Beyond Asian ‘mask culture’: understanding the ethics of face masks during the Covid-19 pandemic in Singapore

Abstract

ABSTRACT During the Covid-19 pandemic, face masks became widely used and sometimes mandatory anti-infection devices across the world. While anti-mask protests emerged in several Western countries, nearly universal mask-wearing is commonly seen in Asian countries. Journalistic and popular accounts suggest that an Asian ‘mask culture’ explains the acceptance of mask-wearing and associates mask culture with political authoritarianism in Asian countries. Based on in-depth interviews conducted with residents of Singapore, an Asian city-state that implemented a mask mandate in 2020, we uncover a wide diversity of beliefs, motivations, and practices of mask-wearing that challenges the existence of a homogeneous ‘mask culture’. Drawing on a recent theoretical movement known as the anthropology of ethics, we draw attention to individual judgments and engagements with cultural norms and obligations in order to characterise how it became ‘desired and desirable’ for a diverse population of Singapore residents to wear masks.