IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB437749650

Layers of Epidemy: Present Pasts During the First Weeks of COVID-19 in Western Kenya (2020)

Geissler, P. Wenzel (Author)
Prince, Ruth J. (Author)

Centaurus: International Magazine of the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology
Volume: 62
Issue: 2
Pages: 248-256

URI: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1600-0498.12295

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1600-0498.12295

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Academia.edu

Postcolonialism Colonialism Medicine, general histories Ebola Cholera Cancer; tumors Human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV) Trypanosomiasis, African Smallpox Medicine and society Public health Epidemics Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) Kenya

The epidemic of COVID-19 appears to be reshaping the world, separating before and after, present and past. Its perceived novelty raises the question of what role the past might play in the present epidemic and in responses to it. Taking the view that the past has not passed, but is present in is material and immaterial remains, and continuously emerging from these, we argue that it should not be studied as closed narration but through the array of its traces, which constitute the texture of the present. To that end, and building on long-term ethnographic research on past and present epidemics in western Kenya, we assemble here some preliminary observations on the first weeks of COVID-19 in Kenya. We explore how the acute epidemic crisis currently unfolding is intertwined with layered fragments of earlier epidemic events, attending to material infrastructures, institutional practices, and ritual responses, to the presence of virally loaded bodies, pharmaceuticals, and their residues, and to the resurgence of often painful memories and emotions. People in this region have experienced a long century of epidemics and anti-epidemic measures of varying duration and intensity, from colonial and postcolonial sleeping sickness and smallpox to HIV/AIDS and more recently cancer, alongside actual or anticipated outbreaks of cholera and Ebola. This local perception of one long epidemic qualifies the notion of a radical temporal break that the COVID-19 pandemic is often associated with in European conversations.

...More

Citation URI

http://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB437749650/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Book Frank M. Snowden; (2019)
Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present (/isis/citation/CBB694307322/)

Article Paul Richards; (2020)
Ebola and COVID-19 in Sierra Leone: comparative lessons of epidemics for society (/isis/citation/CBB007996257/)

Thesis Lopez Denis, Adrian; (2007)
Disease and Society in Colonial Cuba, 1790--1840 (/isis/citation/CBB001561294/)

Book Paul Farmer; (2020)
Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History (/isis/citation/CBB910039837/)

Book John Rhodes; (2021)
How to Make a Vaccine: An Essential Guide for COVID-19 and Beyond (/isis/citation/CBB659711878/)

Article Erkoreka, Anton; (2008)
Épidémies en Pays Basque: De la peste noire à la grippe espagnole (/isis/citation/CBB000933241/)

Book Jacques Pépin; (2021)
The Origins of AIDS (/isis/citation/CBB084551418/)

Article Virginia Berridge; (2022)
The Many Endings of Recent Epidemics: HIV/AIDS, Swine Flu 2009, and Policy (/isis/citation/CBB473200788/)

Article Nükhet Varlık; (2020)
Rethinking the History of Plague in the Time of Covid-19 (/isis/citation/CBB776966901/)

Article Giuseppe Armocida; (2020)
Di nuovo una storia vecchia. L’emergenza Coronavirus (/isis/citation/CBB710967498/)

Article Junaidi; (2023)
Smallpox vaccination in Nias Island, Indonesia, 1854-1915 (/isis/citation/CBB724936721/)

Article Gramlich-Oka, Bettina; (2009)
The Body Economic: Japan's Cholera Epidemic of 1858 in Popular Discourse (/isis/citation/CBB001021352/)

Article Florence Bretelle‐Establet; (2020)
Science, Demons, and Gods in the Battle Against the COVID-19 Epidemic (/isis/citation/CBB540072063/)

Book Mitchell Hammond; (2020)
Epidemics and the Modern World (/isis/citation/CBB106185877/)

Book Holland, Michael; Gill, Geoffrey; Burrell, Sean; (2009)
Cholera and Conflict: 19th Century Cholera in Britain and Its Social Consequences (/isis/citation/CBB000933046/)

Article Michael P. Kelly; Federica Russo; (2021)
The epistemic values at the basis of epidemiology and public health (/isis/citation/CBB856188518/)

Book Charles E. Rosenberg; (1987)
The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (/isis/citation/CBB357086392/)

Book Simukai Chigudu; (2020)
The Political Life of an Epidemic: Cholera, Crisis and Citizenship in Zimbabwe (/isis/citation/CBB727049551/)

Book Urška Bratož; (2021)
L’esangue invasore venuto da oriente. Il colera nell’Istria nordoccidentale (1830-1890) (/isis/citation/CBB261813770/)

Thesis Reinhardt, Robert Holbrook; (2012)
Remaking Bodily Environments: The Global Eradication of Smallpox (/isis/citation/CBB001561026/)