ELCS0091: Crisis 2020/21 UG Class Blog

The Masque of the Red Death is a novel published at the end of the 19th century, by Allan Poe.

The Red Death is the name given to the plague, it is personified through a guest who is going to make an appearance at a closed party. Prince Prospero and a thousand friends lock themselves up in an abbey in order to avoid contagion. They have all the leisure activities and supplies they need to survive. After six months, the prince organizes a masked ball. The ball took place in seven halls, each dedicated to a colour. The seventh hall is strange, even the dancers hesitate to enter. The described clock has a strange effect on those present: each ring makes them tremble and shiver. It was the prince himself who presided over the decoration of the halls. The last room is always unoccupied, this is due to its colours and the clock present there. At midnight, the clock, whose frightening sound provokes an anxious silence. This is the moment when the dancers notice the presence of a mask that horrifies them. All disapprove of the costume of the stranger who is dressed with a mask representing the Red Death. The prince asks for him to be seized, for his identity to be revealed so that he can be hanged. No one dares to approach him, so he passes by the prince and goes into the purple room without encountering the slightest obstacle. Prince Prospero then throws himself at the stranger, dagger in hand, and when he hits him he drops dead. The spectators of this sinister event throw themselves at the stranger and realise that there is no human form under the mask. They all die one after the other.

 

Edgar Allan Poe did not literally live through the plague and speaks here of a ‘red death’ which refers to the black plague. Even if he did not live it, he still describes important points that can be related to someone who has lived an pandemic.

 

The point that I would like to emphasize is how the anguish of the disease is presented in the form of an allegory. The plague is personified and enters the evening to infect all the guests. This terrifying personification describes the frightening but inevitable character of death and illness.The fact that death joins their party, despite the fact that the guests have confined themselves, shows the inevitability of death. Prince Propsero tried to escape death, but death is unavoidable.

The fact that death joins their party, despite the fact that the guests have confined themselves, shows the inevitability of death. Prince Propsero tried to escape death, but death is inevitable, it always comes back. Thus, this intrusion into the evening represents the arrival of disease and the ravages that the plague has had on entire populations, but also more generally the death that is catching up with the human condition.

Coming from a country where you hear horror stories about gay people being murdered by their domestic help or people within their own villages, you can imagine my limited contact with queer theory, queer art and the movement of resistance that came from generations of homophobia and hatred. Luckily, over the course of my degree in Comparative Literature, we came to study a striking film called Blue produced by Derek Jarman, which unveiled the complexities and immense struggle of an epidemic that was sitting right under my nose this whole time. Before touching upon the masterpiece that is Blue, I will delve into Philadelphia and 120 BPM, which are other works that grapple with HIV/AIDS.

Forget about Philadelphia.

Philadelphia, among other works that testify to the rampant homophobia that plagued (and still plagues) America, are integral to preserve because they give us proof of archaic attitudes towards homosexuality. And for me, that’s all Philadelphia ever really will be.

If you’re looking for a striking challenge to the Christian Anglo-American dogma that suggests that AIDS was a disease that came to plague homosexuals, something that subverts these homophobic attitudes altogether or a piece of art that exposes you to a glimpse of what it means to live with the obscenely painful disease, Philadelphia is not the film for you (Blue is). The film’s creators merely ‘ticked a box’ of political correctness and weren’t really invested in the cause; you’ll see this seep into elements of the film.

As Dr James Agar highlighted in his compelling criticism of the film, Philadelphia sub-textually re-enforces some of the attitudes that it seems to criticise, especially through these specific aspects of the film:

• By failing to display any instance of homosexuality, it reinforces the idea that gay people should remain covert and closeted.
• The ubiquitous images of babies reinforce the idea that homosexuals may not be able to have their own children and offer the promise of new generations that will not be homosexual and therefore will not contract HIV/AIDS.
• The final sequence, where Andrew Beckett is portrayed as a child holding a baseball mitt, is evocative of a very masculine American heterosexual archetype. Here, analepsis is used to scrutinise on a moment in time in which he was not homosexual and was considered an innocent, unworthy-of-the-disease, apple-pie-eating American (thanks for the inspo, Dr Agar). This characterisation of ‘innocence’ raises the binary opposite state for the grown-up Andy, who is culpable and tainted by his dark, ‘immoral’ sexual desires.

