Anthropology in Action

Amidst massive economic damage tension between the needs to save lives and save jobs has become the basis of a key political fault-line and a matter of daily on-the-ground management during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article we consider four especially salient changes to work-life wrought by the pandemic: (1) new workplace praxes pertaining to matters of touch; (2) erosion and degrading of the quality of erstwhile intimate relations in certain workplaces; (3) changes to senses of belonging and homeliness in workplaces; (4) and, reflecting on the particular type of work that we do, how the pandemic (and pandemic lockdown especially) is impacting our pedagogical and research practices. Throughout we reveal how the intimacies experienced within workplaces are being transformed – not always eroded or degraded, but also sometimes adapted, sustained in new ways (especially via new communications technologies), and even enhanced.

Touch is essential when living with dementia for communication and remaining connected with the world, and it is also unavoidable when performing body care. Thus, it is impossible to think of living and caring for people with dementia in the absence of touch. Drawing from my ethnographic fieldwork conducted with therapy animals and people living with dementia in Scottish care facilities, in this article I argue that the public health measures taken against the spread of COVID-19 infections need to be reimagined by taking into consideration the role of touch. Furthermore, I try to draw attention to the lessons that we should learn about touch and the role of intimate bodily entanglements in dementia care from the high COVID-19 death tolls amongst British care home residents.

Palliative care professionals often speak of the importance of forming meaningful relationships with patients and their families. Trust and rapport, usually established over extended periods of time through face-to-face interactions, and a ‘gentle honesty’ regarding end-of-life and death are key aspects of developing a sense of intimacy with people who are approaching the end of their lives. A fundamental feature of this intimacy is conveying a sense of ‘being with’ a patient. However, these ways of working were greatly challenged by the impact of COVID-19. This article explores how intimacy both was and was not established at the height of the pandemic, and it describes the extent to which shared concerns functioned as a new means to create a sense of a common experience.

Birth doulas provide non-medical intimate support to pregnant people and their families. This support starts at the very foundation of life – breath. Doulas remind, encourage and accompany people through labour by breathing with them. However, the global COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted doulas’ intimate work, and they are forced to navigate new restrictions surrounding birth practices. Based on data collected from a qualitative survey of over five-hundred doulas as well as subsequent follow-up interviews with select doulas, we find intimacy at births disrupted and reshaped. We suggest that an analysis of doulas provides a unique way to think through the complexities surrounding reproduction precisely due to doulas’ ability to navigate intimate labour between and across boundaries.

Drawing on the story of Valentin, one of the key participants of my current research on escort boys and their male clients in Paris, this article offers some reflections on the very meaning of intimacy as it is lived and experienced by this escort boy and his clients in the spectre of COVID-19. As a strict lockdown has been decreed by the French government for two months between March and May 2020, the situation has been somehow indicative of Valentin's relationship with his clients. The lockdown showed how authentic intimacy, cleared of expected escort performances, arose with even more intensity between Valentin and one of his clients. This article explores the changing nature of their relationship in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article considers the way the outbreak of coronavirus and the subsequent lockdown have egregiously impeded the intimate life practices of Kotis, people who possess a distinct gender-variant identity in India. The Kotis, who subsist mostly on begging or sex work through cross-dressing, counter the hegemonic heteronormative ‘bodyscape’ that fetishizes bodily differences and reinforces normative intimate practices. Using narratives and documentary evidence on their lives, this article elaborates how Koti livelihoods and the intimate practices circumambient of such livelihoods are withering away because of the pandemic. Tragically today, they are branded as ‘corona transmitters’, and their intimate practices are stigmatised as ‘infectious’. A restraint on their physical movement and gathering in public spaces due to the pandemic has ramifications not only for their livelihood, but also for their intimate practices and identity assertions.

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam's largest city, supports a vibrant street food culture. Most of the city's street-engaged food traders are poor and unskilled women, and there is scant research about how they build social networks and social capital that sustain their micro-businesses. This article focusses on the intimate socialities that street-engaged food traders develop with customers, shop owners and sister-traders in order to stabilise their incomes while their informal street-trading activities are policed and potentially shut down. Recent COVID-19 lockdown and social-distancing measures disrupted the crucial interpersonal relations of street trading and left the traders with no income. This article explores traders’ strategies for achieving economic security, and outlines transformations of intimate socialities into mediated and digital relations after the lockdown.

