The other aftermath of the covid

A neighbor from Seville does the shopping in a supermarket last week.PACO PUENTES / EL PAÍS

“Life cannot be to work all week and go to the supermarket on Saturday.

That can not be.

This life is not human ”, stated, before the pandemic, the paleoanthropologist Juan Luis Arsuaga, in a widely publicized interview.

In the book

Daily life in times of covid

(Catarata, 2021), the doctor in Social Anthropology Alberto del Campo, professor at the Pablo de Olavide University, has gathered a dozen studies that allow questioning that statement by showing how these routines were part of life and how their limitations due to covid have generated unexpected consequences, to the point that this daily life has become something desired, privileges or an object of desire.

Employees who dream of returning to their jobs, working mothers overwhelmed by the dismantling of their support networks, young people who change their ways of managing sexual and emotional relationships or people who want to get up without fear every morning are just examples of the other consequences of the pandemic.

“Beyond the numbers of sick, deceased or unemployed people, the pandemic also implies a crisis in daily life, in our ways of relating, communicating, having fun, traveling, studying, dividing up household chores;

in short, how we are, think, feel and act on a day-to-day basis, ”says Del Campo.

The social anthropologist perceived this reality and requested the collaboration of experts in his field and others related to give light to circumstances that are buried by the emergency of the day to day, but that are relevant and, in his opinion, will make the society that emerges after this crisis is different.

These are some of the main consequences of the pandemic, according to the studies gathered by the anthropologist, who concludes: "The coronavirus is not only only an impact agent but also an activator, a trigger for change."

Longing for routine

After a survey on the effects and social changes generated by the covid and in which 3,000 people participated, sociologists from the University of Granada Ricardo Duque-Calvache and José Manuel Torrado have observed something unique.

The most repeated words in the comments about needs, desires and hopes are: go out, friends, family, go for a walk, do or power.

“We find two categories very interesting that express a certain nostalgia for a pre-pandemic daily life, such as routine and tranquility.

Routine, which in other contexts has negative connotations, close to boredom and monotony, is longed for.

Citizens are tired of living extraordinary and interesting times ”, the authors emphasize.

It is also curious that mobility limitations, according to the study, have been perceived as "more bearable" during the phase of absolute confinement than during the less limited phases.

"It is as if this minimal mobility awakens the appetite that has been suppressed for weeks to make longer trips," they explain.

Sociologists highlight the importance of this once reviled routine.

“Our reality unfolds day by day marked by the small events that shape individual and social times.

The bulk of the time is spent in internships that, although they do not always have a set schedule, allow us to continue to function in society, such as housework, travel, working hours or meetings with our families and friends.

We assume such times and activities as a routine part of life, of an everyday life that is nothing but the set of actions that we carry out more or less periodically.

Many of these actions also involve relationships with other people, and all individual realities have this in common: social contact ”.

Vulnerability, distrust and skepticism

“We believed we were safe from many of the evils, misfortunes, disasters and pandemics that can plague the planet.

We believed that we were prepared against any eventuality and we believed that the funds or resources available in privileged areas of the earth would have been used appropriately, preventing worst-case scenarios and making the necessary decisions when this was necessary.

Well, it seems not, ”highlights Luis Díaz Viana, Research Professor at the Institute of Language, Literature and Anthropology at the Center for Human and Social Sciences of the CSIC.

Díaz identifies two age groups that have had different reactions to the reality revealed by the pandemic: the young and the old.

Some of the former, according to the author, "have taken confinement as an anticipated vacation or relief from exams that looked bad."

"There are usually no casualties from the virus among those of their age," he explains.

Some have not found out and others have not wanted to find out about the significance of this crisis

Luis Díaz Viana, Research Professor at the Institute of Language, Literature and Anthropology of the Center for Human and Social Sciences of the CSIC

“The oldest of us came out of the crisis with disbelief, distrust and skepticism regarding a system that we believed to be better than it was and it has been discovered how it limped, dragging glaring deficiencies and insane globalizing effects: a class system, unjust and ruthless with the weak which are all those who are outside the productive circuit.

We already knew it, but suffering the consequences of it fiercely should end up opening the eyes of those who have not yet done so.

Which doesn't seem like it's going to happen.

Some have not found out and others have not wanted to find out about the significance of this unannounced crisis ”, he concludes.

