Anthropology in Action

In this article, we highlight how COVID-19 has transformed, is transforming and may transform into the future human intimacies at several different social levels: between couples, within and between families, between citizens and states, among nations, and between people and their deities. We conclude by highlighting an uncertain future for intimacies that may entail the radical transformation of societies characterised by conversely new and liberating forms of socio-economic organisation or enslavement, especially to new spatio-temporal configurations engendered by the pandemic.

This article examines the transformation of singledom during the COVID-19 pandemic, scrutinising the impact of rules and regulations governing proximity, touch and sex. I focus on government responses in Australia, situating the nation's experience in a global context. National discussions were strangely sexless, presuming widespread coupledom and emphasising the lost, non-sexual intimacies of families and older people. I contrast this to broader theoretical claims of a ‘transformation of intimacy’ that posit a move to atomised relations across the Global North, including a growing tendency towards singledom. Yet assumptions of coupledom clearly persist in Australian policy and social life. I reflect on transformations of singledom and living alone during and prior to the pandemic, exposing tensions between theorisations, local realities, and the governance of sex and singledom.

In this article, based on my ethnographic experience of Ho Chi Minh City's lockdown, I argue that COVID-19 acted as an accelerator of intimacies, allowing people to negotiate alternative forms of sociality both within and outside the domestic space. On the one hand, by confining people at home it brought to light social and housing inequalities in urban Vietnam. On the other, it forced people to find imaginative ways to cope with social-distancing protocols. Since mobility during lockdown was limited, the normatively private space of the house became an incubator for social life, affording people – even those outside the circle of close friends and relatives – the opportunity to be alone together, sharing their temporary stuckness to challenge normative patterns of intimacy and sexuality.

Social distancing has been the central public health strategy for tackling the coronavirus pandemic worldwide. But the ‘Stay Home, Stay Safe’ order in the United Kingdom and the consequent closure of nurseries and schools also created an unprecedented degree of proximity within households. Based on interviews with mothers of young children in Scotland, this article provides early insight into the ways that mothers manage the forced intimacies of family life under lockdown and the opportunities they create through the innovative management of space and time. The result is a more expansive understanding of the family in contemporary Scotland and a notion of intimacy characterised as much by the necessity of distance and distinction as by proximity and mutuality.

During the COVID-19 crisis, living in lockdown and observing social distancing rules have become an integral part of everyday life. In this article, I offer some auto-ethnographic reflections on the increased use of ICTs within families and particularly across generations. Using vignettes relating to communication with my one-year-old granddaughter and my 92-year-old mother, I consider what it means to have the haptic dimensions of kinship relations stripped out and replaced by technologically mediated connection. By way of conclusion, I consider the relationship between the ‘magic’ of ICTs in interpersonal communication on the one hand and Marshall Sahlins’ notion of mutuality on the other.

This article brings together digital anthropology and social work scholarship to create an applied anthropology of everyday digital intimacy. Child protection social work involves home visits in the intimate spaces of others, where modes of sensorial and affective engagement combine with professional awareness and standards to constitute sensitive understandings of children's well-being and family relationships. In the COVID-19 pandemic, social work practice has shifted, partly, to distance work where social workers engage digitally with service users in their homes while seeking to constitute similarly effective modes of intimacy and understanding. We bring practice examples from our study of social work and child protection during COVID-19 together with anthropologies of digital intimacy to examine implications for new modes of digital social work practice.

This article analyses how governments have sustained their relationship with their citizens amidst pandemic restrictions brought about by coronavirus through a focus on the acts of the Turkish government. Specifically, by looking at presidential letters addressed to the nation as well as the government's fundraising campaign, I demonstrate how the Turkish state tried to manage a public health crisis and govern the collective body at once. In doing so, I argue that letters, by serving as both tokens of gratitude to the people and reminders of their patriotic duties, were a powerful political tool used both to re-establish the governmental intimacy between the state and its citizens that was disrupted as a result of pandemic restrictions and to assuage the repercussions of a possible political crisis.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has brought new uncertainties to state–society relations in urban China. Arguably, China's containment of the pandemic can largely be attributed to the state's effective, but controversial, governance of society. At the grassroots level of Chinese cities, local state shequ (‘communities’ centred on the Residents’ Committees) have played a vital role in terms of both surveillance and service provision. However, rather than establishing an intimate relationship with civil society as the state intended, the latter's handling of the pandemic resulted in contested views on the extent to which the state should intervene in society. This article engages with the ongoing debate on state–society relations, and argues that in urban China we are now seeing the advance of the state.

Changes in the conduct and regulation of intimacy during the COVID-19 crisis in the Republic of Ireland has uncovered the legacy of Catholic nationalism in Irish capitalism. Many commentators analysed the increased welfarism and community service provision as the suspension of Irish neoliberalism. In fact, the Irish COVID-19 response is shaped by a longer tradition of political and economic approaches that have their genesis in the revolutionary Catholic state following independence from Britain. Based on ethnography of community development practices in a rural Irish region, the article describes how Catholic nationalist influences are present in the collection of institutions involved in the Community Response and its approach to spatial organisation. The governance of the response also sheds light on a lack of intimacy between citizen and state that is not only the product of neoliberal structural adjustments but is uniquely characteristic of the Catholic ethos that influences Irish capitalism.

