Two recent pandemics, COVID-19 and Ebola, have generated extensive social science engagements. Anthropologists documented community resistance, analyzed health inequalities, and critiqued biomedical reductionism. These contributions were valuable and necessary. And yet, as the world prepares for the next pandemic, anthropologists remain positioned as outside observers and critics rather than contributors to policy design. This positioning is not incidental. The implicit reliance on misleading binaries, between anthropology and policy, nature and culture, local and global, qualitative and quantitative, expert and lay, belief and knowledge, severely limits the capacity to understand how pandemic governance actually works and how it could be made to work far better. Each of these binaries has a long genealogy in disciplinary thought, and each carries the appearance of analytical precision while foreclosing exactly the questions that most need asking.
This commentary proposes a framework that moves beyond these binaries. The proposal is not simply to synthesize what has previously been opposed, because that move, however sophisticated in execution, leaves the original binary structure intact. What is needed instead is a different starting point. Rather than asking how communities respond to pandemic interventions, the central question becomes how pandemics disrupt the mesocosm: the liveable, askable world that human beings actually inhabit, the middle ground between microscopic biological processes and macroscopic social abstractions, the domain where bodies feel, relationships bind, spaces become home, materials accumulate, and symbols make sense. A mesocosmology of the next pandemic focuses on differential temporalities, mediational misalignments, and the recursive capacity for questioning that the concept of askability names. The framework, drawing on comparative analysis of COVID-19 in China and Ebola in Sierra Leone, offers anthropologists tools for moving beyond critique toward constructive engagement with pandemic preparedness.
Time as the Central Challenge
The key challenge of pandemic governance is time, and any analysis that fails to treat time as its primary object of inquiry will produce distortions. Pandemic response is all about coordinating four differential temporalities that operate on different logics, different scales, and different rhythms. Policy fails whenever it treats time as a single metric with rapid responses at one end and long-term planning at the other, because this singular conception obscures the multiple clocks that must be synchronized if governance is to succeed.
The first of these clocks tracks biological temporalities: the doubling times, serial intervals, and demographic patterns in severe outcomes that characterize the spread of a particular pathogen. These clocks set the basic tempo for all other response activities and determine the urgency of interventions. When spread accelerates, all other clocks must accelerate accordingly, or the temporal gap between viral reality and institutional response becomes a space in which transmission runs ahead of control. The second clock governs evolutionary changes in the pathogen itself, the emergence of new variants that escape immunity, altered transmission patterns, or shifted severity profiles. These mutation clocks operate on longer timescales than the spread clock, but they can shift the entire operational environment suddenly and without warning, requiring bridge measures while longer-arc adaptations are developed and validated. The failure to monitor and respond to mutation clocks is not simply a scientific oversight; it is a governance failure with immediate social consequences, because measures calibrated to one variant become poorly fitted to another and communities bear the cost of that misfit.
The third clock encompasses the multiple temporalities through which governance systems detect problems, make decisions, and implement changes: onset-to-isolation intervals, call-to-arrival times, sample-to-result-to-action sequences, decision-to-implementation timelines, and review-to-revision cycles. During COVID-19, much governance became almost entirely oriented to this institutional clock. Lockdowns were described as "buying time" to lower infection rates or to develop a vaccine, and the institutional clock became the primary frame through which policy discussed its own activity. The fourth clock tracks the temporalities through which affected populations adapt to pandemic conditions: household response times to positive tests, contact tracing uptake rates, treatment acceptance patterns, complaint resolution times, and adherence decay curves over extended periods. Communities do not respond instantaneously or uniformly; they adapt through processes that have their own rhythms, and those rhythms are shaped by the particular configuration of embodied life, social relations, spatial arrangements, material resources, and symbolic repertoires available in specific contexts.
China's COVID-19 response initially achieved remarkable coordination between the virus-spread clock and the institutional clock through digital surveillance systems that enabled real-time policy implementation across enormous geographic and demographic scales. What the system failed to do was coordinate with the mutation clock when Omicron changed transmission patterns in ways that made earlier suppression strategies less effective, and it progressively ignored the people-response clock as compliance fatigue accumulated over three years of extraordinary measures. Sierra Leone's Ebola response struggled with different temporal failures, particularly in institutional clock speeds: burial teams taking forty-eight hours to arrive while military operations were organized overnight, a gap that carried devastating consequences for both transmission rates and community trust. At the same time, the Sierra Leone response preserved considerably more space for people-response clock adaptation through community-based negotiation processes that allowed governance to learn from those it was trying to protect.
