Abstract
Taking the lead from Erving Goffman’s celebrated work on stigma, this article attempts to examine ‘stigma as process’ (the process of stigmatisation), delineating the conditions most fecund for the crystallisation of ‘stigma as product’. These factors, appearing almost infallible, make an individual highly vulnerable, non-rational and lonely, with his or her survival instinct climbing the summit. Selfishness reigns, as the cause is located in an external factor which becomes the enemy. In fact, the infected comrades-in-arms become the foes. The lower strata of society, the working force in the tertiary sector of the economy, the poverty-stricken and minorities are stigmatised as potential carriers of the virulent virus. The realisation that the coronavirus has no soul, no life, no discretion and can grip anyone is pushed away. One panacea to eradicate the stigma is to think in terms of the reversal of roles and with the ethos of empathy. We should not forget that those who were stigmatised as disease spreaders are saving the lives of others by donating their plasma.
An old concept running through twentieth century sociology and social anthropology is the distinction between what people do intentionally, consciously and with full awareness and what entails from their actions of which they had no inkling when the act was being carried out. The classical example of this analytical distinction was Émile Durkheim’s study of totemism in which he demonstrated that when Australian aborigines were engaged in corroborees, an indigenous ceremony during which they danced, sometimes performed sacred rituals, they could never anticipate that as a result of these festivities their clans somehow integrated, they experienced an esprit de corps which cemented them together. This celebrated study of 1912 led Durkheim to conclude that religion performed the function (an unintentional outcome) of creating social solidarity. Perhaps 40 years later this distinction was presented in the duality of manifest and latent functions (Merton, 1949/1968), the first being the realm of ‘intentional actions’ and the second, of ‘unanticipated consequences’.
I wish to use this distinction to understand how contemporary households have encountered what is called the stigma, a term that has been widely clichéd during the current times of the COVID-19 pandemic That it was a novel, heart-rending and humiliating experience for a large number of people, especially those who unremittingly adhered to principles of egalitarianism and selflessness, has been documented sketchily in the print media. Fieldworkers (making use of telephonic interviews) have endeavoured to learn whatever little they could about what individuals and their families went through after their encounter with the illness. With the passage of time, these case studies will remain in the public domain bringing to the fore the issues of human rights and raising serious philosophical questions and scepticism about the goodness of human beings.
Quarantine Sticker
One of my respondent’s son, hailing from an upper class family, arrived from New York in the third week of March. He was advised home quarantine with a set of protocols, which then were not as elaborate and clear as they are now, after three months of the announcement of the first lockdown on 24 March. The following day, officials of the health department of the municipality came to his house and after filling in a couple of forms, they pasted on his door a rectangular sticker with a white background and a red border on which the following hand written information was to be provided: name(s) of the person(s) quarantined and the total duration of home confinement . The sticker had a legal sanction. In some states the sticker was in a different colour; for instance, Tamil Nadu had green stickers.
The intention (the manifest function) of this sticker was noble. Quarantining or isolating was not to be viewed as an example of a new kind of untouchability. It was to communicate to the family that it should abstain from coming into contact with others because the infection could be transmitted so altruism lay in keeping oneself isolated. Also, since they were more vulnerable to other infections, as they were already battling with a new infection, than the others ( normal people) through social distancing would be able to protect themselves against any other unwarranted sickness. Thus, by insulating ourselves from the outside world it essentially conveyed we are not only protecting others, but we are also protecting ourselves (the latent function). For the others, strict instructions were printed on the sticker: ‘Do not visit home under quarantine’ had a protective strategy as its objective for both the inmates of the household and outsiders. Moreover, the quarantining was time-bound, two weeks, although it was extendable for a week or so depending upon the health condition of the members of the house.
My respondent told me that during the period of the lockdown, he did not feel lonely as he was digitally connected with his kith and kin. Television and Netflix were his other allies. However, what was not erasable from his memory was the abomination he suffered socially. The first shock he received was that some neighbours and passers-by took a picture of the sticker (bearing his ward’s name), which he said perhaps went more ‘viral than the new coronavirus’! The picture was sent to a whole host of anonymous others. Whether or not the recipients of the picture were acquainted with the family, they now at least came to know the of the location of the infected houses which were being branded. The household had to send their domestic staff on leave; in any case, since the period of staying at home had begun with the observation of the Janta Curfew (22 March), all the members of the household were constrained to do the domestic chores which they at first abhorred but as time rolled by they started enjoying them. The house they felt lookedcleaner and better groomed!
