Contents>> Vol. 13, No. 1
Vietnamese Carescapes in the Making: Looking at Covid-19 Care Responses in Berlin through the Affective Lens of Face Masks
Max Müller,* Anita von Poser,** Edda Willamowski,*** Tạ Thị Minh Tâm,† and Eric Hahn††
*CRC 1171 Affective Societies, Freie Universität Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin, Germany; Department for Anthropology and Philosophy, Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Reichardtstraße 11, 06114 Halle, Germany
Corresponding author’s e-mails: maximilian.mueller[at]fu-berlin.de; maximilian.mueller[at]ethnologie.uni-halle.de
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2298-2415
**Department for Anthropology and Philosophy, Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Reichardtstraße 11, 06114 Halle, Germany
e-mail: anita.poser[at]ethnologie.uni-halle.de
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3679-9048
***Department for Anthropology and Philosophy, Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Reichardtstraße 11, 06114 Halle, Germany
e-mail: edda.willamowski[at]ethnologie.uni-halle.de
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3149-0773
†Department of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, Charité Universitätsmedizin, Campus Benjamin Franklin, Hindenburgdamm 30, 12203 Berlin, Germany
e-mail: thi-minh-tam.ta[at]charite.de
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9252-3161
††Department of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, Charité Universitätsmedizin, Campus Benjamin Franklin, Hindenburgdamm 30, 12203 Berlin, Germany
e-mail: eric.hahn[at]charite.de
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3782-1983
DOI: 10.20495/seas.13.1_7
Face masks were undoubtedly one of the most visible and (at least in some countries of the Global North) most controversial markers of the Covid-19 pandemic. Contrary to the white-German majority society in Berlin, Vietnamese migrants in the city were aware of the essential role of wearing masks in public right from the beginning of this health crisis. In March 2020, when the German government agency for disease control was still advising the general public against donning masks, former Vietnamese contract workers were already producing thousands of fabric masks for donation to ill-prepared hospitals and care facilities. Vietnamese students in Berlin, as well as children of Vietnamese migrants born and/or raised in Germany, also initiated various mask-related campaigns to tackle the health crisis and support local Vietnamese communities.
Based on digital ethnography in the spring of 2020, as well as later offline ethnographic exploration, we tracked the emergence of Vietnamese care networks trying to cope with the then-evolving pandemic. Looking through the analytical lens of face masks, we aim to highlight people’s emic understandings of care as materialized in self-sewn masks.
Besides showing the processual character of those care responses, we also aim to work out distinct differences between the migrant generation and post-migration actors regarding their motivations for organizing their respective campaigns. While our interlocutors from the latter group were much more vocal about anti-Asian racism and thus focused on community care projects, the Vietnamese migrants we talked to framed their care response in terms of a narrative of giving back to their second home country at a time of need. In addition, we will show how these care responses were differently shaped by media discourses from Vietnam and/or the global Vietnamese diaspora.
Keywords: Covid-19 pandemic, Vietnamese diaspora, face mask controversy, anti-Asian racism, community care, carescape
