By Luke Fleming and James Slotta
In the images and stories of families that have been separated by the spread of coronavirus, we have some of the more poignant tokens of the way the pandemic is affecting people across the world. Stories of people unable to visit family in the hospital, of mothers seeing their newborns for the first time weeks after they were born, of people saying goodbye to loved ones over video chat, of funerals that few can attend—these are the heartbreaking hallmarks of “social distancing,” a practice needed to slow the circulation of the virus, but antithetical to a deeply ingrained sense of the importance of human contact.
In the past few years one of us [LF] has been combing through ethnographic, missionary and colonial literatures that document avoidance practices from around the world. In these literatures, regulations on contact especially among kin are very much the heart of the matter. It is not unusual to encounter rules like the one reported by Yubu Okello on “Lango marriage”: “If a woman wishes to talk to her son-in-law, there must be an opaque partition between them” (1951: 72).
Images like the one above cast these sorts of injunctions in a new light (see Image 1). Now, throughout the world, people are experiencing the need for partitions and masks, isolation and avoidance behaviors that ensure distance. And this is bringing home what a significant and signifying resource human contact is.
Rules of avoidance in kinship-centered societies have long provided evidence of the significance of interpersonal contact as a semiotic resource. Through these rules, different modes and degrees of contact come to serve as the means of signaling different kinds and intensities of social relationality. Perhaps best known to linguistic anthropologists are injunctions against touching, making eye contact, sharing objects, and speaking directly with in-laws in Aboriginal Australian communities (Merlan 1997).
We hear echoes of such contact-attuned sensibilities in the current crisis. When Mom says she’s been disinfecting the bottom of Dad’s shoes when he comes in from a walk, or when the New York Times voices our worries by asking “Is the virus on my clothes? My shoes? My hair? My newspaper?”, we see how objects have now come to be regarded as vectors of contact with, often spectral, social others. When we see the poignant pictures of children visiting their parents through the pane glass partitions of their senior care rooms, we are struck by how considerations of contact have come to dominate people’s interpersonal comportment.
We are also struck by how quickly closeness and contact have been reconfigured, how physical distance has become a feature of even the “closest” social relationships. In the face of recent injunctions to social distance, proximity has come to signify exposure and distance has come to signal solicitous care, at least for some. For others, it has become a mark of political identity. These significations have been layered on top of cultural values of proximity that have deep roots. The performative values of contact sanctified across a lifetime, embodied in personal habitus, cannot simply, through authoritative and explicit stipulation, be so easily reversed and overwritten. Lamentations for the loss of our proxemic rituals—overwrought though they might be—and the search for alternatives to handshakes, kisses, and hugs point to a long-standing, socially ingrained sense of the significance of contact. We are pulled in opposite directions by contradictory cultural sensibilities concerning contact.
The transformations happening before our eyes are a reminder that interpersonal contact is a thoroughly semiotic affair, mediated by variable and changeable cultural frameworks that give it significance. “Intercorporeality”—the experienced relationship between bodies—is a fundamental facet of human experience. As the editors of a recent book on the subject point out, “the body is never alone in the first place, or only in conditions of deprivations that we consider inhumane” (Meyer, Streeck, and Jordan 2017: xvii). But this volume also makes abundantly clear that the management and significance of this intercorporeality is a cultural matter through and through. Far from inhumane, social distancing may be a matter of respect, of caring for others, of ensuring their safety.
Social distancing, we might say, is an emergent semiotic register—“a repertoire [of signs]… associated, culture internally, with particular social practices and with persons who engage in such practices” (Agha