Temporal misalignments of these kinds generate predictable policy failures. When institutional clocks move too slowly for virus spread, containment fails at the epidemiological level. When institutional clocks move too quickly for community adaptation, trust collapses at the social level, and the compliance that epidemiological strategies depend upon dissolves into performance or outright resistance. When mutation clocks are not matched by policy adjustment, measures persist past their effectiveness and become costly without being protective. When people-response clocks are systematically ignored, compliance becomes performative rather than protective, a distinction with profound public health consequences. For the next pandemic, anthropological work should focus on documenting and analyzing these temporal coordination challenges rather than conceptualizing community responses as slow lay people resisting fast expert people. This requires ethnographic methods capable of tracking multiple temporalities simultaneously and analyzing their interactions over extended periods of time.
Askability: The Recursive Capacity for Questioning
One of the most decisive factors determining pandemic governance success is askability, the recursive capacity for legitimate questioning and negotiation to emerge and influence the governance adaptations that make responses liveable and sustainable. Askability should not be understood as a refined version of community feedback, formal consultation, or participatory process, because those framings retain the assumption that governance systems receive inputs from communities while remaining essentially separate from them. Askability is something more fundamental: it names the conditions under which questions become possible, legitimate, and productive rather than dangerous, futile, or suppressed.
Askability emerges from mediational misalignment, from the coordination of five domains of everyday experience that must work together for governance to feel legitimate and responsive to those it governs. When embodied practices, social relationships, spatial arrangements, material infrastructures, and symbolic systems align in mutually supportive ways, questions become possible and productive. When they pull apart from each other in ways that people can feel but not yet articulate, the pressure toward questioning builds, and the governance system's response to that pressure determines whether askability opens or closes. All the questions that actually matter in a pandemic arise from embodied being-in-the-world and first unfold without conscious articulation or symbolic expression. Someone notices that the rules do not match what their body is experiencing, or that the spatial arrangements imposed by policy conflict with the relational obligations that sustain their household, before they can say in so many words what is wrong. Much governance failure comes from disconnects between this implicit askability, which is real and consequential, and the explicit policy responses that never encounter it because they have no channel through which it could arrive.
China's digital surveillance system demonstrated that impressive epidemiological outcomes could be achieved under conditions of very low askability, but only temporarily and at significant social cost. The health code system enabled rapid implementation of uniform measures while suppressing exactly the kind of questioning that would have enabled adaptive learning over time. Citizens could comply with or violate rules, but they had limited opportunities to question the logic of specific measures, propose alternatives based on their own knowledge and experience, or negotiate adaptations based on local conditions that central systems could not perceive. When compliance was eventually overwhelmed by the accumulated mismatch between policy and lived experience, the system had no mechanism for course correction because askability had been structurally foreclosed.
Sierra Leone's Ebola response, for all its severe resource constraints, achieved relatively high askability. Communities could not only comply with or resist interventions; they could actively participate in modifying and adapting them based on their own immediate experiences of illness, death, and survival. This recursive capacity for questioning enabled the response to evolve through ongoing negotiation between international health workers, government officials, traditional healers, and affected families. The modifications that resulted from this negotiation were not compromises that weakened the response but adaptations that made it liveable and therefore sustainable. Governance systems with high askability tend to be more adaptive and more durable precisely because they bring diverse forms of experience into their own recursive scope. Policy structures with low askability become rigid and brittle, unable to learn from experience or adapt to unexpected developments, and their rigidity eventually becomes a public health problem in itself.
The analytical yield of askability as a concept is that it moves analysis beyond the binary of resistance and compliance, and beyond the related binary of expert knowledge and lay belief. Rather than asking whether communities accept or reject expert interventions, the question becomes what conditions enable or block legitimate questioning by everyone concerned. What kinds of questions can be asked? Through what channels can these questions be raised and addressed? How do governance systems distinguish between acceptable questioning that enriches the response and resistance that undermines it? These are empirical questions with practical implications, and they open onto the design of governance systems rather than simply the critique of their failures.
