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Disintegration in the Age of COVID-19: Biological Contamination, Social Danger, and the Search for Solidarity

Like any disaster, COVID-19 laid waste to infrastructure and the ability for a community to do community. But, unlike a tornado or nuclear meltdown, COVID-19 laid waste to social infrastructure in unique ways that only a disease can do. On the one hand, a pandemic brings biological dangers that, in...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: Abrutyn, Seth
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9618920/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/00027642221132176
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author Abrutyn, Seth
author_facet Abrutyn, Seth
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description Like any disaster, COVID-19 laid waste to infrastructure and the ability for a community to do community. But, unlike a tornado or nuclear meltdown, COVID-19 laid waste to social infrastructure in unique ways that only a disease can do. On the one hand, a pandemic brings biological dangers that, in turn, make all individuals—loved ones, too—into potential threats of biological contamination. On the other hand, the efforts to contain diseases present social dangers, as isolation and distancing threatens mundane and spectacular ritualized encounters and mask-wearing heighten our awareness of the biological risk. By exploring the link between disasters and disease, this paper leverages the contamination process, beginning first with the barriers it presents to making and remaking the self in everyday life. Constraints on ritualized encounters, both in terms of delimiting face-to-face interaction and in determining that some spaces have contaminative risks, reduces collective life to imagined communities or shifts to digitally mediated spaces. The former intensifies the sense of anomie people feel as their social world appears as though it were disintegrating while the latter presents severe neurobiological challenges to reproducing what face-to-face interaction habitually generates. Finally, these micro/meso-level processes are contextualized by considering how institutions, particularly polity but also science, manage collective risk and how their efficacy may either contribute to the erosion of solidarity or provide a sense of support in the face of anomic terror. Using the US to illustrate these processes, we are able to show how an inefficacious State response weakens the already tenuous connective tissue that holds a diffuse and diverse population together, while also exposing and intensifying existing political, economic, and cultural fissures, thereby further eroding existing solidarity and the capacity to rebuild post-pandemic cohesion.
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spelling pubmed-96189202022-11-01 Disintegration in the Age of COVID-19: Biological Contamination, Social Danger, and the Search for Solidarity Abrutyn, Seth Am Behav Sci Accepted Article Like any disaster, COVID-19 laid waste to infrastructure and the ability for a community to do community. But, unlike a tornado or nuclear meltdown, COVID-19 laid waste to social infrastructure in unique ways that only a disease can do. On the one hand, a pandemic brings biological dangers that, in turn, make all individuals—loved ones, too—into potential threats of biological contamination. On the other hand, the efforts to contain diseases present social dangers, as isolation and distancing threatens mundane and spectacular ritualized encounters and mask-wearing heighten our awareness of the biological risk. By exploring the link between disasters and disease, this paper leverages the contamination process, beginning first with the barriers it presents to making and remaking the self in everyday life. Constraints on ritualized encounters, both in terms of delimiting face-to-face interaction and in determining that some spaces have contaminative risks, reduces collective life to imagined communities or shifts to digitally mediated spaces. The former intensifies the sense of anomie people feel as their social world appears as though it were disintegrating while the latter presents severe neurobiological challenges to reproducing what face-to-face interaction habitually generates. Finally, these micro/meso-level processes are contextualized by considering how institutions, particularly polity but also science, manage collective risk and how their efficacy may either contribute to the erosion of solidarity or provide a sense of support in the face of anomic terror. Using the US to illustrate these processes, we are able to show how an inefficacious State response weakens the already tenuous connective tissue that holds a diffuse and diverse population together, while also exposing and intensifying existing political, economic, and cultural fissures, thereby further eroding existing solidarity and the capacity to rebuild post-pandemic cohesion. SAGE Publications 2022-10-29 /pmc/articles/PMC9618920/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/00027642221132176 Text en © 2022 SAGE Publications https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Accepted Article
Abrutyn, Seth
Disintegration in the Age of COVID-19: Biological Contamination, Social Danger, and the Search for Solidarity
title Disintegration in the Age of COVID-19: Biological Contamination, Social Danger, and the Search for Solidarity
title_full Disintegration in the Age of COVID-19: Biological Contamination, Social Danger, and the Search for Solidarity
title_fullStr Disintegration in the Age of COVID-19: Biological Contamination, Social Danger, and the Search for Solidarity
title_full_unstemmed Disintegration in the Age of COVID-19: Biological Contamination, Social Danger, and the Search for Solidarity
title_short Disintegration in the Age of COVID-19: Biological Contamination, Social Danger, and the Search for Solidarity
title_sort disintegration in the age of covid-19: biological contamination, social danger, and the search for solidarity
topic Accepted Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9618920/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/00027642221132176
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