It becomes quite dangerous when subliminal messages are used to normalise prejudiced views, and this definitely isn’t a new phenomenon in the vein of HIV/AIDS-related media.

120 BPM

120 BPM, coming in nearly 3 decades after Philadelphia, does more for the movement than Philadelphia ever could and has won several accolades. Here are the points that struck me as the most pivotal:
• 120 BPM challenging heteronormativity by portraying homosexuality openly and graphically
• encapsulating the poignancy of losing a loved one to HIV/AIDS
• displaying the pain and heinous symptoms of the disease
• shedding light upon ACT UP Paris’ work and the radical action that the group has had to resort to in order to promote safe sex and pressurise the government to deal with the epidemic more seriously
• using its acoustics incredibly, from the loud whispers of the sequence where Nathan tells Sean about the boy he was once in love with, to the non-diegetic sounds that intensify the cheerleading sequence

My sole criticism would be the lack of intersectionality explored through the film in great depth, but this will be for other marginalised artists to show the world in the work that embodies their unique struggle.

Oh Blue, come forth.

Blue is a piece of ex-cinema, a film that orbits at the periphery, simultaneously being a part of but excluded from conventional cinema (Lippit, 2012). The only thing that you can observe visually in this film is a blue screen, an aesthetic choice that Jarman made to emulate his deteriorating sight, which was characterised by sporadic, blue flashes of light. This, along with the decay of the rest of his body, all stems from his contraction of HIV/AIDS.

By giving you little to focus on visually, Jarman takes you through an immersive journey using the striking power of sound, narrating the pain of the illness and taking you through instances where he contemplates the beauty of his life along with its melancholy. It can get quite dark when he creates a Dante-esque hell, wherein he envisions all of his ex-lovers perishing. A lot of the film is infused with a powerful sense of bereavement for all of the people that he lost to the disease and self-bereavement as he grapples with his own, imminent death.

In other instances, he creates a fictional entity called Blue who fights a strange antagonist called yellow belly (perhaps a manifestation of AIDS?). Mundane moments of the film, such as him drinking coffee, are punctuated by the fact that his coffee is served to him by refugees from the war raging in Bosnia. The narrator is deeply contemplative and a beautiful storyteller. Additionally, the voice of the principal narrator is just stunning. It’s this deep, masculine voice full of musical resonance with such eloquent intonations that you feel as if you wouldn’t need any other acousmatic sounds.

COVID-19 vs. AIDS – some xenophobia here, some homophobia there

It seems as if nations led by bigots will hop onto any opportunity to further marginalise their enemies, or frankly any threat to their power. Pandemics and epidemics are no exception to the trend. American advertisements called HIV/AIDS ‘gay cancer’ and created pseudo-medical advertisements to re-enforce the link between homosexuality and the virus, while Trump and other rightists called Covid-19 the ‘Chinavirus’ and Asians all across the globe became victims of hate crime. Although both instances seem like incredibly blatant cases of discrimination, some people might not see it. Or, they may be too afraid to challenge it because it’s widely accepted. Question, dismantle and counteract such rhetoric and beware of the more subtle embedding of prejudiced content – pseudo-academic accounts are often the most effective at spreading it because they create a veneer of reliability, like the image below:

 

VD vs. AIDS – recycling femme fatale narratives and spreading misogyny

During WWII, propaganda regarding venereal disease was used t o reduce promiscuity to prevent soldiers from contracting STIs. This came with vilification and abjection of the female body, somewhat like HIV/AIDS propaganda was used to vilify homosexuals and criticise sodomising. The parallelism between these two STIs raises the question of another central religious tenant – upholding one’s chastity, which pre-marital heterosexual and homosexual sex both violate. It seems as if this abused dogma surrounding chastity forks out in grotesque ways, resulting in immensely condemning narratives that bolster state agendas.

