Here I am, writing to you in the midst of what the celebrated ethnologist Marcel Mauss called a “total social fact”, something that activates society at all levels. Yes, we have had those around for a while now — war, poverty, inequality — but none quite so compelling in their social networking skills. If you don’t believe me, do any one of the following: open your newspaper, your Instagram account or Facebook page, your WhatsApp messages. Yes, it is true, it is impossible right now to write about anything other than the coronavirus pandemic, but surely we can try.
Right after the lockdown, I was asked, as many in my profession were, to move my teaching online. Right around the time, a meme that went something like this started floating on the Internet: “My professor who has trouble controlling the AutoPlay at the end of YouTube videos is now going to teach online; this should be good”.
Needless to add, it wasn’t good. I pause too much, I speak in long sentences as if I were on stage, and I seem to maintain the same sing-song cadence throughout the course of an hour and some.
I then participate in long, email discussions on the best software to use, look at tutorials on camera angles, and fiddle with my computer to see if it’s managing to offer any symmetrical representation at all of my distinctly asymmetrical visage. I am even currently enrolled in an online course called HOPE (Human Odyssey to Political Existentialism), where I have already realised that the instructor’s presentation skills are only marginally better than mine.
Deep and narrow
But I’m digging deep, as doubtless we all are. And the reason I realise that I’m not particularly great at this online teaching business is because it lets me pretend that everything is the same as before, we just have to soldier on.
I also realise that I’m stuck in the particularities of a remarkably narrow life. And like many others, I’m struggling to navigate that old question, the universal versus the particular.
Should I immerse myself in the numbers of the world, the recovered versus the recovering, the state of the world economy? How then do I also make sure to not turn away from the many marginalised who are being brutally subjected to the violence of an unaffordable, socially distanced lockdown?
Do I perhaps only do what I do best, which is conduct a gender, caste and class analysis of suffering in a pandemic? And finally, how do I not continue to feel a little churlish at the enormous amounts of attention I pay to cooking myself two meals a day? The answer? All of the above. For this time around, there isn’t a choice. This is the nature of a total social fact.
A pandemic is a rude fellow. It tells you everything you always knew about yourself and the world, but were too cowardly to face. It is, in classic anthropological lore, a trickster, a “boundary-crosser”. It mocks rules, it questions authority, it makes fools of us all. It is also often a symbol of an effort to overcome oppression. It heralds a possible breakdown of the symbolic social order. It makes everybody nervous.
And such nervousness is a ferment for all kinds of marvellous possibilities. For in relation to a total social fact, Mauss also tells us that human social life is formed when science and magic exist simultaneously.
Online community
In the past few weeks, for every day of the week except Sunday, I have sent out a writing prompt to a small community online, asking that they produce 500 words a day in response to a set of simple boundaries. At the end of each day, I have written 500 words and read an average of 2,500 more. I have participated in people’s pasts, presents, joys, sorrows, and melancholias, and they in mine. The community has grown and shrunk and grown again.
Our collective imagination of the time, darkly overridden as it is with fear, anxiety, and helplessness for ourselves as well as for others, has nevertheless also been fuelled by other affects, by hope, happiness, laughter, ingenuity, and the will to capture the moment of our living in this time and place. Our writing is a collective act of witnessing. And when this moment passes, as it will, for this is the only thing that all of history tells us, we all are collectively seeking to ask: Who will we be?
Mathangi Krishnamurthy teaches anthropology for a living, and is otherwise invested in names, places, animals, and things.
