June 11, 2020

Olive Minor 'Covid-19 What the anthropologist sees'

39 minutes

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It seems that any Zoom call we are having now - be it business related or with friends and family - we have to navigate a beginning of this call about how we're all experiencing lockdown with COVID-19. What is becoming clear is that many of us are all having the same everyday cultural experiences, which in turn makes it more difficult to share our stories about our lives - homeschooling, baking, exercise, hair getting long, toilet paper. Stories are central to cultural capital, but when they are so obvious and similar, this signifies an era that our lives have been impacted on greatly. We are living in a dystopian reality where those everyday norms that we have taken for granted for decades and centuries are overnight classified as social stigma, pollutions of what is morally right. Sitting on a park bench talking to friends face to face, playing basketball, going to a funeral - our physical bodies have become objects of morality.

In this episode, I unpack many of these contradictions of social norms with fellow anthropologist, Olive Minor. Olive lives in Seattle, and previously worked for Oxfam in West Africa, where she used her anthropological expertise amongst many things to understand how culture shaped attitudes to Ebola. She describes the work she did there and then we use some of her experiences to understand the current cultural landscape related to COVID-19. Let's get into the conversation. Welcome to the Decoding Culture podcast.

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