Medical Anthropology Forum Health as an Individual and Collective Resource – Changing Socialities During the Lockdown in Berlin 2020

With the COVID-19 spread in spring 2020, the everyday lives of most people were changed in ways not foreseen: national borders and public institutions – schools, universities, kindergardens – were closed, physical contact was regulated through strict curfew rules, restaurant, bars, cultural institutions had to shut their doors, and visits to hospitals and retirement homes were prohibited. All this could only happen in the name of ‘public health’, which depended on the many individual ‘healths’. In this paper, which is based on a Berlin-based ethnography of the time between March 2020 and October 2020, Prof. Alex analyses how – in the context of the pandemic induced disrupted routines and worldviews – different resources (especially health, well-being, economic security, knowledge, status positions) were redefined and interpreted, negotiated and hierarchised between individuals, collectives and government agencies.