Intimate to excess, home and the conjuring of boredom

José Antonio González Alcantud, professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Granada, uses a metaphor to define people before and during the pandemic.

The pre-Covid society was "humming", marked by acceleration, like those birds of incessant flight.

"Stopping meant insignificance, social death, expiring without any glory and, ultimately, depression," he explains.

"In the pandemic," he adds, "we have seen the humming man retreat to give way to an artificial dandy" who, in his opinion, "rejects the outside world and locks himself around the fire of the domestic hearth."

"The pandemic has made us extremely intimate, almost to an excess, focused on our subjectivity," says González Alcantaud.

And the fear of succumbing to the emptiness of boredom in that new reality has been conjured.

“People in general have not experienced that scare because their lives have been filled again with intensities, such as surviving on a daily basis and being attentive to the newscasts, posing the pandemic as a true war whose fronts had to be covered by every hour, ”he says.

We have adopted the abode, bourgeois or proletarian, as a kind of shell in the style of snails

José Antonio González Alcantud, Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Granada

The other tool has been the house.

“We have reappropriated the home after a long absence from it as an abandoned space in the heat of the days.

Bourgeois housing has been a rediscovery of warm sensations;

the proletarian, overcrowded, without comforts, cold and soulless, has sowed concerns in its inhabitants.

But the latter has also externalized deep emotions.

In any case, we have adopted the abode, bourgeois or proletarian, as a kind of shell in the style of snails, as a protection against external inclemencies, unknown dangers that would come from the street, from formless life ”, he concludes.

The harms of teleworking

"The sudden implementation of teleworking has revealed some tensions and contradictions in terms of conciliation and balance that move it away from the utopian ideal that some considered," warns Hugo Valenzuela-García, doctor in Anthropology.

According to this professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ​​distance work has highlighted a growing gap of inequality and tensions generated by "the difficult reconciliation between the productive sphere (work) and the reproductive sphere (home)".

A survey reflected in the work of Valenzuela-García on this work modality revealed that the first disadvantages identified by the employees were the extension of the working day and the increase in the workload, which generates a feeling of saturation and self-exploitation.

Second was the feeling of loneliness or longing for social contact and face-to-face relationships.

"This response reveals a rarely exalted but certainly crucial labor aspect of work: its social significance and, specifically, the emancipation and integration of the individual into the broader social fabric," says the author of the study.

He also adds that the lower effectiveness attributed to telework shows that “technology-mediated sociability”, in relation to videoconferences, chats and other interaction platforms, “is not perceived in the same way as that which occurs in person, possibly because the senses involved in the interaction are impaired ”.

Remote work has highlighted a growing gap of inequality and tensions

Hugo Valenzuela-García, doctor in Anthropology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona

Third, the interviewees recognized the difficulty in separating the domestic from the work environment as a disadvantage.

According to their answers, the rebalancing “is reestablished when everything is rearranged according to its culturally habitual place;

that is, when clear distinctions can be made between times and workspaces, delimit routines, equitably redistribute household chores, set reasonable goals, and apply practical strategies to separate the two worlds (fixed times to answer emails, disconnect the phone, turn off screens) ”.

Women-mothers-workers

The closure of schools, the obligation of social distancing and the requirement of teleworking “imposed an abrupt reorganization of family life, which was deprived of the social support that the educational system usually provides, extracurricular activities and the family support network and caregivers, warn the anthropologists Serena Brigidi, Fabiola Mancinelli and Marta Ausona Bieto in the work also signed by the researcher in the field of nursing Juan Leyva-Moral.

The “working mothers-women (MMT)” have had to “juggle” to adjust to the new routines, forced to reconcile professional commitments with homeschooling and caring for children and the home.

In the results of the surveys that support the conclusions, it is highlighted that even the teachers themselves “expected mothers to take responsibility for the correct monitoring of the activities by their children, coming to perceive them if the tasks were not sent or if they were carried out incorrectly. ”.

“Of the male parents, they were not expected to participate in this follow-up and, in fact, they rarely did, creating tension in the couple,” the researchers conclude.

The moment a domestic task becomes a privilege, it ceases to be a duty assumed exclusively by women and socializes with men

Serena Brigidi, Fabiola Mancinelli, Marta Ausona Bieto and Juan Leyva-Moral

The confinement has taken away physical and mental spaces from the “working women-mothers-workers” also from the upper-middle class, according to the study, highlighting the contradictions of the so-called “intensive motherhood”: “The MMTs in this investigation confessed their doubts and internal struggles with the ideal of a responsible, present, productive and organized mother that is, in part, explicitly demanded of them by their partners, children, even school teachers, and, in part, self-imposed.

