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Bill Ellis - Review of Ben Bridges, Ross Brillhart, and Diane E. Goldstein, eds. Behind the Mask: Vernacular Culture in the Time of COVID

Bill Ellis - Review of Ben Bridges, Ross Brillhart, and Diane E. Goldstein, eds. Behind the Mask: Vernacular Culture in the Time of COVID


A plague doctor's mask, Covid masks, and a woman wearing a Covid mask

This volume deals with the intense “lockdown” period experienced by most world cultures during the initial spread of the COVID virus, when the disease erupted in huge outbreaks with high death tolls. Shutting down social activities was prudent, providing time for scientists to devise effective treatment, plus, in time, vaccines. However, this measure put culture under a form of stress not normally felt except during wars or in the aftermath of terrorist attacks. Such constant worry provokes a need for palliative measures. As the editors explain, these reactions are difficult to document, as many of them took place in an enforced privacy, and afterwards, a sort of retrospective amnesia descends. And so ethnographers have a duty to witness such behavior during such periods of crisis. The editors, who wisely take a broad perspective on such reactions, include Ben Bridges, who was at the time of publication a candidate for a dual degree in folklore and anthropology, Ross Brillhart, program manager for a Vermont foundation that does studies on music, sound, and healthcare, and folklorist Diane E. Goldstein, whose Once Upon a Virus (2004) remains a model for understanding belief and legend as a vernacular means of managing risk.

The volume is organized into three sections dealing with the ways vernacular culture responded to the COVID lockdown. The first collects essays detailing behavior that provided relief, encouraged others, and affirmed the value of communities. Andrew Robinson, in “Rainbows, Snakes, and Scarecrows,” gives a detailed account of spontaneous activities that emerged during the most intense time of isolation. Some involved constructing or displaying optimistic messages: e.g., putting up homemade rainbows on street-facing windows or engaging in balcony or front-door “clapping” tributes to medical personnel. Subsequent activities were more often quirky: informal “mooing” contests, construction of scarecrows, and the collective building of a lengthy “snake” out of painted rocks.

“Silver Linings,” by Trod Geist, Pieper Bloomquist, and James I. Deutsch, also involve the creation of art, in this case an elaborate example of a bonadsmǻlning, a Swedish form of folk art portraying the event in stylized form with elaborate captions. Sponsored by the North Dakota Council on the Arts, the artist (Bloomquist) chronicled many modest home-town efforts to pass time and help neighbors. Lucy Long and Theresa A. Vaughan add “Kneading Comfort, Community, Craftsmanship,” a detailed study and analysis of baking bread at home, an activity that experienced a nationwide peak in popularity during the event. The authors call attention to the time-consuming nature of bread-making, involving gathering often scarce ingredients leading to a complicated and repetitive process of mixing and kneading with time left for the dough to rise. Geist et al. note the way the artist filled every space of his canvas, displaying what art critics call a horror vacui or “dread of empty space.” This concept might be relevant to other kinds of pandemic behavior documented in this section, which seem palliative precisely because they are ways of filling “empty time.”

The second section deals with ways in which the pandemic was understood in the form of narratives, including legends seen in previous epidemics. More significantly, the essays argue, they propose implicit story paradigms that help individuals understand (and judge) the nature of risk and individual health care. Sheila Bock’s “Beyond the Deliberate Infector” discusses a theme seen in many previous pandemics: identifying a person or class of people who can be blamed for increasing the disease’s spread. Bock, however, uses many personal narratives to show that the trope is more complex; rather, it is often a means of exploring the risks that everyone has to negotiate when interacting with other people at times when the infective agent’s nature is not well understood.

“False Grannies, Extra Doses, and the One Hundred,” by Andrea Kitta, revisits the fraught weeks after the first vaccines were released to the public, leading to confusion as providers struggled to create means of setting up appointments needed to dole out the precious doses. Kitta is careful not to characterize the resulting rumors as nonsense or untruths; indeed, many of them were quite accurate in describing how clinics behaved when they faced throwing out doses at the end of a day. Julianne Graper, in “Beyond Bat-Eating,” is more critical of legend-creation, showing that proposed origins of the pandemic in human consumption of bat meat inevitably spread racist assumptions. Tellingly, she shows that this anti-Asian bias was not simply part of the informal grapevine, but was already present in the allegedly scientific theories explaining the origins of the pandemic. The scientific community was just as complicit as Lady Rumor in inspiring the explicitly racist songs and stories condoning violence against Asians.

A third section discusses issues raised when circumstances involved the collision of previously disparate communities through new forms of media platforms (such as Zoom), generating new forms of shared performance. Anne Eriksen and Kyrre Kverndokk analyze the Norwegian concept of dugnad, or “communal work,” typically for the common good and carried out by all citizens during a time of crisis. This lofty goal was repeatedly communicated to the public through mass media, but personal diaries (kept during the pandemic at the invitation of the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History) show that this lofty abstract goal of dugnad became problematic when individuals tried to apply it to everyday habits. Kinsey Brooke’s “Zoom, Zoom, Zoom” documents the role of new video-chat platforms in creating virtual spaces that small groups claimed as real-time (if not real-space) contexts for vernacular performance. She examines events in which folk knowledge of many sort–music, narrative, festive behavior, and crafts–were shared and celebrated by such means.

“Virtual Tarantella Folk Music and Dances” by Incoronata Inserra tellingly expands on the previous essay with a detailed account of how an esoteric ethnomusical tradition from Southern Italy experienced a global resurgence through virtual means. Chat platforms allowed musicians to play as a group and perform traditional dances while remaining isolated in their own homes. Recordings of such virtual performances were then shared among broader audiences, creating a worldwide interest in this musical form leading to online classes in the art with students participating globally.

The essays vary in methodologies and represent and speak to a variety of academic and public fields from humanities to social sciences. One would have liked more of a synthesis of these various perspectives. And one could wish for a slightly broader scope. Many of the authors concede that they observed subjects in privileged situations, able to endure the difficult lockdown with the help of affordances such as personal computers and private transportation. It would be equally revealing to attempt to reconstruct COVID-period reactions of populations that lacked such advantages, notably peoples of African and Latino extraction. And while Graper rightly decries the anti-Asian bias in the way the pandemic was framed, it is also telling that the publication surveys no Asian populations, native or in diasporas. One would wish for mention, for instance, of how the dish “Hot Dry Noodles” (Re Gan Mian, 热干面), a signature dish of Wuhan’s regional cuisine, was taken up globally as a means of showing solidarity with the pandemic’s epicenter (Heil 2020).

However, the book is a worthy documentation of ephemeral, yet revealing traditions, and the ground the authors break could well make the theme for another wide-ranging book.

Works Cited

Goldstein, Diane E. 2004. Once Upon a Virus: AIDS Legends and Vernacular Risk Perception. Logan: Utah State University Press.

Heil, Emily. 2020. “Wuhan’s signature noodles become a symbol of solidarity amid the Coronavirus outbreak.” The Washington Post, February 6, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/voraciously/wp/2020/02/06/wuhans-signature-noodles-become-a-symbol-of-solidarity-amid-the-coronavirus-outbreak/

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[Review length: 1259 words • Review posted on September 30, 2024]