ethnography and present evidence of its value in addressing systemic as well as individual care needs for diverse communities.
... This has certainly been the case during the AIDS epidemic, when homosexuals and persons with HIV/AIDS were stigmatized, as were Haitians, in the early years, because of the erroneous belief that AIDS in the Western Hemisphere had originated in Haiti (Farmer, 1992). During the 2013-2016 Ebola epidemic, African immigrants in the U.S. were likewise stigmatized (Sanburn, 2014), as was also true with Guinean migrants in Senegal (Onoma, 2020). Similar xenophobic responses have appeared during the COVID pandemic, especially against East Asians in the U.S. and elsewhere (Serhan & McLaughlin, 2020). ...
This paper examines the COVID-19 pandemic in light of two key concepts in medical anthropology: syndemics and structural violence. Following a discussion of the nature of these two concepts, the paper addresses the direct and associated literatures on the syndemic and structural violence features of the COVID pandemic, with a specific focus on: 1) the importance of local socioenvironmental conditions/demographics and disease configurations in creating varying local syndemic expressions; 2) the ways that the pandemic has exposed the grave weaknesses in global health care investment; and 3) how the syndemic nature of the pandemic reveals the rising rate of noncommunicable diseases and their potential for interaction with current and future infectious disease. The paper concludes with a discussion on the role of anthropology in responding to COVID-19 from a syndemics perspective.
In early 2020, when COVID-19 began to spread in the United States, many Twitter users called it the “Chinese virus,” blaming racial outgroups for the pandemic. I collected tweets containing the “Chinese virus” derivatives posted from March to August 2020 by users within the United States and created a data set with 141,290 tweets published by 50,695 users. I calculated the ratio of users who supported the racist naming of COVID-19 per county and merged Twitter data with the county-level census. Multilevel regression models show that counties with higher COVID-19 mortality or infection rates have more support for the racist naming. Second, the mortality and infection rates effects are stronger in counties with faster minority growth. Moreover, it is mainly in poor counties that minority growth enlarges the effects of infection and mortality rates. These findings relate to the theories on disease-induced xenophobia and the debate between conflict and contact theories.
International students have been historically valued by universities for their contributions to their host countries. Yet, representations of international students in the general public have become increasingly mixed, an issue likely exacerbated by COVID-19, which has shown increased hostility towards international students. Given the increased reports of discrimination during this period, there is ongoing need to understand how international students have been represented in this specific time of crisis. Our study analysed public representations of international students through Twitter data and qualitative analysis of 6,501 posts made during the immediate COVID-19 crisis (January-April 2020). Our findings confirm competing public representations of international students that changed over time: initially through stereotyping and depictions as assumed disease carriers, shifting to empathy and support after university campus closures. We also outline themes of racism and discrimination, which are of importance for the global higher education sector as we move into a post-COVID world.
This chapter explores the communication dynamics within the context of layered governance networks. The purpose is to bring to attention the layered dimensions of managing COVID-19 through the intergovernmental and interlocal organizations. We highlight the importance of handling pandemics as global health challenges that transcend single jurisdictional resources. In particular, the importance of organization such as the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has to be reiterated. These multilateral organizations supplement efforts of individual country health ministries and departments. Without setting the stage for knowledge and resource exchange and communications for intergovernmental relations across the nations, managing a novel virus can be much harder.
During the global COVID19 pandemic, people of all backgrounds, living in highly diverse contexts, are subject to social distancing measures, travel prohibitions, and national lockdowns. Acknowledging the crucial role of online channels in maintaining social relations, social media channels, including Facebook, Google and YouTube, have partnered with the World Health Organisation to promote care at a distance. In this chapter, we identify online platforms as operating through business protocols and argue that the policies and promotional contents of online media channels deploy a particular ‘fantasy production’ (Tadiar, 2004). Through a critical discourse analysis of the coronavirus-related guidelines of several online platforms, we show how, as they are constructed through discourses, strategies and practices of marketing, ‘fantasies’ of caregiving through mobile devices and social media are political devices. By contrasting the imaginaries of care through social media channels with the ambivalent affective experiences of transnational families we reveal a dimension of ‘care divide’ (Madianou 2014). We note that social media platforms benefit from an emotionally charged environment, amplifying profit through advertisements and online engagements,. Yet, their gains often elide the pains and struggles of those who might be in marginalised or vulnerable situations, shaped by the limitations of various polymedia environments as well as by complex emotions that underlie social relations.
