Will Cultural Differences Continue to Exist?

Martina: Oh yes, you’ve got your traditional food. We have our traditional food, you have your heritage, we’ve got our heritage. So in a comparison here, you can really reduces difference.

Thomas: Exactly! I sometimes cannot resist the temptation to quote the late anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who said, tongue in cheek, that cultural difference will still exist. The French will never eat salted butter. But the good old days of widow burning and cannibalism are gone forever. One of the reasons why there has been such a growth in the literature on diversity since around 1990 and the pressure on diversity is much greater than it has been before owing to global overheating, is simply the massive reduction in deep cultural difference. I mean, there have been concerns about cultural diversity for a long time, and crudely speaking, there are still two main schools – the modernists and the relativists, you might say.

Martina: Oh, wonderful, please open a little window of a lectio about that…

Thomas: With pleasure! The modernist view, which you find in the United Nations and most development organizations, is that people should be respected for who they are, whether they are Africans, transcontinental migrants, people from all parts of the world, and yet, they should be allowed to take part in the rewards of modernity. We should give them the opportunity to go to school, to get an education, to get themselves a haircut, a pair of shoes, a movement towards the city and find themselves a good job. So that’s a very sort of assimilationist kind of policy, which was very common and still is towards many minorities. It has resonances of la mission civilisatrice and the white man and the white man’s burden of colonial times.

The opposite view, typically represented by anthropologists and indigenous activists, is also not problematic, and I have often argued against it in the past. This view, shaped by cultural relativism, is that we should allow people with a different culture to be different, just as they allow us to be whoever we are. Recognize and respect the fact that they are different, sometimes in fundamental ways. But you run into dilemmas in both cases because if you encourage people very strongly to become like yourself, that’s a reduction of diversity and disrespect of their unique contribution to humanity. The result is a kind of homogeneity which obliterates and tramples on their cultural memories and cherished traditions. What you’re basically telling them is that everything that they know and all the knowledge and the skills that have been passed down from your grandfather and grandmother and so on are worthless. ‘Leave it all behind and join the modern world!’ The promise held out is the best thing we have to offer, namely the right to become more or less like ourselves. Suppose you are a Greenlandic Inuit whose traditional way of life is fading away. Danish authorities help you to move into an apartment building with a supermarket on the ground floor, and they give you a little brochure, which explains how you can use a banana, what a banana is for, because you’ve never seen a banana before. You then go to school and you learn Danish history and English language. These deracinated Indigenous groups live today in some of the societies with the highest suicide rates, the highest rates of domestic violence, alcoholism and drug abuse in the world. It is true that assimilated Indigenous people generally have better health and longer life expectancy than their ancestors. They have money and wagework. They don’t have to be cold in winter. They live in reasonably comfortable houses. But they’ve lost their self-respect because they’ve been told that everything that their people have stood for is worthless. This is one of the main problems with this policy of homogenization. But the other policy of relativism or celebration of diversity also has its problems because of its problematic relationship to scientific truths and human rights. Shouldn’t human rights be universal and overrule cultural relativism and any form of celebration of diversity? Should we tolerate cultures where children are routinely abused, where men regularly beat their wives, where only grown men have political influence and so on? Should we regard scientific knowledge as just one knowledge regime on a par with orally transmitted knowledge? The fact of their being different does not make them more virtuous than you and me. This is a difficult, but important question, and it is necessary to be aware that when the United Nations or the development industry speaks about diversity, they tend to speak of the kind of diversity that you mentioned at the beginning. It is a kind of diversity which is easy to celebrate and nurture – it is compatible with modernity. It contains handicracts, dance, exciting food and so on – but they never talk about asymmetrical or patriarchal gender relations as a form of diversity. Right? Or even knowledge, and shouldn’t they? There is an inconsistency here. On the other hand: Shouldn’t people, regardless of where they were born, be allowed to take part in the wealth of scientific knowledge that has been developed painstakingly, often in Europe? So there are dilemmas with both positions. An ethical problem is, not least, with what right we are telling other people what to do and how to do it. In what position are we to do so, given our own bloody and shameful history and the way we are currently destroying the planet? Many are tired of white people telling them what to do and how to think. Be this as it may, what is clear is that there has been a reduction in diversity and that this is accelerating. We can see it, for example, in language.

Martina: Ok. Just a question in the middle, sorry, Thomas… from your viewpoint, using intersectionality as a methodology could be a way to read the diversity in a sense in which you can respect the diversity as a researcher.

