Masking in Pandemic U.S.: Beliefs and Practices of Containment and Connection [Paperback]

Introduction: Imaginaries, embodiment and the U.S. Covidscape; 1 Practices of containment and connection; 2 Sewing cloth masks and making do with uncertainty; 3 Performing care and worldmaking; 4 Response-ability and transformation of religious subjects; 5 Conclusion: Imaginaries of masking and unmasking

This anthropological study explores the beliefs and practices that emerged around masking in the United States during the Covid-19 pandemic.

This anthropological study explores the beliefs and practices that emerged around masking in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic. Americans responded to this illness as unique subjects navigating the flux of social and corporeal boundaries, supporting certain beliefs and acting to shape them as compelling realities. Debates over health and safety mandates indicated that responses were fractured with varied subjectivities in playpeople lived in different worlds and bodies were central in conflicts over breathing, masking and social distancing. Contrasting approaches to practices marked the limits and possibilities of imaginaries, signaling differences and similarities between groups, and how actions could be passageways between people and possibilities. During a time of uncertainty and loss, the efficacious intimacy of bodies and materials embedded beliefs, values, and emotions of care in mask sewing and usage. By exploring these practices, the author reflects on how American subjects became relational selves and sustained response-able communities, helping people protect each other from mutating viruses as well as moving forward in a shifting terrain of intimacy and distance, connection, and containment.

Only two years after the inception of the COVID-19 pandemic, Urmila Mohan produces a compelling account of the emotional, religious and subjective implications of this event. She investigates facial masks as micro-technologies of the self, revealing their imalCà