When pathogens and their movement between people cannot be seen, we imagine them. That imagined menagerie—imaginerie—of infection then becomes associated with marginal others whose bodies and actions become popularly conflated with disease and its transmission. This essay explores how methods of imagining and managing the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia echoed historical scripts for policing borders and containing the bodies of outsiders deemed threats to the national body.
Disasters and public health emergencies raise a variety of ethical dilemmas, often including those that require balancing the best interests of individuals against those of groups or communities. The on-going COVID-19 pandemic provides examples of these ethical conflicts, as do other recent outbreaks. Decisions and actions in this context must address different ethical issues, ranging from those directly related to autonomy, consent, privacy and confidentiality to those related to interventions and technologies, such as efficacy, effectiveness, safety and fair access. This paper aims to identify ethical conflicts with complex resolutions involving aspects related to values, rights and needs of individuals and the collective, and to suggest how such challenges could lead to more positive experiences and outcomes when confronted in future emergencies.
The stigmatization of Senegalese return migrants as COVID-19 vectors by fellow Senegalese during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic troubles the self/other distinction that underpins the scholarly focus on epidemics and xenophobia and encourages the broader task of exploring epidemics and phobia. The casting of return migrants as COVID-19 vectors was influenced by longstanding ambivalence toward these migrants that had encouraged some Senegalese to seek to “confine” them to Europe long before the pandemic. Old preoccupations help us understand how Senegalese interpreted and deployed COVID-19 control and prevention measures like “confinement,” lockdowns, and border closures.
As COVID-19 began to spread around the world, so did reports of discrimination and violence against people from marginalized groups. We argue that in a global politics characterized by racialized inequality, pandemics such as COVID-19 exacerbate the marginalization of already oppressed groups. We review published research on previous pandemics to historicize pandemic othering and blame, and enumerate some of the consequences for politics, policy, and public health. Specifically, we draw on lessons from smallpox outbreaks, the third bubonic plague, the 1918 influenza pandemic, and more recent pandemics, such as HIV/AIDS, SARS, and Ebola. We also compile reports to document the discrimination and violence targeting marginalized groups early in the COVID-19 pandemic. This article lays bare the continuation of a long history of othering and blame during disease outbreaks and identifies needs for further inquiry to understand the persistence of these pandemic politics.
The 2013–2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa is the largest on record with 28 616 confirmed, probable and suspected cases and 11 310 deaths officially recorded by 10 June 2016, the true burden probably considerably higher. The case fatality ratio (CFR: proportion of cases that are fatal) is a key indicator of disease severity useful for gauging the appropriate public health response and for evaluating treatment benefits, if estimated accurately. We analysed individual-level clinical outcome data from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone officially reported to the World Health Organization. The overall mean CFR was 62.9% (95% CI: 61.9% to 64.0%) among confirmed cases with recorded clinical outcomes. Age was the most important modifier of survival probabilities, but country, stage of the epidemic and whether patients were hospitalized also played roles. We developed a statistical analysis to detect outliers in CFR between districts of residence and treatment centres (TCs), adjusting for known factors influencing survival and identified eight districts and three TCs with a CFR significantly different from the average. From the current dataset, we cannot determine whether the observed variation in CFR seen by district or treatment centre reflects real differences in survival, related to the quality of care or other factors or was caused by differences in reporting practices or case ascertainment.
This article is part of the themed issue ‘The 2013–2016 West African Ebola epidemic: data, decision-making and disease control’.