Thomas: Yes. It would be a good place to begin. Looking at intersectionality is one way of beginning to describe complexity rather than celebrations of superficial diversity, since you look at different criteria. You don’t just look at one dimension, but combine several and their relationships. However, there are other conceptual tools that can also be used for speaking about diversity. Anthropologists are fond of speaking about cosmologies, or world-views; but you can also look at kinship. Perhaps diversity is a bit too big to be handled easily with just two hands? It’s a blanket term, which covers a lot of ground. So what kind of difference are we actually talking about? That would be one place to begin. We could be specific and begin with an example, which is never a bad thing in social theory. If you take traditional healers in rural South Africa who mistrust biomedicine, have their own ways of treating AIDS, for example. With what right can we tell them that they’re wrong and on what basis? It’s not easy if you if you want to take other people seriously and you want to develop sort of knowledge through a kind of dialogue and mutual respect. Of course, if their treatments do not work and ours do, that is a fairly convincing argument, but let us leave that to one side for now. So what we can do, and this is consistent with the cosmopolitan view, is this. We cannot assume that people will become just like us, that they will miraculously agree with us if we just explain our view clearly and patiently, you can’t really expect that. The classic Habermasian ideal of the dialogue has clear limitations because it is restricted to communication between people who live in the same cultural world, and world-views are not shaped by arguments, but experiences. In the last couple of years, we have see this now with the Covid pandemic, that lots of people are simply immune to a certain kind of knowledge and not interested. Their information, or knowledge, comes from other sources than mainstream science. Yet we can get our message across, and it is possible to understand each other. Each of us, in a dialogue situation, represents a certain point of view, with ethical or moral implications, but we do not have the right to force our views on other people. And I think this is where one of the big ethical challenges lies. We can understand each other, but mutual understanding does not necessarily lead to ultimate consensus.

But the point that I wanted to make is that when we talk about cultural diversity is that there really is a reduction of difference and therefore of flexibility. Now, we have to ask, is this good or is it bad? Well, it depends on who you ask. Many linguists are worried about language death because, there may be 6000 languages, m most of them very small, spoken by just a few hundred or maybe a few thousand people. Many of these languages are endangered and predicted to go extinct very soon. In Papua New Guinea, for example, many now shift from some small village language to Tok Pisin, a creolized version of English which is the national language. They also learn standard English, which is an incredibly convenient language to know if you want a job or just to communicate with the world. People in Melanesia well know that the tiny language they grew up with is not going to get them anywhere. So this is why the question of language death is quite different from the question of species extinction. Why do languages die? The short answer is because people stop speaking them, not because they are exterminated. And they may have good reasons for doing so. So who are we to condemn people to life in kind of reserve in order to keep and conserve cultural diversity? They should be entitled to choose for themselves. That may be one of the most important ethical insight here, the emphasis on autonomy for persons and communities. However, let’s not paint too rosy a picture of the contemporary world. If we move beyond the realm of language, we have to consider the growth and spread of plantations, the explosive growth of mining only in the present century, of urbanization, infrastructure projects, large-scale transformations of nature which to local communities often means simply what the geographer David Harvey speaks of as accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2004). People are evicted because of the new highway, the mine or the plantation. You take away whatever they have – and usually, they have no legal papers proving property rights anyway – and explain that they have to go elsewhere because we’re building a highway or a shopping centre. This is the kind of situation which is very typical of overheated globalization leading to people being forced into a kind of existence that they never. People are being messed around with and they’re not giving away, given the voice and nobody asks them for their opinion, so they feel overrun. So that is one reason why we should be concerned with diversity that had its to do with many things. And one of them is people’s right to have a voice and to be able to take choices for themselves.

Overheating Effects and the Reduction of Diversity

Martina: Do you think the overheating approach could help to share this, this knowledge about the reduction of diversity?

Thomas: Absolutely, since we are talking about an overheating effect more than anything else. So let’s speak about that, but let’s also speak a bit about biodiversity, since there are so few who look at both biodiversity loss and cultural diversity loss at the same time. Yet, there are some striking similarities. When I began to look at these two parallel processes, I spoke with biologists about biodiversity. Many are deeply worried, explaining the effects of habitat loss, industrial agriculture, invasive species and so on. Foreign species often result in a less diverse world since they may outcompete endemic species. But the by far most serious cause of biodiversity loss is habitat transformation, often through the deliberate introduction of foreign species such as maize and cattle. The anxiety you find among biologists resembles the way in which some anthropologists speak about the loss of cultural diversity. So when you talk about habitat loss, for example, which is one typical cause of the loss of biodiversity, it resembles accumulation by dispossession. It affects people, and so does habitat loss. When you when you build a highway or anything involving a lot of cement, which has incidentally increased many times since 1990, many people lose their livelihood, just as the birds and animals and plants also lose their habitat. So this is very similar. But you could also say that about introduced species which were very popular for a long time. As we speak, I’m in the South African city of Stellenbosch. It was named after Simon Van der Stael, who founded it in 1679. Van der Stael ensured that it became a wine growing area and a prosperous at that, but he also planted oak trees, and the town is still nicknamed Eikestad, Oak Town. Both grapes and oaks are foreign species, and they dominate the landscape here. Grapes brought money and oaks were shady, stately and homely for the European settlers who were a long way from home. Later, trout were introduced in the Eerste River which flows through Stellenbosch, enabling European anglers to feel even more at home. Many other European species were introduced consecutively. In the nineteenth century, the American cereal maize, or corn, became a staple crop feeding millions in Southern and Eastern Africa, just as the polenta became a north Italian speciality a little earlier. The most common use of maize in Africa is by making porridge – ugali in East Africa, mealie-meal in Southern Africa. It resembles polenta, in fact. And it saves millions from starvation, while simultaneously reducing biodiversity. So there is no easy way out. And very few would get rid of all foreign species in South Africa for the sake of biodiversity. Few would go so far as to say that, no, we don’t want to have grapevines here because they don’t belong, or we don’t want oaks since they aren’t endemic. There can be no quest for a primordial purity. Quests for purity are always dangerous, and they may also infect your way of thinking about other people. If you don’t want foreign species, why should you want foreign people? By the same token, neither of them ‘belongs’. It’s the same, the same way of framing this loss. We should be wary of this temptation.

