Departments of Anthropology and of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley.
Med Anthropol Q. 2020 Dec;34(4):542-560. doi: 10.1111/maq.12627. Epub 2020 Dec 4.
Old age has been central to public health rationalities and contestations of the 2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic. This article thinks through what age is and does in pandemic times by juxtaposing four domains of ethical publicity in which age comes to matter: (1) mass fatality of old persons under conditions of variable unpreparedness; (2) circulation of social-Darwinist argument for herd immunity through culling of the weak; (3) everyday challenges of late life care as these are amplified under quarantine; and (4) long-term conditions of economic and political impasse and environmental collapse, experienced as failure of older generations and abandonment of younger ones, a situation here termed generational affect. It asks to what extent the figure of the cullable old renders racialized disparities natural and makes sense through a generational affect in which the world feels as if the survival of the young is in question.
老年问题一直是 2019-2020 年冠状病毒大流行公共卫生理论和争议的核心。本文通过对比四个伦理宣传领域来思考年龄在大流行时期的作用：（1）在准备不足的情况下，老年人大量死亡；（2）通过淘汰弱势群体来传播社会达尔文主义的群体免疫观点；（3）在隔离状态下，老年人的日常生活护理变得更加困难；（4）经济和政治僵局以及环境崩溃的长期状况，表现为老年人的失败和年轻人的被抛弃，这种情况被称为代际影响。本文提出了这样一个问题：可淘汰的老年人形象在多大程度上使种族差异变得自然，并通过一种代际影响来理解这种现象，在这种影响下，世界似乎感到年轻人的生存受到了威胁。