Initially, my friend’s house was the one in a row of houses that displayed the quarantine sticker, but soon other houses with suspected cases were identified and singled out. One day, he heard an onlooker pointing his finger towards his house saying, ‘His son spread the infection!’ Ruefully, he says that my house will for years be known as coronawala ghar (the house with corona). And in case his street has more cases of corona in the future, it may well be called, coronawalon ki gali (Corona street). Today’s ignominy will become a part of a people’s shared social history of the neighbourhood. The lesson I learnt from lengthy telephone interactions with my respondent was that an act done with good intentions might have terrible consequences for the social status and psyche of people. Obviously, the objective of the administration was not to stigmatise the family, but what resulted from the entire exercise was exactly what was not foreseen.
Natural Experiment
Other pandemics in the past (such as cholera, small pox, influenza, plague and HIV-AIDS) have generated a significant number of scholarly writings when these diseases were raging. Some writers lucky enough to witness and survive these pandemics wrote at length about them. For instance, Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War gave an account of the Athenian plague of 430–26
A natural experiment, one can say, was taking place in the world from early December 2019, when retrospectively China admitted the emergence of the first cases of SARS-CoV2 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2, the full name of the new coronavirus was given on 11 February). For close on two months, December 2019 to January 2020, we were following the news from Wuhan, the social media pictures of its animal market and also learnt that China had worked out on 11 January 2020 the genomic structure of the new virus. However, the future seriousness of the disease did not occur to us even after the first case of the affliction that the new virus caused it was diagnosed in Thrissur, in Kerala on 30 January 2020. At that time, perhaps we did not realise that globalisation did not only the mean diffusion of technology, commerce, and information; it also meant the unimpeded movement of people and the spread of contagious infections and pandemics through them. That the disease (called COVID-19 by the WHO on 11 February 2020) was not to be taken so casually dawned on us in mid-March 2020 when the first confirmed corona death on 12 March was reported from Karnataka.
Cases of COVID-19 started increasing from late March 2020; on Holi, the festival of colours, celebrated on 10 March, they numbered 50, with no death being reported and on 15 June (82 days of lockdown), the total number of cases reported till date were 320,922 (of whom 162,378 had been cured and 9,195 had died). The astounding increase in the number of cases in the last three months (with the peak of the disease yet to come, as the medical fraternity says) has thrown before us a plethora of unpremeditated challenges in every sphere of our life, and one of which is in the realm of society.
Demonisation and the Externality of Causation
Today’s fear-stricken society is reclaiming kinship; the relatives who were almost forsaken are returning centre stage. When a man all alone attends his mother’s funeral in a hazmat suit, he feels the loss of the departed relative much more piercingly than what would have been the case in normal times when, as he said, a congregation of one thousand would have assembled at the cremation ground and stood with him for consolation (The Hindustan Times, 12 June 2020). The headline in The Telegraph (13 June 2020) that nine doctors from the K. P. C. Medical College and Hospital (Jadavpur, Kolkata) resigned apprehending their aged relatives at home would be at risk if they continued to treat corona patients.
I learnt from my enquiries that when a sick one was in home isolation, daily provisions to his family came from the kinspersons who might be living distantly but rising to the occasion. Some neighbours might demonise those who tested positive for corona, but there were also several instances of those neighbours who took up the role of kinspersons subscribing to the adage when relatives are away, depend on your neighbours. In these moments of ‘phenomenal isolation’, to use Max Weber’s expression from his work, The Protestant Ethic (Weber, 1930/2001), with the djinn of fear possessing our minds, a complex network of exclusion, inequities, intolerance and marginalisation ruins the fabric of amiable living. The canopy term used to describe this variety of negative emotions and discriminatory behaviour is stigma.
