Staying The Blazes Home: Group Charisma, Government Messaging and COVID-19

Abstract

This case study of Nova Scotia, Canada, inspects the uptake and circulation of provincial government health messaging during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, organized around the motto “stay the blazes home.” Messaging and collective narratives are analyzed by way of Norbert Elias’s “established/outsider” dynamics, especially focusing on his concepts of “group charisma” and “praise and blame gossip.” Economic realities and identity practices helped make this motto recognizable as a proffered collective call to action around themes of self-restraint rather than neoliberal risk calculation. Outsiders in this collective identity formation are understood to bring more than disease to the province but “anomic infection” itself. Furthermore, the mechanisms of reopening the province are also found in a longstanding and related collective ethos toward hospitality. Finally, the problematic post-pandemic dynamics of established group identity formation are examined.