By Emily Creek

Disclaimer: Even as I write this the CDC has changed guidelines for vaccinated individuals. At the time of writing Maui county had implemented a secondary post-arrival test while the State of Hawai’i now has a vaccine passport. In July the rules will change again, and Hawaii will begin accepting all vaccines as a way of being exempt from being quarantined. At the time of writing this essay, COVID mask mandates in Maui county remained in place…you are to be wearing your mask anywhere public (walking on beach, sitting and not consuming at a restaurant, on heavily trafficked trails, etc). And the guidelines currently state that indoors and at gatherings masks must be worn. All these things add to the complexity of this essay. Despite the changes, this essay comes from the vantage point of the rules in place when written–the overwhelming impact of post-pandemic “revenge” tourism continues to deeply impact the people of Hawai’i, Maui, and specifically my small and remote community.

***

I work in a heavily trafficked destination in a remote area of Maui. What I observe daily is droves of tourists coming to hike, and a lot of discarded masks in naupaka…and not covering faces.*

Here are the Maui County rules:

1. Hawaii Safe Travels app:
   • Requires a pre-travel Covid test by select partners 72-hrs in advance of your flight. We can already see the flaw in 72-hrs–it gives a lot of space for getting exposed to covid before arriving in Hawaiʻi.
   • As of May 11, a post-arrival test is now also required for travelers.
   • You sign off–in a legally binding document–that you will follow all Maui-County and Hawaiʻi State Covid mandates, including mask wearing.
2. Within Maui County the mask mandate states that masks must be worn indoors and outside. With the exception of times when there is over 6ft of distance between parties. (Note: As of May 25 the Mask Mandate was lifted outdoors. Masks in large outdoor groups heavily recommended. Mask  mandate indoors was unchanged.)

So you’d think that the simple request to wear masks would be followed by those making the choice to visit these islands in the midst of a pandemic. Unfortunately, Hawaiʻi has a history of tourists in some cases quite literally sh*tting on the fragile natural and cultural resources of the islands. Such terrible behavior has continued with COVID-19. To understand why tourists aren’t wearing masks I believe we need to go back to history. First we will cover some of the epidemics that arrived in the Hawaiian islands as the result of “contact” and how that affects local attitudes of covid and then we will go through examples of visitor patterns of behavior over the centuries.

This isn’t the first time that disease has come to Hawaiʻiʻs shores. History gives us many examples of disease and quarantine in Hawaiʻi: Smallpox and measles ravaged Oahu particularly Honolulu and Chinatown. Inter-island travel was not allowed, people had to remain home. These diseases wiped out huge percentages of the Native Hawaiian population in a manner of years. In 1865 King King Kamehameha V signed “An Act to Prevent the Spread of Leprosy” sending anyone, mostly Native Hawaiians, convicted of having Hansen’s disease to the Kalaupapa peninsula of Molokaʻi. This ban was not lifted until all patients were formally paroled in 1969. Eight thousand people were taken from their families and sent to isolation. We could dig into these examples and discuss how disease coming to the islands affected the Hawaiian communities more than any other community. How lineages were lost, language and culture threatened, the long-term familial trauma of the “separating illness” that was Hansenʻs Disease, and more. But I will simply encourage readers to pick up Ma’i Lepera: Disease and Displacement in Nineteenth-Century Hawai’i by Kerri A. Inglis, which weaves together a full picture of the role of disease in the colonization of Hawaiʻi and the long term effects of disease in the islands.

So, with all of this historical trauma, we can begin to understand why residents held “Tourists not welcome” signs at airports, why residents closed off their roads to prevent entry, and why the State of Hawaii and County of Maui took some of the more drastic measures within the United States. If those entering Hawaiʻi sign off that they will wear masks why are the facebook groups in my community are filled with the following statements every single day:

“County of Maui needs to put their mask signs in more places. They come in droves and most are unmasked.”

“They come onto our property unmasked and ask us questions!!!”

“No masks huh?” [in reference to a photo of an illegal tourists]

“ ʻAʻole the masks!”

“Enough already! There is so many people at [redacted location] there is no social distancing!”

“Kids can’t go to school, we can’t have weddings or sports or graduations but this is ok?!”

“Why are fines not being given out?”

“My aunty had a gathering get shut down being ONE person over legal gathering size [keiki in the same household] but this is fine? (in reference to a massive beach party that occurred)

I could fill a 300-page book of resident complaints about tourists trespassing and not wearing masks, but these provide a glimpse of just some of the many responses.

Again, to answer this question we must look no further than the first white people to accidentally arrive in Hawaiʻi: Cook and his crew. From the first moments, people arriving in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi have debated the laws of the land. From Cook’s men attacking Hawaiians because the chiefs refused to end the kapu for him to 19th century land grabbers and the illegal annexation and overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii, we have many examples of wealthy men writing home to their military to send help to allow them to get their way in the islands.  And in the end, they succeeded in taking the land. So we see history re-invent and repeat itself. (see: Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands by Gavan Daws and Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen by Queen Liliuokalani for some specific examples across history).

I wanted to know a bit more from the tourist perspective so I asked a couple of visitors if they wore masks, what they knew about the rules, why they chose Hawaiʻi as their vacation spot during a pandemic and so forth. This research was informal. Although I work directly with tourists I did not ask people at my place of work. Instead, I posted an invite for people to respond on social media, and a few friends shared with people they knew who had traveled. About six people responded. The responses I received included people who said “We wore masks when needed,” and “We were comfortable coming here because of the pre-travel test.” Another response was “We knew what was on the website in regards to mask rules.” On the news and at my place of work we have had people tell us, “My state doesn’t require masks, so I am comfortable without one.” Plenty of people at work have been rude to staff, argued with us about the rules, and even gotten angry because we wear masks.

So, I leave you with this: We should not be surprised that many of the tourists who have come to Hawaiʻi to escape the stresses of their pandemic year are not following the mask and social distancing rules. Tourists have been disrespecting Hawaiian lands and cultural sites for generations. There is a mentality of invincibility when people go on vacation, and Hawaiʻi is seen as a playground. The “playground” where I live has had over fifteen rescues and five deaths in the last six months because tourists did not listen to posted signs and warnings about the weather. In the past two weeks alone we’ve had double the number of rescues. Residents pay taxes for these expensive helicopter rescues. Tourism’s hold on Hawaiʻi goes against the desires of many in my community.

Hawaiians continue to be disenfranchised from their land, their beaches, their surf, their fish, and their cultural sites. Important events like the Merrie Monarch festival and Makahiki have been cancelled–while tourists have been allowed to gather maskless at restaurants, on whale watching tours, and bring their families of twenty for weddings. Mask use highlights a much deeper problem: The immediate concern is the health of the people of these islands, but the long-term concern is the sustainability of tourism. Unfortunately the tourism authority and airlines cannot weed out which tourists will come to Hawaiʻi with respect and which will not. And to be sure, there are respectful tourists. But the pandemic has highlighted the great importance of coming up with creative solutions for the long-term benefit of Hawaii’s people and ecosystem.

Since the day Cook landed, and missionaries and businessmen began making their way here, Hawaiʻi has been seen as a place to take from. It has been a strategic, valuable, and desirable territory for outsiders for a long, long time. Today, Hawaiʻi to (many but not all) guests is an exciting and exotic get-a-way. But the laws of Hawaiʻi, be that the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi or State of Hawaiʻi, or the country of Maui, or the desires of communities, have never been respected by those coming here.

For those with money like Mark Zuckerburg and the businessmen of old, it is a place to grab land for the sake of land grabbing. For tourists and other visitors with less money, it is a place to live out any number of fantasies. Mask use, just like obeying signs posted for safety or cultural respect, doesn’t fit into the Hawaiian vacation fantasy very well. But as the pandemic continues on and visitation increases to pre-pandemic levels, we see how generations of exploitation manifest in new ways. And so this is what we are left with: overtourism, and the Hawaiian islands reaching breaking point. Masks are just one small part of a much deeper problem.

*Naupaka is a native plant that is commonly found in coastal areas in Hawai’i.

Emily is an anthropologist and storyteller. She obtained her MA at University of Denver studying the contemporary dance community in Reykjavik Iceland. Sticking to volcanic islands, she currently lives in a small community on the island of Maui where she conducts oral history work.

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In June of 2020, four months into a global pandemic and a month after I graduated from college (via a YouTube livestream while sitting on the couch in my parents’ living room), I decided to apply to be a U.S. Census Bureau Enumerator. In college I’d learned the decennial count’s importance in determining state and local budgets and, as a bit of a geography nerd, had often used Census Bureau data in G.I.S. mapping projects. Applying felt like a way I could, in a small way, counter the Trump administration’s efforts to obstruct the count. Of course, hiring for journalism jobs had also dropped off a cliff and I just needed to find some work.

After a month of training videos featuring a woman in a trench coat enumerating apartments and brownstones in some dense urban metropolis, I met my new supervisor in an empty parking lot in Davenport, Iowa. He handed me my government-issue iPhone, clipboard, messenger bag, I.D. badge, hand sanitizer and white cloth face masks in a Ziploc bag. The masks were very important, he told me—the government wanted to keep Enumerators safe.

I spent August and September enumerating—following GPS routes down long gravel roads past hand-painted “Trump 2020” barn murals to addresses the iPhone displayed, parking my old Ford Taurus in front of farmhouses and in trailer parks, pulling the cloth mask over my nose and mouth, walking through overgrown yards and trash-covered driveways, and knocking on the doors of Iowans who hadn’t returned the Census survey by the April 1 deadline. The work didn’t look much like the training videos.

I quickly learned that people aren’t thrilled to meet a sweaty, mask-wearing government employee at their door asking for ten minutes of their time and a lot of (what they feel is) private information. It didn’t take long to discover just how unwelcome I was. Late one afternoon in early August I pulled up in front of a house just off the highway and walked up to the chain-link fence. As a half-dozen dogs announced my arrival in a cacophony of barks, I felt my heart begin to race, as it always did at this moment just before uncertain confrontation. A thin man with a goatee and white tank top emerged from the far side of the home, cursing at the dogs. Raising my badge and smiling, I read the now familiar text from my iPhone: “Hello sir, I’m from the U.S. Census Bureau. Do you have a few moments…”

“What happens if I refuse?” he interrupted, smirking. He continued towards me.

