Anthropology in the Time of Corona Virus
Sat, Nov 21
|Zoom event
Plenary Lecture by Dr. Oona Paredes for the Mindanao Regional Conference of the 42nd UGAT Annual Conference
Time & Location
Nov 21, 2020, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM GMT+8
Zoom event
About the Event
ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE TIME OF CORONAVIRUS
In this plenary talk, I provide my personal reflections on Philippine anthropology, as undertaken by Filipino and foreign scholars alike. I relate my journey as a Mindanawon (from Medina, Misamis Oriental) who was trained as an anthropologist abroad and continues to be employed abroad, but works as a field researcher with a Lumad group in Mindanao. I also explain my ongoing intellectual and academic relationship with the critically important but woefully underappreciated body of work often labelled generically as “local scholarship.” Finally, I discuss the value of uncovering and understanding the ‘emic’ in a pandemic, from the perspective of some past pandemics on Mindanao that I have learned about in my research. I argue that it is ever more essential to do ethnography and rely on anthropological methods and perspectives, and to keep our faith in this process at a time when everything feels uncertain both politically and existentially.