           

Blue-related films and readings:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo5BBifhS6M the whole film!!! Watch it before they take it off of YouTube! (Or watch it on BoB!)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jEer2d3nMg&t=584s the denouement of Blue: lost boys.
• https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/jarman-blue-t14555 background into the origin of the blue screen
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/90011646 some interesting secondary reading – some aspects of it however, especially with respect to the interpretation of the young boy, are highly problematic.

AIDS-related media from the 1980s:

• https://theconversation.com/aids-homophobic-and-moralistic-images-of-1980s-still-haunt-our-view-of-hiv-that-must-change-106580

Bibliography:

Lippit, A. M., 2012. EXCoo Exergue Ex-Cinema’. In: Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video. Berkeley: Berkeley: University of California Press.

Within the context of today’s post, translingualism means “operating between different languages” (Canagarajah, 2017).

‘Crisis’ – translations and etymologies from my mother tongues

In her highly intriguing podcast, Dr Staiger invites us to explore the Greek etymology of the prolifically-used English word ‘crisis’ and then takes us through an array of languages in which a similar term exists. The French, Spanish, Italian and German words share the same Greek etymological root but diverge in slightly in meaning as they separate, absorb and extrapolate different meanings, or fragments, of the same root. Dr Staiger also invites us to observe the distinct nuances of the Hebrew word for crisis and the distinctions that come into the term as a result of a unique etymology. This inspired me to share the meanings and etymologies of my own mother tongues Urdu and Turkish.

Urdu is currently the lingua franca of Pakistan, which is home to 74 languages (66 indigenous and 8 non-indigenous) (Tayyab, 2019). The country is split into 4 concrete provinces and debatably more when considering disputed territories that fall within the Pakistan’s borders. The Urdu language’s origins can be traced to Delhi in the 12th century (Atlas, 2021), when the subcontinent was divided into different regions, but when partitions and modern-state borders did not exist. Although it was based primarily on the Hindi language, it was significantly shaped by Arabic, Persian and Turkish. This blend of languages leads us to the contemporary term for crisis:

The Arabic influence is not only clear in terms of modern Urdu typography but also in the etymologies of words; British translator and lexicographer Edward Lane (19th C) suggested that the term بُحران (Bohran) comes from the archaic Arabic البَاحُور‎ (al bahur), which means “expanding” or “widening” to the point of the furthest extremities (Lane, 1863). One can envision such ‘extremities’ as binary opposite poles on the same spectrum or an endless abyss of one form of ‘crisis’, culminating in the form of an extreme position. Given the strong presence of Islam in the conception of Pakistan and the influences of Islam upon Arabic (Dr Staiger explores similar parallels with Christianity) the ‘Day of Judgement’, or the Christian ‘Last Judgement’, could introduce apocalyptic connotations to the term, especially when considering the culmination or utmost extreme point of crisis.

As for my other mother tongue, I’ve chosen to delve less into the history of the Turkish language, even though it is quite rich, primarily because the language has existed for 5500 – 8500 years and can immediately be affiliated with the modern state of Turkey (even though the language stretches far beyond its borders as a result of Ottoman colonial legacy and even periods prior to that). The term ‘Turkish’ invokes less confusion to the foreign ear compared to Urdu, whose name does not immediately link us back to its modern state, or at least in the English language. The Turkish word for crisis is ‘kriz’ and is borrowed from the French ‘crise’. When Turkey was decreed as secular and a modified version of the Latin alphabet was adopted by the nation in 1928 (All About Turkey, 2021) as a result of Atatürk’s reforms, several words from French and Italian were interwoven into Modern Turkish to linguistically echo Turkey’s new secular foundation. In Ottoman Turkish, the word بحران (buhran) was used, which is essentially the word that is used in Urdu today (Canagarajah, 2017).

Further Reading:

The history of the Turkish language: http://www.turkishculture.org/literature/language-124.htm#:~:text=Turkish%20is%20a%20very%20ancient,it%20possesses%20a%20rich%20vocabulary.

Bibliography

All About Turkey, 2021. Ataturk’s Reforms. [Online]

Available at: https://www.allaboutturkey.com/ataturk-reforms.html
[Accessed 2021].

