A bit of basic social science regarding ‘social distancing’

Many people who should know better are being outraged that people are not taking ‘social distancing’ seriously. It is as if all people have to do is simply decide what distance they should keep from people and implement it. The fact is that the distances we keep between us and other people are more part of our social and cultural unconscious and they are hard to shake.

The anthropologist Edward T Hall has devoted most of his work to this question of spatial distancing, and spatial non-verbal communication, what he called proxemics: the study of forms of spatial relations. he not only looked at the distances people kept but how they related, touch, eye contact, smell, etc... He saw these as culturally determined in a variety of ways. It is both banal and extraordinary to reflect on why Mediterraneans kiss and hug more than North Europeans for instance.

Thus, our ways of distancing ourselves from others constitute what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus. we have in us a distancing habitus. This means a number of things.

It means the distances we keep to others are the product of cultural habits (which differ on the basis of class, gender, national and regional differences).

It means that these distances are situationally attuned: we don’t keep the same distance between us and every other person. we grow up to know that there are some people we can get closer to than others, and we know that some people we can get close to in one social setting are off limit in others.

we also grow up to know that there are relations between distances and social hierarchy. we also internalise stereotypes that makes us ‘know’ that there are some people we should always keep our distances from.

At the same time, our distancing habitus allows us to guess how much distance we need to keep from others we do not know according to what kind of people we think they are.

This all to say that it is not enough for someone to ask us to change the way we keep our distances from other for us to just do  it. we need to work on ourselves to do so. and had governments been more attuned to the social science behind distancing they would have thought of providing some strategies to help with compliance rather than merely ask people to do it.

For instance, i am an instinctive hug and kiss kind of person. I even use it politically to mark a certain cultural ground against the supposedly classier English hand-shake. I delight in the fact that hugging at least has become the norm among all Australian youth from whatever cultural background. But now i have to try and not do any hugging or kissing. I am trying to work on myself by trying to convince myself to act as if i already have the virus, and that i am shedding it. it helps me centre on how to do the right thing, because i know i would be petrified by the idea that I am communicating the virus to others.

But one of the reasons why not enough people are taking the request to engage in social distancing as seriously as they should has to do with another ingrained habitus. This is a habitus connected with capitalist modernity. It is the habitus of confident resilience.

Those who have experienced either a personal or social tragedy are well attuned to the brittleness of life. Those who have gone through wars or natural disasters also know how the stability and durability of the surrounding social and natural world can crumble overnight.

But for many people who have not experienced major social or personal calamities, it is very hard to shake the acquired sentiment, dominant in western societies, that ‘I and my society can ultimately cope with anything that is thrown at us.’

This makes it much harder for those who are asked to change their habits to do so out of a sense of impending catastrophe.