Using props gathered for teaching undergraduate anthropology courses on infectious disease, and being an extrovert trapped in social distancing mode, I myself started a daily photo series featuring a Plague Doctor encouraging creative pursuits and self-care while self-isolating. Miasma reminded a rapt online audience to wash their hands. Folks in beaked masks wandered onto live on-location newscasts. Memes predicting Spring 2020 fashion replete with black capes, canes, and beaked masks flooded social media in March 2020, as the rapidly increasing number of COVID-19 cases made global headlines (Figure 1). Steeped in our current context, the stage was set for the Plague Doctor, that iconic masked medical icon, to make a comeback. Anthropologists have explored the imagery of disease-repelling face masks as “potent symbols of existential risk” (Lynteris 442), while Lasco explains that motivations including “cultural values, perceptions of control, social pressure, civic duty, family concerns, self-expression, beliefs about public institutions, and even politics” might make an individual cover their face. Anxiety over invisible invaders encourages individuals to desire a barrier, to wrest back a feeling of control. The spike in face-mask purchasing and crafting in response to COVID-19 fears is not surprising. The efficacy and culture of masks as personal protective equipment has been investigated for over a century’s worth of diseases, including the 1910-’11 Manchurian plague (Lynteris), influenza (Chuang Cowling), SARS (Sin Syed), tuberculosis (Biscotto), and Ebola (MacIntyre et al.).
Whether manufacturing, stockpiling, MacGyvering, sewing, 3D printing, or debating them, masks are (figuratively, if not literally) on everyone’s lips.
Madeleine Mant // 2020 is the year of the mask.
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