Mediational Integration: Beyond the Nature/Culture Binary
Anthropological theory has long been haunted by a nature/culture binary that treats microscopic physiological processes and macroscopic sociocultural meanings as separate domains requiring translation or coordination. Numerous attempts have been made to overcome this binary, through biosocialities, local biologies, naturecultures, and related framings, but each of these attempts tends to reinscribe the very opposition it seeks to dissolve by treating the two domains as genuinely distinct things that must be brought into relation. The binary obscures how pandemic governance actually works and prevents more effective analytical and practical intervention.
Pandemic governance is better understood as a fundamentally mediational enterprise, as a process of valuing and remediating that attempts to align five major mediations so that life under pandemic conditions remains liveable. These five mediations are not separate domains but co-present dimensions of any lived situation, each of which recursively shapes and is shaped by the others. Embodiment encompasses what bodies can feel, sense, and endure under pandemic conditions: the fatigue of extended isolation, the breath-shortening of viral infection, the somatic experience of being told that familiar spaces are now dangerous. Being-with defines the roles, relationships, and forms of trust that sustain communities during crises, the networks of obligation and care that determine who can ask whom for help and who will provide it. Dwelling encompasses the small and large spatial distances, rhythms, and temporal patterns through which governance is experienced, the way that a hospital repurposed as a quarantine facility carries different meanings for bodies that have different relations to medical spaces. Multimateriality includes the tools, pharmaceuticals, supplies, and built infrastructures through which interventions become tangible, the difference between a policy and a mask, between a guideline and a testing kit. Multisymbolism encompasses the words, numbers, graphs, and ritualizations through which governance becomes graspable, the ways in which an R-number or a color-coded health code transforms invisible processes into actionable categories.
Together, these five mediations make up the mesocosm, the middle world where human perception, embodiment, dwelling, materiality, and symbolism recursively mediate each other. The mesocosm is not a scale between the micro and the macro in any simple spatial sense. Rather, it is the domain in which life is actually possible, in which processes that are in themselves either too small or too large to be lived are scaled into forms that can be felt, named, acted upon, and questioned. Everything that is really real is in the mesocosm, not in the sense that microscopic viruses or macroscopic institutions do not exist, but in the sense that they only become actionable through processes of mesocosmic rescaling. Much of the work of pandemic disease experts, whether biomedical or anthropological, is to bring agents and forces that exist outside the mesocosm into it. Microscopic viruses, invisible to the eye and confusing even after they produce felt symptoms, need to be brought into the mesocosm to become something that can be responded to. The virus that is the object of virology and the virus that is the object of lived experience are not the same entity, not because one is real and the other is a social construction, but because they have been scaled into the mesocosm through different mediational processes, each of which selects and transforms what can be known and done. Macroscopic patterns, like the World Health Organization or Chinese kinship traditions, also need to be scaled down so that they make sense in the mesocosm of particular communities facing particular outbreaks. Both rescalings are real operations with real consequences, and neither can be dispensed with in favor of the other.
China's early success with Fangcang hospitals demonstrated what effective mediational integration looks like in practice. Clear bodily routines for monitoring created coherent embodied experience; visible roles and surge capacity through healthcare worker redeployment gave the being-with dimension of pandemic life a recognizable shape; appropriate spatial conversions with organized flows transformed existing buildings into liveable quarantine environments; reliable testing logistics and supply chains sustained the material dimension of response; and coherent messaging that matched operational reality kept the symbolic dimension aligned with what people were actually experiencing in their bodies and relationships. Later failures occurred when symbolic elements, health codes and official announcements, raced ahead while embodied, relational, and spatial elements lagged. The symbol promised a liveable world that the other four mediations were not actually producing, and the gap between symbolic claim and lived experience became the site at which trust collapsed.
Sierra Leone's response achieved different moments of mediational integration. Traditional burial practices were modified to reduce transmission risk while preserving the spiritual and relational significance that made them necessary, a modification that worked precisely because it did not treat the symbolic dimension as mere belief to be corrected but as a real mediational force that had to be worked with. Kinship networks reorganized to provide support for quarantined households, demonstrating that the being-with dimension of pandemic governance was being shaped by existing relational structures rather than overriding them. Community health workers translated between policy and local idioms in ways that kept the symbolic dimension of governance connected to the embodied and relational experiences it was trying to address. Mediational integration of this kind cannot be achieved through better communication or culturally appropriate implementation alone, because these framings still assume that what needs to be done is essentially given and only its presentation is in question. Mediational integration requires a different understanding of how governance interventions need to be inserted within unfolding remediation processes, which means attending to all five dimensions simultaneously rather than treating some as the real substance of response and others as the cultural wrapping.
