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How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.

This has been a week of relatively intense reflections about COVID-19 and its unveilings of not just the inequalities in society and the cruelties of the governments in the U.S., Brazil, India, and elsewhere (which are increasingly becoming pundit discourses), but of a grammar of the bio-social immune system under great stress from multiple insults. I take this language from an extraordinarily rich paper delivered at our Friday Morning Seminar by O. B., which began with a recitation of events in Iran culled from tweets, conversations with physicians and other friends in Iran, attention to official statements (often in conflict with other sources) as they have been unfolding since February, beginning with reports from a hospital in Qum and journalist tweets and the arrest of those who let out the information followed by an announcement of cessation of flights to China (although unofficially Mahan Air continued with some 55 more flights) -- it began like a deja vu not only of previous epidemics in Iran, but like Wuhan and China's attempts to deny and stonewall, and then the fast spread outside Qum to other cities and to surrounding countries -- Iran becoming the 2nd major hotspot of what would become a global pandemic. While the securitization of health data is long-standing in Iran, it begins to look not unlike the attacks on authoritative knowledge collected by medical scientists and epidemiologists by the U.S. government under Trump. Is there a new grammar of biosocial control, but also of (psychoanalytic and psychopolitical) fantasies of what is going on? In Iran, this year is spoken of as a dark year -- the airliner shot down by IRRGC which just happened to be full of young students returning to universities abroad; the thousands of working class people shot in quelling gasoline price hike protests; the insulin shortage due to the trafficking of insulin abroad as the value of the rial/toman drops, the use of health workers as human shields against the virus in weakened bodies, weakened by diabetes, heart disease, etc. Reading Octavia Butler's two books Sower of Seeds and Sower of Talents is one of those astonishing fiction premonitions from the 1990s of what we are going through today with a candidate who is going to make America Great Again [Reagan's slogan of course] bolstered by evangelical extremists, and the collpase of the environment and social structure in the aftermath of the great Pox. But reading Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad deepens the historical continuities of the post Reconstruction white supremacy regimes that the Republicans are attempting to re-install in naked form -- the new Biden-Harris Administration will push back with what look like a series of superb appointments -- but the Trump years and COVID-19 are a stark warning. To widen the range of the dystopia we inherit and inhabit I also just finished the trilogy by Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga of what colonization felt like and the rigors of de-colonialism, and Tommy Orange's "There There" (Gertrude Stein: there's no there there), both of which end in catacylsm. All different but in some ways part of the same complex grammar that OB described and that are parts of our interconnected worlds. All parts also of where my head has been as we wrap up the classes on Ethnographic Methods in Medical Anthropology for physicians from from Rwanda, West Africa, Peru, Myanmar, etc.; and on Colonial Encounters, Postcolonial Disorders with people from an equally wide range of background including two Native Americans, and which dealt with such discourses as white settler societies, historical trauma, decolonizing the mind, PTSD, hauntology, ceremony as healing and counter- or supplement to biomedicine's limitiations and incomprehensions. There is light and hope, but it will take work.