Before 2020 and COVID-19, I never thought much about masks. Now I think about them all the time. One question that keeps coming up is why they have become so controversial and contentious, especially here in the US. Why all the resistance? These questions are on my mind constantly. The whole subject of mask-wearing is often so tense that it can be difficult to even mention the subject. Masks have become a proxy for not only what people believe about COVID-19, but also other issues such as ideas about freedom and liberty, individualism vs. collectivism, the role of science in society, and government power.

All that in a little mask.

So how can we understand all the mask resistance? How can we break through some of the tension, conflict, and mistrust? In anthropology, we tend to approach these kinds of issues through long-term ethnographic research. Spend time with people, listen to them, try to see where they are coming from. The basic idea is to try to “meet people where they are” in order to understand the world through their eyes (see Fiske 2016 on this argument in relation to climate change skepticism).[i] This kind of work is not easy, especially with highly contentious issues.

Last summer I saw one good example of an attempt to “meet people where they are,” but it wasn’t the work of any anthropologists. It was this video by two guys (Chad Kroeger and JT Parr from the Going Deep podcast) who did some comical outreach about masks in Huntington Beach. If you have been following the ups and downs of that beachside community over the past year, you know that Chad and JT didn’t choose the easiest site for community outreach.

In the video, people’s reactions are all over the place: One woman says she doesn’t wear a mask because she thinks they are a health risk. One man said people don’t need to wear masks because “saltwater kills that shit.” Another guy on a bike says he’s not pro-mask because “it’s all fake, dude, come on!” And yet another blows off the idea that wearing a mask could help us open back up sooner, saying that’s just “a talking point on the TV bro.” In the video, one man calls Coronavirus a “bullshit lie” and throws around some profanity. And then, at the end of the video, there’s the guy who says that Chad and JT can’t tell him what his rights are, that he doesn’t believe in wearing masks, and ends with: “if you want some of me come on and get this.”

Not everyone gets angry or completely dismisses the idea of wearing a mask, however. Some are willing to at least talk to Chad and JT. Two young guys even accept a couple masks and swear on “Tyler, the Creator” to actually wear them. Chad and JT offer masks to two young women, who say no thanks, they already have some. So why aren’t they wearing them, Chad and JT ask. One of the women says it’s because they left them in their car. “Oh, ok, that makes sense,” responds Chad.

I have to hand it to these two guys. They have a pretty good ground game. Chad and JT do an incredible job maintaining their cool in the face of some serious hostility. The video is both humorous and troubling all at once. The piece highlights a wide range of responses to masks, from the negligent and ambivalent to the violent. I think their approach shows some of the benefits of trying to spend time on the ground and gain a better understanding of where people are coming from–including the reasons why some people are resistant.

I have made some of my own observations the past year as well. This wasn’t part of any formal research, just some of what I have seen in day-to-day life. I just moved back to the California coast, which means that I have been able to get down to the beach more often again. It’s been nice to get outside after months and months of shelter-in-place, although life is a lot different than it was in the pre-COVID days. Beach trips now mean thinking about masks, crowds, social distancing, and which places are safer to go than others. It feels a bit like trying to run a gauntlet.

There’s one detail that I noticed about mask wearing though. It seemed like most people were not wearing masks at the beach. And I mean right down on the beach or walking along it via sidewalks and boardwalks. There was noticeably less compliance. I did a few informal counts and the rates were around 20-25% of people actually wearing masks.[ii]

But in the commercial areas right near the beach, things were very different. Most people were wearing masks, and it didn’t seem to be a big issue. They just did it. People may not have liked the requirements, but they went along with them. And for the most part, things seemed to be working ok. But down at the beach…it was a completely different story. So what’s going on here?

I think a lot of it comes down to ambiguity. In short, what I noticed is that the rules and expectations were pretty clearly laid out in the commercial zones. Each store or business put up a sign and explained what they expected before people walked in the door. And it worked. People complied for the most part. But the beach was a completely different scenario. While there were rules and pronouncements at the city and county level, it was actually pretty unclear what, exactly, people could and could not be doing when they were on the beach. There were few if any clear posted signs, and essentially no enforcement. While people knew about mask and social distancing mandates, it was not completely clear how they applied to the beach. It was a bit of a free-for-all.

So people improvised and did what they thought made sense…or just what they wanted to do. Some were defiant, others were practical. Surfers, for example, generally were not wearing masks…because they were in wetsuits and heading into the water. It didn’t make much sense to wear a mask on the way to jumping in the water. Overall, the situation at the beach was pretty haphazard. At times it seemed to work OK and people kept their distance and went about their business. At other times, however, it left a lot of room for stress, tension, and worse.

