Thinking in the Global South — Reflections on Anti-Vaxxers as an Instance of Global Alterity

• Main Author: Pertierra, Raul
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2021
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/socialtransformations/vol9/iss2/2; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/socialtransformations/article/1132/viewcontent/ST_209.2_202_20Thinking_20in_20the_20Global_20South_20__20Pertierra.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

Excerpt: The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light several features of the present state of globality. In many countries, objections against vaccination have attracted media prominence. Although reasons for this resistance may differ from one country to another, there seems to be a common thread linking them globally. This paper examines this thread and explores its relationship to conditions underlying modernity. As some have argued (e.g., Latour 2014, Luhmann 1998), modernity is not an explanatory concept but a category that allows us to label a complex reality, which includes internal contradictions (e.g., a society of universal levelling whose mechanism effaces some differences while imposing others). Moreover, Markus (1997) argues that the concepts of nature and culture central to modernity are characterized by significant antinomies. Hence, contrasting nature and culture as brute facticity vs. ultimate meaning is fraught with conceptual problems. Modernity is based on a particular understanding of this duality. Previously, nature was contrasted with culture as brute facticity vs. meaning as human agency. Latour (2014) has pointed out that the recent classification of a geological period as the anthropocene indicates the extent of the entwining of nature and culture. It seems that sediments and sentiments are more closely aligned and imbricated than we assumed. Following Latour (2014), rather than seeing nature as brute and dumb facticity, we should see it as involving complex forms of animation, linking diverse structures, including human agency.