# On Wor(l)ds and Pandemics

## TL;DR

This paper explores how pandemics, like the current coronavirus, have historically led to the idea of the end of the world, drawing parallels between past and present.

## Contribution

The paper introduces the concept of Pachakuti to reframe the end of the world as a material event for marginalized groups in history.

## Key findings

- The spread of smallpox during European colonization marked a material end of the world for indigenous populations.
- The current pandemic reflects a crisis of the globalized world imagined by modern society.
- Historical parallels reveal how pandemics reshape the concept of the world and its inhabitants.

## Abstract

The spread of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has stimulated eschatological speculation. To the environmentalist and liberal diagnostician that had already been warning about the Anthropocene and the breakdown of post-Cold War global harmony, an alarm has now been added that in its worst prognosis estimates that, in 2020, we only started witnessing the beginning of a staggered health debacle. The idea of the world, as conceptual support for an imaginary community with global reach, has become a crisis. The world, an object often invoked by theoretical speculation over the last 30 years, has been now decreed finished. However, infectious diseases, in their epidemic and pandemic form, have devastated different societies at different times. This paper parallels two historical scenarios and a series of texts dealing with contagious diseases to shed light on the idea of (the end of) the world. The analysis centres on documents that bear witness to the importation of smallpox and other diseases into America and its spread during the European invasion and colonization. By recovering the concept of Pachakuti, a radical turnaround that can be understood as “end of one world”, this paper shows that the chronicles reporting on the outbreaks of smallpox in America document a material end of the world for subjects who were not protagonists of history. The current end of the world is, on the contrary, that which would correspond to the protagonist of our phase of globalization and, eventually, to his world—which makes it more resonant and absolute.