I started into the next prepared response: “Well, it’s in your best interest to respond to the Census because…”

“I’m not a fan of what the Census is doing,” he responded, “and I really don’t like that you’re coming here to my house wearing a mask in this fake-ass pandemic.” By now, we were face to face. “Are we done here?” He asked, raising a fist.

After I realized he wasn’t going to whack me, I returned the gesture, bumping my fist against his. Then, shaken, I returned quickly to the car, started the engine, and pulled out of the trailer park and back onto the highway. I stopped at a Casey’s convenience store next to the Mississippi River, took a deep breath, and went in to buy a Coke and settle my nerves. As I pushed the glass door open with a tinkling of bells, everyone in the packed store turned my way, like I was a masked gunslinger from out of town come to cause trouble in their saloon. I felt their eyes on me until I’d paid and left—none of them wore masks. 

A Tale of Two Cities

I grew up in the neighborhoods I was enumerating—in rural Iowa outside the city of Davenport. I went to college just across the Mississippi River in Rock Island, Illinois. Together with Bettendorf, Iowa and Moline, Illinois, these cities form a bi-state region called the Quad Cities. Culturally and politically, there’s a long history of cooperation and conflict between these interconnected communities and states. Most of the time, Quad Citizens give little thought to these borderlands they call home—many live in one state and work in the other, traveling across the Mississippi River bridges multiple times each day. The COVID pandemic, however, brought state differences into sharp focus. Suddenly, our bi-state community felt like two separate worlds.

On March 17, 2020, Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker signed an executive order mandating face coverings in public places, closing schools and all non-essential businesses and requiring residents to stay at home. Across the River in Iowa no such order came, despite criticisms from mayors of several major cities and the Iowa Board of Medicine who predicted that without an official stay-at-home order with enforceable consequences for violation, Iowans wouldn’t take self-isolation seriously. As the weeks went on, Governor Kim Reynolds did single out particular types of business for closure—bars, tattoo parlors, swimming pools, adult toy shops—but the message was clear: no need to shelter-in-place, Iowans.

We Quad Citizens experienced firsthand the confusions and consequences of this lack of consistent messaging between states. The patchwork response fractured our bi-state community. As a college student studying in Illinois and living across the river in Iowa, my daily routines suddenly became violations of Illinois’ much more stringent stay-at-home order. I could go to a bar or sit down and eat in a restaurant on my side of the river (though I didn’t, of course) but couldn’t drive across the bridge to visit my girlfriend in Illinois without risking being pulled over by police. In Iowa, I could find no evidence of an ongoing pandemic; in Illinois police guarded grocery stores and streets were eerily deserted. 

As stay-at-home restrictions were slowly loosened in Illinois over the summer of 2020, I began to do all my shopping there and moved in with my girlfriend to keep my parents in Iowa safe. Like everyone else in Rock Island’s grocery stores and on its city sidewalks, I wore a surgical mask wherever I went. As fall arrived, I applied for the Census job and for the first time in months found myself spending time in Iowa again. There, I found a very different world than the one I’d been living in across the river—one that almost made me question the pandemic reality.

One morning in September, I put on my mask and drove through a drive-through chain in Rock Island to buy an iced coffee from a masked barista. No shops were yet open for inside dining. An hour later, Census messenger bag at my side and clipboard in hand, I realized I was the only one with my face covered in a crowded Iowa bar. A man at the counter joked “Oh no, the Census is here for us,” prompting widespread laughter. “You don’t have to wear that on our account, hun,” the bar’s owner told me when I started reading the questionnaire to her. I had gotten used to variations on the “take that mask off, you have to be too hot wearing that,” (which was actually a common complaint about masks back in 1918 too) greeting many times by now, and had a prepared response about government policy at the ready. The judgmental eyes and reverse mask-shaming was hard to resist—I was glad to have my “government employee” excuse as a sort of apology. The longer I was there, wearing a mask in that bar did start feeling sort of silly—surrounded by happy, healthy looking people, it was hard to remember a deadly pandemic was still raging. My mask, I think, was an uncomfortable reminder for them.

A statewide mask mandate was now actually—finally—in effect, but you wouldn’t know it looking around that bar. Governor Reynold’s mandate had exceptions galore—no need to mask if you can maintain six feet of distance, or you’re eating in a restaurant, or attending a religious gathering, or have a “medical condition.” Here, where the sides of several barns down the street featured hand painted “Trump 2020” murals, residents were already primed by their political affiliations to disregard the pandemic—the governor’s halfhearted mandates were too little, too late.

Across the county, masks had become yet another facet of identity politics—an identifier for whether you’d attended college or were a Democrat or Republican. I’d become pretty adept at impression management as a liberal in Iowa. I knew how to fly under the radar in particularly red areas. When enumerating Trump houses (always very clearly identifiable by their devotion to yard signs), I could hide the fact that I’d attended our local hub of “liberal indoctrination” (the liberal arts college), but my mask was an instant stigma marker—my politics were spread clearly all over my face. 

We know the reasons for spurning masks are multifold and complicated. On a personal level, politics play a big role, of course—Republicans see masks as another way “elite” experts are trying to infringe on their freedoms, while Democrats see wearing them as a moral imperative, a sacrifice for the health of the greater good. In Scott County, Iowa, 50.7% of registered voters are Democrats. In Rock Island, Illinois, across the river, 54.8% are. Like in many public health crises, gender plays a role too—masks are “a sign of weakness” to some men. Religion can also be a factor. Though early national public-health messaging about mask wearing was mixed and unclear, Illinois locked down fast and made it clear the pandemic was a serious crisis. It seems clear to me, as someone living in a masking borderlands, that top-down mask regulations, laws, and government messaging can play a significant role in changing attitudes and culture quickly. I struggled at first to conform in Illinois—it was hard to remember a mask when leaving the house. But there was intense social pressure to remember. In Iowa, there was never a new social norm to adapt to.

Now that many Americans are fully vaccinated, the CDC has loosened guidelines—only requiring masks on public transportation and telling vaccinated Americans they can “resume normal activities” unmasked. Local businesses have followed these new rules in both Iowa and Illinois, and I’m starting to see fewer people wearing masks in grocery stores and coffee shops. The changes, though, just add more ambiguity—Americans will have to trust the unmasked people they meet are being honest about their vaccination status.

Christian Elliott

Christian is a journalism graduate student at Northwestern University. He received his Bachelor of Arts in cultural anthropology and environmental studies from Augustana College, a small liberal arts school in Rock Island, Illinois, in 2020. He enjoys bringing together anthropological research/theory and personal experience to tell true (written and audio) stories and understand our complicated, globalized world a little better. You can reach Christian on Twitter @csbelliott.

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Photo credit: Lehi Sanchez (APTNNEWS.CA)

UPDATED 5/6/2021

Today, May 5, 2021, people across the United States will wear red in recognition of missing and/or murdered American Indian (Indigenous) women. They will type #MMIW, #MMIWG or something similar in their social media feeds. If they are one of a few American Indians in their organizations, they may be asked (a bit ironically) to make special statements about missing American Indian peoples.

Why does “MMIW” exist? Recently, the skeleton of a Turtle Mountain Chippewa woman was found in a storage unit in Durham, North Carolina … 15 years after she went missing. All over North America, each week, murdered American Indian women are found in bushes, abandoned houses and trashcans. In 2017, in the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, the disintegrating bodies of three women were found dumped on the same block within about 45 days. The many cases of American Indian disappearance and murder around North America highlight the fact that, in the United States, American Indian bodies remain disposable and invisible (not just disposable).

Campaigns like “MMIW” attempt to push against social, economic and political processes within which American Indian absence is simply accepted. This is tricky intellectual territory. American Indian peoples are present, but our presences tend to exist in very specific ways. To be American Indian is to carry a wardrobe with you that signifies genetic and cultural authenticity. This wardrobe might be as grand as traditional Indian regalia sewn with beads, shells and/or metal pieces (jingles). It might be as simple as a turquoise pendant worn on the lapel of a Ralph Lauren suit. Over the last decade, graduates of colleges and high schools have fought to place an eagle feather on top of standard, institutionalized graduation wardrobes.

However, there is a reckoning of wardrobe that is taking place in the age of MMIW. An increasingly popular act across Indian Country is to take a red-painted hand and cover your mouth in various social settings. This red hand over the mouth represents blood and silence – shed blood of American Indians which ought not to be normal, and the pervasive silences that American Indians die within and attempt to speak through. Several news articles have been written about the practice. What these stories tend to hilight is the fact that American Indian peoples are asking to be seen even as we are finding ways to step out of (or completely abandon) colonial expectations of how we ought to appear.

This has a lot to do with race. Years ago, I wrote an article about racial seeing in the Lumbee Tribe. Among other things, I made a distinction between Indian race as “blood” and Indian race as “phenotype”. In most political conversations in Indian Country, race as a blood-quantum concept is more important than race as a matter of how our bodies are shaped or how our bodies look. In my article, I made a very specific point that we (American Indians) are often not allowed to talk about how we look and how our composition (our physical substance) means a lot to the communities we are from.

A famous Lumbee folk singer, Willie Lowery, in the 1970s, composed a song titled “Brown Skin”. It was an ode to American Indian presence in a Black-White U.S. South. It was also permission to appreciate unique characteristics of Lumbee embodiment. My students often laugh when I tell them that many Lumbees say: “No baby smells like a Lumbee baby”.

Back around 2014, while teaching medical students in Chicago, I often made the case that American Indian physicians are needed because Indian people experience Indian bodies unlike other people. Part of being in medicine is being in close contact with a human being – feeling the vibrations of their body, smelling, and listening. A physician can affirm the presence of your body within the clinical space (which is the substance of good medicine) or they can abandon your body within the clinical space (which is the substance of medical harm). Diversity in medicine is about placing the right people in the clinical space to affirm bodily presences.

On that note, abandoning and disappearing (the actions that cause “MMIW”) don’t have to be murder and burial in a wretched place. They can exist in casual, seemingly innocent interactions. I recently spoke with a colleague who reminded me of the racial contexts of my being in the academy. He once heard another faculty member state that I didn’t “look Indian”. I asked him (my colleague) why he didn’t tell me what he heard when he first heard. He stated that it was tough because, on one hand, he thought that I couldn’t take the news. He thought I would be hurt. On the other hand, he didn’t know if it was ethical to make me more visible – to point out how I actually look: “David, I knew that in their eyes you would never look Indian enough, no one could be.”