At the same time, introduced species have led to a reduction of biodiversity in many places because they destabilize local ecosystems and may threaten local species. Australia may be the most obvious case. The successive introductions of rabbits and foxes in the nineteenth century and more recently cane toads, which I’ve written about in my work from Queensland, have changed the ecology and driven local species to extinction in an ecosystem which was vulnerable to begin with owing to the long isolation of Australia. So we shouldn’t ignore these losses. In this context, it could can be useful to speak about the Plantationocene as an alternative to the Anthropocene. It helps you focus on a certain logic of standardization. The world is in some ways becoming like a plantation. Suppose you replace a rainforest with a plantation. The number of trees may be identical, but they are all the same, while the rainforest got its identity through its internal complexity. The same goes for the people working in the plantation! They are forced into a kind of uniformity comparable to working in a McDonald’s. In the plantation, there is so much which is lost, such as a great many species of trees, the intricate networks connecting insects, birds, subterranean fungal networks between the trees and so on. All this is being simplified, and species go extinct before they have even been discovered by scientists. So there’s a huge process of simplification taking place for the sake of efficiency and productivity. And this is quite similar to the kind of process we also see in in culture, where people are expected to be part of the monetary economy and act as fully-paid-up citizens. You pay your taxes, you stop at red traffic lights, send your children to school, and there is very little resistance against this in the national discourse. It is taken for granted that certain versions of modernity are inherently good. But at this particular moment in time – and now I’m finally going to answer your question – the overheating years since neoliberalism ensured that market mechanisms replaced collective efforts, we can easily see that there are some serious, deep contradictions in modernity to do with identity. People don’t have a sense of belonging. There’s a lot of alienation. Many don’t feel that they have a stake in the world in which they live or a real chance to influence the conditions of their lives. Some call for strong leaders – think of India, Brazil or the USA – while others just resign. The only article of faith left in the neoliberal gospel is the belief in consumption, growth and progress. But as I’ve said before, in order to fulfil these promises, we have to destroy the environment. So if we want to leave this impasse, it is necessary to think differently. And I do think that the overheating approach helps us understand alienation and powerlessness, as well as, perhaps, giving us some clues as to where we can go and what we can do. I don’t think small is always beautiful. Sometimes you need big things. You need a national health service to deal with a pandemic, for example. You need hospitals, you need universities, and villages do not have the resources to build hospitals or universities. You need a large scale society to do that. But we shouldn’t scale up too much, since that creates a gap between the life-world and the system-world, to speak in the jargon of twentieth century social theory. And there is no inherent reason that the Kenyan school curriculum should be more or less identical to the Nepali one; so instead of speaking of education as a mantra, or an empty signifier, we could think seriously about the forms of knowledge and skills needed to navigate in particular societies.

If we could scale down whatever could be scaled down, that would give local communities more autonomy, more self-determination, and it would be a good thing for diversity and personal identity. The literature about biocultural diversity very often deals with Indigenous groups, which is fine, but with certain limitations. But by all means, Indigenous people are among the most vulnerable groups regarding cultural autonomy. Just think about the Amazon, where the Indigenous groups were forced into a nation-state they never asked for, and where the president – Bolsanaro – essentially wants to cut down the entire rainforest to make money from logging, soya and pastoralism, and to open it up for the mining industry. There are hundreds of small, stateless groups living in the Amazon and who are increasingly threatened by this onslaught of modernity just for the sake of profit. However, the argument I’m making is not mainly about Indigenous groups, it’s about everybody, about finding ways of making peace with your surroundings in your own way. And it could be relevant to mention a conversation I had a couple of years ago with the well-known British cultural theorist Paul Gilroy, about the kind of cultural creativity that slavery miraculously gave birth to. Both Paul and I are all for the urban life, mixing, impurity, creolization, hybridity, you name it. He is of mixed origins himself. But then at one point I asked him: So Paul, what do you think is the most important thing you can do now? His slightly surprising answer was that we should do our best to relate seriously to our ecological surroundings, with the neighborhood, with that little clump of trees which is growing next door which you have never noticed before, so that you can scale down your engagement with the surroundings and realize that we are in the world. One way of cooling down is scaling down. This would clearly be a good thing both for bio- and cultural diversity. It’s not easy and it’s not simple, and yet ... During this century, we’re going to have to accept the fact that there will be less material assets in the affluent part of the world. There will be enormous pressure on us to consume less and live in less destructive ways. Africa is in an opposite situation. Most Africans have contributed little to ecological catastrophe, climate change and diversity loss, but they are faced with the bill every day through climate change effects. The city of New York alone produces more greenhouse gases than the entire African continent. There’s no problem with overheating in Nigeria and Mali, in fact there should have been more metaphorical heat in their societies. They need things to happen in order to make a living. But the global middle and upper classes have to accept the fact that we’re going to consume less and it’s going to be a good thing, since we then can engage in more satisfactory ways with other people and our immediate surroundings. The danger is that this will lead to xenophobia and bigoted nationalism, but it’s not a necessary outcome. Um, so yeah: One of the major causes of the loss of diversity is to do with scale, the kind of standardization resulting from scaling up for the sake of profits and efficiency. There is this enticing book, I don’t know if you’ve come across it, Martina, by the American sociologist George Ritzer. It’s called The McDonaldization of Society (Ritzer, 1993). Ritzer speaks about standardization from a Weberian point of view, describing how we increasingly have created a modularized world where it is as though you have a box of Lego blocks which you can assemble in different ways, but they will still be Lego blocks. His view that there is less and less diversity and more and more homogeneity, simplification and standardization in the world of consumption. And, you know, when I have his book and his argument at the back of my mind and think about biodiversity, it is clear that they’re talking about the same thing. The plantation is like the shopping mall. If you can make coconut trees grow in Trinidad, why shouldn’t you be able to grow them in Mauritius? If you can do it big, why do it small when big yields greater profits?

