A Revelatory Pandemic
Crisis, Agency, and COVID in Latin America
Will be published approx. on 1. December 2025
Book
Hardback
286 pages
978-1-83695-278-7 (ISBN)
Description
Political leaders and the news media described the public-health catastrophe of COVID-19 as a crisis, while scholars and public intellectuals portrayed the pandemic as a debacle that would lay bare the inequities and contradictions of an increasingly neoliberal global political economy and usher in an era of progressive, transformative change. Bringing the anthropologies of disaster, epidemics, and crisis into conversation, A Revelatory Pandemic subjects these hopeful expectations of post-pandemic change to social-scientific scrutiny across Latin America and challenges popular and scholarly assumptions about the causes and outcomes of crisis.
Reviews / Votes
"This book deals with an interesting subject and chain of events triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Its main value is the editors' attempt to conceptualize crises in Latin America, while connecting this notion with other concepts such as risk and disasters." * Gonzalo Lizarralde, Universite de Montreal"This is an excellent book that critically examines how the pandemic was produced, contested, and experienced by differently situated groups and subjects throughout Latin America." * A.J. Faas, San Jose State University
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
Library binding
Illustrations
Bibliography; Index; 16 Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
571 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-83695-278-7 (9781836952787)
DOI
10.3167/9781836952787
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Roberto E. Barrios is Professor of Anthropology and Doris Zemurray Stone Chair of Latin American Studies at the University of New Orleans. He has conducted research on disaster recovery and mitigation in Central America, Mexico, and the United States and is author of Governing Affect: Neoliberalism and Disaster Reconstruction (2017, University of Nebraska Press) and co-editor of, Disaster Upon Disaster, with Susanna Hoffman (2022, Berghahn).
Content
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Kim Fortun
Introduction: Crisis without Guarantee and the Social Science of Pandemics and Disasters
Roberto E. Barrios and Virginia Garcia-Acosta
Part I: A Pandemic Where Crisis is the Norm
Chapter 1. Uncertain Futures, Wavering Hopes: Crisis, Pandemic, and Expectations around the COVID-19 Vaccination Process in Argentina
Sergio E. Visacovsky and Gabriel Noel
Chapter 2. Fear as Luxury: The Intersection of COVID-19 Policies and Violence in El Salvador
Norbert Ross
Chapter 3. The Pandemic in a Disastrous Context: COVID-19 Conjuncture and Post-Earthquake Conditions in Morelos, Mexico
Mari?a N. Rodri?guez Alarco?n
Part II: Pandemic Governance in the Post-Colony
Chapter 4. Responsive Scholarship and COVID-19 in Southern Ecuador: Exhaustion, Ethnographic Collaborations,and Vulnerability
Maka Sua?rez and Fu Yu Chang
Chapter 5. Resisting Necropolitics: Mutual Aid and Grassroots Responses to the COVID-10 Syndemic in Brazil
Victor Marchezini , Marcos Rodrigo Maciel Ferreira and Fernando Severo
Chapter 6. The Pandemic Crisis Reveals Indicators of DRM in the Strategy against the Disaster in Mexico
Raymundo Padilla Lozoya
Chapter 7. Dis/Connections in the Argentinean Interior: (Im)Mobility and Morality in Times of Pandemic
Susann Baez Ullberg and Diego Zenobi
Part III: A Transnational Pandemic
Chapter 8. "We Don't Have That Freedom": Labor, Stress, and the Racial Capitalism of Agriculture at the Advent of COVID
Claire Branigan, Jessica F. Brinkworth, Korinta Maldonado, Ellen Moodie, and Gilberto Rosas
Chapter 9. The SARS COVID-19 Pandemic: A Critical Moment of Vulnerability in Guatemalan Migrations
Alfredo Danilo Rivera
Chapter 10. Collective Reasoning When Plunder is the Established Ethos: The COVID-19 Pandemic in Honduras and the Epistemological Basis of Social Disaster
Gustavo Pen?a-Flores
Conclusion: A Pandemic's Revelations
Roberto E. Barrios and Virginia Garcia-Acosta
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Kim Fortun
Introduction: Crisis without Guarantee and the Social Science of Pandemics and Disasters
Roberto E. Barrios and Virginia Garcia-Acosta
Part I: A Pandemic Where Crisis is the Norm
Chapter 1. Uncertain Futures, Wavering Hopes: Crisis, Pandemic, and Expectations around the COVID-19 Vaccination Process in Argentina
Sergio E. Visacovsky and Gabriel Noel
Chapter 2. Fear as Luxury: The Intersection of COVID-19 Policies and Violence in El Salvador
Norbert Ross
Chapter 3. The Pandemic in a Disastrous Context: COVID-19 Conjuncture and Post-Earthquake Conditions in Morelos, Mexico
Mari?a N. Rodri?guez Alarco?n
Part II: Pandemic Governance in the Post-Colony
Chapter 4. Responsive Scholarship and COVID-19 in Southern Ecuador: Exhaustion, Ethnographic Collaborations,and Vulnerability
Maka Sua?rez and Fu Yu Chang
Chapter 5. Resisting Necropolitics: Mutual Aid and Grassroots Responses to the COVID-10 Syndemic in Brazil
Victor Marchezini , Marcos Rodrigo Maciel Ferreira and Fernando Severo
Chapter 6. The Pandemic Crisis Reveals Indicators of DRM in the Strategy against the Disaster in Mexico
Raymundo Padilla Lozoya
Chapter 7. Dis/Connections in the Argentinean Interior: (Im)Mobility and Morality in Times of Pandemic
Susann Baez Ullberg and Diego Zenobi
Part III: A Transnational Pandemic
Chapter 8. "We Don't Have That Freedom": Labor, Stress, and the Racial Capitalism of Agriculture at the Advent of COVID
Claire Branigan, Jessica F. Brinkworth, Korinta Maldonado, Ellen Moodie, and Gilberto Rosas
Chapter 9. The SARS COVID-19 Pandemic: A Critical Moment of Vulnerability in Guatemalan Migrations
Alfredo Danilo Rivera
Chapter 10. Collective Reasoning When Plunder is the Established Ethos: The COVID-19 Pandemic in Honduras and the Epistemological Basis of Social Disaster
Gustavo Pen?a-Flores
Conclusion: A Pandemic's Revelations
Roberto E. Barrios and Virginia Garcia-Acosta