ABSTRACT
With the development and rollout (though globally patchy) of COVID vaccines, attention turns inevitably to what the post-pandemic world will look like. Genevieve Bell wonders, in anthropological parlance, whether the pandemic liminality – of lockdown and the like – will end in a return to normality or to a world that has been thoroughly transformed. In stating that ‘anthropology's emphasis on the experiences and views of ordinary people helps draw attention to the need to acknowledge the expertise of local populations and bring this into the process of government’, the editors of this important volume seek implicitly to take forward an anthropological post-pandemic praxis. The pandemic brought inequalities into sharp relief. Anthropologists have, as one might expect, demonstrated how the pandemic has impacted different categories of people unequally – by age, sexuality, gender, ethnicity and particularly, class and caste.