My wife’s grandfather, Grandpa Ray, watched a lot of Western movies before his death in 2012.  When I was around the Lumbee community, I would sometimes join him in his living room, and we would laugh at portrayals of Indians by White actors such as Burt Lancaster in “Apache”. One day, Grandpa Ray looked over at me and said: “You know that is a White man, right?” I automatically replied: “Of course.” He laughed. “Let me tell you something; It is easy for us to tell that that is a White man playing us. But it isn’t easy for them (White people) to tell that we are Indians playing them.”

This was an eye-opening conversation. Grandpa Ray wasn’t attempting to describe how American Indians really look. He also wasn’t saying that we (American Indians) attempt to be White. No, he was making an assertion that we (all Americans) are trained to see Whiteness, and that decades (or centuries) of our being taught to see, respect and possibly fear Whiteness made it almost impossible to hide Whiteness under brown/red paint. The power of ‘red face’ (Indians being played by non-Indian people) was that you can never put on enough paint and fake hair to look Indian. At the same time, we (American Indians) always attempt to make ourselves seen in response to ‘red face’. American Indian people often change our behaviors (our gestures, our mannerisms, our ways of being in the world) for non-Indians to catch a glimpse of us.

My point here is that, in a world of racial cosplay, American Indians are constantly defaced and disembodied.

The transformation of Indianess into a disembodied reality – into a costume to be worn – began during the emergence of military operations in the United States. In elementary school, you may have learned about the Boston Tea Party of 1773. However, I doubt that your teacher was prepared to explain why White politicians dressed in brown paint and feathers as part of their participation in this critical colonial event.

By the 1800s, during the Civil War, the famous outlaw Jesse James disguised himself as my grandfather, Henry Berry Lowry, during a bank heist. His theory was that my grandfather had become so infamous (he had a bounty on his head larger than Jesse James) that no one would follow after them if they disguised themselves as my grandfather’s gang. During World War 2, the US military used American Indians as decoys (in addition to using Indian languages within “code talking”) during assaults on islands in the Pacific. By the Vietnam War, planes and tanks were named after American Indian communities and persons.

Placement of American Indians as a skin on top of the American colonial project mirrors an equally powerful intellectual project within the United States to re-racialize America within Black-White, immigrant-citizen dichotomies. Recently, sociologist Nancy Yuen, when asked about the roots of Whites portraying Asians in Hollywood, stated that this practice came out of minstrelsy (White people playing Black people). I disagree. White portrayal of non-White people was first and foremost based in White portrayals of American Indians from the mid-1700s to today.

Meanwhile, American Indians are defaced. For example, our bodies are easily confused for Puerto Rican, Italian, South Asian, Colombian or Asian bodies. We look like everything and nothing, simultaneously. When Deb Haaland was announced as the Secretary of the Department of Interior, my friend who lived in India part of his childhood stated in humor: “As long as she keeps turquoise necklaces on and not gold, we will remember that she is the other Indian”.

The defacement of American Indians – our identities being attached to cultural realities rather than to a physiologically recognizable self – is becoming especially problematic in an age of artificial intelligence and facial, biometric security. When I was at MIT directly after 9/11, my wife (then girlfriend) warned me to shave “appropriately” before I went to Boston’s airport. Her fear was that newly improvised security (there were rumors back then that the FBI used facial recognition) might have seen me as a potential Arab threat. In 2020, in the midst of COVID19 and tumultuous conversations about racial recognition and artificial intelligence, MIT’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences published a series of discussions by faculty who spoke from the conditions of their research about the meaning of masks. I was quickly reminded that MIT didn’t have American Indian faculty present to critique or offer insight within MIT’s academic debates about artificial intelligence. American Indians were not present as scholars or subjects of AI scholarship. There were no concerns for how or when American Indians were written into software codes. The recent removal of the R-word mascot seemed to end any chance of American Indians being facially recognized.

At that same moment, I was regularly present on social media asking for anyone and everyone to pay attention to Major League and National Football League teams who manufactured and sold face masks adorned with American Indian mascots. In the Lumbee Tribe (my home community) teachers in the local school system notified me that Black teachers wore masks with the R-word mascot. “They don’t care,” one Lumbee teacher told me, “it is like they know we can’t say anything about their masks because (their masks) are for health and safety. One of them (a Black teacher) even had a Black Lives Matter shirt on with an (Indian) mask.”

Image: During the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, online shops like etsy.com have become central hubs for the circulation of face masks featuring American Indian mascots. I tend to call them “red masks” because of their over celebration of American Indian caricature, genocide and marginalization. 

This is an especially important conversation in the midst of emerging policy changes across the United States that seem solely focused on relationships of the American police-state to Black bodies. As “Black Lives Matter” and similar frameworks of racial testimony help frame journalist accounts, academic awards and other streams of influence, and as George Floyd and other Black victims of police shootings become the faces of racial justice in America, we are pushed to forget that the American Indian Movement (AIM) began in Minneapolis as a response to police violence directed toward American Indian bodies.

The emerging devotion of Americans storytellers to Black-White politics is affecting conversations that, just ten years ago, would have placed American Indians at the center. The Guardian and other newspapers recently published accounts of a controversy that has been brewing at Princeton University over the use of “bones of Black children” to teach anthropology. Upon first reading Guardian’s article, I shouted:

How, in an article about the role of anthropology in the use of bones from murdered children, do you not mention the fact that the bones of murdered American Indian children established the discipline of anthropology?

I was once again reminded that American Indian death is not prioritized within institutions of social justice. As we have seen with countless videos of Black men shot by police over the last few years, Black deaths are hyper-visualized. American Indian deaths are not.

In the meantime, American Indian bones have been moved from evidence of a crime (colonialism and genocide) to a symbol of entrepreneurship and social movement. There are many stories of all-White fraternities at Yale and other places that used Indian skulls for ceremonies. More recently, as fashion entrepreneurs have selected symbols to represent their work, Indian skulls have become aesthetically pleasing medallions worn by American consumers. This over-representation of Indian death and disfigurement on clothing parallels under-representation of Indian identity and perspective in the clothing/fashion industry.

During one of my recent exchanges on Twitter about Indian mascots, a White man from Tennessee interjected:

Don’t you realize by getting rid of references to Native American culture (i.e. Indian mascots on sports uniforms), you are the one advocating for genocide. In fact the final genocide where they are no longer even talked about in society

I quickly responded:

You sound like a drug trafficker suggesting that the end of drug dealing will be the end of the American economy. You sound like the head of the KKK suggesting that the end of his organization will be the end of community service.

We cannot allow American Indian bodies to be transformed into a fossilized fuel for the colonial project. As we put away our masks – which we have worn faithfully over the last year of pandemic – we cannot forget what they have taught us about mattering in America…we cannot forget what they have taught us about what we wear and how we are worn.

David Shane Lowry

David Shane Lowry, a member of the Lumbee Tribe, is the Distinguished Fellow in Native American Studies at MIT. In this role, David is leading a new conversation at MIT about the responsibilities of MIT (and science/technology education, more generally) in the theft of American Indian land and the dismantling of American Indian health and community. Since 2013, David has lectured across the United States – roles in which he has become well versed in conversations at the intersection of race, (health) science & popular culture. His first book, titled Lumbee Pipelines (under contract with University of Nebraska Press), explores American Indian utilization of colonial conditions to create opportunities that are both uplifting and oppressive. His second book, titled Black Jesus, is an ethnography of Michael Jordan. It began when David realized that he and Jordan shared the same anthropology advisor at UNC … 23 years apart.

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By Adam Fleischmann

The site is easy to access. Just a short walk and I’m there, immediately confronted with two large rectangular windows. The large window up high and on the right is mostly opaque, save one dominating feature: a single, dark line scorches across its surface like a comet’s tail, bottom left to top right. The window on the left is less subdued, less ominous. Graceful curving layers of color arc to the right and skyward, almost topographical in their technicolor. Later, the layers will change shape, sloping hills, climbing ever-upwards or back down, until 2100.

I click on the “Graphs” menu above the two windows, switching the window on the left to a graph of “CO2 Emissions and Removals” rather than “Global Sources of Primary Energy.” I move the “Carbon Price” lever on the Energy Supply table and the lines on both windows plunge dramatically.

This field site, of course, is a website, and I’m visiting it from the desk in my bedroom that has served as my home office for over a year, due to the public health measures surrounding the novel coronavirus pandemic and thanks, in no small part, to my own privilege allowing me to work from home. The website is the online space of non-profit Climate Interactive’s climate change solutions simulator, En-ROADS. This simple climate model is free, runs on a laptop in less than a second and is available in nine languages. It is a climate policy System Dynamics (an approach to systems science) model that can show “how changes in the energy, economic, and public policy systems could affect greenhouse gas emissions and climate outcomes” (Climate Interactive). Just a click away from the Climate Interactive (CI) homepage, En-ROADS is the model to match the Climate Action Simulation role-playing game.

Last Thursday, April 15, 2021, I joined 316 other people on Zoom in a giant game of the Climate Action Simulation. Before it started, I went to refresh my memory on the En-ROADS model, whose refaced and expanded version was released about eighteen months ago along with the game, a non-role playing workshop and a guided assignment for the classroom and elsewhere. Last year CI converted the Climate Action Simulation, which is usually played in-person, for online play during the pandemic and beyond. Originally set up to play with twenty to fifty people (same as the in-person version), last Thursday’s giant game was an experiment to see just how scalable it could be.

Following my own experiences with remote, online and event-based research—some of which I’ve previously written about here on anthro{dendum}—this giant online climate change game has inspired me to ask questions related to anthropology and the shared circumstances of the global pandemic. For remote research methods, can a website act as a placeholder? Can a website be part of a field site? More broadly, for many, including many academics and educators, the past year has been spent Very Online It’s a year that has forced us all to think about our individual actions in relation to our communities and a larger virally interconnected globe. It’s also been a year that’s further demonstrated the inequities of our political, economic and medical systems. Could the experiences of the pandemic provide gateways into another possible world, ways of seeing and being in the world that emphasize our relations, in spite of the distances between us? Climate Interactive’s in-person games allow people the opportunity rethink their relationships with larger systems through learning experiences that are embodied, social and affective. I was curious how these learning experiences could function online in ways that give insight into building a better world post-pandemic.