During the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Hutu extremists who launched a propaganda campaign to demonize Rwandan Tutsis, accusing them of planning to exterminate Hutus. Embracing the propaganda, gangs of Hutus went on a killing rampage, rooming the streets and ravaging Tutsis who fell prey to their assaults. Yet, the framing of Hutus as perpetrators cannot capture the work of those Hutus who actively offered assistance to Tutsis. These Hutus provided safe haven, essential material goods and emotional support to an unknown number of Tutsis. Why did these Hutus risk their lives to save Tutsis? In addressing this question, we provide the results of a study in which a small number of Hutu explained their actions. In a clear case of altruism, their efforts arose from their moral obligation to others, an obligation that centers on their good heart. A good heart is a physical embodiment of their wisdom to discover the righteous path, compassion for the suffering of others, and courage to overcome the fear in of their own suffering in carrying out the commands of their faith.
Anthropologists were called by the WHO to "humanize" the response to the Ebola outbreak. Yet, frontline actors had developed practices that shared this goal; this article documents these agents’ community surveillance practices. Institutions involved in the Senegalese outbreak relied on volunteers from the Senegalese Red Cross to conduct a 21-day follow-up of 74 contacts "at risk" of being contaminated and transmitting the virus. In-depth interviews with these officers carried out as part of an ethnographic research project about the outbreak show their multiple care practices, which can conflict with biosafety measures in contact follow-up, reflecting an evolving conflict of logics during the crisis. This analysis contributes to the debate about the coercive nature of public health measures in the response to emerging epidemics and on tensions between control and care, and calls for the inclusion of frontline actors’ experience to define surveillance modalities.
The purpose of this paper is to analyze stereotypes and prejudices of Fulani pastoralists as they have become an important part of national and local community policies and discourses. We show how these attitudes have subtly led to Fulani exclusion and discrimination and structured community-pastoralist relations. Typical stereotypes and prejudices of Fulani include Fulani as armed robbers, rapists, violent and uncivilized. We argue that stereotypes, prejudices and practices of Fulani pastoralists’ exclusion go beyond the normal perceptions of them being non-citizens and a non-indigenous ethnic group in Ghana, but have been developed through social cognitive categorization. Our study found that these perceptions have resulted in Fulani pastoralists being denied settlements in communities and the use of and access to resources. Besides, stereotypes and prejudices suffered by Fulani pastoralists are constructed in the community and media discourses and have been built historically and culturally. National and local policies such as national expulsion exercises of Fulani (e.g. Operation Cow Leg), local community evictions and confiscations of Fulani-acquired lands have led to subtle discrimination against them in many spheres of Ghanaian society. The paper uses insights from primary field data of interviews and observations, as well as reference to media and news reports.
International Political Economy and the 2014 West African Ebola Outbreak - Volume 58 Issue 1 - Adia Benton, Kim Yi Dionne
Most press reports would have us believe that the genocide in Rwanda was the result of a “centuries-old” ethnic/tribal hatred. There is no denying that mass murder and genocide took place in Rwanda. It is estimated that between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people died in the most appalling way. Those killed were from all ethnic groups, Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa; but the vast majority of those killed were Tutsi. However, it is important to understand the process by which this took place: we must stop and ask if this genocide was inevitable, if it was universal, and if it was the result of ancient irreconcilable hatreds.
The reference to tribal warfare, or even ethnic conflict, implies that there are (at least) two sides fighting, and that all members of society are caught up in the killings. But in this case, the great preponderance of deaths resulted not from “conflict” but from murder.
The classical immunological paradigm is predicated on the body's ability to recognize and eliminate “nonself.” However, the “self–nonself” model has yet to facilitate any resolution of the field's major concerns, and may thus prove to be of limited use. Merely discarding it is no solution, as the juxtaposition of “self” and “nonself” persists in research, in clinical settings, and in everyday practice despite the best efforts of theoretical immunologists. Instead, the very conception of “selfhood” may prove to be key. Replacing immunology's prior and persistent “self” with less static concepts derived from non-Western contexts not only resolves immunology's famous paradoxes but also offers a new and more accurate model that allows immunology to reframe what may become an outmoded Enlightenment construct of “self.” In such a new paradigm, immunology's well-known system of protection and defense is replaced with a view in which nonself becomes less the body's enemy than its primary mechanism for the creative assimilation of difference. This incorporative model—in which the “immune system” functions more as a search engine than as an expeller of difference—both resolves outstanding paradoxes, and complies more accurately with contemporary knowledge and research practice.
