A call for a critical medical anthropology of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

This paper is a call for a renewed critical medical anthropology (CMA) of the COVID-19 pandemic, one that attends not only to the pandemic’s acute phase but also to its enduring afterlife. We argue that COVID-19 persists as a structuring condition that continues to impact individual experiences as well as domestic and global politics and culture. We introduce the concept of ‘narrative compression’ to describe how public and institutional discourses have foreclosed space for the ongoing suffering of individuals with long COVID and others marginalized by pandemic legacies. By tracing how closure is epistemically and politically produced, this paper reframes COVID-19 as an ambient and persistent crisis. We advocate for an anthropological approach that remains with the pandemic to diagnose its transformations and imagine more accountable health futures.