A Solution: Scaling Down in Different Dimensions of Our Lives

Martina: Yes. It’s quite clear, so in order to contrast that, to reduce the loss of diversity, it’s important to scale down in different dimension of our life.

Thomas: Yes, we should really think seriously about decentralizing. But as always, we need to think dialectically and about striking a balance between opposites, lest we are left with the sound from one hand clapping. We will continue to need some large-scale big things. We need states, and we need multilateral cooperation of a kind resembling the UN system, at least as an ideal type. It is therefore a matter of some concern that in the overheating years since 1990, multilateralism and international cooperation have been weakened substantially. There is more competition now, less collaboration. The IMF, the World Bank, the UN and the NGO world; we may have mixed feelings about them, but still they were important to keep the global dialogue going and to help people raise their gaze above parochial concerns. And so we’re going to need these institutions, plus – naturally – complex societies need coordination of their public activities. But a lot of other things can and should be scaled down. So I do think that the focus and emphasis should now be on the local and on what I call sideways scaling. That is the kind of coordinated, ultimately global form of organization which is not top-down but consists in connections between local groups and places. This form of coordination has been facilitated greatly through electronic communication, not least the smartphone – which, paradoxically, is itself a flattening device in some ways.

Martina: Yeah. I’m curious. You have a strong relation between you as a person and you as a scholar in your life every day. You are how you are trying to scale down. How do you contribute to on what you are studying?

Thomas: Personally, I enjoy the small things. It’s not difficult for me. I mean, I enjoy being with my family and going for walks. Every day at work, I take breaks, go for short walks and smell the flowers. There’s a small nature reserve just next door, which is a bit larger than the Institute’s garden. It’s not huge, but it also has footpaths, majestic trees and a teeming insect life.

Diversity always manifests itself locally. It is often unscalable, unlike the plantation or the smartphone app. And well, since we started this conversation by talking about Marvel films and how they seem to be superdiverse. But when you look closely, you realize that they may be socially diverse, but with a few exceptions not particularly culturally diverse, since they are all built into the same framework. And let’s just look at food. I just came across an interesting article by an Indian woman who claimed that many might still talk about the recipes from your grandmother that had been handed down and which had some unique characteristics, with secret ingredients and so on. But this is nowadays an increasingly obsolete view, she says, adding that Indian women around the world, if they want to cook something Indian that they remember from their childhood and they don’t know how to do it, they go on YouTube. So where is the uniqueness in this recipe? In other words, you make the same dish as thousands of other Indian women around the world. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps everybody does it in their unique way anyway. But the change she identifies is fascinating. She speaks of standardization and homogenization with globalized digital media as a medium. By all means, there are positive things about this development. It’s not just about loss. Often, those women get access to recipes they were only dimly aware of if at all, so YouTube expands their culinary world. And besides, sometimes the reduction of diversity can be a good thing. Getting hooked onto the grammar of modernity may give you opportunities to travel, to learn from others, to expand your world. You can have contacts across boundaries, which you didn’t before. And regarding food crops, it is obviously a blessing for Aotearoa New Zealand that they imported sheep in the nineteenth century, and they have so many that the sheep currently outnumber people by a factor of six. The sheep do not seem to have created huge ecological imbalances, at least not to my knowledge.

Martina: Yes. So you are balancing a negative and positive side or the reduction?

Thomas: Yes, although the big picture is grim, there is nuance, and there are alternatives which exist, thrive and are perfectly viable. There is a fun, but also well-informed, book about species invasion, called Where do Camels Belong? by Ken Thompson (2014). Essentially, what he is saying is that foreign species are often harmless and sometimes beneficial to biodiversity. It’s quite controversial, but he has lots of good examples of positive species interactions, and he also worries that when we speak too much about invasive species, it could lead to an unhealthy, static view of ecology and even racism.