In India, the ‘unlock’ period has allowed some domestic workers to return to work; this comes amidst government advisories of greater risk of contagion generally. Drawing on ethnographic work with women domestic workers in the city of Delhi, the article delineates how formalities of social distancing and mask-wearing have begun to inflect personalised labour relationships in ways that entrench existing hierarchies enabled by caste practices. This can be evidenced from a doubling of the idea of contagion – a culturally polluted person rendered even more pestilential because of contagion, but whose service/s are, nonetheless, needed to disinfect the space of the employer's home. With no data set available for assessing whether caste has been a variable in the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, anthropology will have to take up the responsibility of demonstrating that the latter is indeed a social phenomenon.

Initially with the massive outbreak of COVID-19, physical distancing in the form of stay-at-home campaigns made the headlines. The most stringent lockdown period in India was envisaged by the privileged class as a productive time at home. I show that the home as a space of leisure and intimacy is also a site of caste and gender privilege that upholds the social division of labour. By looking at both the work of home and the work from home, I problematise the notion of productivity from home and argue for a renewed understanding of what constitutes work and what constitutes home as an intimate space.

This article aims to reflect on the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic changed how experiences of intimacy occur with a specific focus on the domestic relations of women living in favelas in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In contexts marked by precariousness and by the everyday difficulty of cohabitation in spaces that are characterised as small and with little infrastructure, the pandemic retraces the forms of co-existence, modifying the ways in which intimacies are built and experienced. The perspective adopted takes into account the ways in which the pandemic creates, recreates and intensifies relationships of vulnerability that not only include prevention of the virus, but changes to domestic space and women’ private lives.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, access to space has been strictly regulated and restricted. Many of us feel acutely disconnected from our relationships, while at the same time new forms of (virtual) intimacies have become ubiquitous. In the pandemic present, nearly all interpersonal relations are now characterised by a double absence that is concrete and material, and also emotional and felt. This article offers a theoretical reflection on how conditions of absence create new practices of intimacy and new strategies of coping. It does so by discussing how pre-pandemic emotional repertoires are translated into new forms of intimacy that can synchronise or throw out of sync. It highlights the centrality of spatial and temporal relations under absence in uncovering new mediated practices.

This article examines how lockdown measures have affected international students living in an international student dorm in Copenhagen. During the COVID-19 lockdown in Denmark from March to June, the dorm, which was previously considered a domestic space only, emerged as a closed circuit that collapsed into a single space living, work and leisure activities. The article shows that due to the lack of physical, mental and temporal demarcations between spaces of work and leisure, the dorm as a closed circuit has altered social and intimate relations. Drawing on concepts of non-places, home, and hyper-places, it argues that the life of international students was particularly disrupted by the COVID-19 lockdown.

This article is a result of the way in which the design of a first-year anthropology course attempted to undo stern structural hierarchies between students and teachers. Instead, the participants regarded one another as fellow anthropologists undertaking ethnographic research on the university context. This article examines the intimate relations that came available to participants when the course moved from in-person to Zoom format. Participants moved into homes to document the unfurling COVID-19 crisis, (back) into intimate familial relations. But this was not the only intimacy with which participants had to grapple anthropologically. The lecture materials, too, connected themselves to things and experiences in immediacy as they arrived into homes through laptop screens. The screens themselves offered up new insights into the lives of others – something newly minted anthropologists had to account for as they completed the course.

We have been conducting collaborative ethnographic research together for over 20 years. Over the past 12 months, this collaboration has included face-to-face encounters, both in Kampala, Uganda, and in Perth, Australia. However, since the advent of COVID-19-related ‘lockdowns’ in our respective countries, our engagements have been conducted exclusively over online platforms, including WhatsApp, Facebook and – increasingly – Zoom. In this article, we reflect upon our shared experience of conducting ethnography through this platform as a tool for understanding the effects of the pandemic in Uganda. We argue that, despite all kinds of material constraints (at both ends), Zoom has much to offer the ethnographer particularly because it can generate an intimate understanding of experience and time. However, against this advantage, some aspects of social life remain beyond the range of its channels, for which an assemblage of additional methods are required. We finish by reflecting upon what these methods have contributed to our long-term study of emergent cultures of mobility in Uganda – a study which is now being conducted in an ostensible context of immobility.

The World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 pandemic on 11 March 2020, and the world has been different ever since. Recalling the work of Victor Turner and Arnold van Gennep, this article explores how their ideas about rituals and rites of passage can be used to make sense of the pandemic. In particular, it seeks to show how using the structure of rituals of separation and incorporation and liminality can unpack and highlight changing ideas about temporality, embodiment and relationships.