Distrust, distrust, suspicion… Difficult to find the right term but since the appearance of the coronavirus in China, certain behaviors have questioned. “We have people who call us because they have met someone of Asian origin in the street who was blowing their nose,” deplores, for example, the French emergency doctor Patrick Pelloux.
For Frédéric Le Marcis, professor of anthropology at the ENS (École normale supérieure) in Lyon and director of research at the IRD (Research Institute for Development), the pattern only repeats itself: each epidemic has its goat emissary. From the black plague in the Middle Ages to Ebola today – his field of research -, he analyzes for Le Parisien the forces behind these unfounded amalgams.
With this new epidemic, the Chinese community, or more generally Asian, risks being stigmatized. Is it something you fear?
Frédéric Le Marcis. It is a risk and also, already, a reality. From an epidemiological and geographical point of view, there are amalgams to deconstruct: first, the province of Wuhan is not all of China. However, generalized speeches give the impression that all Chinese people are susceptible to transmitting the virus. This is totally false, both in terms of the distribution of the epidemic in China today and from the point of view of modes of transmission and prevention tools.
This type of fear is not new and the way in which epidemics have been perceived in history always reveals the stereotypes of an era through the scapegoating of scapegoats. Already during the epidemic of black plague (1347-1352), the Jews were accused of spreading evil and were massacred. At the onset of AIDS syndrome, the same process. We first targeted what we called “4 H”, that is to say Haitians, homosexuals, hemophiliacs and heroin addicts. With each epidemic, our contemporary fears resurface.
What are the fears linked to the coronavirus that appeared in China?
This objective fear of coronavirus infection inevitably questions Western stereotypes about Asia: fear of Chinese demography, the grip of sino-capitalism on the world economy, but also blacklisted in culinary practices or therapeutic. In the collective imagination, the economic threat is linked to the health threat. Animal markets and their diets are said to be essentially responsible for the spread of disease. We already had this type of fantasy around the H1N1 virus (2009-2010).