One of the lessons here is that ambiguity can easily breed confusion and conflict. And I think that’s a key problem. But the issue is not solely about ambiguity and the presence or absence of rules. As Elinor Ostrom and others have demonstrated, it depends on who creates, implements, and enforces those rules. There were mask mandates at the city and county level,  so they were essentially imposed top-down. But I think more people were willing to comply in commercial zones here in my coastal neighborhood, for example, because the rules were clear and perhaps because they were implemented by local users (business owners). It wasn’t as if there were city or state officials there implementing and enforcing those rules–it was up to the business owners and employees themselves. This is my running hypothesis, at least. Yes, there were instances of conflict and even protests over the mask mandates around town, but for the most part they seemed to work fairly well.

But again, down at the beach things were very different. Even so, there wasn’t exactly a lot of overt conflict. It was more a matter of confusion and ambiguity, which just added to the overall stress and anxiety of daily pandemic life. I do think that clear rules and guidelines at the beach would have helped, but one of the big challenges was actually a matter of who, exactly, should or could implement and enforce them. Much of my argument here comes from my work on the politics of conservation, particularly local resistance to and compliance with conservation projects. If people aren’t part of the process, it’s not surprising that they resist. But, it’s not as simple as just “getting the community on board” and expecting everything to work out.

Still, when it comes to the case at hand, that missing ingredient–the community of users who could actually implement and enforce rules–was something I have thought about a lot in the past year. I often wondered why there weren’t any attempts to involve communities, rather than just imposing rules and regulations and hoping for the best. Maybe there were such attempts, but I didn’t see or hear about them. It’s not an easy situation, but I think that community-based organizations could have helped quite a lot, especially if they were involved in a meaningful way. That, I think, would be a big step forward for ameliorating some of the ongoing tensions and conflicts between the masked and the unmasked. Perhaps there’s a lesson here for whatever comes next.

-RA

[i] Fiske, S.J., 2016. “Climate scepticism” inside the Beltway and across the Bay. Anthropology and Climate Change: From Actions to Transformations, pp.319-335.

[ii] This is not a proper representative sample, but just based upon a few instances and the general observation about less compliance. Overall, I think the observation holds, but I’d like to see some formal research on it.

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist.

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In a textured ethnography in guise as an ESPN feature by Sam Borden, The New Hooligans of Russia, one of the men interviewed, “believes fighting is a necessary part of dealing with the anger that grows out of life’s inevitable frustrations and disappointments.” The authorities in Russia are cracking down on these individuals, with some arrests and a general state of alertness. Borden’s article makes space for such fights to sound like a resurgence of an older tradition, a cultural artifact linked to heritage, not a practice that has emerged recently due to an erosion of civil society, class struggles, or some anarchic impulse, which many of the other reports suggest.

Within Anthropology, of course, we can look back to the literature related to war, aggression, and sports. As I have been reading the various reports on the Russian Hooligans, much of the analysis continues to feel settled (perhaps stuck) in early popular ideas related to combative sports. Even though as early as 1973 anthropologists like Richard Sipes argued that aggression is a learned cultural behavior pattern, we continue to see popular ideas of war, aggression and masculinity being linked, particularly in relation to sports.  We also know that the ways in which sports have been studied has changed and become more nuanced, but it continues to be talked about in public discourse in a way to suggest that it has not really moved beyond those early frameworks of aggression. In contrast, Sports (as an enterprise) is and has been trying to change the view that it is linked to masculinity and aggression. Just recently, FIFA Secretary General Fatma Samba Diouf Samoura claimed at the 2018 FIFA conference on Equality and Inclusion, that football can change the world; that it can be used as a tool for social change.

Utilizing her own appointment as the first female Secretary General at FIFA as an indicator, she seems to be leading change within the sport, increasing numbers of women administrators in FIFA from 32% in 2016 to its current 48%. But her claim is not just about hiring more women – it is about inclusion, it is about understanding and underscoring that football has the ability to transcend religion, race, and gender (for some critical reading on issues of race/gender, see The Place of Afro-Brazilian Women in the World Cup, by Melissa Creary and Erica L. Williams).

The Secretary General brings with her the postwar optimism that surrounded the UN – not surprisingly so, given that is her experience prior to FIFA. And in some measure, she is not wrong; there is certainly something about football that brings much of the world together, for example I’m thinking of all the neighborhoods, particularly in the postcolonies, that go all out and decorate their neighborhoods in team colors, like at Siddiq Goth in Malir, Karachi. In these neighborhoods, however, violence and aggression do not break out during the World Cup – at least they have not been reported as resulting from sporting aggression. Being a Baloch neighborhood, there are other issues of violence that continue to plague many of the residents, and it seems as if football provides some respite.

There is something familiar that Secretary General Samoura is trying to do that, at least from the outside, looks somewhat impossible, and yet necessary. She is attempting to un-do a system that was created to reflect (and maintain) a certain world order, a particular power structure that we all love and loathe simultaneously.

