Coronavirus: "Each epidemic reveals the stereotypes of an era"

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).

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VIDEO. Coronavirus in France: symptoms and prevention

Listening to you, we inevitably think of the front page of the Picard Courier "Yellow Alert" and the editorial of the newspaper titled "The Yellow Peril? (The editorial staff apologized the next day, note).

We are in a similar logic. This notion of "yellow peril" was used as early as the 19th century by Westerners and reflected the fear of their being surpassed by the Asian populations. The problem is that we forget our own customs a little too quickly, and the fact that we eat snails in France, for example. What shocks on the other side of the Channel, for example. It is necessary to distinguish the circuits of contamination and the stereotypes conveyed around each community.

You are studying in particular the repercussions of the Ebola virus in West Africa. Are the reflexes the same in this region?

Absolutely. In the international community, people living in forest areas have been pointed out: their supposed proximity to wild animals explains the emergence of a virus hitherto unknown in Guinea. Basically, the appearance of the virus is thought by observers as an indicator of "non-civilization". Inside Guinea, the stigma rested on different springs. On the spot, the Muslim majority of the country questioned the animist forest populations because they consumed monkey meat, which was then thought to be a reservoir of the virus. The psychosis around an epidemic is still making its bed of contemporary fears.

If there is collective psychosis, can it have political repercussions and lead to bad decisions?

Of course. There is this systematic desire to put countries in quarantine and to isolate them completely from their neighbors. This is what happened around Guinea with Ebola. But even the World Health Organization advises against doing so. Basically, it is not a question of ignoring the real risks of contamination, but of responding to them while taking care not to reinforce stereotypes.