In this article I address the role now being played by libertarian attacks on the enforcement of health regulations such as the wearing of masks. I suggest that a kind of cultural intimacy now emerging may take the form of guilty but willful complicity in a libertarian stance, not for reasons of social solidarity or collective freedom but for a NIMBY-like selfishness. That attitude constitutes a larger threat to society and is cultivated by racist and other hate-directed groups often sheltering behind bullying national leaders. These groups adopt the libertarian rhetoric and nationalist tropes of concern to protect individual freedoms, whether in the United States or the United Kingdom. The article ends with an appeal for anthropologists, in particular, to respond by framing a more socially conscious vision of freedom.

By examining seemingly contradictory reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic and relating these to the basic income debate in Australia, this article explores the potential that the socio-economic crisis provoked by COVID-19 presents for a transformation of welfare systems. Drawing on ethnographic observation, the article describes the emergence of grassroots forms of solidarity in response to the pandemic. Within the context of the increasing hardship experienced by Australians, ongoing failures of existing welfare systems, and inadequate government responses to COVID-19, the groundswell of solidarity may coalesce with increasing support for a basic income, creating a conjunctural movement that propels radical social transformation.

In the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic situation, physical interaction and public performances became difficult, while use of digital media for public and private purposes was extended and intensified. This affected citizens’ right of assembly and led to new forms of collective sociality. This article analyses how social intimacy was re-arranged during lockdown through a thick description of mediated performances circulating on Italy's Day of Liberation from Nazi fascism. It examines how a politicised commemoration of resistance echoed fears and desires relating to the virus and enabled the production of subjectivities in a transnational techno-social environment. Combining Lauren Berlant's concept of intimate publics with theories of media, social movements, mediation and national identity, it offers an analytical framework detailing three layers of social intimacy: spatial/corporeal materiality, biography and mediation.

Based conceptually on Michael Herzfeld's ideas of cultural intimacy and disemia, and empirically on lockdown auto-ethnography, this article considers how erstwhile intimate inter-and intra-national relations have been transformed by COVID-19. Its particular ethnographic focus is Australian–British post-colonial relations and the personal emergence of a hybrid Br-Australian consciousness.

Amidst the COVID-19 crisis, nation-states closed borders. Borders divide – and intimate difference. In this article, I trace an emergent epidemiological nationalism which intimates a contagious other, taking ‘the’ border as my (unstable) object. While post-war and post-wall European projects celebrate dismantling borders, bordering continually becomes by saturating space with territoriality. Illustrating epidemiological nationalism's intimately located here and there, I turn an ethnographic gaze to Wales: a nation yet not a state, with a border that cannot be closed. Through the socio-spatial saturate of the Welsh border's enduring (non)existence run frictive, entangled intimacies. Meshing border studies with Lauren Berlant's theorisation of intimacies, I show epidemiology's conscription in imaginatively inscribing a safely state-like Welsh nation.

As the coronavirus started to spread in Ireland, the epidemiological data became the most sought-after information in the country. This article will examine the ways in which COVID-19 redefined the intimacies of the relationships that health professionals and the members of the public have with medical data. It will focus on Irish examples and explore how the context of the pandemic turned numbers from abstract cognitive tools into important and affective tenets of social lives that dictated the moral values and conditions of sociality. It will examine the role of enumeration and metrics in mediating new forms of intimacy with state and society.

Intimacy with God is at the heart of Islamic practice through prayer. Intimacy with fellow congregants became central to the worship practices promoted by religious leaders during the holy month of Ramadan even when social distancing was required because of the pandemic. This was, by and large, an economic matter. Clerics and mosques rely significantly on the income generated through collective worship, especially during Ramadan. This article provides an account of people's sense of intimacy with God and fellow congregants during Ramadan and how it contributed to the spread of the coronavirus in Pakistan.

In this article I discuss how the pandemic state of emergency has formed a subject field in Islamic biopolitics. By analysing the fatwas and official statements issued by Russian Muslim leaders between March and May 2020, I identify their discursive strategy of ‘interpreting’ the language of bureaucracy and medical terminology into the language of Islam, and of providing theological justification for certain governmental decisions. I consider several cases which illustrate the intervention of political and medical discourses of corporality into religious discourse. These include the politicisation of the regulatory functioning of the body, the sacralisation of quarantine as a special time for spiritual activities, the formatting of funerary ritual according to medico-administrative regulations and the comparing of victory in the Great Patriotic War to the victory over COVID-19.

Global lockdowns have resulted in a challenge to our carefully constructed notions of time, the work week and time-space compression. For the past few months, we have been living in ‘Quarantime’. Quarantime moves differently than our daily lived temporalities of routine and order, and forces us to question the intimate relationship that we may have with how we structure our daily lives around a clock and timesheet. This article questions the challenges and opportunities inherent within the disruption of routine intimacies enacted through Quarantime, drawing on case studies of clock time and the work week, and through examining Quarantime's unique relationship to time-space compression. It will suggest that Quarantime opens up a space for us to question intimate attachments to enforced routine and wide institutionalised concepts of clock time.