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The society of astonishment. Meshwoks of lives quarantined

Abstract

The COVID-19 virus pandemic has the paradoxical effect of putting us in a completely new scenario in the modern world and at the same time mobilizing concepts that we have known for a long time. The purpose of this article is to suggest that the coronavirus pandemic made explicit the entanglement of the world, but in doing so it transformed us into what I call the “society of astonishment” inhabited by a new subjectivity, characterized by the “new wounded” as conceived by Catherine Malabou. Through establishing associations between Mauss, Bateson and Ingold, an attempt is made to understand the relationships between man and the world as an interlocking set of lines of life, growth and movement, which allows us to understand the relationships between the biological, psychological and social dimensions. It is proposed to understand the pandemic and quarantine as a traumatic event through which a new collective and individual identity could be built.

Keywords:
anthropology; subjectivity; pandemic; astonishment

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