Front and Back Covers, Volume 37, Number 6. December 2021

Abstract

Front and back cover caption, volume 37 issue 6COVID‐19 DIVINATIONFront cover: Domestic fire makes human life possible in the Siberian Arctic. The fire also communicates warnings and predictions to those who can listen and understand it, like this Nenets woman.Back cover: The UK National Health Service (NHS) designed its Covid‐19 (‘track and trace’) app to avoid ambiguities like those of Siberian fire interpretation, but in doing so, it creates a climate of detachment and cynicism.This app serves as a critical public health technology by warning users that they have been near someone who has subsequently turned out to be infected. So why has it encountered so much resistance and non‐cooperation?In this issue, Roza Laptander and Piers Vitebsky look for an answer by comparing these on‐screen phone alerts with messages from the domestic fire of nomadic Siberian reindeer herders as it crackles alerts about potential illnesses or accidents. Though these prediction technologies may seem radically different, they are both instruments for thinking about possible futures and adjusting behaviour.They are both forms of divination that differ not so much in their logic as in their embeddedness in wider cosmologies of person, fate and society. The Siberian fire generates meaning as a focal point within many narrative strands concerning family, landscape and the movement of animals; its properties contribute to local ideas of normality, and acceptance of its messages is rooted in intimacy and entanglement.This highlights how the Covid‐19 app belongs to a state of emergency and exception. Its statistical idiom of risk and its culturally hyper‐valued focus on privacy deliberately conceal the identities of people caught in the chain of infection, thereby blocking social and narrative coherence.