{"title":"Covidiots and the Clamour of the Virus-as-Question","authors":"B. Lim","doi":"10.3167/aia.2020.270212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/aia.2020.270212","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on my experience with gay men in London who, despite COVID-19-related public health guidelines, continue to meet up and congregate so as to engage in a myriad of sexual (and non-sexual) practices, this article grapples with how an insistence on prepandemic intimacies of bodily interactions during a pandemic might prompt us to reconsider our relationship with biomedicine. While these covidiots’ experiments with mortality in the form of dance parties, orgies and casual hook-ups may not be ethically exemplary, this article argues that they are at the very least ethically interesting because they serve as lures through which our other intimacies with temporality, futurity and finitude may be reconsidered.","PeriodicalId":43493,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology in Action-Journal for Applied Anthropology in Policy and Practice","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47407084","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A. Streinzer, A. Poppinga, Carolin Zieringer, A. Wanka, Georg Marx
{"title":"Familial Intimacy and the ‘Thing’ between Us","authors":"A. Streinzer, A. Poppinga, Carolin Zieringer, A. Wanka, Georg Marx","doi":"10.3167/aia.2020.270210","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/aia.2020.270210","url":null,"abstract":"During the government-imposed contact restrictions in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, older adults feared that they may no longer be able to experience physical contact with family members. They were, however, given hope by a ‘cuddle curtain’, a device that promised to enable familial intimacy while blocking the exposure of older bodies to the coronavirus. Our research team traced how one such artefact was used in nursing homes in Switzerland. Here, we discuss its cultural biography to explore notions of intimacy by relating discussions about the curtain to anthropological discussions about entanglement and detachment. We contrast positive associations between the curtain and familial intimacy with regulations surrounding body fluid barriers in sex work, in order to relate the ‘thing’ to the larger context within which it circulates.","PeriodicalId":43493,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology in Action-Journal for Applied Anthropology in Policy and Practice","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42138123","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Carmen McLeod, Eleanor Hadley Kershaw, Brigitte Nerlich
{"title":"Fearful Intimacies","authors":"Carmen McLeod, Eleanor Hadley Kershaw, Brigitte Nerlich","doi":"10.3167/aia.2020.270205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/aia.2020.270205","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores how COVID-19 could be reshaping human–microbial relations in and beyond the home. Media sources suggest that intimacies of companionability or ambivalence are being transformed into those of fearfulness. While a probiotic sociocultural approach to human–microbial relations has become more powerful in recent times, it seems that health and hygiene concerns associated with COVID-19 are encouraging the wholesale use of bleach and other cleaning agents in order to destroy the potential microbial ‘enemies’ in the home. We provide a brief background to shifting public health discourses on managing microbes in domestic settings over recent decades across the industrialised world, and then contrast this background with emerging advice on COVID-19 from news and advertisement sources. We conclude with key areas for future research.","PeriodicalId":43493,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology in Action-Journal for Applied Anthropology in Policy and Practice","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3167/aia.2020.270205","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42895467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Take My Breath Away","authors":"D. Fergie, R. Lucas, Morgan Harrington","doi":"10.3167/aia.2020.270208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/aia.2020.270208","url":null,"abstract":"This article eschews the singularity of much disaster, crisis and catastrophe research to focus on the complex dynamics of convergent crises. It examines the prolonged crises of a summer of bushfire and COVID-19 which converged in Eurobodalla Shire on the south coast of New South Wales (NSW), Australia, in 2019–2020. We focus on air and breathing on the one hand and kinship and the social organisation of survival and recovery on the other. During Australia’s summer of bushfires, thick smoke rendered air, airways and breathing a challenge, leaving people open to reflection as well as to struggle. Bushfire smoke created ‘aware breathers’. It was aware breathers who were then to experience the invisible and separating threat of COVID-19. These convergent crises impacted the ‘mutuality of being’ of kinship (after Marshall Sahlins) and the social organisation of survival. Whereas the bushfires in Eurobodalla drew on grandparent-families in survival, the social distancing and lockdown of COVID-19 has cleaved these multi-household families asunder, at least for now. COVID-19 