The history of witchcraft and sorcery has attracted a great deal of interest and debate, but until now studies have been largely from the Anglo-Saxon perspective. This book shows how that approach has blurred our understanding and definition of the issues involved, and sheds new light on witchcraft in England. What had hitherto been seen as peculiar to England is now shown to be characteristic of much of northern Europe. In ending the Anglo-Saxon monopoly of witchcraft studies, this book takes into account major new developments in the historiography of witchcraft - in methodology, and in the chronological and geographical scope of the studies. An immense amount of archival work by all the contributors has furnished a volume rich in new material and ideas, providing an indispensable guide to the subject. The themes treated include the relationship between witchcraft, law, and theology; the origins and nature of the witches' sabbath; the sociology and criminology of witch-hunting; and the comparative approach to European witchcraft.
This article examines the effect of geographical proximity on targeting patterns during Ebola-era xenophobic outbursts by Senegalese against a migrant Peul population of Guinean origins. It highlights the limited extent to which epidemics shape the micro-dynamics of outbreaks of xenophobia during public health crises, demonstrating that epidemics are not defining events that inflect inter-group relations. They mostly reinforce long-persisting patterns of exclusion. The conclusion is that the contours of xenophobia in contexts marked by public health crises and in those situations in which these issues of public health do not constitute a major concern tend to mirror each other.
As the Ebola epidemic ravaged the Mano River Basin in 2014, there was concern in Senegal that the resident Peul community of Guinean origins will cause the spread of the disease to Senegal. These fears went unrealized as the Peul migrants embraced many of the epidemic control and prevention measures, which often distanced them from primordial publics in Guinea. While partly motivated by concern over the dangers of Ebola, Peul migrants embraced these measures also because the epidemic and measures advocated to curb it allowed them to assert greater autonomy in their often-fractious relations with primordial publics in their places of origin in Guinea. Their embrace of these measures suggests a rethink of the emphasis on intercommunal strife, intra-communal conviviality and trenchant state-society chasms, which pervades much work on the political economy of postcolonial Africa and which draws significant inspiration from the work of Peter Ekeh.
This book challenges a dominant hypothesis in the study of epidemics. From an interdisciplinary array of scholars, a consensus has emerged: invariably, epidemics in past times provoked class hatred, blame of the ‘other’, or victimization of the diseases’ victims. It is also claimed that when diseases were mysterious, without cures or preventive measures, they more readily provoked ‘sinister connotations’. The evidence for these assumptions, however, comes from a handful of examples-the Black Death, the Great Pox at the end of the sixteenth century, cholera riots of the 1830s, and AIDS, centred almost exclusively on the US experience. By investigating thousands of descriptions of epidemics, reaching back before the fifth-century BCE Plague of Athens to the eruption of Ebola in 2014, this study traces epidemics’ socio-psychological consequences across time and discovers a radically different picture. First, scholars, especially post-AIDS, have missed a fundamental aspect of the history of epidemics: their remarkable power to unify societies across class, race, ethnicity, and religion, spurring self-sacrifice and compassion. Second, hatred and violence cannot be relegated to a time when diseases were mysterious, before the ‘laboratory revolution’ of the late nineteenth century: in fact, modernity was the great incubator of a disease-hate nexus. Third, even with diseases that have tended to provoke hatred, such as smallpox, poliomyelitis, plague, and cholera, blaming ‘the other’ or victimizing disease bearers has been rare. Instead, the history of epidemics and their socio-psychological consequences has been richer and more varied than scholars and public intellectuals have heretofore allowed.
Chronic and acute illnesses sit uncomfortably with asylum claiming and refugee mobilities. The story of a Sierra Leonean, an athlete who feared Ebola and sought refuge in the UK, provides an opening to examine protection discourses that invoke fear, trauma, and crisis metaphors, to understand how asylum claims are performed, and how related petitions are adjudicated during public health emergencies of international concern. Ebola is revealed as a novel claim strategy, and thus a useful subject matter to investigate the shifting modalities of migrant agency, the unstable fabric of medical humanitarianism, and knowledge production in moments of exceptionality.