Martina: In other words, it’s funny that aren’t as good as most of these.

Thomas: Some of these species fit in really easily, and they can even enrich the local biosphere. They don’t threaten anybody. The majestic oaks lining the streets of Stellenbosch are doing fine, and I don’t think they have done much damage to other species. They just made it a more pleasant place to live for humans. So when thinking about Thompson’s approach, I am reminded of the way some South Africans speak about immigrants from Zimbabwe. South Africa is a country with its share of xenophobia, not just between the traditional apartheid categories of whites, blacks, Indians and coloureds, but also towards people from other African countries. When you rely on Uber for your local travel, you soon come to realize that nearly all the Uber drivers you meet are from Zimbabwe. The reason is that they cannot get a formal job, and when you work with Uber, you’re self-employed. So as long as you don’t speed or drive in a drunken state or do other foolish things, you can work with them. Zimbabweans have been skilled at finding and using these niches. Yet, South African populist politicians argue that Zimbabweans who are coming here work for lower salaries than South Africans, taking our jobs from us and so on, just as your Salvinis and Orbans might say in Europe. Economists object that this is this simply isn’t true. This kind of migration doesn’t threaten anybody. It doesn’t take anybody’s jobs. In fact, it creates new jobs. You know, you’re a Zimbabwean and you settle in the township of Kayamandi outside of Stellenbosch and you start a restaurant, you hire people, the food suppliers get more business, and there are other ripple effects. These contributions to the economy are often poorly understood by people who believe in economic arguments against migration. If you allow immigrants to work, they’re going to. They are not parasites or invasive species, and indeed, many foreign species also work hard to fit into the local ecology.

Martina: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it’s a good way to close our conversation on diversity. It’s an ironic side of the reduction of diversity. Yeah. What do you think?

Thomas: Yes. I was just going to say that I think the bottom line for me regarding cultural diversity is that we should give as much autonomy as possible to local communities in order to allow them to choose for themselves who they want to be and leave them with the option of withdrawing from modernity. Do we want to become more or less like everybody else, get a haircut and move into the city and get a salaried job? Or do we want to find a balance between keeping our traditions going and being members or part of the modern world? Some Indigenous groups are in fact doing pretty well. The Saami in northern Scandinavia are a good example. Actually, many of them have found a viable balance between sticking to their traditions and being part of the modern world. So there’s no necessarily contradiction here. And the same goes for biodiversity, there is a need to be pragmatic. But what we need to object to and to react to is the random and insensitive destruction we see around us – the razing of rainforests, the destruction of waterways, short-sighted overfishing, plastic pollution – there is a study which shows how many of the world’s mammals are wild. Four percent of the mammalian biomass in the world are wild. Four per cent! 36 percent are humans. That’s you and me. 36 per cent humans and 60 per cent domestic animals, mainly pigs and cattle. When you see these figures, you come to realize that there is something at stake, there is something important happening. And it’s not about puritanism, it’s not about a romantic view of nature. It’s merely part of the search for ways out of the corner into which we have painted ourselves.

Interlude: Conversation with a Social Worker About the First Pandemic Wave

Abstract. Thomas was due to arrive in Italy in December 2021, but infection rates were rising again at the time, making it unwise to arrive in a country with restrictions still in place and likely to increase. We had planned an ‘ethnography day’ during what was called the first outbreak of the pandemic in Italy, in Vo’ Euganeo, a small town in the hills not far from Padua. I thought of a way to include a voice about the first wave in our book. I found a social worker who had been involved at the time, and Thomas interviewed her one morning. What emerges from the unprecedented situation described by the social worker is a complete reversal of people’s habits, of how we relate, and how we think about each other. We thought of including this interview largely because - later on - we both had the feeling that everyone would begin to move on from the shock caused by the pandemic, and the aim of this interlude is so that it is not forgotten. Following the spirit of Zerubavel’s sociology, we included this chapter in our conversations to add a small brick to the social legacy of the past.

Thomas: Thanks for being here. It isn’t easy to remember the very beginning … when did all this begin?

Social worker (SW): ... the first day of that March? I remember only this visit to my doctor’s because I went there with a boy from Bangladesh for a check-up. You know, this type of thing is normal. They (people from Bangladesh) don’t believe in viruses. So, as you can imagine, I was stuck in that hospital with people who didn’t care about the emergency.

Thomas: You’re saying the Bangladeshis didn’t really believe in the pandemic.

SW: Yes, but they weren’t the only ones. Africa does not believe in a pandemic. From my experience, Nigerians don’t believe in this pandemic. They only get vaccinated because they want to go away (out?).

Thomas: I see, you were working during the early days of March 2020. How has the situation changed in the last year and a half? I mean, what’s new, and in what way is it different?

SW: There have been various definitions of the situation, and this I think this is very bad - the type of information, especially about vaccines. It’s just impossible to stay in Italy now (December 2021, research note) because there is a strong polarization. Some people are all for vaccines and don’t look at anything else. They don’t look at any collateral aspects, for example. On the other hand, there are people who look at all the collateral issues. There’s a trap door (?) in everyone’s social life because, stuck in this polarization, it is impossible to stay together.

