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Bodily Experiences of Physical Proximity and Vulnerability

Abstract

Proximity is a component of social situations that often receives little explicit attention in everyday experience but becomes especially poignant during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ethnographic data allow us to demonstrate how proximity is produced and avoided when bodies are not only coded as infectious and thus vulnerable, but also experienced in this vulnerability. Following the phenomenological concepts of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hermann Schmitz, this path of experience will be reconstructed with the body at the centre of the hermeneutic interpretations. Furthermore, the field of everyday transformations through the pandemic will serve a more general interest: How is the experience of proximity integrated into the physical approach to the world? An insightful approach to this aspect of experience will be presented. Physicality and proximity are to be related by interweaving phenomenological theories and observational data in order to enable a perspective on social situations that approaches the experience in a comprehensible way.