Abstract
What does animal studies have to teach us about the health catastrophes of our generation? This essay proposes that analyzes of the pandemic caused by COVID-19 can be stimulated by the reflections that anthropology has carried out over the last decades regarding the plural effects of the interaction between human and non-human animals. Relationships so intimate and, at times, so unpredictable with sets of entities whose agency and modes of existence are not always able to identify precisely. The provocation is that animality, as a relational marker, not only expresses the counterpoint defined by interspecific alterities that we establish with certain animals different from us, but is configured as a “category-metaphor” that enables us to perceive the multiple and complex ways in which we compose our lives in relation to the “nature” of everything around us.
Keywords:
animality; anthropology of human-animal relations; COVID-19; pandemic