A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: sentiment analyses of new connections and communities in a COVID world. Quarantine re-makes the city around us, re-defining “inside” and “outside,” “home” and “neighborhood.” “Staying home” means complying with a socially and politically constructed bubble that delimits not only who or what can move from one side or another, but the protocols to be followed when that barrier is breached. Moreover, transitioning from one to another is not just a matter of spatial movement, it also involves a shift in identity, from the one quarantined to the one not quarantined. Finally, quarantine is a temporal state: fourteen days, or until the city lifts the quarantine measures. Under these conditions, what does “home” mean? What does “inside” mean? And when one is quarantined, what do more collective identities like “community” and “neighborhood” mean? U...
Occasional posts on anthropologically interesting science fiction, anthropological futures and my own future as an anthropologist.