Vulnerability processes and abyssal inequalities: would the earth be flat and the coronavirus be round?

• Autor(a) principal: Portella, Sérgio
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Oliveira, Simone
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Vértices (Campos dos Goitacazes. Online)
• Texto Completo: https://editoraessentia.iff.edu.br/index.php/vertices/article/view/15898
• topic: Disasters; Pandemic; Inequalities; Vulnerability Process; Desastres; Pandemia; Desigualdades; Proceso de vulnerabilidad; Desastres; Pandemia; Desigualdades; Processo de vulnerabilização

In a world built by processes of vulnerability and abyssal inequalities, could we classify the Covid-19 pandemic as a natural biological disaster? The process of naturalizing crises caused by health emergencies, such as the pandemic, or disasters in general, is a trend in the way in which the Western imagination deals with these problems. The construction of communication about the pandemic follows this trend and we can follow this naturalization, as a modus operandi, whether in a pandemic or in a disaster, when considered natural. This essay follows this modus operandi in its step-by-step approach to the coronavirus pandemic. How is a disaster or pandemic naturalized? The act of naturalizing extreme events seeks to stabilize facts. This "natural" perception would be indifferent to human, amoral, and timeless action, and characterized by an automatism commanded by allegedly immutable laws - physical, natural or as immutable as: from God. It is quite clear that “natural” and “divine” are synonymous here. Naturalizing, objectifying, reifying, outlining, limiting, isolating: this is how facts and their nature are constructed! Here, however, we also have the invisibility of the process of population vulnerability: the belief in a flat world and a round virus!