Living with the new coronavirus : learning from pastoralists

Abstract

The COVID-19 crisis challenges the main pillars of our society: it affects mobility, sociality, relationships, and exchanges. It generates uncertainties we seem unable to bear and manage. Furthermore, it illustrates the artificiality of the dichotomies that normally structure our ideas of society: in the broader picture public and private interests coincide, individual and collective behaviours affect each other, different knowledge systems need negotiation, central and localised decision-making must align, and most strategies (should) rely on neighbourhood, intergenerational and transnational empathy, coordination and complicity.