Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji

Written by Emily Mendenhall

Unmasked is the story of what happened in Okoboji, a small Iowan tourist town, when a collective turn from the coronavirus to the economy occurred in the COVID summer of 2020. State political failures, local negotiations among political and public health leaders, and community (dis)belief about the virus resulted in Okoboji being declared a hotspot just before the Independence Day weekend, when an influx of half a million people visit the town.

The story is both personal and political. Author Emily Mendenhall, an anthropologist at Georgetown University, grew up in Okoboji, and her family still lives there. As the events unfolded, Mendenhall was in Okoboji, where she spoke formally with over 100 people and observed a community that rejected public health guidance, revealing deep-seated mistrust in outsiders and strong commitments to local thinking. Unmasked is a fascinating and heartbreaking account of where people put their trust, and how isolationist popular beliefs can be in America's small communities.

This book is the recipient of the 2022 Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of art or medicine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press Audio
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780826504517

Reviews for Unmasked

[scottjpearson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In anthropology, an ethnography is an account of the culture as told by the people in that culture. As such, it’s basically a fancy word for a series of interviews within a group of people linked together. In this work, Mendenhall, a medical anthropologist working at Georgetown University, offers us an ethnography of the early days of the coronavirus pandemic in rural America. She does so in a personal account while she visits her hometown in Okoboji, Iowa.Okoboji is a rural, tourist town based on a beautiful lake. It consists of almost exclusively white people, most of whom are politically and culturally conservative. In an election year, Trump was on the forefront of many minds. Mendenhall’s father was a urology doctor now sitting on the city council. This sort of complicated politics where social pressures impact decision-making – as openly described here – is common in smaller towns lie Okoboji.By Mendenhall’s telling, the town did not handle the pandemic well, much like the rest of the United States. In the spring of 2020, restaurant workers were heavily impacted, but few restaurants shut down. In June, a peak in case counts occurred, associated with the start of the summer season. In the late summer, debates at local school board meetings raged about how to reopen schools. After reopening, mandated by Iowa state government, local COVID case counts increased dramatically. Indicative of the small-town dynamics, the author even wrote a piece in the local newspaper, cited as influential in producing a stronger mask mandate in the school district.With the strength of her academic training and ability to see structural issues, Mendenhall centrally blames a lack of national and state leadership for Okoboji’s issues. Under the guise of personal responsibility, leaders placed the brunt of dealing with coronavirus on local shoulders. Correspondingly, businesses and local leadership often put self-interest and profits over doing the right thing for their neighbors. Mendenhall bases this conclusion not on political whim but on many interviews and first-hand observation. Given her thorough data collection, it’s really hard to come to any other conclusion after reading this account.This book is one of the first systematic accounts of this pandemic, published even before its conclusion. I expect further, similar stories to be published in coming years. Mendenhall’s account will expose to the reading public and record for history just how disheveled the American response looked like on the ground. Response to this book will likely be driven by politics at first, but over time, I expect this book to be a helpful resource to academic researchers and governmental planners who aim to bring about a different outcome than we saw from coronavirus.