Epidemics of contagious diseases often motivate the social constitution of “dangerous communities.” These communities are defined as having a high potential to further spread the diseases involved to a wider public. Migrant communities’ links with sick people in places of origin that are badly affected by such diseases ostensibly justify the construction of these communities as epidemic dangers to their places of residence. But this depiction of certain groups as health threats is always grounded in other long-standing narratives about the populations targeted. Such narratives often portray those targeted as radically different from the wider body politic and stigmatise them in multiple ways. The situation of the Peul of Guinean origin in Senegal at the height of the Ebola virus disease outbreak in the Mano River Basin sheds light on these processes of sociogenesis and their implications for epidemic control and prevention. © 2017, GIGA German Institute for Global and Area Studies. All rights reserved.
The arrival of Kent Brantly and Thomas Duncan in the United States in late summer 2014 marked a shift in American news media's coverage of the 2014 Ebola outbreak. The media triggered Americans' fear and conceptualization of Ebola as “other” and “African,” sparking a discourse of panic and propelling the otherization of Africa and Africans. The othering process led to the stigmatization of Africans living in the United States and those returning from West Africa. This article examines this discourse in American mainstream news and social media from late July to December 2014. It shows how otherization reproduced and perpetuated the Ebola-is-African, Ebola-is-all-over-Africa, and Africa-is-a-country narratives.
In response to the Ebola scare in 2014, many people evinced strong fear and xenophobia. The present study, informed by the pathogen-prevalence hypothesis, tested the influence of individualism and collectivism on xenophobic response to the threat of Ebola. A nationally representative sample of 1,000 Americans completed a survey, indicating their perceptions of their vulnerability to Ebola, ability to protect themselves from Ebola (protection efficacy), and xenophobic tendencies. Overall, the more vulnerable people felt, the more they exhibited xenophobic responses, but this relationship was moderated by individualism and collectivism. The increase in xenophobia associated with increased vulnerability was especially pronounced among people with high individualism scores and those with low collectivism scores. These relationships were mediated by protection efficacy. State-level collectivism had the same moderating effect on the association between perceived vulnerability and xenophobia that individual-level value orientation did. Collectivism—and the set of practices and rituals associated with collectivistic cultures—may serve as psychological protection against the threat of disease.
The purposes of the current study were twofold: (1) to investigate affective and cognitive responses and social-contextual factors related to Ebola and their intercorrelations in a developed country without widespread Ebola transmission; and (2) to examine the relationships among risk perception of Ebola, levels of knowledge about Ebola, and (blatant and subtle) prejudice toward African immigrants. Between January 2015 and March 2015, an anonymous cross-sectional survey was conducted among a convenience sample of 486 Italian adults. Results showed that most participants were not particularly concerned about Ebola and did not feel at risk of acquiring the virus. Cognitive dimensions of risk perception of Ebola (i.e., perceived severity of illness, perceived personal impact, perceived coping efficacy, and likelihood of infection), affective response (or worry) to Ebola, and social-contextual factors (i.e., perceived preparedness of institutions, family members' and friends' levels of worry) were interrelated. Prejudice toward African immigrants was positively related to risk perception of Ebola and negatively related to levels of knowledge about Ebola even when controlling for sociodemographic variables including political preference.
La surveillance des sujets contacts de personnes contaminées par le virus Ébola a pour objectif de contrôler les chaînes de transmission. Cette mesure soulève des questions d'éthique qui imposent de documenter ses modalités d'application et ses effets sociaux. L'étude a été menée au Sénégal sur la base d'entretiens approfondis auprès de 43 sujets contacts du cas survenu à Dakar d'une personne venue de Guinée contaminée par le virus Ébola, complétés par des observations. La surveillance avec confinement à domicile a été appliquée différemment aux co-résidents du malade et aux agents de santé. Les aides matérielles furent indispensables, la dimension relationnelle et la protection contre la stigmatisation étaient appréciées. Mais l'information a été insuffisante pour lever l'angoisse d'être contaminé ou de contaminer des proches, et certains ont éprouvé une souffrancemorale, la perte de leurs revenus et/ou de leur emploi. Les modalités de surveillance des sujets contacts devraient être plus acceptables et adaptées. Le rapport entre inconvénients et bénéfices reste à évaluer d'un point de vue de santé publique.