Perhaps, it is the first time in recent history that the term stigma is being employed with remarkable consistency for understanding the myriad cases of discrimination. For instance, a Congress MLA in Arunachal Pradesh sought the Prime Minister’s intervention to stop incidents of social prejudice and attacks in cities on people from the Northeast who were being called ‘corona’ or ‘virus’. He drew attention to the fact that India is a signatory to the International Committee on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, and therefore the state must deal stringently with all cases of unfairnesses and biases (The Deccan Herald, 11 April 2020). Several shameful cases appeared. A doctor in Edachira (Kakkanad, Kerala) was stopped from entering his flat in a housing society after he returned from his hospital where COVID-19 patients were being treated, and a nurse was asked to vacate her apartment in the same complex, because the society’s office bearers feared that she would spread the virus (The New Indian Express, 8 April 2020); among umpteen cases of this type was another even more despicable one from Khandagiri in Bhubaneswar, Odisha where a lady doctor was threatened with rape if she did not vacate her flat in the housing society (The Times of India, Bhubaneswar, 29 March 2020) as she was working in a hospital which admitted corona patients.
To add insult to injury, the Prime Minister of Nepal stated in the Parliament that the ‘Indian virus’ was more lethal than the one from China and other countries affected by the new virus. He also said that migrants from Nepal who were working in India were bringing home the virus on their return as they were avoiding any testing and health check-ups at the international borders for fear of being disallowed entry (The Indian Express, 26 May 2020).
The implication of these cited instances has been the creation of two strata in society: the sedentary and the migrants. The former are viewed as disease-nascent, the latter, as disease-saturated, and thus they become what epidemiologists have called ‘super spreaders’ (Lloyd-Smith et al., 2005). The irony is that the people of the same origin, already differentiated on lines of class and ethnicity, are further cleaved. Inequality further compounds, becoming what Robert Dahl said in another context ‘cumulative’ (see Mayhew, 2015)—migrants returning home under duress, already caught in the viciousness of penury and destitution, tired and worn out, are further labelled as disease diffusers. Not just migrants but also domestic help, vendors and hawkers, auto-rickshaw pullers, and even minorities have met with the same fate. Reports by domestic help show that after their employers denied them work even after the lockdown was relaxed and the state had said that they would be allowed to work after strictly adhering to protocols of disease management. As a result many such people were forced to beg. In several cases, their past dues remained unsettled (The Indian Express, 29 May 2020).
Instead of sympathetically understanding the predicament of people and the conditions that have caused it, whenever the crisis remains unmitigated we look for a cause outside our domain. The underlying idea is the belief that, ‘we were normal and un-diseased’ till outsiders barged in and spread this deadly infection. The disease is viewed as located extraneously. In fact, a study of pandemics from the Plague of Athens to the Ebola (December 2013) informs us that the genesis of the illness was always zeroed down to an external human or animal cause: the enemy is the outsider. About the Athenian plague the thesis was that it originated in Ethiopia from where it spread to Egypt and Greece. The Plague of Galen (or the Antonine Plague, 165–180 AD) was attributed to soldiers returning from a campaign in the Near East; similarly, the first plague pandemic (the real plague), the Plague of Justinian (541–549 AD) was supposed to have originated in Ethiopia and the global outbreak of the bubonic plague, known as Black Death, of the mid-1300s was traced to China (Tuchman, 1987). Likely to have been introduced by fruit bats, the Ebola virus appeared in a village in Guinea from where it spread to Sierra Leone and Liberia (Preston, 1995). The same was also said about the Spanish Flu (Kolata, 2001).
The externality of causation is one of the conducive factors of stigma. There is also a legion of other factors, like the ease of its transmission, overlapping symptoms of ailments, its virulence, absence of cure and physical isolation from others, including family members, thus causing psychological traumas. In an environment of suspicion, misconceptions about the disease breed, contributing cumulatively to positing the other as the enemy. Unsurprisingly, such a social situation gives birth to discrimination, xenophobia, racism and, what I would call, ethnicism.
Process and Product
Besides the writings of social psychologists, the oft-read work on stigma is that of Erving Goffman. Subtitled Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, which itself tells us what stigma is expected to mean, Goffman (1963, p. 3) uses this term to refer to an ‘attribute that is deeply discrediting’. The person who bears this ‘dishonoured label’ is seen as ‘tainted, discounted’ (Goffman, 1963, p. 3). As a thing in itself, the attribute, Goffman says, is neither ‘creditable nor discreditable’, but its evaluation (how will society look at it?) under the armoury of social forces attaches a value to it. Societies differ concerning the attribute(s) picked up for discrediting, and for this, the analysis needs to look at the culture of society.
