Agnieszka Chwieduk

In the paper the socially significant issue of the relationship between the course of the COVID-19 pandemic and the discourses about the disease was addressed, their infl uence on social attitudes towards pandemic and how in the spoken debates the patocenotic thinking (Mirko Grmek paradigm on relation between pathogens and pandemics and other dependencies e.g. social, economic, cultural) is presented. The analysis covered three main fields of discourses: 1) scientific-expert (reports of Polish Academy of Sciences, articles of polish medical society), 2) patient-expert (medical advice portals), 3) bottom-up and non-expert discourses (social media). The determinations were made on the errors in both public communication and expert discourse, functioning of technicized and medialized medical advice portals, emotional dimension of discourses in social media, as well as polarization of all those fields.

The postulate of openness to Others is practiced both by anthropologists and active volunteers. In the case of the former, it is a condition for the acquisition of knowledge on the diversity of ways of life in the world and undertaking actions in the activist paradigm, while with reference to the latter, it is not only tantamount to assistance, but also the basic premise behind their actions. This common ethical perspective turned out to inspire reflections on how the anthropological knowledge can be useful for volunteer activity, which by the way is often understood in practice as ‘helping others out of one’s own accord’. As a result, in 2021/22 the didactic project An Anthropologist – an Expert in Voluntary Activity. Improving Communication Competencies in the Situation of Intercultural Contact was developed in the Department of Anthropology and Ethnology, Adam Mickiewicz University.

For immigrants, a disruption of their migration biography as a result of detention, waiting to be granted the status of a refugee/asylum seeker, is tantamount to being in a state of suspension. Relevant literature often metaphorically refers to this situation as a state of ‘limbo’. In my article, I refer it to the institutional dimension of the total reality of the Guarded Centres for Foreigners (GCFs), calling it an ‘external limbo’ in which the individual is reduced to the rules of the controlling system. This situation evokes a state of alienation in the subject (immigrant in the role of a subordinate), who is strictly dependant on the officers (personnel) supervising their functioning. In effect, such conditions lead to different adaptation attitudes of the people detained in the GCFs, but above all, they do not promote their mental well-being. I call this last dimension of one’s stay at the GCF an ‘internal limbo’.

My reflections are concentrated on an analysis of official documents describing events concerning a young Woman detained in one of the six GCFs in Poland. I treat this material as an exploratoryexplanative case study on the topic of the attitude of detention institutions to persons ‘in a mental/ emotional crisis’ and I ask about the ‘external limbo’ as understood in psychiatric anthropology, focusing on sociocultural conditions legitimising institutional use of disciplining practices in relation to the people the personnel of GCFs consider as ‘raising concern’. In my interpretation, I refer to the context of the functioning of the guarded centres as a total institution and the ‘economies of morality’ that are disclosed there. As a result, my goal is to indicate the characteristic manifestations of the ‘external limbo’, which may affect the condition of the ‘internal limbo’, and I progress towards reflection on the sense of detaining persons who pose no threat to their surroundings in the GCF, which is connected with an answer to the question concerning the manner of functioning of the guarded centres (in view of the welfare of all the people who stay there, not only immigrants).