This paper makes a case for conviviality as a currency for frontier Africans. It argues that incompleteness is the normal order of things, and that conviviality invites us to celebrate and preserve incompleteness and mitigate the delusions of grandeur that come with ambitions and claims of completeness. Conviviality encourages frontier Africans to reach out, encounter and explore ways of enhancing or complementing themselves with the added possibilities of potency brought their way by the incompleteness of others, never as a ploy to becoming complete, but to make them more efficacious in their relationships and sociality. Frontier Africans and conviviality suggest alternative and complementary modes of influence over and above the current predominant mode of coercive violence and control.
Monograph Series The CODESRIA Monograph Series is published to stimulate debate, comments, and further research on the subjects covered. The Series will serve as a forum for works based on the findings of original research, which however are too long for academic journals but not long enough to be published as books, and which deserve to be accessible to the research community in Africa and elsewhere. Such works may be case studies, theoretical debates or both, but they incorporate significant findings, analyses, and critical evaluations of the current literature on the subjects in question.
This article briefly surveys the history of pandemics in the West, contesting long-held assumptions that epidemics sparked hatred and blame of the ‘Other’, and that it was worse when diseases were mysterious as to their causes and cures. The article finds that blame and hate were rarely connected with pandemics in history. In antiquity, epidemics more often brought societies together rather than dividing them as continued to happen with some diseases such as influenza in modernity. On the other hand, some diseases such as cholera were more regularly blamed than others and triggered violence even after their agents and mechanisms of transmission had become well known.
This article looks at young Rwandans of ‘mixed’ Hutu–Tutsi heritage, exploring how their mixed identity shaped their experiences during the 1994 genocide and how it influences their everyday experiences of categorization and belonging in contemporary Rwanda. It reveals the complex position of these young ‘Hutsi’ and the significant constraints they face in exercising identity choices in a context with a history of ethnic violence and where state policies have outlawed ethnicity. This article argues that the experiences, narratives and performances of these young Rwandans simultaneously challenge and reinforce the binary ‘ethnic logic’ that persists in contemporary Rwanda. Yet it suggests that providing space for Rwanda's ‘Hutsi’ and their diverse experiences could help to de-essentialize the categories ‘Hutu’ and ‘Tutsi’ and reduce the risks of future violence.
E. M'Bokolo — The Plague and Urban Society in Dakar: The 1914 Epidemie.
Despite outbreaks occurring in various coastal cities since the turn of the century, the authorities in Dakar were taken by surprise when the plague reached the city in 1914. The epidemie lasted for one year and spread into the hinterland despite the attempts to cordon the urban area as soon as the disease had been identified. The sanitary precautions imposed by the administration were generally opposed by the African population, partly because they ran against the grain of beliefs and customs, partly because they looked (and often actually were) discriminatory. The news of the war in Europe also contributed to this negative attitude which impeded the action of the medical service.
The importance of hate radio pervades commentary on the Rwandan genocide, and Rwanda has become a paradigmatic case of media sparking extreme violence. However, there exists little social scientific analysis of radio's impact on the onset of genocide and the mobilization of genocide participants. Through an analysis of exposure, timing, and content as well as interviews with perpetrators, the article refutes the conventional wisdom that broadcasts from the notorious radio station RTLM were a primary determinant of genocide. Instead, the article finds evidence of conditional media e fects, which take on significance only when situated in a broader context of violence.
This article discusses the phenomenon of cheating in refugee camps and settlements. Though the reasons why refugees cheat on aid agencies and governments may vary from one situation to another, it is argued here that such behaviours have little or nothing to do with being a refugee. People do not become dishonest simply because they are refugees. The case studies presented here show that in spite of refugees' cavalier attitudes towards the rules that govern allocation and distribution of international aid and their propensity to behave in a morally unrestrained manner in their interactions with aid agencies, their pre-displacement social institutions are still intact. This is reflected, inter alia, in the fact that refugees' internal social relations and economic transactions are regulated by strictly enforced complex informal institutional constraints. Within refugee communities, an act of cheating committed in pursuit of self-interest disregarding the interest of a relative, a neighbour or a villager is considered to be disgraceful and inappropriate behaviour. The same act when committed against faceless entities such as governments, UNHCR and NGOs may often be considered heroic. The central question the article addresses is: why do refugees behave under two different moral systems with different actors and how should this problem be solved?