For instance, scanning the internet brings to our knowledge several entries of famous people who have suffered from the new virus. Wikipedia has a site named, ‘List of deaths due to COVID-19’, which catalogues the notables who have passed away from the infection. It is arranged date-wise beginning from 25 January when the Wuhan doctor, Liang Wudong, the whistle-blower, died due to hospital-acquired infection. Celebrities in the West had no compunction in letting the world know that they were corona positive. Some even released videos giving a detailed account of their symptoms and how they were being treated. The public viewed it as of supreme educational value. Perhaps, the afflicted knew that falling ill in these days and being tested positive would not bring them any dishonour or shame, therefore they would unhesitatingly approach the healthcare system and openly talk about it. Compare this with the situation in India. It has been the observation of many, including the Director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, that many sick people do not approach health centres and hospitals because they fear that diagnosed corona positive would discredit them and their families (The Hindustan Times, 9 April 2020). It seems that they would prefer languishing to death rather than face the stigma.
A reading of Goffman raises two interrelated questions: first, how is stigma built up (‘stigma as process’) which leads to social labelling (‘stigma as product’); and second, what are the cultural and structural conditions most favourable to the emergence of stigma. True, another important area of investigation is the complex feelings a stigmatised person has towards himself and towards others (the normal), and how these condition the relationships between the two. Also, worthy of study are the strategies the stigmatised person improvises to maximise his life chances. These were the areas that Goffman (1963) studied intensively. I think once proper, face-to-face variety of fieldwork begins, rather than the present telephonic interviews, it would be advisable to carry out a study of a sample of the people and their families who have suffered from the COVID-19 infection.
Fear of the Unknown
The term stigmatisation may capture the sense of ‘stigma as process’—how stigma crystallises, and then its metamorphosis into a dishonoured label which is stuck to individuals, families and communities, and through them to material objects. The stigmatisation of a community also means the stigmatisation of its way of life, food, language, folklore, in essence, its total culture. Stigma is like a python—it engulfs the individual and the community, and everything connected to them.
There are various forms stigma may take. It may be in the form of signs that are already carved on the body (like the absence of sight, deformed limbs, auditory disability, or any other body blemishes) or they may be etched (or burnt) on the body as happened when the Amritsar police tattooed on 8 December 1993 the word pickpocket (jeb katri) on the foreheads of five village women who were alleged to have been engaged in criminal activities (The Indian Express, 19 October 2016). Or it may be attached to a despised and immoral career like that of a prostitute or a criminal who has served time in jail. These labels seem to be quasi-permanent; that is why Goffman (1963) said that ‘stigma lasts’; it has a longer life span and continues to hover over the person even when he has returned to normal life. For example, a person cured of a mental and behavioural disorder continues to be haunted by the ghosts of his past even when he is craving for a normal existence like others; and the lingering stigma might be the raison d’être of his relapse into a psychiatric malady. The same may apply to an infectious disease like tuberculosis or leprosy. The situation, however, is different with leprosy because it leaves its horrifying marks on the body of the stricken which are unmistakably noted by others.
What happens in the case of COVID-19? As said previously, the disease spreads fast, from one person to another, is presently incurable and can grip a person simply when he touches an infected elevator button, a mobile phone or a newspaper, which carries the virus. For weeks together, households stopped their subscription to newspapers, fearing that these might carry the virus. As the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus skyrocketed, in direct proportion it increased the levels of fear among people. The scientific community inculcated the belief in us that this inanimate, protein molecule covered by a layer of fat was ubiquitous and could live on a material surface for hours. The fear multiplied manifold with the quality of its unknownness. The new virus, said the head of WHO’s health emergency programme, Mike Ryan, ‘knew no borders and [it doesn’t] care [about] your ethnicity, the colour of your skin, and how much money you have in the bank.’ 2 In other words, all of us are equally susceptible to the virus notwithstanding all the other biological and social parameters, put separately or collectively.
To the fear germinating from the ubiquity of the virus was added the way of its reification, its symbolic presentation. The huge corona helmet was scary (The Economic Times, 29 March 2020), and so was the man dressed up as the ‘god of death’ (yamarāj) (India Today, 1 April 2020). The purported aim in both cases was to urge upon people to stay home: ‘If you are inside your house, the corona will be outside.’ At the latent level, however, the fear was becoming more and more intense. An aura of suspicion prevailed—anyone and everyone could harbour the infection, for there were umpteen numbers of asymptomatic people who were corona positive but were hale and hearty, yet they were transmitting the disease.
