The time bit its own tail

viral ruins of a microbio-anthropology

Abstract

The following text is composed by selected excerpts from an entry in my research journal. The excerpts were part of an unfinished text written throughout four days, in which I was thinking about the two-way in which the virus and the pandemic affected my research practices. On the one hand, I was still facing the problems of losing the place I was living in the university, as a visiting scholar in the United States. On the other hand, I was trying to make sense out of this abrupt change in which it was not possible to come back to Brazil, connecting it with the way the pandemics impacted on the concepts and themes of my research. Working together with anthropology and microbiology on the end of the world and ruins, I was forced to deal with the impact of the virus itself and the pandemic in my research. The virus weakened the concept of life and the coherent picture I was painting around fungi and bacteria regarding the recuperation of soils. The pandemic, on its turn, weakened the idea of the end of world, which was very based on the ruins produced by the acceleration of todays’ capitalism.