The scalability experiment opens by unmuting everyone and having them say “hi” in their language. Among the 317 participants, I count people and languages from North America, Europe, South Asia, South America, Central America, East Asia, Africa and Pacific Islands. CI co-director Drew Jones briefly introduces the model, its confidence-building methods and the work of CI to “apply systems thinking as a framework for addressing climate and climate-related justice and equity issues.” He then breaks down how we’ll play the game. Players assigned alphabetically to one of the teams of stakeholder groups will negotiate their team’s positions among four to six fellow players in Zoom breakout rooms. Each stakeholder team is represented in the main Zoom room by a Team Leader, played by a CI staff member or associate. For Climate Justice Hawks, it’s Swedish activist Greta Thunberg; for Conventional Energy, former Exxon Mobil CEO and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Land, Forestry and Agriculture is represented by someone playing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and World Governments, Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina. Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors leads Industry and Commerce, while Clean Tech is led by Elon Musk of Tesla Motors and SpaceX fame. After breakout room negotiations, each team will be polled on which policy lever in the En-ROADS model their Leader should move, and each Team Leader will advocate for their team’s chosen climate policy change back in the main Zoom room. Drew will then share his screen and show us all in En-ROADS what difference that policy change makes. Together, all teams will work toward the goal of reducing global temperature increase to below 2°C, and ideally below 1.5°C—just like the goals of the actual UN Paris Agreement on climate change.

I’m assigned to the Conventional Energy team. I’ll have to negotiate for the continued relevance of the fossil fuel industry. We’re given five minutes to read our role-play briefings, change our Zoom names and backgrounds to align with our teams. Drew returns, now sporting a jacket and tie as UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, and sends us to our breakout rooms with gusto. By chance, all but two players in my room are from Conventional Energy, including Team Leader Rex Tillerson, played by CI staffer Bindu Bhandari, based in Nepal, who is wearing a necklace of money symbols from different world currencies. Myself, Yvonne in Switzerland and Paula in the U.S. round out the Conventional Energy team. Rory from Ireland represents World Governments and John plays team Land, Agriculture and Forestry from Hong Kong. Much as Rory tries to be the voice of reason, John quietly backing him up, we from Conventional Energy dominate the debate, arguing for carbon capture and storage technologies—a solution that allows us to keep producing our existing products even though those technologies do not yet exist. A pop-up appears telling us we’ve got 30 seconds before Zoom sends us back to the main room.

Up first in the main room is Clean Tech, who vote to increase the carbon price. Elona Musk, a woman in a sharp red blazer with an eastern European accent, steps up to the Zoom mic, riles up her Clean Tech teammates, and rallies the rest of the stakeholder groups for carbon pricing. “Electrify everything! Make them pay! Let’s put a carbon price on everything, we can do it by ourselves!” Before Drew-as-Guterres shows us how a carbon price of $50/ton CO2 would lower global temperature increase, he asks all the players “run your mental model,” to mentally simulate what we think our actions will do to the global temperature. The CI team then releases another poll, asking us, “What are the equity considerations that concern you with this policy? Or equity-related co-benefits you’d hope to capture?”

A $50 carbon price in the model leaves +3.2°C temperature rise, a relatively small reduction from business-as-usual 3.6°C.  The Conventional Energy and Industry and Commerce teams thwart a higher carbon price. Bolsonaro pledges some afforestation (planting trees), but it doesn’t do much to reduce emissions since carbon-absorbing trees take so long to grow. Team World Governments proposes some mild investment in renewables, but that, too, only reduces the global temperature by 0.1°C, since Clean Tech’s carbon price already drastically reduced coal use. During the whole first round of negotiations and proposals, the Zoom chat feature is figuratively on fire, the debate raging among what feels like all three-hundred-plus participants. Drew spurs us on with urgency, “This is terrible! We’re only at 3.4°, we started at 3.6°!”

In our second-round breakout room, Paula from my Conventional Energy team breaks the ice. “Out of character, this role-play is amazing. I want all my meetings to feel like this!” Rory, representing World Governments, agrees: “Three things: first,” he addresses our Rex Tillerson, “you in character are amazing. Two, how are you going to pay for carbon capture and storage? Third, you mentioned your engineering expertise and expressed concern for developing nations, Rex. Allow them to piggyback on your clean energy technology! You could be leaders!” Yvonne from Switzerland provides a counter argument for our dominant Conventional Energy team, but suggests conceding to a $50/ton carbon tax. Then I interject to reclaim the power dynamics. “I feel like I need to simply say: ‘Fossil fuels keep the lights on.’” I fidget, smirk. When Tillerson nods and repeats my phrasing, the rest of the breakout group all smile at the repetition of a phrase we all hear but suspect Bindu and I don’t actually believe out of character.

Brought back after the second breakout room, we have twelve minutes left. Drew-as- Guterres asks Team Leaders for just one sentence on the one policy their team will advocate for. Eventually we do get the temperature down to 1.8°C, using a combination of carbon pricing, electrifying the transport sector, regulating methane and other greenhouse gases and even carbon dioxide removal technologies (which, Drew reminds us, don’t exist yet, despite their appearance in countries’ real-life Paris Agreement pledges).

Drew stops the game there, and acknowledges what we’ve just accomplished. The team shares a link to our simulation, where our results can be viewed. He tells us we’re going to shift into a mode of reflection, removes his tie and suit jacket and asks everyone to remove background images saying what team they’re on. He asks us how we’re feeling, how it feels to go through this, to play a different role. A word cloud is produced on the polling website based on our answers: “hopeful,” “frustrated,” “overwhelmed” and “complex” loom largest. “I want to acknowledge the legitimacy of whatever you’re feeling,” he says. We’re then asked to take a 60-second moment of silence to reflect on what we would love about being part of a world on track to making something like our scenario happen. During the silence, I can hear only Drew’s quiet breathing, my roommate speaking in the room next door, my own thoughts. Other players have closed eyes, or are staring up in contemplation, hands on chins, ponderous. This time, instead of a word cloud, the screen lights up with dozens of responses. “Justice” and “future” are two words I note repeat. The simulation debrief ends with a question about what we’re going to do next to help fight climate change.

Ideally, this climate-policy simulation is meant to teach people some of the dynamic complexity of the climate-policy system, relating their own lives to broader systems and equity issues, while teaching them to connect delayed and distant climate causes and effects that are not intuitive. If the giant online game of the Climate Action Simulation is any indication, this form of climate change education and communication can work even with increasing levels of abstraction. Perhaps this unsurprising, given the success of the large Zoom call setting that is not unfamiliar to many students and educators during the past year or more of much teaching and learning from home. However, the longevity of online Zoom-style games for climate action work like CI’s remains unknown; there have clearly been advantages and challenges to hybrid and online learning during the pandemic. As for websites as field sites, many ethnographers contend that remote fieldwork works best when combined with some element of in-person research, and it’s true that my own has involved both. Some learning moments can be gateways to the possibility of making the world anew, independent of the learning or research venue.

In a recent talk organized by Trent University’s Anne Pasek, UCL anthropologist Hannah Knox talked about “the magic of scalar shifting” available when understanding global climate change action through a technological lens. Knox also noted how for the bureaucrats, engineers and scientists with which she did fieldwork, climate change was close to home—not far away, distant and global. Knowing climate change entailed a rethinking of people’s relationships with themselves and larger systems. I’ve experienced this gateway opening among my students, and also as a student, in anthropology and other classes that taught me to see the world anew. I’ve also experienced this new possibility through the lens of photography as an early teen. For many people, Climate Interactive’s games and models make global climate change about “immediate, material relations to the world and knowledge about the future,” as Knox put it in her talk. Through engaging learning experiences (“I want all my meetings to feel like this!”), CI’s work like the giant online Climate Action Simulation allows people to form those immediate relations between their lives, the global climate and future ways of being in the world. As Drew put it in his closing remarks, “We’re going to need to find the arguments, voices, ways of being that bring others together to get to the solutions we need.” I’m hoping that the strangeness and distance of the past year can, counterintuitively, help us do that.

Adam Fleischmann is a PhD candidate at McGill University in Montréal, Québec, located on unceded Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territories. His research looks at the community of non-state climate change actors at the intersection of science, politics and technology.

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By Soham Govande

Today, hopes are held high that the COVID-19 vaccine will gradually bring an end to the pandemic. Due to systemic health disparities, disadvantaged groups such as Indigenous peoples have especially suffered this past year—both biologically and culturally. Hence, vaccination efforts in these communities must be successful to prevent further damage. Yet, the lack of trust between Indigenous communities and governmental programs stands as a significant challenge to overcome.

Health Disparities in Indigenous Communities

Why is vaccination so important for Indigenous peoples?

First, health disparities stemming from systemic oppression have placed these communities at a significantly greater risk of infection; a recent CDC report found that tribal members were more than three times more likely to become infected, a figure later found to be an underestimate due to insufficient data. Furthermore, even after infection, Indigenous peoples remain at a greater risk of hospitalization and mortality. One reason for this could be that many reservations suffer from poorer social determinants of public health. For example, the non-nutritious food given by the federal government increases the risk of diabetes and obesity, comorbidities that increase one’s immunological susceptibility to COVID-19. In addition, the lack of potable water and adequate housing on some reservations can create unsanitary conditions and increase one’s exposure to pathogens—in turn, this places Indigenous peoples at a greater risk of sickness.

Yet, there’s a cultural impact just as important as the biological one: as elder tribe members are guardians of language and traditions, their loss would impact the transmission of these cultural elements to younger generations. In an era so deeply influenced by the day-to-day cultural diffusion of media and information, preserving traditional tribal culture is of even greater importance. Thus, it’s clear we need to take whatever steps we can for vaccination efforts to be successful.

A Lack of Trust: The Living Legacy of Colonialism

One challenge to tribal members providing consent to vaccination is that they mistrust Indian Health Service (IHS), the federal agency in charge. Indeed, their worries are supported by a historical legacy of settlers worsening tribal health. For example, in the 1800s, settlers “gifted” tribes blankets infected with smallpox in an effort to eliminate the tribe through the deadly disease. More recently, similar efforts have taken place: in the 1970s, the federal government forcibly sterilized Indigenous women, a modern form of genocide.