This paper examines the impact of more than one million refugees from Rwanda, Burundi, and Congo on host communities in western Tanzania. It argues that the burdens and benefits associated with the refugee presence were not distributed evenly among local hosts. Some Tanzanians benefited substantially from the presence of refugees and international relief agencies, while others struggled to maintain access to even the most basic resources. The impact varied within host communities based on factors such as gender, age, and class. Host experiences were also different from one area to another depending on settlement patterns, existing socio-economic conditions, and the nature of host-refugee relations. In the end, hosts who already had access to resources, education, or power were better poised to benefit from the refugee presence, while those who were already disadvantaged in the local context became even further marginalized.
How do ordinary people come to commit genocide against their neighbors? Ethnicity-based approaches cannot explain the different pathways that lead to mass violence or the different forms that participation takes over time and place. In Rwanda, different processes and mechanisms led some to join in the carnage while others resisted. Utilizing Mark Granovetter's concept of “social embeddedness,” this article argues that social ties and immediate social context better explain the processes through which ordinary people came to commit mass murder in Rwanda. Leaders used family ties to target male relatives for recruitment into the killing groups, which were responsible for carrying out the genocide. Ties among members of the killing groups helped to initiate reluctant or hesitant members into committing violence with the group. Finally, ties of friendship attenuated murderous actions, leading killers to help save Tutsi in specific contexts. Which ties became salient depended on the context. In the presence of the killing group or authority(ies), low-level participants (a group I call “Joiners”) tended to go along with the violence. Alone, Joiners often made different choices. The findings in this article are based on data collected during nine months of fieldwork in two rural communities and two central prisons in Rwanda.
This article examines the tensions between the Rwandan government's discourse on reconciliation and its fight against negationism. It shows how the government's campaign against negationism has taken shape—from the law against “divisionism” in 2001 to recent accusations of “genocide ideology.” The article also explores the treatment of Hutu rescuers at the national level. It raises concerns that the broad definition and application of genocide ideology may have a negative impact on reconciliation in Rwanda.
The recent wars in the DR Congo have led to a marked upsurge in both elite and popular discourse and violence around belonging and exclusion, expressed through the vernacular of “autochthony.” Dangerously flexible in its politics, nervous and paranoid in its language, unmoored from geographic or ethno-cultural specificity, borrowing energy both from present conflicts and deep-seated mythologies of the past, the idea of autochthony has permitted comparatively localized instances of violence in the DRC to inscribe themselves upward into regional, and even continental logics, with dangerous implications for the future. This article analyzes how the “local”/“stranger” duality of autochthony/allochthony expresses itself in the DRC through rumors, political tracts, and speeches and how it draws energy from imprecise overlaps with other powerful, preexisting identity polarities at particular scales of identity and difference: local, provincial, national, regional. Across each, autochthony operates as a loose qualifier, a binary operator: autochthony is adjectival, relational rather than absolute, policing a distinction between in and out, and yet not indicating, in itself, which in/ou t distinction is intended. Thus many speak of “Sons of the Soil,” but of which soil, precisely? The slipperiness between different scales of meaning permits the speaker to leave open multiple interpretations. This indefiniteness is a paradoxical source of the discourse's strength and weakness, suppleness and nervousness, its declarative mood and attendant paranoia.
From evolutionary psychological reasoning, we derived the hypothesis that chronic and contextually aroused feelings of vulnerability to disease motivate negative reactions to foreign peoples. The hypothesis was tested and supported across four correlational studies: chronic disease worries predicted implicit cognitions associating foreign outgroups with danger, and also predicted less positive attitudes toward foreign (but not familiar) immigrant groups. The hypothesis also received support in two experiments in which the salience of contagious disease was manipulated: participants under high disease-salience conditions expressed less positive attitudes toward foreign (but not familiar) immigrants and were more likely to endorse policies that would favor the immigration of familiar rather than foreign peoples. These results reveal a previously under-explored influence on xenophobic attitudes, and suggest interesting linkages between evolved disease-avoidance mechanisms and contemporary social cognition. Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications London Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi.
