Medical Anthropology ForumChanging Air, Change of Air, Catching Air – Fugue for Covid and the Moral Temporalization of Air

It was a great photo-op moment amidst all the fear and anxiety. The world seemed to come alive in a dazzle of colour just as people began to die in droves. The world at large, instead of breathing in the clean air, began to mask up to keep out the unseen visitation lest they be caught unawares. The rich attempted to beat the visitation through a change of air and fled to their remote resorts; while the hoi polloi, apart from masking up, resorted to making effigies of the visitation that was trying to catch them and began to drum and dance the visitation into submission through entreaty and threat. These three co-eval movements caused by corona – the changing air, the change of air and catching air – were often moralized through temporalization. The resulting allochrony – where the co-eval is seen as vestigial – and the moralizing and often pathologizing polyphony has a chequered genealogy. In this paper, we will attempt to address one strand of this triptych in an attempt to show its continuing entanglement with the other two strands, and draw out the ontological and epistemological implications through a de-temporalization.