As with most disasters, when the history of the COVID pandemic is written, there will be a fair amount of finger-pointing involved.
Much more could have been done to mitigate the coronavirus impact in the United States, but in reality, there are very few countries that totally escaped this scourge. Scientific research has provided a lot of new knowledge by which to manage the pandemic—and of course, the development of vaccines in record time is welcome news. But even with vaccines, success in controlling this virus continues to depend in large measure on human behavior. Science cannot take on these big challenges solely through medical fixes; rather it needs social and behavioral science to have a seat at the table as well. History is also a useful guide for understanding the present.
Anthropology is a broad field that has long focused on issues having to do with social organization, cultural meaning and human behavior. And as a professor of history and anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, in addition to my role at the New York Academy of Sciences, I have seen how classic fieldwork methods of ethnography—based on close observation of patterns and structures of social meaning—have revealed important insights into why modernity has accommodated enormous variation of thought and behavior. Join the conversation @scarsleftbhind