Joseph Gone at Harvard’s Native American Program says that tribes feel “sensitized to and wary of government” in turn translating into “acts of mistrust.” Indeed, this lack of trust has manifested tangibly. In a recent vaccination effort in the Navajo community, 50 out of 200 members declined to receive vaccinations. While a 75% consent rate is most likely enough to achieve herd immunity to the virus, a higher rate may help reach herd immunity more quickly.

Solutions and Successes Regarding Tribal Vaccination Efforts

How can we build trust between Indigenous peoples and vaccine providers?

First, local tribal leaders and traditional healers should serve as channels of communication between agencies and tribes—as they have stronger connections with the community, they can communicate in a more effective and culturally-competent way. For example, the Yurok Tribe in California found success by connecting the CCUIH’s vaccine advocacy to their tribal values of protection and duty. This approach is backed by research; a recent study by Northwestern University found that Indigenous peoples are most likely to place trust in voices within their own community, suggesting that doing so is a feasible mechanism to reduce vaccine hesitancy.

Secondly, tribes should increase outreach to tribal members in geographically remote locations, who are more likely to experience vaccine hesitancy. For instance, the Navajo Nation sent public health officials to provide 5,000 vaccines to community members in desert areas of New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona. They found that recipients felt more reassured about the vaccine because the tribe had reached out to them first, mitigating some of the uncertainty they experienced. The Cherokee Nation is experimenting with a similar strategy, deploying single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccines to members in remote areas.

These examples are indicative of broader national optimism. Thanks to the tireless and proactive efforts of tribal leaders, there have been significant successes in Indigenous vaccination efforts. A national poll by the Urban Indian Health Institute found that 75% of Indigenous respondents were willing to receive a vaccine, much greater than the percentage of white Americans who wanted a vaccine.  Indeed, the Navajo Nation, the Oglala Sioux Tribe, and Alaskan sovereign tribes—as well as countless others across the country—have outpaced both the national rate of vaccination and their respective state departments; some reservations have been so successful that they’ve opened their supply to non-Natives as well. Each success demonstrates that independent tribal initiatives, tailored culturally and geographically, can be more effective than traditional state-run efforts for vaccination.

While modern medicine may advance the horizons of science, addressing societal concerns is just as critical to expanding public health to minorities; by building stronger relationships between our healthcare system and oppressed groups, we can envision a healthier society for all.

Soham Govande is a junior at Round Rock High School, and he hopes to study the intersection between anthropology and public health to expand healthcare access to underprivileged communities. Feel free to reach out to him at sgovande@anthroanalyst.com!

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Before 2020 and COVID-19, I never thought much about masks. Now I think about them all the time. One question that keeps coming up is why they have become so controversial and contentious, especially here in the US. Why all the resistance? These questions are on my mind constantly. The whole subject of mask-wearing is often so tense that it can be difficult to even mention the subject. Masks have become a proxy for not only what people believe about COVID-19, but also other issues such as ideas about freedom and liberty, individualism vs. collectivism, the role of science in society, and government power.

All that in a little mask.

So how can we understand all the mask resistance? How can we break through some of the tension, conflict, and mistrust? In anthropology, we tend to approach these kinds of issues through long-term ethnographic research. Spend time with people, listen to them, try to see where they are coming from. The basic idea is to try to “meet people where they are” in order to understand the world through their eyes (see Fiske 2016 on this argument in relation to climate change skepticism).[i] This kind of work is not easy, especially with highly contentious issues.

Last summer I saw one good example of an attempt to “meet people where they are,” but it wasn’t the work of any anthropologists. It was this video by two guys (Chad Kroeger and JT Parr from the Going Deep podcast) who did some comical outreach about masks in Huntington Beach. If you have been following the ups and downs of that beachside community over the past year, you know that Chad and JT didn’t choose the easiest site for community outreach.

In the video, people’s reactions are all over the place: One woman says she doesn’t wear a mask because she thinks they are a health risk. One man said people don’t need to wear masks because “saltwater kills that shit.” Another guy on a bike says he’s not pro-mask because “it’s all fake, dude, come on!” And yet another blows off the idea that wearing a mask could help us open back up sooner, saying that’s just “a talking point on the TV bro.” In the video, one man calls Coronavirus a “bullshit lie” and throws around some profanity. And then, at the end of the video, there’s the guy who says that Chad and JT can’t tell him what his rights are, that he doesn’t believe in wearing masks, and ends with: “if you want some of me come on and get this.”

Not everyone gets angry or completely dismisses the idea of wearing a mask, however. Some are willing to at least talk to Chad and JT. Two young guys even accept a couple masks and swear on “Tyler, the Creator” to actually wear them. Chad and JT offer masks to two young women, who say no thanks, they already have some. So why aren’t they wearing them, Chad and JT ask. One of the women says it’s because they left them in their car. “Oh, ok, that makes sense,” responds Chad.

I have to hand it to these two guys. They have a pretty good ground game. Chad and JT do an incredible job maintaining their cool in the face of some serious hostility. The video is both humorous and troubling all at once. The piece highlights a wide range of responses to masks, from the negligent and ambivalent to the violent. I think their approach shows some of the benefits of trying to spend time on the ground and gain a better understanding of where people are coming from–including the reasons why some people are resistant.

I have made some of my own observations the past year as well. This wasn’t part of any formal research, just some of what I have seen in day-to-day life. I just moved back to the California coast, which means that I have been able to get down to the beach more often again. It’s been nice to get outside after months and months of shelter-in-place, although life is a lot different than it was in the pre-COVID days. Beach trips now mean thinking about masks, crowds, social distancing, and which places are safer to go than others. It feels a bit like trying to run a gauntlet.

There’s one detail that I noticed about mask wearing though. It seemed like most people were not wearing masks at the beach. And I mean right down on the beach or walking along it via sidewalks and boardwalks. There was noticeably less compliance. I did a few informal counts and the rates were around 20-25% of people actually wearing masks.[ii]

But in the commercial areas right near the beach, things were very different. Most people were wearing masks, and it didn’t seem to be a big issue. They just did it. People may not have liked the requirements, but they went along with them. And for the most part, things seemed to be working ok. But down at the beach…it was a completely different story. So what’s going on here?

I think a lot of it comes down to ambiguity. In short, what I noticed is that the rules and expectations were pretty clearly laid out in the commercial zones. Each store or business put up a sign and explained what they expected before people walked in the door. And it worked. People complied for the most part. But the beach was a completely different scenario. While there were rules and pronouncements at the city and county level, it was actually pretty unclear what, exactly, people could and could not be doing when they were on the beach. There were few if any clear posted signs, and essentially no enforcement. While people knew about mask and social distancing mandates, it was not completely clear how they applied to the beach. It was a bit of a free-for-all.

So people improvised and did what they thought made sense…or just what they wanted to do. Some were defiant, others were practical. Surfers, for example, generally were not wearing masks…because they were in wetsuits and heading into the water. It didn’t make much sense to wear a mask on the way to jumping in the water. Overall, the situation at the beach was pretty haphazard. At times it seemed to work OK and people kept their distance and went about their business. At other times, however, it left a lot of room for stress, tension, and worse.

One of the lessons here is that ambiguity can easily breed confusion and conflict. And I think that’s a key problem. But the issue is not solely about ambiguity and the presence or absence of rules. As Elinor Ostrom and others have demonstrated, it depends on who creates, implements, and enforces those rules. There were mask mandates at the city and county level,  so they were essentially imposed top-down. But I think more people were willing to comply in commercial zones here in my coastal neighborhood, for example, because the rules were clear and perhaps because they were implemented by local users (business owners). It wasn’t as if there were city or state officials there implementing and enforcing those rules–it was up to the business owners and employees themselves. This is my running hypothesis, at least. Yes, there were instances of conflict and even protests over the mask mandates around town, but for the most part they seemed to work fairly well.

But again, down at the beach things were very different. Even so, there wasn’t exactly a lot of overt conflict. It was more a matter of confusion and ambiguity, which just added to the overall stress and anxiety of daily pandemic life. I do think that clear rules and guidelines at the beach would have helped, but one of the big challenges was actually a matter of who, exactly, should or could implement and enforce them. Much of my argument here comes from my work on the politics of conservation, particularly local resistance to and compliance with conservation projects. If people aren’t part of the process, it’s not surprising that they resist. But, it’s not as simple as just “getting the community on board” and expecting everything to work out.

Still, when it comes to the case at hand, that missing ingredient–the community of users who could actually implement and enforce rules–was something I have thought about a lot in the past year. I often wondered why there weren’t any attempts to involve communities, rather than just imposing rules and regulations and hoping for the best. Maybe there were such attempts, but I didn’t see or hear about them. It’s not an easy situation, but I think that community-based organizations could have helped quite a lot, especially if they were involved in a meaningful way. That, I think, would be a big step forward for ameliorating some of the ongoing tensions and conflicts between the masked and the unmasked. Perhaps there’s a lesson here for whatever comes next.

-RA

[i] Fiske, S.J., 2016. “Climate scepticism” inside the Beltway and across the Bay. Anthropology and Climate Change: From Actions to Transformations, pp.319-335.

[ii] This is not a proper representative sample, but just based upon a few instances and the general observation about less compliance. Overall, I think the observation holds, but I’d like to see some formal research on it.

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist.

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This essay is about ice cream, beading, trust, friendship, and finding happiness in unexpected spaces while being an anthropologist. Collaboratively envisioned and written, we offer these reflections on praxis for a screen-bound contemporary moment, as well as an equitable and critical way to conceive of intellectual work in our future that feels like it engenders a space of happiness.

Setting the Stage
When the organizers (Uzma Z. Rizvi and Sarah Jackson) began planning an academic workshop, with funding from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, they envisioned a space of concentrated engagement for a group of anthropologists working on topics related to crafting and worldmaking in ancient contexts. They imagined intense, productive conversations, planned excursions that engaged with local experts and the landscape.

On the first Friday in October 2020, instead of meeting on Tohono O’odham land, the eleven of us found ourselves in a virtual space, located in Zoom boxes from our homes around the globe. The pandemic had changed our world. Instead of canceling, we had decided to imaginatively rethink the possibilities. We built in ways by which the engagement with the workshop was not bound by space or time, but rather through materiality and intentional gestures of community building that we borrowed from participatory and community-based archaeology, and from adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy (2017).

