Indoor Anthropology: Chapter 1
Armchair anthropology in the time of coronavirus
On March 16, I have started a series of “auto-ethnographic stories” to reflect on the current situation in Slovenia and abroad: “During and after the quarantine, anthropology will have to adapt its approaches and put more attention to new forms of ethnography with fewer physical contacts.”
Quarantine Day 5 (March 17): The Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Hey, what are you doing?” shouted the cashier with a protective mask on her face to a young man holding a beer in one hand and stuffing a sandwich into his mouth with the other.
Afterwards, they must have had a heated debate. Actually, I could only sense it from afar by their gestures, but it was obvious that the woman was furious at the irresponsible youngster who dared to touch the automatic cash register with his bare hands while eating. Despite the obvious anger, she did not get too close to him. Instead, she kept some distance and took into account the new rule that people should be a meter and a half apart when they were in the shopping centre — this is also what the signs at the cash register warned.
Today’s shopping was completely different from last week. It all seemed kind of normal, but at the same time I felt the uncanny mixture of feelings that Freud called “das Unheimliche” — we get that feeling when we look at a relative’s corpse on a mortuary bed, which is, on the one hand familiar and on the other foreign and unusual. Well, the store was like it always was, the shelves were still full, only the shoppers behaved somewhat unusually.
Almost half of us wore gloves and protective masks on our faces, and we were moving like gas molecules: trying to be as far from one another as possible.
We haven’t looked at anyone, let alone started a conversation. Even after the purchase, the cashier, whom I recognised behind the mask, did not even say “Thank you” or nod. “Just move on,” she perhaps thought while she stared at me motionlessly, watching me how I pulled the rubber glove from my hand to open an app on my phone that had my loyalty cards loaded. It was not until I came to the cash register that I realised that I could not unlock my phone if I wore rubber gloves, so I took off one of them with disgust and pressed the fingerprint sensor.
When I got home, I first stripped naked, threw my clothes in the laundry basket and showered with hot water. I tried to flush off any viruses that made their way to the skin. All the body parts I touched in the store felt contaminated, unclean.
I started to feel a little better when I rubbed myself dry with a towel and realised that I could afford a beer at lunchtime, which I had chosen while shopping. Adequately with the situation we found ourselves in, the beer is named after the horsemen of the apocalypse.
#anthropology #ethnography #worldneedsantro #wwna #covid19, #coronavirus #research #stayathome #workathome #shopping #experience
Quarantine Day 6: Naked Sun over the Caves of Steel
“Police, police!” shouted my wife. Where, and why? I ran into the kitchen and looked out the window, as did the children, who arrived quickly after me to see what was going on and leaned against the window sill.
A police vehicle was parked near the metal fence of the school playground. Two uniformed men emerged from it, approached the revolving metal door and shouted something to the young men throwing the ball at the basket. Taller and — at least provisionally — the older of the two froze in the middle of his throw. He then grabbed the ball under his arm and stepped boldly toward the officers, while the younger one followed him more timidly. One of the officers yelled at them something indistinct to my ear and pointed at a distance toward the other side of the field. I understood the gesture as: “Go home and stay there! Now it is not the time for games! The young guys bowed their heads and marched back to solitude.
Last week, socialising was still part of normalcy. Well, not so anymore. What kind of impact will this make on society in the long run? Will we transform existing ways of socialising and communicate more online? Will we still hug, shake hands and kiss when we meet?
During such self-questioning, my stream of thoughts often drifts to the sci-fi trilogy of Isaac Asimov, which begins with the novel “The Caves of Steel,” continues with “The Naked Sun,” and concludes with “The Robots of Dawn.” In the first part of the trilogy, we meet the protagonist Eliah Baley, who lives on Earth, several millennia in the future. The Earth of the time is inhabited by eight billion people. For Asimov in the 1950s, when he wrote the novels, it was almost an unimaginable number. However, today there are almost as many actually living on the planet. The people in the novel live in their “caves of steel”, safely hidden under a giant dome that rises above the city. Due to the collective and gradually cultivated agoraphobia, only a few of the inhabitants dare to step outside the safe zone.
In the sequel, titled “The Naked Sun”, the events are set on the planet Solaria, where social life is even stranger as on Earth: there are only tens of thousands of people living there, and each of them is being taken care of by thousands of robots. Citizens meet and talk almost exclusively at a distance, using devices that help them create holograms. They even consider sexuality to be unclean and “practice” it solely to continue the species.
Asimov was more than six decades ago — in the era of black and white television — incredibly visionary in his imagining of the future, which began to materialize much earlier than he apparently expected. Currently, both presented scenarios actually came true: the one from “The Caves of Steel” and the other one from “The Naked Sun.” We are more crowded and connected than ever in history and at the same time often more detached and disconnected than we have ever been. In the time of COVID-19, however, both tendencies have quite obviously collided.
Staying together or staying apart? For a while, the second scenario is clearly better and more urgent — for the species to survive.
As the police drove away, the silence became more apparent. From the distance, I could clearly hear birds singing and the sun was shining on the empty playground. In an uncanny way, it was quite beautiful outside.
#anthropology #ethnography #stayathome #workfromhome #covid19 #shortstories #coronavirus #experience
Quarantine Day 8: Boredom and Innovativeness
We ran out of clean plates and dishwasher cubes and we had to get along as seen in the photo…
Eh, not really! In fact, we had enough time for lunch and decided to prepare pumpkin soup, which was served in “original packaging.” It is interesting how we suddenly got time for half an hour to hollow out the pumpkins, to carefully chop the ingredients and to cook the soup slowly. Apparently, we have enough time for being innovative. We cut, glue, transplant flowers, play board games, scroll through albums, clean up forgotten folders on the computer … and write records like this one. If we complained last week with a touch of pride that there is never enough time, we have suddenly got enough spare time. Lo and behold: we even get bored here and there.
Boredom is an almost creepy word in our present vocabulary. However, it was not always the case.
It comes to my mind how, decades ago, during school holidays, I actually appreciated those boring days when time dragged on forever. I had a perfect time when it was raining during our stay at the seaside so we couldn’t go to the beach. Then I was able to read old magazines, titled Politikin Zabavnik, I found on the shelf and managed to learn the Cyrillic alphabet on the way, because on the island where we went to the sea, Slovenian editions of Politika’s newspapers and magazines were not sold — we could buy only “originals” printed in Serbian and Cyrillic script. If I had nothing to read, there was no problem. It was great to do nothing, to have time to just stare at the ceiling and think. I got so used to doing nothing that I was terrified of those days when we went to the beach or for a full day trip, knowing that a precious holiday time would pass like it never existed if I had too much fun.
I have no idea when I forgot to appreciate boredom, but it probably happened somewhere in the process of growing up when I started to be in a permanent state of hurry. And why am I actually in a hurry? There is no easy answer to the question.
During the pandemic, not only me and my family stopped, but — it seems so — the whole world halted. It is obviously time to think and get new ideas during the boredom. We will undoubtedly need them — if not for anything else, we can think about what will be on the plate tomorrow. If we meanwhile get an idea about the best recipe for the society of the future … Well, even better.
#anthropology #ethnography #worldneedanthro #stayathome #workfromhome #covid19 #shortstories #coronavirus #experience #pumpkinsoup #recipe #society #future
Author: Dan Podjed
applied anthropologist │ WWNA founder │ developer of planet-centred solutions