Duration Discipline: Governing Endings
One of the most important innovations available for pandemic governance is also among the simplest to state: every extraordinary measure should include an explicit expiry date and a renewal test. If the test is not met by the date, the measure should lapse automatically. This single design principle, which might be called duration discipline, would prevent the temporal failures that turned China's initial success into prolonged suffering and could make future responses more targeted and proportionate across the full arc of a pandemic's social life.
The eventual failure of China's zero-COVID policy demonstrates the pattern with unusual clarity. Measures that were effective and proportionate in 2020 became counterproductive by 2022 but persisted because they had become emblems of the state's pandemic competence rather than responsive epidemiological tools. The institutional clock had become decoupled from all three other temporal registers: viral spread no longer warranted the measures in place, mutation had rendered them poorly fitted to the circulating variant, and the people-response clock was registering compliance fatigue that had long since passed the threshold of sustainability. Policy lost its recursive capacity to learn and adapt as reviews became ceremonial and duration became indefinite. The measures could not end because their ending would have required acknowledging that the criteria for their continuation were no longer being met, which in turn would have required that such criteria had been made explicit in the first place.
Duration discipline requires what might be called temporal governance: explicit attention to the rhythms and cadences through which measures begin, continue, and end. This includes clear service-level agreements of the kind that specify how long an ambulance should take to reach a home, with published performance against agreed goals and automatic escalation when projections cannot be kept. It includes renewal tests that become more stringent over time, preventing the institutional drift that turns temporary emergency measures into permanent fixtures of governance. It includes weekly review cycles with genuine authority to stop, shrink, or reverse rules, and such cycles should be understood not as bureaucratic formalism but as safeguards against the transformation of emergency into habit. The decline in public trust in public health expertise that followed COVID-19 has often been attributed to irrationality, political manipulation, or conspiracy thinking. These explanations are not entirely wrong but they are insufficient. A substantial portion of that trust declined because people experienced, in their bodies and relationships and everyday spatial practices, the decoupling of stated rationales from actual measures, and they had no channel through which to raise legitimate questions about that decoupling. Duration discipline is partly an epidemiological tool and partly a mechanism for maintaining askability over the long temporal arc of an extended response.
The insight that even sensible measures go wrong when they outlast their moment also helps to clarify what is analytically interesting about the concept of spectacle in pandemic governance. Spectacle arises not simply from cynicism or performativity but from the institutional pressures that accumulate when measures persist without renewal tests: the longer a measure has been in place, the more it becomes a symbol of institutional seriousness, and the more its continuation serves symbolic rather than epidemiological purposes. When pandemic interventions begin to look like staged performances, the relevant question is not whether they are real or fictional but what conditions generated the pressure to continue them beyond their utility. A performance that does not know when to end is one that has lost its internal criteria for success, and pandemic governance that lacks duration discipline faces exactly this structural predicament. For anthropologists studying the next pandemic, duration provides a crucial analytical lens: how do different kinds of people experience extended measures, what happens to compliance and trust as duration stretches beyond its initial rationale, and how do different mediational configurations shape the acceptable length of extraordinary governance?
Domestic Mediations: The Household as Governance Space
Every pandemic response depends on enormous amounts of unpaid and unrecognized household labor: caring for sick family members, queueing for tests and supplies, losing wages during isolation orders, providing translation and navigation help for vulnerable relatives, managing the emotional and relational consequences of prolonged restriction. Most governance plans assume this labor will be done automatically and indefinitely. The assumption is empirically wrong and creates predictable failures that are concentrated among the populations least equipped to absorb additional burdens.
The household is not simply the site at which individuals receive or resist governance interventions. The household is the primary arena in which the five mediations are coordinated under pandemic conditions, and this coordination work falls differently on different household members depending on existing distributions of care, income, mobility, and symbolic authority. When a quarantine order is issued, someone must procure and prepare food for the duration. When a sick family member requires monitoring, someone must provide that care while managing their own exposure. When bureaucratic navigation is required to access services or exemptions, someone must acquire the knowledge and spend the time that navigation requires. The distribution of these burdens within households, and the distribution across households in different class and gender positions, is a primary site of pandemic inequality that most governance frameworks treat as incidental rather than structural.
