A State of Emergency, a State of Transition: How the Covid‐19 Pandemic May Help Reconcile Historicism and the Anthropology of Crisis

Abstract

The incongruence between Bourdieu's historical sociology and the ahistorical structuralist theories of Levi‐Strauss’ students has often contributed to a complete disregard for the historical significance of cultural meaning on the one hand and the role of structural dichotomies (i.e. us vs them) and the phenomenon of the myth on the other. The crisis events of the 2020 Global Covid‐19 Pandemic offer a unique opportunity for anthropologists to reconcile historicism with theories of ahistorical (or exceptional) phenomenon. In particular, the linguistic coding of the pandemic as a “crisis” reveals a two‐fold, cultural understanding of the term. Crises entail some repetitive structural element (such that we recognize a given event or state as a crisis) but the structure repeated is, in fact, a sudden, novel change in the field of practice experienced as an “unprecedented time.” Comparingcontemporary circumstances to other events coded as crises in the United States, I argue that the (perceived) catalyst of the ongoing rupture in social and economic order is best understood through Douglas’ lens of pollution: an external threat to the structural dichotomies and myths that define the boundaries of the social body. What emerges from considering repetition and rupture at once is a new understanding of crisis as a reoccurring phenomenon characterized by an incongruence between doxa and habitus—a state of liminality wherein the previously accepted myths, symbols, and dichotomies at the foundation of citizens’ habitus and society's structures are suspended. This incongruence is resolvable by two mechanisms: either crisis‐era praxis is integrated into habitus (providing the practical basis for anewsetofmyths, structures, anddoxa), or the suspended schemata are reintegrated in a way that account for the expansion of what is considered possible according to pre‐crisis doxa. In this way, a symbolic purification of the social body is enacted by the application of new or extant myths to changes within a field during the crisis‐era. Bourdieu's historicism can thus be applied to the anthropology of crisis alongside structuralist theories by treating crisis as a kind of transitional state of social doxa, not via inductive reasoning or extrapolation from historical phenomenon.