Last time, I wrote about the practice of “memorying,” and on one such excursion, I found the quote above, about nyāya, “the wintery tree.” It reminds me very much of the concept of abeyance1 in the social movement literature. This “…delineates a process in social movements that allows challenging groups to continue in nonreceptive political climates….” I think this describes well the process by which social movements may spring to life into a rapid mobilization. It is an idea to which I shall return in the overall scheme of things. But for now allow it to link once more the personal and the social, the project of the sociological imagination.
That is, I suppose, the point of the post, for there is another Instagram post that appeared in my memories that speaks even more directly to the overall project.
Have you seen how hard it is to vaccinate and boost every person in a community? Now imagine how hard it is to get them to eat well and exercise for their lifetime. Solutions must be accessible, not just educational in nature.
—Dr. Mauricio Gonzales Arias, Internal Medicine & Emergency Physician.
Further, in the same post, Nini Muñoz argues the following:
Encouraging vaccination doesn’t preclude support for other interventions or lifestyle habits that improve health….
Vaccines and better lifestyle habits are not mutually exclusive, they both constitute public health responses.
@niniandthebrain, January 12, 2021 (slide 4)
These statements are intended to undo the false dichotomy between wellness and vaccination. In this case, it is a response to the specific comment “I see you are ‘pro-vaccine’.” It could stand as a response to anyone who claimed that they didn’t need a vaccination because they are “healthy” or “have a strong immune system,” because of their wellness practices. This casts wellness practices also as a matter of public health. Given my encounters with scholars and students of public health at university, I’ve always sensed a deep affinity between sociology and that field. Indeed, Dr. Nirab Shah, former Maine CDC chief, and now Principal Deputy Director of the US CDC, argued that public health was a combination of biology and sociology. Like sociology, public health looks at people in aggregate. US hyperindividualism misses this.
Casting wellness as public health then, avoids the individualist trap into which I often argue my Conspirituality friends fall. As such, it also undoes the snarky dichotomy they frequently draw between wellness and liberatory politics.
It all returns to the question of abeyance. What happens when social movements demobilize? Joseph Gusfield articulated a view over forty years ago.2 While I shall explore this further in a future post, allow me to argue for now that there are continuities, or rather dialectics, where others propose unhelpful dichotomies. Here, instead of drawing a dichotomy between wellness and politics, we instead locate the disconnect of anti–vax conspiracism in individualism rather than wellness. Further, I will argue as I did in my earlier post that locating explanations for conspiracism in individual psychology does nothing to resolve the disconnect. Truly resolving the disconnect requires modes of mobilization towards which we have thus far made only halting steps.
- Taylor, Verta. 1989. “Social Movement Continuity: The Women’s Movement in Abeyance.” American Sociological Review 54 (5): 761–75. ↩︎
- Gusfield, Joseph R. 1981. “Social Movements and Social Change: Perspectives of Linearity and Fluidity.” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts & Change 4 (January): 317–39. ↩︎
Dance Like Fire 