Atlas, 2021. Urdu Language – history and development. [Online]
Available at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/atlas/urdu/language.html#:~:text=Urdu%20started%20developing%20in%20north,Persian%2C%20as%20well%20as%20Turkish.&text=During%20the%2014th%20and%2015th,to%20be%20written%20in%20Urdu.
[Accessed 2021].

Canagarajah, S., 2017. Translingual Practice as Spatial Repertoires: Expanding the Paradigm beyond Structuralist Orientations. [Online]
Available at: https://academic.oup.com/applij/article/39/1/31/4626948
[Accessed 2021].

Lane, E. W., 1863. Arabic-English Lexicon. [Online]
Available at: https://archive.org/details/ArabicEnglishLexicon.CopiousEasternSources.EnlargedSuppl.Kamoos.Lane.Poole.1863/01.ArabicEnglLex.v1p1.let.1.2.3.4..Alif.Ba.Ta.Tha..Lane.1863./page/n192/mode/1up?view=theater
[Accessed 2021].

Tayyab, A., 2019. How Many Languages Are Spoken in Pakistan. [Online]
Available at: https://www.samaa.tv/culture/2019/02/how-many-languages-are-spoken-in-pakistan/
[Accessed 2021].

 

Not So Fun Facts About ‘The Plague’ Today

1. It’s still rampant in Madagascar

The country regularly faces outbreaks, and its most notable outbreak wasn’t too long ago (2017). 2,348 people were infected and 202 were killed. Carriers of the pathogen occasionally misconstrue symptoms of the plague with those of malaria (a disease which is not contagious by human transmission) and therefore do not isolate, which leads to the propagation of the disease (Chodosh, 2018).

2. The bacteria that caused the plague (Yersinia pestis) was nearly used as a biochemical weapon during the Cold War.

Both the USA and USSR contemplated using Y. pestis as a part of bioterrorism. The Soviet Union gathered enough research to determine that 50 kg of the aerosolized pathogen could begin an epidemic that would infect 150,000 people within a city of 5 million inhabitants (Ibid, 2018).

3. Dung and urine prescribed remedies in the Middle Ages

This is one of the many experimental treatments that doctors resorted to when they were unable to identify a remedy that would actually work. Some doctors believed that unpleasant smells could drive the plague away, which is why they resorted to using human faeces and unpleasant excretion products (Facts Chief, 2015).

However, this is incongruous with other anecdotal evidence from the era. Impure air, tainted by the scent of rotting corpses, fruit and vegetables, as thought to induce poor health and subsequently produce maladies. What we now call aromatherapy was used to treat patients of the plague (M. L. Duran Reynals, 1949, p. 75).

Miscellaneous Snippets of History

Etymology of ‘Pestilence’

The Black Death was referred to as the Pestilence or the Great Mortality (Facts Chief, 2015). During the Middge Ages, the term was defined as: “a time of tempest” induced by the “light from the stars’. Pes (the first syllable) was derived from tempesta, te (second syllable) from temps (time) and lencia (third syllable) from lencia from the Greek lencos (which translated to brightness or light) (M. L. Duran Reynals, 1949, p. 63).

Unique Symptoms

A few anomalous symptoms, dictated by region, as a result of the plague among other maladies:
• Kingdom of Valencia – anthrax (AKA “the vulgar tongue of Catalonia”)
• Germany – abscesses
• Sabartes – goitre (swelling of the neck resulting from an enlarged thyroid gland, typically caused by iodine deficiency)
• Lombardy – women giving birth to monkeys
• France – deformed female babies (Ibid., 1949, p. 63)

The Four Humours and Medieval Alchemy

The word humour stems from the Latin humor (moisture), which is why blood, phlegm, yellow bile (or “choler”) and black bile (called “melancholy”) were referred to as the Four Humours. According to medieval alchemy, an individual’s personality traits, health and complexion were dictated by the balance of these four liquids within them and every individual on earth possessed the Four Humours. The ideal or ‘balanced’ human being had an equilibrium of the four substances. An excess of one or more of the four humours was considered the source of illness and diagnosticians performed treatments to reinstate balance. (Miller, 2014) Drawing upon Carol Symes’ criticism of the way that readers dismiss Medieval practitioners as ignorant or primitive, an important part of decrypting literature, medical archives, art or any remnant of history is to attempt to remain neutral and to stray from one’s contemporary lens to allow oneself to live vicariously through the voices of the deceased that live within the extracts we analyse. (Symes, 2014)