Thomas: Yeah, right. But this seems to be something to do with the vaccine. I mean, about a year ago everybody was waiting for the vaccine. They were saying ‘as soon as we get the vaccine the problem will go away’. Then the vaccine arrived and things turned out to be a little bit more complicated. It seems to me there is something about this vaccine that makes it different from other vaccines. For example, I recently heard about some people from Georgia, who were living in France, and who didn’t want to have the Covid jab. They were arguing with their French friends, who said, “Look, it’s irresponsible. You have to do it” … the usual argument, right? Then it turns out that the people who didn’t want the Covid jab had been vaccinated against other ailments, such as typhoid, measles and so on, and this hadn’t been a problem for them. So there seems to be something about this Covid vaccine that scares people.

SW: I remember the words of my grandmother: she said that we don’t want something in a straight way because, when the thing arrives, it’s different from what we really wanted. The situation is very similar with this vaccine. We wanted it. But when we got the vaccine, things changed, and we had many ideas in our heads. And science can’t solve all of this.

Thomas: Do you think this has something to do with the fact that the state is in effect trying to force people to get vaccinated, in other words that it isn’t really voluntary? If you don’t get the jab, it creates a lot of problems for you. I just heard a story from a friend who is a professor of law. He was in Slovakia to launch a book, and it turned out that his translator wasn’t allowed to enter the auditorium with him during the book presentation because he was unvaccinated. The law professor concluded that this was an authoritarian and probably unconstitutional practice. It creates a kind of vaccination state, which takes away certain democratic rights. This would probably not be so much of a problem for the Bangladeshis you talked about, but might be so for many Italians. You currently have demonstrations in Rome against the Green Pass, and so on.

SW: Yes, now guess my friends want to go to a restaurant, for example, but a lot of my friends are not vaccinated, they are stuck in a choice. For me, the Green Pass is not the solution if you want to share life moments. But the Green Pass is the solution for a company where you are working. So, for me it’s not the solution, it’s a problem.

Thomas: Yes, there is considerable uncertainty, but the government has to give the impression that they are doing the right thing, that they are being efficient, and they have a clear policy. But it leaves you with a bad aftertaste. As a citizen, you go into a restaurant and you have to show your vaccination pass every time you go somewhere. But you said something about the information that people had been given, that hadn’t been adequate, or hadn’t been good enough for minorities, for example. But if they don’t trust the information they get from the State anyway, maybe they don’t believe - as you said, they didn’t believe in the pandemic. They had been afflicted by far worse crises before. To them, it may have been just like a flu, which God might take care of.

SW: For example, if I try to think about this problem. I don’t have an answer, but I have a hope that one day I’ll have an answer because I’m a social worker. I am not a doctor and therefore with respect to the informed choice of vaccine I can only decide for myself. It becomes deontologically complex for me to explain some thing I don’t know - whose effects are unknown to me - to illiterate people. Hence my difficulty in demanding that these people get vaccinated.

Thomas: There are different groups that are skeptical about the vaccine in European countries, and I assume it would be the same in Italy. I mean, obviously, you have people from minorities because they basically don’t trust the state. They see no reason why they should. Then there are people who don’t trust science. They don’t believe in science partly because science has been wrong in the past, but there is often a deeper mistrust, a conspiratorial mistrust in mainstream society lurking underneath. Then you have parts of the Green Movement. You know, if you believe in ecology, and you are wary of laboratory-produced chemicals, and you have something enter your body, piercing the skin to make a hole in your body, and then pump an unknown fluid inside, and you don’t know what it is? Many are afraid of doing exactly that. Then, moreover, there may be people on the left. Quite a few leftists are highly critical of the pharmaceutical industry. They are perfectly well aware of the way in which Pfizer and some of these companies have made billions of dollars producing these vaccines, so they have a strong economic interest in pushing it. There may be many kinds of reasons why people are critical of this. Then there’s the human rights aspect. Am I not to be treated equally as a human being just because I have made this choice? It’s difficult because there are so many different groups that resist the vaccine. But what do you think should have been done differently?

Social worker: So, if there are problems - for example, I take two pills every day because I have a heart problem. I know that I know it works well for my heart, but it can-in the long run-have effects on other organs.