Against this backdrop, the human body lost its place of charm and beauty, depressing into a site of infection. The body became despicable, an enemy, because even its inadvertent touch, howsoever slight, could be fateful. However, the positivity lay in religiously observing physical distancing as this would stem the cycle of spread. It was well said by the Queen of Denmark on 18 March: ‘…we have to show our togetherness by keeping apart’. 3 The message was, we are caring for others and also ourselves by observing do gaz ki doori (a distance of two yards) from them.
One outcome of the distancing was pent-up negative feelings. The moment we learnt that someone was ‘positive’, we resorted to shunning; however, if it was a matter of kinship, we rose to the occasion, rendering all possible material help to the family and emotional strength, although observing all precautions. The society seemed to be divided broadly into two groups: those who fell ill, and thus were shunned, and those (who presently normal) might fall ill tomorrow, and thus were waiting and fearing to be shunned. Stigma needed to be understood as a process in terms of the complex of fears and the behaviours of shunning.
As a process, stigma is placed on a continuum. It grows and hardens when the cases are few—it shows its ugliest face; but when cases multiply and the community becomes coronawalon ki gali, then who will shun whom? Who will stigmatise whom? Thus, instead of treating stigma as immutable, we may conceptualise it as having different degrees by the dynamism present in society.
Enemy Approach
Corona was reified as an enemy, indeed an international enemy. Different nations reacted to corona with this terminology: for France, it was the ‘invisible and elusive enemy’; for China, it was the ‘people’s war against corona’; Italy wanted to equip herself ‘for a war economy’; for UK in its war against corona, ‘every citizen is directly enlisted’, and President Donald Trump defined himself in the context of this pandemic as the ‘wartime president’. Perhaps the most charitable comment came from the Queen of Denmark who characterised corona as a ‘dangerous guest’. India gave the concept of ‘corona warriors’; ‘they are the shields (dhal) protecting us from the dangerous virus’. 5 The aim of this characterisation of the virus was not only to draw attention to the gravity of the situation, and thus adopt a war-like approach to combat the disease, but also to arouse sentiments of patriotism and urging upon people to sacrifice their personal interests by remaining home, observing social distance, postponing their festal celebrations and listening to the government’s directions to save the nation. The message was clear that eventually it was going to benefit the individual and his family. Lockdown was not a sanction; it was the most viable strategy to break the cycle of infection, thus saving people from death.
That we should ‘hate’ the virus and not the ‘sick’ is an oft-repeated message. The discipline of criminology, barring those of its pursuers who lean towards bio-genetic theories of crime, states unambiguously that crime breeds in a set of social and economic conditions, and for lowering the crime rate in a society these triggering conditions have to be studied and politically controlled. At the theoretic level, it is acceptable but it is the opposite that has happened in practice and history is its witness; the sinners, the criminals, the witches (whom the devil chose to implement his designs on the earth), the heretics, and the stigmatised have borne the brunt of punitive sanctions, both corporeal and mental. By punishing deviants, society was not only restoring the sanctity of the legal system but also conveying to law-abiders that it would never allow their interests to be harmed; in this way, the ‘collective consciousness’ remained intact, as Durkheim said (see Burkhardt & Connor, 2015).
Well known to all was that since the new coronavirus, like any other contagion, could entrap anyone, why should harsh and inhuman treatment be meted out to the sick? Why were communities of Asians and minorities in the West especially targetted so that they became the butt of ridicule for having transmitted the infection but sick individuals largely spared? As we observed earlier, the sick unhesitatingly spoke about their symptoms and curative measures. In India, not only communities, like people from the Northeast, but quasi-communities too such as members of the Tablighi Jamaat and migrant labourers, were singled out. Other individuals were also attacked, whether they were sick or working in COVID-19 care-centres. (The Hindu, 29 May 2020).
