Work

Pandemic Memes and Tamil Health Narratives

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: This article analyses the Tamil COVID-19 memes as artifacts of humor and social commentary during Tamil Nadu's first pandemic wave. Drawing on a corpus of WhatsApp memes, cross-verified on Facebook and Instagram, we trace how Tamil cinematic iconography and anthropomorphism articulated health anxieties and negotiated therapeutic authority between Siddha and biomedicine. Using visual ethnography, we identify two narrative logics, namely, dissonance (skepticism, satire) and congruence (pragmatic coexistence). Framed by encoding and decoding, carnivalesque inversion, and performative health communication, we argue that memes do not merely reflect sentiment, rather, they actively stage reasoning about care and pluralist health imaginaries.

Source: Medical Anthropology

Authors: Haripriya Narasimhan, Shriram Venkatraman, Venkata Ratnadeep Suri

Institutions: University of Southern Denmark, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi

Language: English

Topic: Humor Studies and Applications

Subfield: Social Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

OpenAlex ID: W7163195807

FWCI:

Cites: 44

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