When in Doubt… Become Pious

Within a Medieval context, for the religious, a plague or natural disaster would have been attributed to mankind displeasing God. The Bianchi, among other Christians, did not wallow in self-loathing or feel disabled by the omens – instead, they demonstrated proactivity and began repenting and worshiping zealously, partaking in processions, antiphonal singing, self-flagellation and emulating Christ (Imitatio Christi). (Jansen, 2018) Amidst crises, it is intriguing to observe the way in which mankind finds autonomy and tries to remain in charge of the catastrophe in which it is placed.

Bibliography

Chodosh, S., 2018. Five things you might not know about the plague (not including the fact that it still exists). [Online]
Available at: https://www.popsci.com/bubonic-plague-black-death-modern-facts/
[Accessed 2021].

Facts Chief, 2015. Black Death Facts. [Online]
Available at: https://facts.net/history/historical-events/black-death-facts
[Accessed 2021].

Jansen, K. L., 2018. Preaching, Penance, and Peacemaking in the Age of the Commune. In: Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

M. L. Duran Reynals, C. E. A. W., 1949. Regiment de Preserv Acio a Epidimia o Pestilencia e Mortaldats. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Volume 23, pp. 57-89.

Miller, M. J., 2014. The Four Humors and the Integrated Universe: A Medieval World View. [Online]
Available at: https://owlcation.com/humanities/The-Four-Humors#:~:text=As%20mentioned%20above%2C%20these%20four,the%20attributes%20of%20these%20humors.
[Accessed 2021].

Symes, C., 2014. Introducing The Medieval Globe. The Medieval Globe, Volume 1.

 

Economic failure

As the letters of London merchant John Paige (1648-58) pointed out, pathogens transmitted themselves through international trade, which caused epidemics to gradually spread across the globe. (Paige, 1984) As a result of this, in addition to the disruption in supply chain labour as more and more people contracted the disease, trade would come to a standstill, leading to a surge in commodity prices. The sharp rise in specific commodities today, from precious metals to fertilizers (World Bank Group, 2020), and the detrimental impact upon citizens of countries that are heavily dependent on imports, highlights our failure to reshape the global economy to stay afloat in the midst of crises. For developing nations like my home country Pakistan, state debt and our excessive reliance on imports doomed the poorest civilians of our nations and pummelled our currency substantially. With the deprecation of the rupee, it has become obscenely more difficult for more people to keep up with price inflations and meet regular payments.

Anacardina Espiritual – history really does repeat itself

‘Sad laments’ and ‘cries of pain’ ensued after the prices of loaves of bread rose to unbearable feats (Serrano de Vargas y Ureña, 1650). All pandemics are marked by the exacerbation of pre-existing socio-economic disparity, as we’ve seen through our encounters with Medieval English and Spanish literature, as well as contemporary sources.

While the death of ‘notable people’ (Serrano de Vargas y Ureña, 1650) made the contagion seem more tangible in Málaga in the 1600s, we observed the same phenomenon in the 21^st century when figures like veteran actor Tom Hanks or North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un contracted Covid-19.

What do HIV/AIDS, the plague and Covid-19 all have in common?

They’re all zoonoses (a term we’re all familiar with now because we’ve all become epidemiology experts during this pandemic).

The plague: rodent/flea –> human

Influenza: pig à human –> bird à human

HIV/AIDS: chimpanzees –> human

Covid-19: bat à pangolin à human

A deeper explanation of zoonoses and how atrocious farming practices, like cramping animals into tiny cages where they can expel urine and faeces on top of one another, can really mess things up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPpoJGYlW54

But what even is a pangolin?

A scaly ant eater.

Bibliography

Paige, J., 1984. The Letters of John Paige – Letters: 1649. [Online]
Available at: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/london-record-soc/vol21/pp1-8
[Accessed 2021].

Serrano de Vargas y Ureña, J., 1650. Espiritual, Anacardina. [Online]
Available at: https://moodle.ucl.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/3799508/mod_resource/content/2/Anacardina%20translation%20and%20transcription.pdf
[Accessed 2021].

