This article explores the work of the influential poststructuralist and postcolonial anthropologist Saba Mahmood. Mahmood’s work in anthropology adopts an Asadian and Butlerian approach, particularly in the seminal Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. In this work, Mahmood critically interpellates the categories of ‘Western’ secular feminism through an exploration of the lives of pious Muslim women of Salafi orientations in Cairo in Egypt. Mahmood’s work constitutes an important intervention at a point in time when secular feminist (...) discourses are increasingly instrumentalized across the political spectrum in anti-Muslim discourses in the ‘Western’ world and in Europe. I argue, however, that in wanting to use the understandings and practices of pious Muslim women in Egypt in order to critique Western secular feminism, Mahmood fails to pose critical questions about the historicity of these practices and understandings, and lends her analysis to a form of cultural relativism which offers few prospects for a way forward for feminism. (shrink)

In Norway, priority for health interventions is assigned on the basis of three official criteria: health benefit, resources, and severity. Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have mainly happened through intersectoral public health efforts such as lockdowns, quarantines, information campaigns, social distancing and, more recently, vaccine distribution. The aim of this article is to evaluate potential priority setting criteria for public health interventions. We argue in favour of the following three criteria for public health priority setting: benefit, resources and improving the (...) well-being of the worse off. We argue that benefits and priority to the worse off may reasonably be understood in terms of individual well-being, rather than only health, for public health priority setting. We argue that lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic support our conclusions. Keywords: COVID-19, Prioritarianism, Priority Setting, Public Health, Severity. (shrink)