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New Sociabilities: Celebrating Father’s Day in Quarantine

Celebrating Father’s Day (March 19 th ): Continuing on the theme of new sociability, Father’s Day in Spain coincides with the Liturgical Feast of Saint Joseph in the Latin Rite Catholic Church.   This is always on March 19 th . Mandatory quarantine and confinement had begun on March 14 (or 16 th depending how you count it).   So it wasn’t clear how people were going to celebrate. The solution was building upon the consolidating practice of balcony applauses and cacerolada. A traditional children’s song (“Don Pepito”) would be sung in cadence (here is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJCYmHQjycs ).   It is a children’s song of call and response, two characters talking to each other:   Pepito and José (or Joe and Joseph).   All apartments in buildings with odd street numbers (11, 23, etc.) would sing the opening line, and all houses with even street numbers would respond.   While the actual singing somet...
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New forms of socializing?

New forms of socializing?    Given the ambience of quarantine and social distancing, many have asked what the social effects of this would be.   At this point I’m not talking about the macro social effects in terms of governance, fear of “Others”, economic effects, etc. but more simply about how social life is continuing or morphing under quarantine. Of course this will look very different in different sites and even neighborhoods, so we’ll only pass on what is happening here. From the very first (or maybe second?) night of the quarantine, on Saturday March 14 th , text messages were passed around saying to stand at your window or balcony and clap in solidarity with doctors, nurses and health care workers at 10pm.   This was massively echoed all over the country.   By the next night, the time was changed to 8pm, and it has continued and increased every night since the quarantine began 3 and a half weeks ago and counting.   A few days ...
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March 9th-14th

March 9 th -14 th By Monday the 9 th , these early local warnings were seeping into “cancellations”.   First, a field trip for our 10 year old daughter on Wednesday the 11 th was postponed to June.   The trip included meeting students of another Montessori school in Valencia- which was seeing many more cases of coronavirus.   Next a “family in nature” day planting trees at our son’s high school,   scheduled for the 14 th is cancelled.   The trip was to a rural area, other than the bus, mostly outdoors, we weren’t quite sure it made sense to cancel, and we only understood later the risk factor of the bus ride.   Nonetheless, I had a medium size work meeting (30-50 people) on Wednesday from different work sites, this was not postponed.   I was going to get my bread and coffee, but much more attentive to whether the snack I ate had been on display long, where I put my lips on the coffee mug…etc.   the corona nerves were be...
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March 8th, 2020

March 8 th , 2020, In the midst of a large lunch at the affordable, though hurried, Basque restaurant in Zaragoza (Itziar),   I can see the news to my right.   Sitting there with my kids, and extended family, most of the meal is occupied by making sure everyone has their dish, has the portions cut right so as to ingest them properly, and eating quick enough before the waiters diced we’ve had enough time on that course!   We can’t here the news, but we see maps of Italy with huge swaths of the North of the country in red, and headlines below stating something to the effect of “16 million under confinement”.   Though serious, the news still felt far away, that this was something we did not need to worry about in a concrete way here.   I messaged with my cousins in Northern Italy to see how they were.   Other than staying at home they seemed fine, except the one in Milano where the situation was more dramatic. As the week between ...
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Introduction

These posts are a series of notes about the evolution of the coronavirus crisis form the vantage point of the goings on in Zaragoza, Spain.   As Spain becomes one of the centerpieces of this crisis for the moment (mid-March 2020) and one of the countries   of the EU to be hit the hardest (after Italy), we decided to take some notes on how this process unfolds ,especially with quarantine.   The idea is simple and limited.   A series of ethnographic style notes, when regular ethnography becomes difficult.   Trying to take notes on the forms of existence, on experiencing a “crisis” that feel distant and close, on reconciling peaceful moments with the family with concerns for relatives far away, on being socially and geographically isolated, yet bombarded incessantly with digital images, messages, requests, news, etc.   On new forms of sociality (and its lack) that merge in this place in this context. We have sense, as do many other people of course, that...
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