Emotive Banners and Billboards: Worlding Covid-19 and Orders of Feeling in Kupang, Indonesia

Stodulka, Thomas

Abstract

This paper analyses the affective ramifications at the onset of the emerging Corona pandemic in Kupang, Indonesia. Steering towards now established social and political orders of public conduct outside one’s home and neighbourhood, public billboards and warning signs became early visible manifestations of worlding Covid-19 into the city’s infrastructure. Rapidly emerging governmental and entrepreneurial banners communicated new orders of personal and communal hygiene practices. They created messages of Covid-19 infectiology based on globalised public health rhetoric calling familiar socialities and ordinary feelings into question. This paper scrutinises the pandemic worlding of spaces and socialities and reflects on the relationship between newspaper reports, billboards and the feelings they evoked. The article proposes the concept of ‘orders of feelings’ as a valuable complement of ‘worlding’ theories via the analysis of banners, signs and newspaper articles as ‘emotives’. Ultimately, it contemplates anthropological knowledge production in a pandemic context that obstructed tradational ethnographic engagement.