Not only that, the dead were also equally stigmatised, denied an honourable funeral. The case of Dr John Sailo may be mentioned here. The founder of a premier hospital in Shillong, Bethany Hospital, Sailo was one of the most respected doctors in the state of Meghalaya. He died of COVID-19, the first patient to die of this disease in Meghalaya. His family was denied permission to giving him a funeral by the management of the city’s crematorium and the town’s executive committee. His burial took place a day after his demise on 15 April when the High Court in Meghalaya intervened, directing the authorities to initiate legal action against those obstructing the burial or cremation of COVID-19 victims in the state (Outlook, 17 April 2000). Locals fondly remembered Sailo’s exemplary deeds in the past,his compassionate nature and were sad at the treatment he received after his death. It was unfortunate but the ‘COVID-19 identity’ of Sailo eclipsed all his other identities. identities and he was seen, like the others infected by corona, as a ‘probable transmitter’ of the disease. The doctor became the enemy, so did the other sick! Attaching ‘corona/COVID identity’ to individuals these days is common; just type ‘Hari Vasudevan’ on Google, and you will see many postings, ‘Hari Vasudevan COVID’. 6 Professor Vasudevan was a distinguished historian from Kolkata who died of COVID-19 on 10 May (The Indian Express, 11 May 2020).
In the Indian context, a striking parallel is noted between the cases of spirit possession and corona patients, and this paradigm can be extended to other contagious ailments as well. The spirit that possesses and the virus that infects a person are both external. Each ensnares the body on its own volition, but the prerequisite is defilement; one sullies the abode of the spirit and it catches you to punish, and one goes out of the house unprotected and fails to follow the rigour of cleanliness, thus the ground for corona infection is created. Both make the body ill. And both require treatment, in one case it is an exorcism, in the other, isolation. Both of these treatments have severe psychological impacts. In both cases, the body is subjected to humiliation—the possessed may be chained and tortured, for the belief is that the torture inflicted on the human body is in fact on the body of the nefarious spirit. In the corona case, the sick may be isolated with rigorous protocols of treatment. Incidentally, a couple of states favouring ruthless containment of the disease went to the extent of disallowing the institutionalised sick the use mobile phones, but later this order was withdrawn (The Hindu, 22 May 2020; The Statesman, 24 May 2020). In both cases, the enemy is the body which is to be dealt with ruthlessly; and needless to say this frequently used term definitely brings to our mind images of a heartless and punitive approach. However, irrespective of the important difference between spirit possession and corona affliction, which is in terms of their contagion, for the first does not infect the others, the point is that for the outside world (the normal), the body is stigmatised, demands harsh treatment, so that it does not harm others. 7
Combat Stigma
Stigma is a product of an unequal society, where distinctions of gender, age, strata, colour and ethnicity, and of bodily distinctions (normal versus physically challenged) prevail. Regardless of the concerted efforts that the political states make to create equality, these distinctions are rarely transcended, though they may be temporarily pushed to the backseat. However, in times of crises they precipitate with great intensity, as has been happening during these corona days. We look for scapegoats (both communities and individuals) who caused the calamitous situation. The blame theory is very prevalent as epidemiological studies are also finding that a small percentage of ‘infected people’ are accounting for a large proportion of the novel coronavirus spread. Similarly, news of 23 February from South Korea documented the case of a woman who allegedly infected 37 attendees of the church where she had gone for service. 8 Called ‘super spreading events’ in epidemiology, while they may be true, the social consequences of these studies and the entry of their findings in the public domain are expectedly destined to lead to witch-hunting and a reinforcement of stigma. Some individuals are likely to be held responsible for the misery of others, so they become targets, to be treated the way deviants are dealt with. Stigma seems to be inseparable from the person and the community and a pessimistic view would be that stigma is bound to prevail forever. Utopian thinkers may argue in favour of an overhauling of society, to weed out inegalitarianism from each sphere of our existence, give principal attention to the process of socialisation and inculcate values of equality and humanism in the new generation. They may also say that each individual should initiate change in his thinking and behaviour, follow the principles of equality, thus becoming a reference point for others.