World Bank Group, 2020. Commodity Markets Outlook. [Online]
Available at: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/34621/CMO-October-2020.pdf
[Accessed February 2021].

 

AIDS is one of the most deadly infectious diseases. 1 million people will have died of AIDS in 2016 worldwide (up from 2 million in 2005), and 76.1 million since the beginning of the epidemic. ( FRM, 2019). AIDS was officially diagnosed in 1981 at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where American researchers published the first significant findings about the disease. The virus was first diagnosed in 5 homosexual men, but it spread rapidly between continents and scientists soon realised that heterosexuals were equally susceptible to the disease. The first name of the disease was Grids (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) and in 1983 the name Aids appeared: Acquired Immunodeficiency Virus.

It was not until six years later, in 1987, that the world health organization (WHO) established a program on aids. It aimed to raised awareness about the pandemic; formulated evidence-based policies; provided technical and financial support to countries which they did mainly in Uganda and Thailand; initiated relevant social, behavioral, and biomedical research; promoted participation by non-governmental organizations; and championed the rights of those living with HIV. (Merson, 2006). This need to raise awareness and for governments to take action is well expressed in the French movie 120BPM from Robin Campillo released in 2017 retracing the life of an AIDS activist.

In the mid-2000s, the global response accelerated rapidly with universal access to treatment becoming a major priority. Despite its achievements, the Global Programme to Fight AIDS has not mobilise enough the political will around the world. Therefore in 1996, the program was replaced by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), which is now sponsored by 10 UN agencies.

As we can see in the graph, there has been an important increase of the virus between 1980 and 2005. 2005 was a peak for the virus, new diagnoses have now been declining since then.

There were approximately 38 million people across the globe with HIV/AIDS in 2019 and approximately 81% of people with HIV globally knew their HIV status in 2019. (HIV gov, 2020)

Nevertheless, the UNAIDS program has in 2016 announced its plan to put more priority on the disease. They aim to have been able to end AIDS by 2030. These include a goal that by 2025 more than 90% of countries will have decriminalised sex work, possession of small amounts of drugs, and same-sex sexual behaviour. (The Guardian, 2020)

Comparing the policy response in the 1980s with that of today can give us much food for thought on global crisis management. Coronavirus was officially named as a global pandemic two months after its detection in China, researchers from all over the world came together to create a vaccine in about ten months, and the media have talked about this for a year now. Indeed, science is more developed today than it was in 1980 but it prompts a reflection on how politicians have been able to make this a non-priority for such a dangerous virus, while a less-lethal virus has taken on an unimaginable and unprecedented scale in the last year.

According to UNaids, the whole focus of covid 19 is to limit the creation and spread of drugs for people infected with AIDS, which could have serious consequences for the sick: has estimated that a six-month complete disruption in HIV treatment could lead to more than 500,000 additional deaths from AIDS-related illnesses.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

the Guardian. 2020. This World Aids Day the global response to HIV stands on a precipice | Winnie Byanyima and Matthew Kavanagh. [online] Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/dec/01/this-world-aids-day-the-global-response-to-hiv-stands-on-a-precipice>

Merson, M., 2006. The HIV–AIDS Pandemic at 25 — The Global Response | NEJM. [online] New England Journal of Medicine. Available at: <https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp068074>

Tht.org.uk. 2020. HIV statistics | Terrence Higgins Trust. [online] Available at: <https://www.tht.org.uk/hiv-and-sexual-health/about-hiv/hiv-statistics>

Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale (FRM). 2020. Tout savoir sur le sida. [online] Available at: <https://www.frm.org/recherches-maladies-infectieuses/sida/focus-sida>

A crisis can be defined as a situation involving fundamental threat. However, the concept of crisis can associate with vast degrees of semantic significance according to the distinctive language and discipline context.