China's early response included substantial household supports through community committees and volunteer networks, a dimension of the response that received less international attention than the surveillance and enforcement mechanisms but was arguably more important to its initial success. As measures extended and resources strained, these supports eroded while compliance demands remained unchanged. What emerged was a one-sided version of pandemic citizenship in which the obligations of compliance were sustained while the reciprocal protections that make such obligations legitimate were withdrawn. This asymmetry contributed substantially to the eventual collapse of public cooperation. Sierra Leone's response largely ignored household realities from the outset. Families were expected to call for burials but burial teams took two days to arrive. Households were told to isolate sick members but received neither guidance nor supplies nor support for safe home care. Communities developed their own practices in response to this abandonment, practices that officials subsequently blamed for transmission without acknowledging that they were adaptations to governance failures.
Every pandemic measure changes the distribution of time, risk, and cost within and across households, usually in ways that planning documents do not acknowledge and that institutional monitoring systems do not measure. The best responses treat household labor as a genuine resource that must be supported rather than a free input that can be indefinitely assumed. This means budgeting explicitly for household time and burden: food and cash delivered before isolation orders rather than promised afterward, mobile services where transport costs exclude the poor, paid leave for caregivers, childcare support during isolation periods, and clear channels through which households can report when the burdens imposed are unsustainable. For anthropological research, household labor is both an empirical object and an analytical entry point. Documenting who queues for tests, who provides care during isolation, who loses wages when family members are sick, and who navigates bureaucratic systems for elderly or disabled relatives is not merely descriptive but illuminates the actual social infrastructure on which pandemic governance depends. Without that infrastructure, no governance system functions as designed.
Spectacle and Mesocosmic Visibility
The pressure to look decisive during emergencies is real, institutional, and impossible to eliminate, but it can be channeled more productively than governance systems typically manage. Pandemic policies need to develop what might be called spectacle immunity, a capacity to recognize when visible operations are crowding out less photogenic but more essential work, and to redirect attention and resources accordingly. This requires moving beyond a simple critique of spectacle as empty performance, because that framing reinstalls the binary of genuine and staged, real and theatrical, in ways that prevent understanding why governance systems make particular visibility choices.
Spectacle arises from genuine institutional pressures. The need to demonstrate competence, maintain public cooperation, sustain political support, and signal to international audiences all push toward visible, dramatic operations that can be represented and communicated. The question is whether these operations are paired with the less visible work that makes them effective. Sierra Leone's Ebola response shows the spectacle trap clearly: military operations were organized quickly because they demonstrated resolve and attracted media attention, while the mundane work of organizing reliable burial teams received less attention and resources. The result was a response that appeared decisive in exactly those dimensions visible to distant observers but felt disconnected and unreliable to those who needed care. China's response shows how spectacle can initially align with substance, as mass testing campaigns were both symbolic displays and genuine epidemiological operations, but become divorced over time as measures persist past their effectiveness while maintaining their symbolic importance as markers of state seriousness.
Spectacle immunity requires three interconnected practices. Capacity pairing means that no visible operation is mounted without its care component being already in place: announcing that burial teams will be deployed quickly only when teams are actually available and resourced to respond. Temporal bounding means that all operations, including those with high symbolic valence, have clear start and end conditions rather than persisting as long as institutional inertia sustains them. Competence display means deliberately redirecting public and media attention from dramatic gestures toward boring reliability, toward the performance metrics that track whether call-to-arrival times, test-to-result sequences, and complaint resolution cycles are meeting agreed standards. Boring reliability is harder to represent and generates fewer memorable images, but it is the dimension of pandemic response that most directly shapes the experience of those the response is trying to protect, and therefore the dimension on which trust ultimately depends. If spectacle is understood not as the opposite of substance but as a necessary form of multimediation, it becomes analytically productive rather than simply a target for critique. The question becomes how symbolic visibility can be organized so that it draws attention to the competences that matter rather than away from them.
Research Priorities for an Anthropological Mesocosmology of Pandemics
These insights, taken together, suggest a reorientation of anthropological pandemic research toward the mesocosm as its primary object. The conceptual tools of mesocosmology, the five mediations, temporal coordination, askability, duration discipline, and the analysis of household labor and spectacle pressure, can be operationalized as empirical research practices rather than remaining at the level of abstract framework.