has also made plain how the mingling of breath is a new index of intimacy.","PeriodicalId":43493,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology in Action-Journal for Applied Anthropology in Policy and Practice","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44529125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Microbial Intimacy","authors":"A. Dawson, Simone Dennis","doi":"10.3167/aia.2020.270201","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/aia.2020.270201","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, we highlight how COVID-19 has transformed, is transforming and may transform into the future human intimacies. This, we argue, is an appropriate focus for anthropological investigation particularly. We posit a scaler approach to the anthropological study of the transformation of intimacy in COVID-19, embracing multiple levels from human relations with microbes through to human relations with deities. Furthermore, we offer examples of the overlaps between the ways in which intimate relationships at small and large scales are conceptualised, especially metaphorically.","PeriodicalId":43493,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology in Action-Journal for Applied Anthropology in Policy and Practice","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3167/aia.2020.270201","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46672523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Intimacy, Zoom Tango and the COVID-19 Pandemic","authors":"J. Skinner","doi":"10.3167/aia.2020.270214","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/aia.2020.270214","url":null,"abstract":"This is a personal reflection reacting and responding to the COVID-19 global pandemic and the domestication and on-lining of physical leisure pursuit. In Anthony Giddens’ The Transformation of Intimacy, there is the suggestion that the condition of the plastic is one ‘decentred’ and ‘freed from the needs of reproduction’. Giddens was writing generally about sexuality and the physical labour of reproduction, but this suggestion warrants wider exploration, particularly when Giddens concludes his argument with the suggestion that intimacy and democracy are ideally implicated in each other: autonomy of the self and open conditions of association as preconditions for establishing his reflexive project of the self. This personal reflection develops this suggestion by looking at two creative responses to the pandemic lockdown as socially distanced tennis and Zoom tango become tactics for living with the unexpected, for coping with isolation, for retaining and returning to an everyday.","PeriodicalId":43493,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology in Action-Journal for Applied Anthropology in Policy and Practice","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49557240","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Exposed Intimacies","authors":"E. Block","doi":"10.3167/aia.2020.270209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/aia.2020.270209","url":null,"abstract":"COVID-19 has overwhelmed health-care providers. The virus is novel in its prevalence, severity and the risk of asymptomatic infection. In order to reduce the risk of infection and stop the spread of COVID-19, clinicians in hospitals across the United States are taking measures to limit exposure to infected patients by reducing the frequency of visits to patients’ rooms, touching patients less, and adopting new protocols around the use of personal protective equipment (PPE). While these newly adopted practices are helping to reduce transmission risk of COVID-19, they are producing a habitus of infection; an acute shift among clinicians that is deeply embodied and likely to have a permanent impact on the health and wellbeing of both providers and already isolated patients.","PeriodicalId":43493,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology in Action-Journal for Applied Anthropology in Policy and Practice","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41363199","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Learning to Dwell with Micro-Organisms","authors":"Lydia Maria Arantes","doi":"10.3167/aia.2020.270206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/aia.2020.270206","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I enquire in which ways the corona-induced lockdown in Austria has reshaped intimacy in our household by scrutinising my husband’s sourdough bread-making journey. As physical distancing has thrown us back onto ourselves, my field of research is equivalent to that which is immediately available – our everyday life within the confines of domestic space, at times expanded via digital technologies. My elaborations are based on my (research) diary in which I usually conflate personal and research-related aspects of my everyday life. As, during lockdown, (entries on) bread-making and caring for sourdoughs came to play an important role, I became inspired to unfold issues of corporeality, relationality and temporality with regard to newly developing intimacies, interdependencies and modes of knowing.","PeriodicalId":43493,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology in Action-Journal for Applied Anthropology in Policy and Practice","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41739107","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}