Shenzhen, a city located on the border between Mainland China and Hong Kong, is populated primarily by internal Chinese migrants. After the 2003 SARS epidemic, the pressure in Shenzhen to contain infectious disease has been considerable. By engaging with issues of global biosecurity, migration and citizenship, and intersubjectivity in medicine, I argue that in their attempts to prevent another SARS and protect their own subject positions as modern, urban citizens, Shenzhen's public health professionals worked to maintain precarious boundaries between themselves and their city's majority migrant population. However, by establishing the migrants as dangerous, biological noncitizens, by denying connections between the migrants' experiences and their own experiences of migration, by failing to engage with the migrants as subjects, and by defending structures that institutionalized these exclusions, they undermined both the health of the migrants and the stability of the city they were trying to protect.
Leprosy, or Hansen's disease, continues to be feared and poorly understood in the United States, where knowledge of the disease is limited and prevalence is low. The presence of leprosy among immigrants, however, provides fuel for those with an anti-immigration agenda. In recent years, there have been several examples of popular media distortions of statistics and of information on leprosy's properties and contagiousness. As in previous eras of U.S. history, public fears about leprosy seem to be related to anti-immigration or nativist sentiment, which often mask underlying concerns about the potential economic threat of immigrant populations. In this article, I analyse the role of the U.S. media and other stakeholders who may have an interest in generating public fear associated with leprosy, in presenting and at times manipulating data about the disease to create an association between leprosy and undocumented immigration.
Despite being told that we now live in a cosmopolitan world, more and more people have begun to assert their identities in ways that are deeply rooted in the local. These claims of autochthonyâmeaning âborn from the soilââseek to establish an irrefutable, primordial right to belong and are often employed in politically charged attempts to exclude outsiders. In The Perils of Belonging, Peter Geschiere traces the concept of autochthony back to the classical period and incisively explores the idea in two very different contexts: Cameroon and the Netherlands. In both countries, the momentous economic and political changes following the end of the cold war fostered anxiety over migration. For Cameroonians, the question of who belongs where rises to the fore in political struggles between different tribes, while the Dutch invoke autochthony in fierce debates over the integration of immigrants. This fascinating comparative perspective allows Geschiere to examine the emotional appeal of autochthonyâas well as its dubious historical basisâand to shed light on a range of important issues, such as multiculturalism, national citizenship, and migration.
A la mort de Sékou Touré, le tiers des Guinéens vivait en exil. Cette diaspora a accueilli avec intérêt la fin de la dictature. Mais que beaucoup d’exilés n’aient pas choisi ou eu la possibilité de se réinsérer manifeste l’existence d’une fracture entre Guinéens «de l’intérieur» et Guinéens «de l’extérieur». Ceux qui sont revenus ne constituent ni un lobby ni un parti clandestin.
striking aspect of recent developments in Africa is that democratization seems to trigger a general obsession with autochthony and ethnic citizenship invariably defined against “strangers”— that is, against all those who “do not really belong.” Thus political liberalization leads, somewhat paradoxically, to an intensification of the politics of belonging: fierce debates on who belongs where, violent exclusion of “strangers” (even if this refers to people with the same nationality who have lived for generations in the area), and a general affirmation of roots and origins as the basic criteria of citizenship and belonging. Such obsessions are all the more striking since historians and anthropologists used to qualify African societies as highly inclusive, marked by an emphasis on “wealth-in-people” (in contrast to Europe’s “wealth-in-things”) and a wide array of institutional mechanisms for including people (adoption, fosterage, the broad range of classificatory kinship terminology). In many African political formations, prior to liberalization there was an important social distinction between autochthons and allochthons, but its implications were strikingly different from today. Often rulers came from allochthon clans who emphasized their origin from elsewhere, yet had privileged access to political positions. Since the late 1980s, in contrast, autochthony has become a powerful slogan to exclude the Other, the allogène, the stranger. Political liberalization seems to have strengthened a decidedly nonliberal tendency towards closure and exclusion (cf. Bayart 1996).