Documenting temporal coordination means tracking how different timelines align or misalign in specific contexts. How do communities experience the gap between policy announcements and implementation? What happens when institutional response speeds exceed community adaptation capacity? What forms of knowledge and suffering accumulate in the spaces between temporal registers? These questions require ethnographic methods capable of extended presence in the field and analytical frameworks sensitive to processes that unfold at different speeds.
Mapping askability means examining the conditions that enable or disable legitimate questioning in specific governance contexts. What kinds of questions can communities ask about pandemic measures? Through what channels can these questions be raised and addressed in ways that actually reach decision-makers? How do governance systems in practice distinguish between acceptable questioning and dangerous resistance, and what are the consequences of that distinction for the populations on whom it falls? These questions open directly onto the design of governance institutions, and anthropological findings bearing on them have practical implications that extend well beyond academic debate.
Tracking mediational misalignments means following changes in one domain of experience to understand how they affect others. How do spatial restrictions reshape social relationships? How do material shortages influence symbolic meaning-making? How does the symbolic framing of a measure shape the embodied experience of complying with it? This kind of tracking requires attention to all five mediations simultaneously and an analytical commitment to their mutual constitution rather than their separate determination.
Documenting domestic labor means mapping the actual unpaid work that makes pandemic governance possible, identifying who provides care, bears risk, loses income, and navigates bureaucracy, and what supports would make compliance sustainable rather than extractive. This documentation is also an intervention in the planning processes that systematically ignore household labor as a resource requiring replenishment, and anthropologists who produce it have something concrete to contribute to the preparedness conversations they have too often addressed only from the outside.
Beyond Critique
The next pandemic will, again, test the capacity to coordinate complex temporalities under pressure while preserving the cooperation that makes coordination possible. The framework outlined here offers anthropologists tools for moving beyond traditional roles as critics or cultural consultants toward more direct engagement with pandemic preparedness, not by abandoning the analytical distance that criticism requires but by recognizing that the binary between theory and practice, closeness and distance, is itself one of the misleading oppositions that mesocosmological analysis helps to dissolve.
Anthropological insights about temporal coordination, askability, mediational integration, duration discipline, and household reality could inform the design of governance systems that are both epidemiologically effective and socially sustainable. Realizing this potential requires anthropologists to engage more directly with the challenges of creating responsive governance under conditions of radical uncertainty, which means accepting that some findings will be used in ways that are imperfect, that knowledge generated in one context will be adapted to others in ways that inevitably introduce distortions, and that the alternative to this imperfect engagement is a purism that purchases theoretical clarity at the cost of practical irrelevance.
The stakes are not merely academic. Emergency governance that lacks accountability for duration, competence, and household impact erodes the social foundations that make collective action possible in the first place. The framework presented here offers a path toward emergency governance that strengthens rather than weakens social resilience, preparing not only for the next pandemic but for the many forms of collective challenge that will require coordinated response in an uncertain future.
The transformation begins with a shift in language. The terms in which both policymakers and social scientists currently discuss pandemic response are deeply shaped by the very binaries that mesocosmological analysis identifies as misleading. The spatial metaphors of scaling up and working on the ground, the temporal metaphors of rapid response and long-term planning, the social metaphors of community engagement and expert guidance: all of these carry within them the assumption that governance operates by moving across the distinctions between micro and macro, fast and slow, inside and outside, expert and lay. A mesocosmological framework proposes that governance operates, when it works, by rescaling diverse processes into the liveable middle world where bodies feel, relationships bind, spaces become familiar, materials accumulate, and symbols make sense. Pandemic governance does not scale anything up or down; it scales processes into the mesocosm, or it fails.
The anthropology of the next pandemic must focus on mesocosmology: on tracing how bodies, households, institutions, and symbols are recursively held together in the mesocosm and how that holding-together is disrupted and remade under conditions of extreme pressure. Pandemics do not rupture nature or culture separately. They disrupt the recursive middle world where human life is possible. The analytical and practical task is to illuminate how that world can be remade under pressure, and to do so in ways that strengthen rather than merely describe the recursive capacity of those who must remake it.
An earlier, abridged version of this article was published in American Ethnologist in 2025 (https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.70028)