Arrangements, Semiotic Links and Evaluations: Purifying the Familiar Environments from COVID-19 Among Serbia’s Young Professionals

Abstract

Our research principally engages with the issue of encounters with COVID-19 within an everyday frame, underlining how the restoration of a “distorted” familiar environment occurs through gradual coping with such a mysterious non-human entity. The specific objective of our project was to discern how 20 young professionals from Belgrade (Serbia), whom we interviewed during the curfew, encountered, re-organized, and eventually re-settled into their common, everyday spaces and routines, while the virus was spreading in the background. Our examination first seeks to register how the distorted relationality of humans with a non-human entity – which the virus is – became distilled into everyday objectivity. More profoundly, we intended to seek understanding of what alternations the possibility of getting infected were associated with common, everyday arrangements, and how the actors pursued hygienic “purification” as a principal task. In this sense, we managed to unveil that – albeit this interplay with an invisible and rather mysterious non-human entity involved a number of confusing moments – the latter was ultimately stabilized within a specific evaluative and cognitive format that dictated the former’s actions. Being highly appreciative of domestic familiarity and intending to quite reflexively purify potentially contaminated zones and objects, our respondents also pursued a specific moral frame. In conclusion, we underline how these “purifying” actions were substantially guided by a desire to maintain the domestic order of familiarity and immediate care.