Essential to Whom? An Exploration of Pandemic‐Era Care and Reciprocity. Issue 1 (1st September 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Ding, Jessica
• Is Part Of: Student anthropologist. Volume 7: Issue 1(2020)
• Page Start: 76
• Page End: 79
• Publication Date: 2020-09-01
• Subjects: Essential workers -- integrative care -- reciprocity; Anthropology -- Periodicals; Anthropology; Periodicals; 301
• DOI: 10.1002/j.sda2.20200701.0015
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2330-7625

Abstract

Abstract : The challenges of combatting the COVID‐19 global pandemic are vast and systemic. It has required the world to adapt how we work, learn, and communicate. In this new reality, Americans have been confronted with what it means to provide and to receive care. The U.S. now looks beyond professional medical caregivers (doctors, nurses, first responders, etc.) to include others who provide additional services of care. The fluid label of "essential worker" recognizes a wider range of equally important frontline service roles (trash collectors, grocery store workers, etc.). After elaborating on the history of the term "essential workers, " I move on to discuss those in the immediate periphery of the medical community (workers in personal or self‐care industries and those in traditional or alternative medical sectors—among others) who have been sidelined as nonessential. This sparks many questions: who determines who is essential and when? Who provides care during these times? Whose jobs have been suspended and not recognized as acts of care? To explore those questions, I compare contemporary American trends to patterns discovered during my fieldwork in Shanghai. Three months in a Chinese Integrative Medicine Department revealed a phenomenon of reciprocal caregiving: patients provide food and support to doctors who practice excellent care. My analysis will reveal how caregiving in the U.S. can also be reciprocated under current circumstances by community members. I reveal how COVID‐19 has re‐defined how communities value care and disrupt understandings of how, by, and for whom care should be practiced.