Apocalyptic futures: morality, health and wellbeing at the end of the world

Abstract

In the context of Covid-19, anthropologists of medicine and religion alike may be tempted to join with the media in declaring that humanity is facing the end of the world as we know it. Indeed, as the global pandemic rages on, and the dramatic restrictions of national lockdowns ease and then retighten with an anomic unevenness akin to cardiac arrhythmia, it would be easy to imagine that these 'strange times we now live in' are somehow utterly exceptional -an eschatological precipice like no other. Yet, as the papers in this Special Issue on ' Apocalyptic futures: Morality, health and wellbeing at the end of the world' amply demonstrate, while the health and social crisis of the coronavirus pandemic is replete with compelling end-times signs, it would be wrong to assume that this new disease -even in its most acutely challenging of moments -holds a monopoly over human imaginations and experiences of world endings. Put simply, popular fascinations with the end of the world did not begin with Covid-19, nor, in our view, will they end with it.Taken literally, rather than as a bad pun, this observation about the longue durée of apocalypticism provokes new and important questions which the authors contained within this Special Issue seek to answer. How do human imaginations of the biomedical and spiritual future alter life in the present? What happens, in this forward-looking temporality, to human reflections on the past -to 'lessons learned' about old diseases now eradicated, or past sins now atoned for? In the context of global disease, international conflict, national protests, and localized fears and anxieties, what does wellbeing look like, and how do humans continue to promote it -medically and morally -even as they face their own mortality, and that of those they love? In seeking to safeguard the 'health' of a nation, how might political and clinical interventions butt up against (or marry with) millenarian religious activism heralding an imminent apocalypse? If, according to some medical and religious commentators, the apocalypse is temporally soon, geographically here, and corporally near, then how might such convictions change the way humans experience their own bodies, as well as the world around them? Apocalyptic timesSuch questions centrally address the notion of time, but, we argue, also highlight the relationship between immanence and transcendence, and often with surprising results. Thus,

Interventions in critical health geopolitics: Borders, rights, and conspiracies in the COVID-19 pandemic

“…As we explain elsewhere (Sturm & Albrecht, 2021), apocalyptic forms of coronavirus conspiracy theorizing maintain that the overall purpose of the pandemic is to create public acceptance of authoritarian global governance, or the New World Order (NWO), which presents itself as the only possible solution of the global COVID-19 crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic thus becomes embedded within established apocalyptic right-wing geopolitical imaginations of an imminent and immanent restructuring of the world's order (Lynch, Sturm & Webster 2021).…”