Confinement narratives: TV advertising during the coronavirus outbreak in Spain

Spain had been one of the worst affected countries during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, and by mid-March it had enforced one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe. As ethnographers, we have to deal with the unexpected (Canals, 2020) and cultural narratives embedded in widely broadcast audiovisual productions can be a key source for analysing social discourses and prevalent images during exceptional periods. Of these productions, TV advertising can be extremely valuable, with its intentional micro-stories of everyday life that condense self-contained, meaningful audiovisual tales into less than 60 seconds.I examine here cultural narratives on the quarantine and subsequent de-escalation process in Spain by analysing a sample of 32 spots from 17 different brands and institutions in two different rounds of advertising. Among the recurrent tropes, a consistent storyline on a new sense of communitas is forged by emphasising resilience and continuity as cornerstones for a more robust concept of togetherness based on the idea of mutuality of sharing – drawing upon Sahlins’ “mutuality of being” (2013).