We met on the five Fridays in October, picking times that recognized our span of time zones. While we communicated a tentative plan for the meetings in advance, it evolved with group input over the month. The rhythm of the full-group meetings alternated between ones in which group members, their projects, and academic ideas took precedence, and two meetings in which we welcomed an honored guest, Krista Leddy, an expert Métis beader, who taught us beading techniques and told us stories to contextualize the significance of beading within Métis culture. This approach to crafting, learning, and being, fit beautifully within our concept of Crafting as Worldmaking. Between our weekly meetings, we hosted optional and agenda-less “coffee hours” — one per week — at various times. Alongside these synchronous, live contacts, we had a background infrastructure of multiple connections: group Dropbox folders to facilitate sharing of materials, and a Slack group with channels for both official and social exchanges.

At the end of October, we realized that none of us wanted to stop meeting, that we had made real, new friends, that our scholarly conversations had been some of the most productive and collaborative we had had. In the midst of unabashedly adverse circumstances, we had not only achieved success in carrying out our workshop, we had also found unexpected happiness. The larger context of the world was precarious, which made the connections we found particularly precious.

Our intention in writing this piece is not to share logistical best practices for successful or effective online meetings; rather, we wish to share what happened — how we found happiness and connection in an unlikely space of separate Zoom boxes, physical distance, and considerable disappointment — in order to think about how this experience can impact the ways we come together, to form and sustain communities, not only in pandemic contexts, but also in other moments of literal or metaphorical separation.

Building Trust
To gain trust you have to take a risk and open yourself up to others you do not know. This is not an easy thing to do even when you are meeting people in person. Being online takes it to another level as we cannot see or react to body language or cues of those with whom we are in conversation. It makes us think differently about how we engage and create trust with each other in this new reality. You are putting yourself out there, into a vulnerable place, trusting process. Without taking this risk we will not learn how to trust others in this new world of online convening.

We came together without most of us knowing each other beyond professional ties. We engaged in intentional, meaningful, and community building processes so that we could make our gatherings more than just a meeting. One of the significant ways we did this was through sharing parts of ourselves that we do not usually share in professional settings. A moment we all hold as significant is our first introduction with Krista Leddy; she asked us who we were, what kind of ice cream we liked, and how we came to like this type of ice cream. This simple yet important way to engage with each other created a place where we all have common ground, even sharing that some of us may not like ice cream. This exercise, facilitated by Krista, made her an important part of our group. She not only taught us how to bead together; through her teaching, we learned an archaeology of beads, histories, stories…ways of knowing about Métis life, and each other. Her framing allowed us to be heard as we started our conversations and not feel dismissed as we were talking.

In our meetings with Krista, we were taught a new skill — beading. Our vulnerability was inevitable as we all had the space to make mistakes. Interestingly, Krista made us feel like no mistake was ever irreversible nor was it something that could not be adjusted. That generosity of the craft and of her teaching created an energy of equitable exchange, a feeling that we were all in it together. It was also during this time we all became comfortable with silence on Zoom; when someone was ready, they shared.

Each part of this process allowed us to feel comfortable in taking a risk to engage with each other. As we shared and visited every Friday we started building trust in each other to follow through with what we were engaged with, and we learned how to think together.

Making Space
There is no one way that a virtual space has to be; because our meetings were mediated by Zoom did not mean that our interactions had to follow an established template. As the context for this workshop was during a period when we were all envisioning new ways of working, teaching, and collaborating, meant that we were all more open, willing and thus able to experiment. What we created together was a place for making mistakes; a space of vulnerability.

This space emerged from the framework and tone that the organizers established from the beginning, but it came alive through what we all brought to the space, and subsequently, what the space engendered. It began with the intentionality of the organizers to create a space that encouraged listening and engagement; one that eschewed hierarchy. For example, rather than facilitating discussion by calling on people, as a way to hear all voices and provide each voice with the vested position of directing our collective thoughts, whomever spoke would choose the next person to speak. This dismantled the hierarchy of conducting a conversation in a particular form and fashion.

As participants, we all found ourselves coming into a space that, therefore, was not strident or competitive; what we brought with us, and what was encouraged, was the ability and desire to be collaborative, open, and vulnerable. We found ourselves within our scholarship in new ways because we were in new spaces online, which in turn fostered a different engagement with texts, ideas, and our ways of sharing. We built together, adding bit by bit, and ensuring we did not tear things down. This became a clear ethos in the group – a generative, rather than destructive approach to knowledge sharing.

Moving beyond the visual-centered nature of Zoom created a different kind of space. Communal crafting engaged us tactilely while still allowing for conversation; our vision was engaged elsewhere, at a different focus; unexpectedly, we found that this more closely evoked in-person, comfortable encounters. This multi-sensory experience where the screen was de-privileged allowed for insights that would not have otherwise arisen.

Ultimately, the space was fluid in ways that mimicked in-person engagements but also took advantage of not being in one physical space for a continuous week. The virtual workshop was temporally spread out, allowing time to process ideas in ways that would not have been possible in the more intensive atmosphere of an in-person experience. A part of each participant’s physical space contributed to the collective virtual space of the workshop, and the interplay between the individual and collective spaces added to the productive and generative dynamic of the workshop.

Visiting, Not Meeting
Many of the virtual spaces we enter in our work are formal meetings or structured presentations, where our participation is determined by agendas or schedules. These spaces require us to interact in ways that conform to expectations of our workplaces and to come with our minds rather than our hearts. From the outset, however, it was clear in our crafting workshop that we were doing a lot more than meeting. Instead of the focus being on achieving some particular goal, our focus was on building connection. This shifted us from being in a meeting space to being in a visiting space. Indigenous scholar Cindy Gaudet writes about a visiting methodology as a means of building connection in her work with Métis women in Saskatchewan, where the emphasis is on spending time with one another.

Visiting centers reciprocity, respect, and relationality, rather than emphasizing the accomplishment of a specific outcome or producing a product. The outcome of the visiting space is actually the relationships built between the participants. In our context, we began each gathering in conversation with one another, inviting into the space something we were engaged within our lives. The prompt in our first meeting of what we have each been crafting or making, opened up the space where we entered into the fullness of each other’s lives. Krista’s ice cream inquiry created a visiting space as she led us through the process of learning to bead. Part of the beadwork teachings she shared with us emphasized the visiting nature of doing beadwork. She shared a story with us of when she first was learning to bead with her Métis relatives where they kept asking her to thread their needles as they beaded, drank tea, and visited. This story demonstrated for all of us the importance of visiting during the process of crafting or making.

We were not just visiting with each other, but we were also visiting with ideas. We would start with texts that we’d share with one another, readings that we found inspiring, or concepts that we wanted to discuss. In some of the small groups, we continued with our crafting work as we visited with ideas; in others, we shared our own writing as ‘crafted material.’ Out of these small groups came inspiration for work that we wanted to do, deep conversations about terms and concepts, and the forging of new relations between people as well as ideas.

Materializing Connections
In addition to the intentionality of building trust, creating space, and visiting, there were particular material connections we shared. This engagement came through boxes of materials that were mailed out by the organizers prior to the start of the workshop, which created and continue to create connections. Opening the box was like opening a delightful trove of presents on one’s birthday!

Archaeologically, it was an assembly of materials….but also a first step into the ethos of the meeting. The hosts had thought long and hard how to open the meeting and say, ‘trust us, these are places we are going to go’.

Some of the items were familiar residents of conferences: coffee, tea, a drip-coffee filter and mug, and to everyone’s glee, an assortment of gourmet, free-trade chocolate bars. Anthropologists have long recognized that commensality builds ties and makes communities. For us, the simple addition of a way to share in food and drink was one ingredient of intellectual sharing whereby taste and smell fed discussions, points of articulation between different research domains, and friendships between new colleagues.

The box included a suite of books on craft production, relationality, creativity and worldmaking from BIPOC, subaltern, queer, and feminist perspectives. The intent of the books was not to read each one cover to cover. Rather, participants dipped into different books before the meetings, read elements throughout at their leisure, and afterwards now have those books as points of reference – evoking other participants and recalling conversations.

Some of the other goodies in the box were meant to stimulate ideas through doing – a topic we as archaeologists are committed to in theory, but do not often engage with in practice. These included the bead-making kits, origami paper, watercolor markers and blank postcards. We might have been initially reticent, yet once everyone started, we realized that ‘doing’ opened up a creative outlet that had us ask new questions and allowed us to see craft production from new perspectives. The presence of these tools in our personal spaces throughout the month materialized the ongoing workshop. For some, the doing was therapeutic. For others, it was a way to share something with colleagues.  For all, it was good fun. We snail-mailed the watercolor postcards to each other with little hand-written notes at the end of the conference. These personalized notes and colored works are not just material mementos of the conference but are indeed gifts in the sense of the word by Marcel Mauss. They set up possibilities for reciprocity that so much of our participatory and community based archaeological work depends upon. They are points in a chain of reciprocal engagement that compel us to want to keep that conversation going.

Concluding thoughts

Now
make room in the mouth for
grassesgrassesgrasses

Layli Long Soldier begins Part 1 of her book of poetry, Whereas with these words. As one of the books in our box, we returned to her words in different ways during our sessions as we read her poems out loud to one another in our large group. These were emotional because we were reading out loud the violence of settler colonialism, not just citing it. These were not performative gestures or readings, rather, they became ways by which we were bringing each other closer; gentle and inclusive. We all shared the horror of the mass killing of the Dakota 38.  As we recognized parts of ourselves in each other through these feelings, there was an intimacy to scholarship and a focus on relationality among ourselves.

This relational aspect of togetherness as something we experienced, rather than just studied, shifts the ways by which we incorporate theory into our everyday research: we are not working on something but working with something. As we consider this experience, we feel it has pedagogical implications on how to teach and learn differently. Indeed, it has already shifted the ways by which we all engage in our academic spaces.

Finally, it is important to recognize the rigor and criticality that we imbued in our spaces — that criticality could be generative and not about tearing down arguments was a revelation for some of us, and became part of our ethos. We had come together not only to think about crafting as worldmaking, but in some part, we also redefined our own praxis as anthropologists. And it was there that we found our happiness – the ability to read, think, learn, make mistakes, bead, and visit theory in a just and equitable framework; where we were not asking the past in extractive ways to fuel our own professional goals, but where we brought respect and a different way of knowing to inform our workshop. In some manner of speaking, we enacted crafting as worldmaking as our experience beading made a new and different world for all of us, leading us to unexpected happiness in virtual spaces.

