Project description

The COVID-19 pandemic has recently shown how much even comparatively short experiences with diseases leave their mark on the behavioral patterns and culture of societies. It is assumed that the longer the threat lasts, the stronger the imprint seems to be - especially when it comes to endemic threats that persist for centuries and thus fundamentally influence the cultural and social practices of a society. These correlations are difficult to prove scientifically. It becomes even more difficult when the threat situation has ended and has largely disappeared from people's everyday lives and memories. This project aims to trace these legacies, which have hardly been scientifically proven to date, using a novel multi-perspective approach. Through an innovative combination of historical and social anthropological approaches and methods with approaches from transgenerational trauma research, completely new insights are to be gained into the connection between diseases and socio-cultural patterns of action in a society. Using the example of malaria in southern Italy, which plagued the country for centuries, claimed countless lives and made large areas barely habitable, the project will take an innovative approach to investigating the cultural and social legacy that the disease, which was defeated in the 1950s, has left behind to this day.