Social Distancing as Cooperative Action: Affiliation and Disaffiliation during the Pandemic

Abstract

The article considers the problem of the cooperation of participants in everyday interactions while doing social distancing. "Social distance" has become one of the symbols and the new reality of the pandemic. For sociologists, social distance most often serves as a metaphor for social relations that takes shape today when restrictions on face-to-face contacts are imposed by officials, employers, or people themselves. But social distance is also a practical problem that everyday actors have to deal with in routine circumstances. The article examines the grammar of social distancing that can be found in everyday situations, and describes how this grammar is realized in two particular cases, one of which demonstrates affiliation between the participants while the other demonstrates 76 disaffiliation. It is shown that in both cases some form of cooperation is present: in the case of affiliation, cooperation is observed following social distancing and involves monitoring the actions of the other, while in the case of disaffiliation, cooperation is observed prior to the instance of nondistancing and involves not monitoring the other. These observations allow us to take a critical look at the possibility of applying the classical sociological notion of "solidarity" to the phenomenon of social distancing.