The Truth of Politics. On the Epistemization of the Protests against the German Corona Policy
The diagnosis of an epistemization of the political, according to which political questions in Western democracies would increasingly be negotiated as questions of knowledge, is confirmed also in the debate about the state imposed measures to contain the spread of SARS-CoV-2. This tendency would suggest the possibility of objective decision-making through science and a lack of alternatives in political actions that obscured the values behind the decisions. Accordingly, proponents and opponents of the measures accuse each other of being guided by false knowledge, i.e., of being unscientific and thus incapable of participating in a reasonable discourse, which leads, on the one hand, to fragmented publics through excluding the other side from discourse and, on the other hand, to accusing the other side of strategically hiding their own political goals behind factual discussions and thus impeding or even obstructing democratic decision-making. Based on anthropological fieldwork among critics and supporters of the measures in Germany, this presentation attempts to reconstruct the epistemic and political practices as well as the mutual misrepresentations in this controversy, thereby suggesting at the same time a mediating role that anthropology can play in these and similar controversies.
Panel “The Politics of (Post-)Truth: Knowledge-Making in
Fragmented Worlds of Mis/Trust” at the conference “Contested Knowledge: Anthropological Perspectives” of the German Anthropological Association (DGSKA).