A catalogue of suggestions has been offered to mitigate stigma. 9 The situation is believed to be serious because a number of people diagnosed as corona positive have committed suicide (The Indian Express, 10 May 2020), and the instances of mental health crises (depression, substance abuse, violence, post-traumatic stress syndromes and loneliness) have increased manifold. 10
One of the suggestions given to fight stigma is to completely eschew the stigmatising or criminalising terminology’ especially in the media while referring to corona patients. Words matter. They are not value-free. Each word is filled with an image or a set of images. When the language is hostile (like, ‘corona cases were caught’, ‘corona cases were found’), it may sharpen the divide between the self and the other, with the other appearing more foe-like. ‘People-first language’, as it is called, where people are at the centre and are seen as human as any other, can empower all of us; and this can be a positive step towards our war against stigma.
This is linked to another aspect of naming the disease after the name of the place where its cases were found. In May 2015, the WHO observed that if a disease is named after a region, place or country there is a high probability that it will have a negative impact on the people of that area. It laid down guidelines with respect to the nomenclature of the disease which should be done in light of its generic characteristics and the symptoms it causes. But at the societal level, the practice is exactly the opposite. The President of America on 16 March 2020 called the new virus a ‘Chinese virus’, and when he was questioned why he did so (and ignoring the criticism that he sounded racist), his reply was: ‘It comes from China, that’s why’. 11 An MLA shouted a new chant with his followers in Hyderabad: ‘China virus, go back’. 12 And an excerpt from Shobha De’s new book has been titled, ‘How a Chinawali bimari ruined this love story’ (The Times of India, 30 May 2020). Hundreds of such examples can be culled from the media where the yawning gap between what was being said to alleviate stigma and what was being done to reinforce it can clearly be seen.
That it was not always just lip service paid to battle stigma can be gauged from the peace committees set up in 36 Gram Panchayats (Village Councils) in 190 villages located in Balangir, Nuapada and Bargarh districts in Odisha, the explicit aims of which were to educate people about the need to quarantine in case it has been recommended, and not to discriminate between those who are sick and those who are not. The office bearers of the peace committees travelled through the villages telling people that the sick, of course, would be cured over time and those quarantined would be out of isolation but if the stigma continued unabated, it would destroy their society and its integrity forever. Wounds that the stigma would cause would remain unhealed; the fission would be for eternity; so for the sake of the unity of the village, office bearers said they should refrain from indulging in any kind of discrimination (The Hindu, 25 May 2020). We so far do not know about the success of this campaign, but such endogenous, culturally-rooted efforts employing local values would definitely yield fruitful results. Such cases abundantly tell us that we should not consider people as passive. They are equally in the know of what is going around them and they improvise the strategies that would be contextually suitable.
Anthropology and Xenophilia
Finally, let me spell out a lesson from anthropology which perhaps is of relevance in the contemporary world. Anthropology studies the enormous diversity of people, trying to account for why cultural differences tend to continue despite the attempts that political powers have made at different points in time to create homogeneity. In their studies, anthropologists have documented the intense fear local communities have of outsiders; they suspect that the invaders will deprive them of their resources, ridicule them, and make them work as their serfs.
In other words, whether it is a small community or a large nation people are doubtful of outsiders/foreigners; thus an element of xenophobia is always imminent. And this is the chief enemy of the present-day world. In no way has globalisation diluted the xenophobic feeling. On the contrary, the spread of coronavirus has made this more militant. Stigma against Asians (particularly Chinese) can be traced to the 1900s when the Chinatown community in San Francisco was ostracised. The city’s mayor, James D. Phelan, termed the Chinese a ‘menace to public health’. They were also said to be ‘indifferent to sanitary regulation’ and were ‘breeding diseases’. Thus, for any disease catastrophe, the ferocity of stigma against them was so strong that they were always held responsible (Saxton, 1971/1995). The ‘other’ was the enemy!
If anthropologists want to contribute to ameliorating this world they will have to impress upon the people time and again to remember that differences are natural to human living. Even iron hands will not succeed in effacing them. The beauty of living lies in learning from others, learning to empathise with them. Scheper-Hughes says that for frustrating xenophobia we need what she calls ‘xenophilia’, an uncommon word mainly used for certain botanical species that seem to adjust to an alien floral environment. For her, xenophilia ‘is not so much the love of difference as freedom from the fear of difference’. 13
A cultivation of this feeling, both from below (the community) and above (the political state) will go a long way in transforming the world. The underlying principle is of empathy—feeling for others: I should not stigmatise the sick, for tomorrow, the role may be reversed. The individual is thus, in fact, the harbinger of change.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.