Where have the gatherings gone? Reweaving the social fabric in the time of pandemic and interpersonal distancing

Abstract

For this Forum, I would have normally offered a few observations about the vanishing of the festive and the carnivalesque in times of contagion, but events have moved me to think instead, in an autoethnographic fashion, about the cultural rearticulation of mourning during the temporary abrogation of its customary collective and shared forms. In many parts of Europe, religious rites in general and funerary rites in particular are, in normal times, the examples par excellence of how sociality is periodically reestablished through the ritualisation of family, friendship and labour network ties.

These practices are inevitably being rethought and reconfigured, their importance though indirectly confirmed, in these days, along with more mundane and cheerful ones, through a variety of cul-tural means, such as digital ones. Thus we reweave damaged, disrupted or inter-rupted sociality in the current interregnum of the private and domestic sphere over the public one.