Kate Mason, a PSTC faculty associate and Assistant Professor of Anthropology, and Yifeng Troy Cai, a doctoral student in Brown’s Department of Anthropology, have just received a RAPID award from the National Science Foundation for an ethnographic investigation of the social change occurring in China as the country experiences what they have coined the “liminal pandemic period.” The project will integrate interviews, media analysis and observation on the ground to understand how Chinese people in Shanghai with different experiences share and interpret information about COVID-19 during this liminal period. 

As Cai explained, “Our project aims to arrive at a theory that helps to explain how factors such as culture, emotion, income, and education influence the ways in which people perceive, interpret, and circulate information and knowledge. Through carefully selecting a field site (Shanghai) and diversifying our samples (age, gender, profession, income level, education level, etc.) we will be able to generate findings with high generalizability.” 

Cai, who has been in Shanghai since August 2019, is witnessing this unique phase of the pandemic in China, where the crisis seems to be both already over and imminently returning. “I experienced first-hand that scientific explanations and findings – which are themselves vexed with political, emotional, and cultural factors and interests – appeared to be unevenly accepted by the public, depending on the specific contexts in which these explanations and findings are released,” he stated. “We hypothesize that emotions play a significant role in the perception, interpretation, and circulation of knowledge related to COVID-19. In other words, people who have a strong desire for this pandemic to be over will be geared towards the more hopeful and optimistic findings and theories about the pandemic and vice versa.”

“This is an unprecedented period in history to be recording first-hand– the first wave in China has come and gone, and people's lives have more or less gone back to normal,” Mason added. “But everyone expects another wave to arrive in the fall. So that's why we refer to a ‘liminal pandemic period’– everyone is betwixt and between, anxious and waiting, unsure what will happen next.”

Mason has conducted previous fieldwork on public health in China and wrote Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health after an Epidemic (Stanford University Press, 2016), but is cautious about anticipating how the pandemic may continue to develop: “My past work examined the aftermath of the SARS epidemic of 2003 on the Chinese public health system. So, the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic felt extremely familiar to me, because at first it unfolded in a similar way. But then things went in a wildly different direction. So, I really don't want to make any assumptions about what we'll find!”

Nonetheless, they both expect to find that income level plays a role in people’s experiences. Mason posited, “I imagine that just as here [in the US], people with lower income levels [and/or] who have more precarious employment have suffered more with the lockdowns.” However, Cai also noted that, “Those with higher income seem to be much more cautious and tend to have a more stark expectation for what will happen in the upcoming months. But we need more evidence to verify this.” 

Given that China was the first country to experience COVID-19, and to enter this liminal pandemic period, the pair has considered how their findings might inform other countries, although they acknowledged that the Chinese experience with COVID-19 has differed from other countries, not least because many world leaders blame China for the virus’s spread. “In terms of culpability, there is an awful lot of nationalism in China right now,” Mason observed. Cai added, “The official governmental media outlets have been constantly reporting and criticizing the culpability foreign governments are placing on China. To say the very least, the majority of Chinese people are highly conscious of the criticisms from overseas.”

Cultural differences between countries may also affect the generalizability of the findings. Cai explained, “As a cultural anthropologist, I expect that culture also plays a very significant role in knowledge perception and reaction living through the pandemic. In terms of specific practices and (re)actions, I actually expect behavioral differences for people in different countries, as we have already observed globally up to this point– the willingness of wearing masks, for example.”

Despite being unable to predict how people’s behaviors may change in China in the coming months, Mason commented, “If we ever manage to fight our way out of this first wave here in the US, we may find ourselves in a similar situation. So I do think we can learn a lot from the Chinese case.”

Photos courtesy of Brown Anthropology Department