Affective Cartographies of Collective Blame: Mediating Citizen-State Relations in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Affective Cartographies of Collective Blame: Mediating Citizen-State Relations in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia during the Covid-19 Pandemic

SUSANNA TRNKA, LISA L. WYNN

In both Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia, Covid-19 lockdowns were enforced through public scrutiny of the movements of supposedly “irresponsible” individuals. Denouncing their impact on public health created an affective cartography of collective blame uniting State and society in shared moral indignation. Produced through assemblages of mainstream and social media and government statements, such mediated spectacles engendered a sense of collective unity and shared purpose at a time when both collective cohesion and narratives of individual responsibility were of particular interest to the State. Spatio-temporal maps and diagrams of culpable contagion helped to materialize the invisible movement of the virus, but also enabled identification of the sick. Some bodies, more so than others, were made to carry the morality of the collective enterprise of stopping the virus.

Susanna Trnka is a social/cultural and medical anthropologist. She has carried out anthropological fieldwork in the Czech Republic, Fiji, and New Zealand on a range of topics including: crises and states of emergency, patient subjectivity, state-citizen relations, and embodiment. She is currently involved in two projects: examining New Zealanders' responses to COVID-19 and investigating young New Zealanders’ uses of digital technology for promoting mental wellbeing.

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