Our current plausibility structures upon which the existence of society is dependent and threatened and we are urgently in need of alternative sociocultural contexts to provide structures of meaning. Peter Berger ( 1967) described a ‘plausibility structure’ as the ‘symbolic base’ that every society ‘has to continuously construct and maintain for assuring its existence as a world’. In the time of Covid-19 it has become obvious that the current world order is becoming a thing of the past and the future is highly likely to be different. But apocalypses can be secular as well as religious. It is religious fundamentalists who generally associate coronavirus as a sign of end times or a final judgment. Here I focus upon another aspect of religion-apocalypticism- as one way of understanding Covid-19. To date much of the scholarly work on religion and Covid-19 has focused on religious practices and the transmission of the virus (Dein et al. Philosopher of science Bruno Latour ( 2020) discusses the ‘astounding lesson’ that the coronavirus has ‘taught us’: ‘That it is possible, in a few weeks, to put an economic system on hold everywhere in the world and at the same time, a system that we were told it was impossible to slow down or redirect’. It has highlighted issues of work, social inequality, globalization, individualism and social interaction generally. Anthropological research is essential for placing the virus in context.Ĭovid-19 threatens key symbolic frameworks and presents unprecedented challenges for both people and society globally in terms of its impact on mortality, morbidity, economic decline and the ways in which we lead our lives. As anthropologists would argue, pandemics are more than metrics (numbers, cases, and prevalences), they are embodied, affecting situated lives. But global events are always enacted in a local context and it behoves social scientists to understand the meanings of Covid-19 in specific contexts. While the global death rate from Covid-19 has been phenomenal, the virus cannot be divorced from its sociocultural context.
Instead, narratives about contagious disease hold up a mirror to our deepest, most inchoate fears about our present moment and explore different possible responses to those fears. The appearance of being a safe and thriving land becomes only a façade that hides the threat of death.’ As Schwetz ( 2020) states: ‘Pandemics scare us partly because they transform other, less concrete, fears about globalization, cultural change, and community identity into tangible threats.’ This was summed up well over two thousand years ago by the Roman poet Virgil’s notion of a ‘maze of dread’: ‘The world itself seems entirely unreliable: not only dangerous but also deceptive. Self-isolation and quarantine create a sense of being separated from the community and world generally-a sense of anomie. Pandemics indicate the fragility of life and the world, chaos, engender paralysing anxiety that the world is dissolving, a sense of detachment and raise significant issues of meaning resulting in existential crises. A pamphlet, The Millennium-A Prophetic Forecast, warned readers that the flu epidemic was only the beginning of the affliction that was stated in the Book of Revelations. One member of the Dutch Reformed Church, Johanna Brandt, prophesied that the Day of Judgment had come. In another case, Howard ( 2008) reports on religious explanations of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic where appeal was made to ideas of sin and of an eschatological sign of Christ’s second coming. While bad air, divine punishment and witchcraft were postulated causes, for many the Black Death signaled the end-times (Lerner 1981 Dwyer 2016). As one example explanations of the Black Death (1347–1352) involved ideas of sin and apocalypse, acts of God and alignments of the planets. Throughout history pandemics and apocalyptic narratives have run closely together.
While epidemics in the ancient world were generally accounted for in religious terms, a concept of contagion still existed (Feder 2013). Historically pandemics have been attributed to both religious and naturalistic causes. While Covid-19 is of course natural, the way it spreads is highly influenced by social, political and cultural factors. Cases are rising on a daily basis throughout Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Emerging in Asia in late 2019, the virus is present in every continent except Antarctica. To date there have been 9,738,975 cases and 492,390 deaths worldwide as of J(Worldometer 2020). The coronavirus covid-19 pandemic is the most significant global health crisis of our time and presents the greatest challenge we have faced since the Second World War.
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