Thomas: What this means, I guess, is that it is to a great extent a matter of trust. While you were talking, I was just thinking that there are so many things we don’t understand, but that we accept, such as the weather forecasts? If they tell you to expect a snowstorm tomorrow, you naturally expect it to snow and prepare accordingly. You have no idea how the meteorologists know this, but you trust the information you get because it’s usually right. We use a lot of technology that we don’t understand the first thing about, like this video conference, and most of us do not see that as problematic at all. But I think there is something here to do with your body and health that makes things different. I’ve seen this because I’ve been doing fieldwork in Australia about pollution, climate change and that sort of thing. Most of the people in the city where I worked didn’t really care about climate change. They cared a bit about pollution, but they cared a lot about health. If there were signs of some emissions - foul-smelling dust in the air, smoke, or whatever - that could have an effect on their health, they would react. Anything to do with our bodies and health is therefore very sensitive. It’s very personal and intimate. And it is bounded, certainly when it comes to health. We often think that we make boundaries. I mean, we have an obsession with boundaries between groups, between individuals, and your first boundary, as a person, is the boundary of your skin. Anything that is outside your skin is not you. This is where I end. I start and end with my skin. So, if someone makes a hole in your skin and pushes something into it, it is a fairly dramatic thing. We know this from the past. On the other hand, if we think about vaccination history - I’m just thinking aloud - vaccination history in Africa, for example, health workers managed to get most Africans to take the smallpox or polio vaccine. So, after a while, smallpox was gone, but not Covid.

SW: I only work with minorities, but I don’t know if I’m a minority on this show. We don’t have all the answers. I can only say I try to find a better solution for these people. But I suppose that sometimes there are good solutions for them.

Thomas: Yes. You know what? I’d like to ask you something more about Covid and minorities that you see. One reason is that one of my students just submitted his master’s thesis. He is Italian, but his father is from Burkina Faso, so he is a black Italian. He is from Macerata. He did fieldwork in his hometown during the pandemic because he was able to travel, since he is Italian. He has been looking into the exclusion of Africans, meaning mainly the way in which Africans are somehow stigmatized, they never get fully accepted in society, and how this creates some vicious circles of exclusion because they are forced to work in the informal sector. Many of them are then forced into petty crime, you know, just to survive, and they don’t get to know many Italians. One of the main subjects he discusses in this dissertation is systematic racist exclusion, which seems to have got worse during the pandemic, with all kinds of stories circulating about Africans and other non-Europeans spreading the disease. The pandemic has just magnified inequality. It has just made matters a lot worse. Many people have lost their jobs. They are being even more stigmatized by Italian society because they are not vaccinated. And it has made things even harder for them. What do you think?

SW: I think that’s true. But, for example, all my beneficiaries must want to get vaccinated because they’re afraid of losing their job. But I think that’s not too good for them, because they do these things not because they think they’re right for them, but only because they have no alternative. I feel so sorry for them. You know, there are many problems for us because, for example, there is a very difficult thing, for immigration and immigrants, the language: Italian is a difficult language and it is difficult to learn, and sometimes they don’t even want to learn it. They don’t want to learn and they don’t want to be with Italian people. They want to stay with the eastern community. And it’s a very big problem because they don’t trust us. For example, I work with Corporal Abdul, ok? And I have a help desk, a point where people come, and the story is the same. My friends who live in villages near me in Bangladesh just say that you need to go to work in this place. There you go. If I say there’s a good job, there’s a good job for you in another place. So, with Italian people, the Italian police that try to keep in touch with them. They don’t want to go. No. They don’t trust me.

Thomas: Basically, the reason why they are in Italy is to be able to send money home, so it is important for them to save money.

SW: Yes, it’s difficult at the moment. It’s very, very difficult for Italians, but also for immigrants. There is a lot of money that the worker needs. But there is the problem of language. It was quite a difficult job and it was difficult to explain in English or in Bangla, with people who can explain. There are companies that need workers for some that do not have work and no connections. We try to get some schools to back up the language they need. Almost the B1 level, they don’t have B1, and they need that one year to have the B1 level, and they want to study. And I think that’s the problem of admitting that they don’t recognize us and we don’t recognize them. Because we think that many things, for example, they are your worker’s money, clothes are important. I don’t speak for me, but I speak for my society. But this is not the case. This is an important thing. We don’t make a connection because I can’t understand what they really want and they don’t really understand what we need. And this is the reason why at this moment there is there is no real connection between us practitioners and our beneficiaries.

Thomas: What you’re saying is very interesting because this is one of the things I have been discussing with my student. I mean, having worked with minority issues in other countries, there are certain things that you recognize. And one of his arguments is that there is a lot of racist exclusion in Italy, which is probably true – as in other European countries. But then there is another side to this as well, which you are describing, namely that many people belonging to minorities are not really interested in Italian society. So in a way, it goes both ways. Now about the current situation with the pandemic, it has gone on for a long time, creating a lot of divisions in society, as we were saying. And it is also, I mean, it has magnified or strengthened certain inequalities that were already there, like ethnicity and race, and so on. How do you see the situation a year from now? Will this continue? Is this the new normal?

SW: I asked two of my friends yesterday if it’s possible to stay together in a very small place like two years ago, together. It’s very stupid. Like eating at the same place, for example, getting food, ok? And she said, I suppose that’s not possible, ok? And I think that for people like me who are 40 years old after this period, it is that. I fear to go to a restaurant, I fear to go to a theatre. I’m afraid too. For example, going to dinner all together to meet someone new. Ok, because I don’t know where you’re going. And if this is a problem for me, for other people and me thinking about it every day, you know, because I don’t want the death of my life, is that. Only fear, only through fear.