FIFA was founded in Paris in 1904, conceived of as an umbrella sports organization within Europe. With France leading the meeting, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland in attendance, and a remarkably absent Great Britain, FIFA was created. As FIFA’s history web-page (very pointedly) relates, “When the idea of founding an international football federation began taking shape in Europe, the intention of those involved was to recognise the role of the English who had founded their Football Association back in 1863.” Apparently the Football Association had been contacted, but there were delays in getting feedback from everyone involved to move it forward. But really, how could they have moved it forward? Great Britain and France were not really on good terms. In fact, the founding of FIFA happened a little over a month after the Entente Cordiale (April 8, 1904) — an Anglo-French agreement that ended (or started the end of) the antagonism between both powers primarily to grant freedom of action to Great Britain in Egypt and to France in Morocco. This agreement did not create an alliance, but it did set the stage for diplomatic cooperation that would help in their stance against the German’s leading up to WWI. Also part of this agreement, and arguably more significant, was France renouncing its exclusive right to certain fisheries off Newfoundland, and Great Britain ceding the Los Islands (off of French Guinea) to France. Moreover, Great Britain agreed to French control of the upper Gambia valley, defined the frontier of Nigeria in France’s favor, and zones of influence for the French and British in Thailand were outlined. Indeed, as Matisse was imagining how to represent a world in a particular manner and form in Paris, in just as vivid and non natural strokes, the colonial powers were distributing the world and its resources, and conjuring up new worlds within which football would bring people on the European landmass together.

I do applaud FIFA Secretary General Samoura’s efforts to transform a remarkably colonial, racist and misogynist organization, but I also want to draw attention to what happens when there are aggressive transgressions that contest the histories of power, its abuse, and how the bodies that perform them on the field are held to different standards. In this case, it is about the history of wars, aggression and sports that continues to play itself out on the field and in the stands. There are particular ways in which we see brown bodies claim their space on the field — where it becomes less about the patriotic jerseys and claims to nationhood that football teams obviously represent – and it becomes something slightly more nuanced, an historic global resistance that pulls people together because the tension of being pulled apart becomes obvious through some action done to that body as a power play. This can be done through the media and narratives spun around the players, or can be done by the powerful sports institutions themselves. It is the responses that those athletes have to such explicit racism that I am always watching for because it, in that moment, becomes emblematic of all of our struggles.

Gearing up for the World Cup, there is always a lot of activity in the football world. In particular, last week I read a headline about how Zinedine Zidane resigned as Real Madrid’s Head Coach. As ESPN’s Dermot Corrigan reported: “Zidane shocked the football world with Thursday’s snap decision to resign just days after securing a third Champions League trophy in just two and a half years as Madrid coach.” The mode by which many sports reporters articulate this decision is telling: they focus on the quickness of it, the knowing that he might be getting fired anyway, and the overall snappiness of it is reminiscent of the tone used after the 2006 FIFA World Cup Final. It was in that World Cup Final that Zidane, famously, ended his last game as Captain of the French Team by getting a red card in overtime after headbutting Marco Materazzi. At the time, his actions were called into question as unsportsmanlike and acts of a hooligan. What else could one expect, they asked us from their news rooms, from an Algerian Kabyle descent child who grew up in poverty in northern Marseille? Reporters continued to bring up Zidane’s childhood in order to explain his actions. He was cast as violent, unpredictable, and uncivilized.

Halfway around the world, however, in Brooklyn NY, the entire crew of football enthusiasts cheered for him. Caught off guard, we knew the headbutt was not just for whatever verbal altercation that had ensued. We raised our fists and yelled at the projection in the side room of a dingy restaurant in Williamsburg.

I cannot help but think of the many ways by which we love and loathe colonial structures (cough archaeology cough) and how these choices to decolonize or address issues of equity and inclusion are not limited to academic discourses but are emerging in multiple disciplines, and practices. Right now, because of how toxic the world has become, the academy is starting to feel like bare-knuckle fighting among ourselves – allies, accomplices, friends, and others. I wonder if our disciplines are ready for that change or if we will have to continue to slowly headbutt our way through, red card after red card.

Uzma Z. Rizvi

Uzma Z. Rizvi is an associate professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY, and a Visiting Scholar at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan. Her current work focuses on Ancient Pakistan and UAE, during the third millennium BCE. She utilizes poetics as a mode through which to push the limits of archaeological theory. Additionally, her research focuses on ancient subjectivity, intimate architecture; memory, war, and trauma in relationship to the urban fabric, critical heritage studies at the intersections of contemporary art and history, and finally, epistemological critiques of the discipline in the service of decolonization.
Previous posts can be accessed via https://savageminds.org/author/uzma/

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