They mentioned the feeling of guilt for not being able to keep up with everything ”, highlights the work.

Regarding the behavior of men during confinement, the study also observes “role reversals with respect to those domestic tasks that involve leaving the home”: “Those that were normally assumed by women, such as shopping or walking the dog, began to be carried out by men (…) The moment a domestic task becomes a privilege, it ceases to be a duty assumed exclusively by women and socializes with men ”.

Fear and insecurity

“Under the threat of the coronavirus, most of us humans have felt fear.

And this has not been for being a man or a woman, for being young, old or old, for being rich or poor or educated or without a formal education;

almost all of us have felt the fear of the virus ”, highlights in her work Ana María Huesca González.

Professor of Sociology and Criminology at the Universidad Pontificia Comillas in Madrid and tutor at the UNED.

But that fear, according to Huesca, despite being a “shared nexus”, “rather than unifying, it divides”.

"More than generating common ways of thinking, feeling and acting, this new society that we are seeing being born is doomed to the proliferation of multiple realities based on extreme individualization", warns the researcher.

In the same way, the sociologist highlights how the general feeling of insecurity due to the disease itself and the socioeconomic repercussions of it “is the best way to get the whole of society to accept any decision that supposedly involves a reduction in threats, even if this implies the reduction of rights and freedoms ”.

The gap between the included and the excluded will be wider than ever

Ana María Huesca González.

Professor of Sociology and Criminology at the Universidad Pontificia Comillas in Madrid and tutor at UNED

“The new society that looms over the horizon of the new normal and social distance does not have the same consequences for everyone.

The gap between the included and the excluded will be wider than ever: it is not a problem for the winners because they have the means (to take the diagnostic tests they need), the necessary residential conditions (large and adequate houses and homes with access to the garden) , the capacities to stay interconnected (they are well adapted to live in a network) and adaptive values ​​to the change of time (possessive individualism).

For the losers, it means putting one more obstacle in their development possibilities ”, he concludes.

The management of affective-sexual desire

"What risks or changes in affective-sexual models could result from the union of desire, sexual need and covid?", Rebeca Cordero (Political Sciences) and criminologists Jorge Ramiro Pérez and Antonio Silva ask themselves.

“Based on our experience, we have identified the existence of two clearly differentiated groups;

those who assumed the confinement and managed their desire avoiding physical interactions with others and, secondly, those who from different motivations decided to go to the physical plane to interact.

In addition, a possible paradigm shift was glimpsed in terms of affective-sexual relationships, returning to a type of love close to the

traditional

one once the effects of

fastlove

were discarded

”, they conclude.

The covid has reflected the change to an atypical model for young users of affective-sexual applications: “The deep and exploratory knowledge would be more satisfactory and profitable for them than the ideology of immediate consumption present in the

fastlove

.

This possible paradigm shift also sheds light on an exercise in self-awareness that has led some people to decide what they want and don't want to do.

Some have even confirmed that for them sex is now less important ”.

Some people have even confirmed that sex is less important to them now

Rebeca Cordero (Political Sciences) and the criminologists Jorge Ramiro Pérez and Antonio Silva

After three different research works on users of affective-sexual applications, the authors identify five exclusive categories in the management of relationships:

"Reinvention

.

Those individuals who break with the

fastlove

paradigm

, establishing deeper ties of knowledge of the other, without seeking physical contact in the midst of a pandemic and making the common good prevail over the individual.

False perception of security

.

Those who seek physical sex with known people, considering that having had previous contacts with them removed them from danger.

It is a misperception, since that prior knowledge does not exclude them as vectors of contagion.

Individualism

.

People who, from a hyperindividual perspective, seek to satisfy their needs: sex, drugs, physical contact, etc. without control.

Taking advantage of other people's vulnerabilities (buying sex).

This category corresponds to those situations in which an individual, knowing the difficulties others are going through (motivated by covid), decides to pay for sex to those people who are in a situation of social fragility.

As a survival mechanism

.

In this last category would be the people who accept physical sexual practice for money, to alleviate their economic hardships ”.

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