Thomas: I think you’re right. I mean, this is something that somehow has become part of our culture. I mean, before February or March 2020, it was so unproblematic to deal with people in an informal and relaxed way. You could go out, you could travel. You didn’t have to worry about anything. And now I think that tourism, for example, will be different for a long time. You know, who wants to go on vacation to another country where you have no idea what things are like, what kind of bacteria, viruses, what kind of diseases? And then you have what you say about just being with other people. Today, on this Friday, we were supposed to have our big Christmas party at my anthropology department with about 100 people, the director, the Ph.D. students, and so on, which was canceled. Lots of people in this part of the world have this sort of pre-Christmas gathering where they go out to a restaurant with colleagues or whatever. Almost everything has been canceled, so even if restaurants have re-opened, people daren’t go. And I wonder if something of this is going to last, so we are going to treat each other with a little bit more suspicion and fear than we did. My hunch is that this is going to last for a long time. I think it’s unnatural. You know, I mean, it’s a word I use very rarely, ok? But in this case, it is not natural for us people, us human beings, because what is normal for us is to be together with other people. In many if not most cultures in the world eating together, having a communal meal, is crucial. It is the most important social event of all. And in many parts of the world, like Somalia, but also in India, and so on, people eat with their hands. So you have this big bowl of food and people just help themselves. This kind of communal meal would be what they now call a super spreader kind of event. But for many people, this is the main thing. It is not something that you can do without. So that is why I am saying that there is something very unnatural. You know, when this pandemic came in March last year, I immediately thought that this might, in the long run, be a good thing for the climate and the environment because we will get used to doing things a bit more slowly, traveling less, eating less, and being more with other people. But increasingly, what we see is that it is catastrophic because it destroys social relations. I mean, you have students you may have never met. I’ve only seen them on Zoom and that kind of thing. It’s not good at all.

SW: But we must try to find a solution. I try to do my best for other people. But I think that the road is still long. We accept that we are not immortal, and then we can in some way.

Thomas: Yes, that’s a lesson. There is something to learn.

SW: Yes, it is not so simple for us because we have a lot of feelings for everything. We think that our life is the most important life. But I don’t know. I don’t, because I’m not that important. No, no, I wouldn’t ask about whether I stay in this world or not. I think things are different, that for many people, I try to do my best for people who work with me. I try. And if I make the difference in my life for just one person, that’s ok. I can go.

Thomas: Yes, well, that’s a very good attitude, and I think it is also something we might learn. I hope that we might learn from the pandemic, and I’ve also written about this - the fact that we are vulnerable, weak, and mortal, and we aren’t going to live forever. Maybe that is something we could learn from the current crisis. So, that would make us a little bit humbler and maybe a bit more grateful. I don’t know. You know, five years ago I had a very serious illness, I had major surgery for cancer. For about two years, I was basically dying. It seemed as if it was time to say goodbye. Then somehow I managed to recover. Nobody understands why, but I’m still here. But during those two years, my own micro-experience was very similar to the sort of thing we can learn from the Covid pandemic at a higher systemic level - that you realized you weren’t going to live forever, that you are weak and vulnerable. We can do our best and maybe on my gravestone, they could write: okay, everything went to hell, but at least you did your best?

Perhaps that is all we can hope for. So maybe I should say, in this kind of society, we have been so used to thinking that we are indestructible and that there’s a pill for everything. And you can stay young if you eat your carrots and go jogging every morning. But that is not the way it is. Now, even young people occasionally get seriously ill from Covid and so on, and in a complex situation with a lot of uncertainty, there is a great demand for simple answers, to help them make sense of what’s happening. So, yeah, it could be a conspiracy theory – the idea that the government is doing this to us, so we have to be critical of everything they say. Or it could be another simple answer, namely that God will take care of this since he has created everything including viruses. I mean, you’ll find some kind of answer that you can easily understand, as you were saying, during our conversation, there are so many things to look at. There are so many complexities around the pandemic that it’s hard to know where to begin. And when we ask, you know, what should we have done? What should we do? We don’t really have the answer. We have to muddle through, as so often.

SW: The reason is that I don’t know if it’s black or white. There are a lot of callers these days, and the people need the only way because it’s not possible for a lot of people to understand the complexity of the world. It’s really like, you know, I’ve got to say this, if you do that you don’t go to paradise. Everything will be done. Yes, it’s the same vaccine that is paradise or no vaccine. Paradise isn’t real. Because in every action that we take, there is that I would … the way it is. I would pass and then I wouldn’t bother shaping every decision. There are a couple of issues, not good or bad, but it’s difficult for us to understand. So if people think that all I could do is do a little bit, study or make something, it is the best thing you can do. It is white or some narrow black for the same. Not gold. This cooler master learned the metal how I can find something, how I can find a solution for a problem, but it’s not the best, the way it is the best, the way that I can go in that moment with the debt, that information, for one thing, this moment that I am back, it isn’t the bad. The solution. Different.

Thomas: Exactly. It has been wonderful talking to you. But we have to go. I’m sure you have to work and I thank you so much for sharing your experience. It has been fantastic. It has been great and good luck with everything. You are doing a very important job.

SW: I try to do my best about that, and I know it is bad (laughing).