Message From Anthropology Chair on COVID-19 Virus
Dear WSU Anthropology Community,
During these challenging times I am writing as your Department Chair to affirm our commitment to helping you confront adversities produced by the COVID-19 virus. We are working to ensure our teaching, scholarship, and service missions continue, and to support each member of our community in navigating the many impacts of this unfolding epidemic. Classes continue online; our research continues (but not face-to-face) our connection with each other continues, but virtually. WSU and the Department of Anthropology are committed to ensuring the continuity of your education, professional development, and careers.
Clearly this epidemic will stress each of us today and in ways we will learn over time. Please contact the Department office, the staff, your faculty advisor, or any faculty member for assistance if you need it. We will do our best to help or connect you to appropriate resources.
For myself, on a personal note, I began my Medical Anthropology life when AIDS first emerged. Then, ignorance, fear, bigotry, moralizing led to wildly inaccurate ideas of the epidemic, false approaches to treatment, and widespread suffering and death. Covid-19 is different. It is moving much more quickly; yet with similar social and cultural issues shaping its spread and lethality. I urge you to use your training as an anthropologist to read, evaluate, and synthesize the barrage of information and commentary about COVID-19 to help your family, friends, and community make sense of what is happening and to follow the recommendations to keep people safe. Epidemics can bring out the worst in people; but they can also bring out the best.
As distressing as the epidemic is, this experience can foster opportunities to observe and learn about human behavior, values, beliefs, and the powerful webs of social lives. As this disaster falls on each and every one of us, we are ready to share ideas, insights, and commitments in your lives going forward.
Indeed, as students of anthropology, Margaret Mead's words speak clearly to the need for our work today:
Most people prefer to carry out the kinds of experiments that allow the scientist to feel that he is in full control of the situation rather than surrendering himself to the situation, as one must in studying human beings as they actually live.
Margaret Mead. Blackberry Winter (1972), 321