Uzma Z. Rizvi

Uzma Z. Rizvi is an associate professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY, and a Visiting Scholar at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan. Her current work focuses on Ancient Pakistan and UAE, during the third millennium BCE. She utilizes poetics as a mode through which to push the limits of archaeological theory. Additionally, her research focuses on ancient subjectivity, intimate architecture; memory, war, and trauma in relationship to the urban fabric, critical heritage studies at the intersections of contemporary art and history, and finally, epistemological critiques of the discipline in the service of decolonization.
Previous posts can be accessed via https://savageminds.org/author/uzma/

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By Elizabeth Surbrook, Logan Honshell, and Elle Nienhuis

In this time of COVID-19, we mainly rely on technology to communicate with one another. Technology can be defined as the devices and equipment used for practical purposes in our daily lives.  In terms of schooling, we have had to communicate with some of my classmates through my laptop (hybrid learning). Hybrid learning means that we have the choice to be either in person or attend class virtually. Two of us are virtual students, which entails that we are expected to join the zoom for class every single day to participate in class, but often feel as though we are not really a part of the class since we are not physically in the classroom. Additionally, as virtual students, it can be difficult to participate in class because we don’t want to feel as though we are interrupting the flow of class. Sometimes, our internet connection can be very weak and can prevent us from joining the zoom meetings and getting the materials we need for class. Our microphones as well as video can also cut out, preventing us to speak our voice in class as well as the teacher’s video cutting out so we might miss information. One of us is an in-person, in which we feel more included in the class as possibly compared to virtual students due to us being physically in class. Only being able to talk to some of our classmates through our computer screens can cause a feeling of disconnect between us, virtual and in-person students. Having to adapt to this new normal with the aid of technology has affected how we communicate, our daily routines or rituals, and the boundaries that were previously in place.

Communication Technology and Virtual Learning

As an online student, communication has been one of the biggest changes for me during the covid-19 situation. Technology has made it possible to be online and yet feel like you are in person. Whereas before I could go to teachers or meet with my peers in person, I now communicate 100% virtually. Language is a human universal, essential to human survival and culture, which allows cultural knowledge to be passed from one generation to the next, so having it be limited has definitely altered the way I operate. I find myself using different applications such as the Teams chat feature, email, GroupMe, Zoom and more just to stay in touch with those around me. People try to classify change as either productive or counterproductive, however, there are places where it can be both simultaneously. Although technology has been a great resource, that is not to say that the transition has been an easy one. In my experience, it is hard to communicate with the teachers during class because unmuting myself on the Zoom video feels like an interruption to the students in person. Although we are there virtually, there is an unavoidable disconnect between the virtual students and the rest of the class. In addition to in class communication, communication with my peers outside of class has also been impacted by the coronavirus. One friend and I have began to FaceTime daily after school in order to keep in touch. During these video calls, we discuss things such as funny moments from class, new hobbies we have picked up to pass the time during the pandemic, and books we are reading. It is moments like these that make virtual learning feel not as isolating. For me, the decrease in communication has been one of the downsides of being completely virtual, so although technology has made the change possible and fairly easy, socially, it has been much more difficult.

Boundaries of Hybrid Learning

I’m an in-person student so when there is an assignment I have to work on with people who are online, there are, of course, going to be some boundaries that form. Especially with a global pandemic going on, technology has both made boundaries as well as destroyed some boundaries. Thanks to technology, I am able to talk to my peers about work without having to go anywhere. In contrast, a boundary has been made between the people online quarantining and the people who are not since we don’t see each other in person until they return to campus. Even though technology has made it easier to talk to peers during this pandemic, the movement of boundaries is not as easy. All assignments are mainly done on a computer, and there are some difficulties with that. In math class, taking notes on a computer is difficult because I’m trying to make sure I get all the information down, but I have to make text boxes and input special symbols that slows my typing ability. When I’m in classes in person, we stay 6-feet apart in order to maintain social distancing. With the case of hybrid learning, there is already social distancing between the online and in-person students since the virtual students are at home joining the class on Zoom. In the cases of both virtual and in-person students, there are, of course, different boundaries in place: both physical and imaginary. The concept of virtual classes in itself is a physical boundary between the students and teachers. I personally don’t like the idea of having to do school at home because I am in an environment that will get me distracted and unable to focus. This illustrates the universal that boundaries are actively maintained, especially in times of crisis, which are more actively maintained.

Quarantine and Changing Rituals

Throughout covid-19 my daily rituals have changed majorly. Rituals are a series of actions or type of behavior regularly followed. Rituals can be found in all cultures. Before covid, every day I would wake up at 6:00 to get ready for school, get in my truck, and stop and get breakfast on the way to school, however, now that I am at home, I don’t do this anymore. Now a normal day for me is to wake up around 8. I still get ready and eat breakfast, but I don’t leave to go anywhere. Then I just get on my phone and get on snapchat and Instagram and look at the new posts that were posted while I was asleep until 9 when my first class starts. In between this time my mom will usually come tell me bye before she goes and starts her day. Previously, I would have been the one saying goodbye to her when she was getting ready. After she tells me bye, I go to my desk and open my laptop to start my classes for most of the day. I do work at my desk which is unlike when I went to school because I used to talk to my friends in class and with zoom, that can’t be done unless you want to disrupt the whole class. Another ritual that was changed was hanging out with my friends after school and going to sports games. After Covid, I still do hangout with my friends but only on the weekend and at places like Shelby farms where can be outside and socially distanced. We only go between like 12-4 now because the sun has started setting early, and the park closes at sunset.

Conclusion

This auto ethnography shows the new life of students during this quarantined school year and how technology has had a huge impact on both the virtual and in person learners. Auto ethnography is a form of qualitative research in which an author uses self-reflection and writing. According to Brent Luvaas in his ethnography of street style blogging titled Street Style, “In auto-ethnography self-reflexivity is a mechanism for creating a more honest, situated, and grounded form of social scientific research” (Luvaas, 12). Auto-ethnography is a useful method of study because it challenges one to be reflective. We hope that our auto-ethnography properly represented and reflected on the current state of our lives as we face this global pandemic. Luvaas also writes, “Auto-ethnography does not just use the self to do research; it is explicitly about the ‘self’ as the medium through which research transpired” (Luvaas, 12). Auto-ethnography is unique in that the self is both the research method and the topic of research. Who better than ourselves to talk about what is going on in our lives? Through discussing our own experiences of high school during a pandemic, we allow outsiders to gain insight from our point of view.

Bibliography

Luvaas, B. (2016). Street Style: an Ethnography of Fashion Blogging. Bloomsbury Publishing.

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By: Jad Hamze, Robert Dyson, and Lucie Finley

As students of KTH school, our identities have changed drastically. We have experienced complex social isolation, new forms of learning and how our hobbies have turned virtual. COVID 19 has had an immense shift in our day to day lives we once knew. The students of 2021 in KTH school, experienced considerable and ongoing changes their senior year. As students and individuals, we have been forced to navigate the educational options being either in virtual learning or in person learning. Both forms have rules that students must adhere to. If one is a virtual student, they must login to the Zoom link at 9 AM because that is when our classes start. As a virtual student, you are required to show your face while school is in session. KTH teachers want to make sure that you are engaged in the lesson at hand. You may remain muted unless you are needed during the class and in that case you unmute yourself. However when there is a break given, you have the liberty of turning off your screen to do anything you need to do to reenergize. If your choice is to be in person there are also rules that students must abide to.  While in class, students must keep their masks on and practice social distancing to lessen the spread. We only really do not have our masks on when it is break time (if you brought a snack) and lunch. Also, in person students are responsible for bringing their own water bottles in order to not have everyone touching the water fountains. KTH school includes water bottle refill stations controlled by foot. When it is lunch time, students go to their advisory and eat lunch with them every day. Our advisory has the same teacher and students and it is a small knit group, so we get to know everyone very well. Although our day to day education is constantly changing, we are still receiving some variation of our education either virtually or in person.

Extended Isolation Effects

I feel like teenagers all over the world witnessed a massive shift in identity with the extended period of isolation that adolescents universally underwent over the past year. One’s identity is contingent on their sense of group belonging, essentially being one with a certain group, and this idea of belonging was globally hindered when stuck in quarantine for months on end (Pountney and Marić, 145). An aspect of identity I felt affected by was the way that I socially interacted among those I had social relations with. A social relation can comprise any relationship between two or more individuals, and typically speaking, when any sort of interaction is carried out, the identity of the folk within that interaction have a large effect on how the relation goes. For the most part, my peers and I found ourselves stuck inside for about three months (March to May) without any real interactions other than with our direct family members. I would say it was premature, but when people decided to go back out again, it felt as if I had lost an aspect of my identity that had made me such an outgoing and social person. A universal regarding social relationships and specifically human organization is that humans organize themselves into complex social relationships, and the relationships that we put ourselves in after extended quarantine were complex to say the least.

A specific example of this occurring, was when I saw some of my school peers for the first time in months in July. Having had the majority of our relationships carried out online through apps like Snapchat and iMessage’s, seeing others in person was really awkward at first. For three months, the development of our identity was significantly stunted, and I remember when my friend, CH, asked me “what’s new with you”, I had nothing to say. For that period of time, I had very little development in my identity and aspects of my personhood. Having gone through the unprecedented with all my peers, when poised with such a question, my response was the same as the person next to me. I spent time online, on my electronics, virtually communicating and doing online school. Everything was new but at the same time everyone was doing it so it wasn’t really new, it was average. If you had told me how my life would’ve changed three months before the whole pandemic, I would believe that it was all strange, but doing things like online school are now the new norm, an aspect of my identity and life that everyone had experienced. I used to feel very awkward when asserting myself into complex social relationships, but what I have started to notice is that everyone has been going through the unprecedented and that our social relations and identities have all been stunted in some sense, making it a universal hinderance.

