The COVID exception.

Abstract

© 2020 European Association of Social Anthropologists. how people shift between these modalities of empty waiting to focused, purposeful waiting. Further, we need to unravel the relations between doubt, uncertainty and hope vis‐à‐vis waiting. During these days, waiting for the aftermath intensifies. The imagined repercussions of the virus create both utopian and dystopic visions. Some of us anticipate a bright future where consumerist appetites and hyper‐individualism is tempered, and global solidarity and ecological consciousness prevails. For others, coronavirus is a dry run for an apocalyptic future of economic devastation and consequences of the new surveillance systems. Does our waiting oscillate between these variegated stances? What forms of affective fusion can this entanglement produce? We also need to be attentive to the wider structures that shape our understanding and practice of waiting, namely to the various engagements with the structural and institutional conditions that compel people to wait. In what ways are the ‘poetics of waiting’ intertwined with the ‘politics of waiting’ in different regions? Finally, what does this waiting teach us about our own methodology? In the words of Janeja and Bandak: ‘how can we use the ethnographic method and the various forms of waiting it entails in exploring the phenomenon of waiting’ (2018: 2)?