Reinhart Koselleck suggests the concept of crisis ‘remains as multi-layered and ambiguous'(1). Koselleck further proposed three primary conceptions of crisis approaching from different disciplines. Crisis in the medical sense emphasis the notion of it as a turning point. This is supported by various medical terms, such as hypertensive crisis, aplastic crisis, identity crisis, etc., where each represents an established change of situation in the human body. Concurrently crisis in economics refers to both acute destructions and ongoing breakdowns of a certain system. Examples of such representations of crisis are evident in the descriptions of the 2008 financial crisis and the ongoing economic crisis due to the impact of Covid 19, which demonstrates an established and an ongoing breakdown of various economical systems worldwide (2). Lastly, from a theology standpoint crises are concerned with eschatological significance and present the conception of permanent transfiguration. Because of the eschatological significance in theology crisis, the concept of theology crisis often aligns itself with the representation within religions. A crisis arises in the bible whenever a man is confronted by God (3) with possible judgment to be made. The Last Judgement from the bible is an example of theology as it correlated with the world or eternity of life after death, where the permanent transfiguration is presenting fundamental aspects of an eschatological concept (4).

Another way to look at the ambiguous characteristics of the concept of crisis is through comparisons of the definitions of crisis in different languages. For example, in classical Greek, krino which is the foundation of the word krisis or  crisis in classical Greek refers to the idea of the action of separation, judgment, or decision. The concept of crisis in Greek is highly used in politics and correlates with the notion of decision-making in the sense of reaching a verdict or reaching a crucial transition point. (5) While in Chinese, crisis or 危机（wei ji） takes into account two concepts. One is the concept of crisis as a situation where there is a hidden danger. The other refers to the concept of an important life-changing turning point. (6) While the first concept relies upon the first character of 危(Wei) which correlates deeply with the conception of danger and precarious(7), the second relates more to the second character 机(Ji)which correlates with the notion of chance, transition, or opportunity(8). On the other side, in Japanese 危機（kiki）, relates to the concept of ongoing risks, destructions that were unexpected and cannot be resolved by method from past experience (9). Although most kanji characters in Japanese are adapted from Chinese, sometimes the same combination of characters might create different concepts. In the case of the word crisis in Japanese, it differentiates from Chinese in the sense that it is highly correlated with the notion of 危機管理（crisis management）which was first used during the Great Hanshin Awaji Earthquake in 1995(10). Such correlation deeply relates to the current definition of crisis in Japanese as at the time the earthquake was still ongoing and the scale in addition to the urban location of the Great Hanshin Awaji Earthquake meant methods of encountering the earthquake from the past will be ineffective in the situation. So the concept of crisis in japan correlates with more the notion of uncertainty rather than opportunity or transition in comparison to the concept of crisis in other languages.

Although there might be defined characteristics of a crisis in the modern world today the concept of the crisis still remains ambiguous due to the different perceptions context and language it is used in.

References

(1) Runiciman,D (2016), “What Time Frame Makes Sense for Thinking about Crises?”, Critical Theories of Crisis in Europe pp3 – 16 https://moodle.ucl.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/3349471/mod_resource/content/1/critical_theories.pdf

(2)Sogani, A (2020), “The Great Lockdown vs The Great Depression and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis”, E- International Relations, https://www.e-ir.info/2020/07/02/the-great-lockdown-vs-the-great-depression-and-the-2008-global-financial-crisis/

(3) Fischer, P. (1964). “THEOLOGY OF CRISIS IN PERSPECTIVE”. The Centennial Review, 8(2), 216-227. Retrieved February 25, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/23737913

(4) KORNER, A; (2011) “The Experience of Time as Crisis. On Croce’s and Benjamin’s Concept of History.” Intellectual History Review , 21 (2) 151 – 169. Downloaded from UCL Discovery: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1321530

(5)Kosellect. R and Richter .M .R 2006, “Crisis,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol.67 No.2 pp357 -400, University of Pennsylvania Press https://www.jstor.org/stable/30141882

(6) Weiji, Qian pian Hanyu dictionary, https://cidian.qianp.com/ci/危机

(7) wei, Handian dictionary, https://www.zdic.net/hans/危

(8) ji, Handian dictionary, https://www.zdic.net/hans/机

(9) kiki, Weblio dictionary, https://www.weblio.jp/content/危機

(10)Hirasawa. A, n.d, Chuo online https://yab.yomiuri.co.jp/adv/chuo/opinion/20121217.html