Diary Entry of an Online Student

On December 1, 2020, I woke up at 8:50. This was one of the few times my alarm clock actually woke me up, usually it has to go off 2 more time before I get out of bed. Once I’m awake all I have to do is put some clothes on, walk over to the desk in my room and login to my computer  to be in class by 9:00. I stay logged in to my first class from 9:00 to 11:50. I had math class first, which is fine because I like my math class. Math class on zoom isn’t very difficult, I just watch learn through zoom and take notes to remember what the teacher teaches us. After we get dismissed from class we go on lunch break until 12:50. I had a bowl of cinnamon toast crunch cereal during my lunch break, I eat 1 or 2 bowls of cereal every day. I eat, brush my teeth, and  shower before its 12:50, then I have to login my next class which was Dance for athletes. I like dance class because it gives me a break so I don’t have to sit down in front of my computer all day. In dance class I stand in front of my computer camera and participate in yoga, ballet and other dance exercises. This class ends at and school is over at 3:40. At 3:40 once the class is over and the teacher has dismissed the students, Online students like myself can simply leave the zoom meeting and carry on with the rest of their day. My identity as an online student comes with rituals and responsibilities that I have to keep, for example keeping my eyes on camera, logging into class on time and most importantly KTH. KTH is a shared social memory among the students of our school because we know that KTH stands for Knowledge, Truth, and Honor. This school motto is especially important for online kids because we can’t physically be supervised by any teachers while we work.

My Adjustments to Quarantine

Ever since COVID 19 started in March, new forms of communication have had to come into play. Communication is a systematic set of meaningful learned symbols and signs shared among a group. Zoom has been an immense factor in the way that humans all over the world have been communicating. Globalization is the increasing interdependence of the world’s economies, cultures and population. Like everyone else, I have had to adjust to a much more virtual world we are now living in. The main way in which I use Zoom is to participate in my virtual voice lessons. For obvious reasons, my voice teacher and I both decided to continue my vocal journey on Zoom in order to still participate in my lessons. I am given a Zoom code/password and show up at the same time being 4:30 pm accordingly. Just like many individuals, I have had to navigate the world of Zoom.

Over my time, I have come to observe many different aspects of my virtual voice lessons. We have a living room with a piano in which I keep my music. I always login to Zoom on my phone and I have learned now that my phone microphone can pick up sound very well. Often times when I would do my vocal warm ups, I would have to take a step back because if I was too close to the microphone, the volume of my voice would be much to loud because of my teacher playing the piano and my voice. So, I learned that technology is very sensitive to noise and if I am too close then it is not as effective. Also, I came to realize that it is often hard to hear the piano over Zoom. My teacher now plays one note on the piano to give me my vocal pitch and then I start singing. He does this because if he tries to play a whole song, it does not come all the way through for me to hear. I have now observed that I am much more independent when one note is being played because I have to keep the song going. Listening to karaoke versions of the song for a couple times helps me feel more confident in my independence as a musician. As many of us are working through Zoom, I know that we have all had to learn how to work independently and strategically. We are all in this new technological community together which in a way is little less scary. All humans around the world have had to better their selves with technology because that is the main source of communication right now.

Conclusion

These paragraphs give us an idea of how identity can be affected by sudden change. This year we have all had to overcome obstacles and find way to adapt and persevere when met with challenges. Technology has helped us so much by giving us ways to virtually go to school. All the online students in our school learn how to properly use zoom so that they will be able to actively participate in the class from home. Student and Teachers who were at the school however, had to learn how to work with the online students and engage with them through a computer screen.  Brent Luvaas makes a comment on technology on page 15 saying “They often work in technology or creative industries and their work as bloggers, whether professional or avocational, requires access to personal computers, an internet connection, and experience camera equipment out of reach to large portions of the populations”. This quote made me realized something else about the identity of our school. We have a school where we could easily transition to all virtual and afford to provide technology for students who need it. A lot of the kids in my school including me would not currently identify themselves as poor or impoverished. Luvaas also says in his book “Auto-ethnography does not just use the self to do research; it is explicitly about the ‘self’ as the medium through which research transpired.”(12). He explains how important it is to study yourself when creating an auto-ethnography. It was very important for me to look at my own habits and take notes of the little things to be able to provide detailed and educated auto-ethnography. However due to the recent COVID guidelines, I live a much more boring and sleepy life, so it wasn’t hard for me to go back and think about the things that happened in my day. From the perspective of an Online student school has only changed in the aspect that we are present virtually not physically, and this has made it so that technology is an even more crucial tool to our education than it was before. Before COVID technology was a tool that helped in education but was still optional, now for some families technology is a necessity in order to get education.

Bibliography

Luvaas, B. (2016). Street Style. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Pountney, L. and Marić, T. (2015). Introducing Anthropology. Polity Press.

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By: Kewe Chen, Cristian Gonzalez, and Kortni Owens

Human culture is made up of varying complex social relationships found in every social group around the world. Social relations are any relationships between two or more individuals in a larger network of relationships and involves an element of individual agency. Many anthropologists believe that the most significant way in which social relationships are organized is through kinship, or system of how people are related to each other (family and relations). Recently, the entire world has been forced into unprecedented situations, creating new challenges for us all. Social relations with friends, peers, coworkers, were halted as the world shut down. Through these challenges, our school has worked to offer a choice for students: to choose between returning to school and participating in classes online. In person, students are required to remain 6 feet apart at all times and wear a mask. Many precautions have been added like wiping down tables, limiting classes to 2 a day, and eating lunch with advisories. The challenges extend to online learning as it is difficult to stay engaged with the online barriers such as distractions, technical issues, and more.

The Formation of New Rituals

One of the biggest changes created from Covid-19 is the social interactions between individuals as we all have to wear masks and maintain social distancing, making it hard to communicate and form social relations as normal. Covid safety guidelines have prohibited many of the activities that aid the formation of said relationships such as hanging out with friends in public. Recently, after making the decision to switch to online learning to protect myself and my family from the virus, I realized that I barely talked to my friends because I never saw them, as compared to seeing them every day before, and communication was hindered. As a result, my friends and I agreed to facetime, which is a form of face-to-face conversation with someone. over the internet using the mobile app FaceTime. at about the same time every week, creating a new ritual between us, which are symbolic actions that help people physically express their beliefs and values and are found in all cultures throughout time and around the world. As Malinowski’s theory (Pountney and Maric, 167) about rituals said, rituals help control emotions and are important because they help to pull people together to be calm and centered, and by always making sure to always communicate and check up with those around me, it made the relationships I had stronger, which is especially needed during these difficult times. It felt extremely good to be able to talk through my feelings and listen to what others were experiencing as well. In addition, another new ritual that I have experienced was being able to spend more time with my family, specifically, always making sure to eat dinner together every night. This structured event promoted a sense of community, as my family and I have a lot more bonding time to talk through what each of us did every day and even participate in helping and learning how to cook some traditional Chinese foods, making this experience very valuable.

New Emphasis on Kinship

Personally, my family and I have become closer through the new ways of working and schooling from home, and on October 13th, I made the switch to online learning in order to protect myself and my family members from exposure to COVID. My maternal grandparents are very influential as we are a matrilineal family. This means the authority passes down through my mother’s line. (This does not align with external views from most of Western society). The week before I switched to online learning, my grandparents expressed to me that I needed to stay home from school if I wanted to be able to see them. Of course, their safety is my priority, and I decided to switch. Fast forwarding to this November, I tried to do everything in my power to see my grandparents and cousins during Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I received a presumptive positive test result, meaning I had tested negative for COVID 19, but had another coronavirus. I called my grandmother, and she was very sad to hear the news. I could hear my younger cousin in the background, talking about how excited she was to eat. In my family culture, familial ties and bonding are the most important thing. This year has put a strain on it but has also allowed us to grow closer and appreciate the time we did spend together more. Kinship can be in the form of social kin, blood ties, or marriage which is present in every culture, and in turn, I think my experience with my family and the importance of kinship can be related to universally.

Impacts on Personal Identity

Over that past couple of months people have been forced into a way of learning that they may not enjoy. Hybrid learning is a type of learning that allows students to be taught virtually if they choose to or if they must. It is the form of learning that everyone, whether that like it or not has, has become accustomed to. The problem with this form of learning is lack of identification and social relations. Identification is important as it allows for people create a sense of belonging for you. Social relations can be ordered by identities; therefore it is important to understand the way people see you and how you see yourself during a time where many of us are separated. At the beginning of the pandemic my agency or free will was low because my choice to stay in person was not available. This in turn changed my identity, the qualities that define you, around and made me an online learner. Moreover, near the beginning of the pandemic in May, my sister tested positive for Covid-19. This came as a surprise as they were very few cases being announced at the time, especially in the city we live in. Because of this my sister was told to self-quarantine for two weeks in a secluded area. Not only was this difficult for her but it was hard for us as a family as well. Her sense of belonging was being sheltered in an area from us in order to keep

us safe. A social relation is a relationship between two or more individual’s in a large network often involving individual agency. During my sister’s quarantine, not only did it feel like she wasn’t there, but her social relationship with us was being attacked. Her agency, or her ability to have free will, was low. She did not have a choice, but to stay enclosed and remove her sense of belonging. Her identity as a member of our family and a healthcare worker were something that was maintained and even compelled. This was because of her lack of social relations during a two-week period. Furthermore, once we learned of her positive test, I got tested for antibodies and learned that I was exposed to Covid-19 at some point before June. This allowed me and my sister to identify as part of the covid-competent population (patients who have recovered and developed immunity to the disease).

Conclusion

Throughout these unprecedented times, social relationships have been significantly impacted, whether it be with new rituals, the relationship of one’s kinship, or personal identity, they seem to all have been challenged. This ethnographic approach used is an example of how the recording of a culture or society is important in identifying and analyzing this unexpected occurrence. Specifically, this is a visual autoethnography, a form of qualitative research in which an author uses self-reflection and writing to explore anecdotal and personal experience, where “auto-ethnography differs from ethnography not in kind, but in the degree of self-reflexivity and focus on oneself” (Luvaas, 12). Furthermore, in auto-ethnographies, “…self-reflexivity is a mechanism for creating a more honest, situated, and grounded form of social scientific research” (Luvaas, 12). We chose this more honest and approachable form of ethnography which allows us to have direct insight into people’s lives in an unprecedented situation like this one.

Bibliography

Luvaas, B. (2016) Street Style: An Ethnography of Fashion Blogging. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Pountney, L. and Marić, T. (2015). Introducing Anthropology. Polity Press.

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