ON SOCIAL DISTANCING

- Deepali Aparajita

The coronavirus saw scores of migrants leaving the city (source Indian Express)

The language of policies is often carefully chosen, sometimes not. Words are thought out and put in order to convey meanings that are easily comprehensible by people at large. Inadvertently, they are reflective of their social and ideological underpinnings. They also carry with them the baggage of their history. Most often their meanings are overlooked. But with the spread of coronavirus, the language of policies and their effectuation have led to the unearthing of deeper questions of the social. 

Ever since social distancing was suggested as a preventive measure against COVID-19 there were conjectures from different quarters on the appropriateness of the phrase. And it was not long before the meanings of social distancing played out in the different quarters of human life and society. The etymology of ‘social distancing’ lies largely in American urban sociology where the concept was used to measure both geometric and social space and later on emerged as a tool to measure racial prejudice[i]. 

One of the foremost writings on distance in sociology was by the German thinker Georg Simmel in his 1908 essay The Stranger. Simmel wrote: 

As such, the stranger is near and far at the same time, as in any relationship based on merely universal human similarities. Between these two factors of nearness and distance, however, a peculiar tension arises, since the consciousness of having only the absolutely general in common has exactly the effect of putting a special emphasis on that which is not common. For a stranger to the country, the city, the race, and so on, what is stressed is again nothing individual, but alien origin, a quality which he has, or could have, in common with many other strangers. For this reason strangers are not really perceived, but as strangers of a certain type. Their remoteness is no less general than their nearness (Simmel 1908: 148)[ii]. 

The definition of Stranger is premised on the notion of a membership. Strangers are not members and yet they are part of the society. They are crucial to the functioning of the society and yet they remain to be outsiders. When Simmel was writing his essay, he was referring to the Jews in medieval Germany who had a different, rather exploitative, system of taxation as compared to the Christian population. Today, the stranger is the migrant to the city. The construction workers building the apartments, the domestic help having access to private space of homes, the watchman at the gate. These are the strangers to the city. 

Simmel’s essay was critical in shaping the works of American sociologist Robert E Park, belonging to the Chicago school, who developed on the idea of the marginal man[iii]. Park picked up the idea of distance from Simmel, but he took departure from the idea of metaphoric distance that the latter was constantly referring to. The ‘urban ecology’ approach of the Chicago school drawing from Darwin, Spencer was making a case for a naturalisation of human distance. Park and Ernest Burgess wrote Introduction to the Science of Society (1921) where they talked of social distance. They wrote: 

A society in which all distances, physical and psychical, had been abolished, in which there were neither taboo, prejudice, nor reserve of any sort; a society in which the intimacies were absolute, would be a society in which there were neither persons nor freedom. The processes of competition, segregation, and accommodation brought out in the description of the plant community are quite comparable with the same processes in animal and human communities. A village, town, city, or nation may be studied from the standpoint of the adaptation, struggle for existence, and survival of its individual members in the environment created by the community as a whole (Park and Burgess 1921: 166)[iv]. 

This approach was quite influential in shaping urban studies in the twentieth century. It held that the natural world of plants provides a good model to study human interaction in urban spaces, which was characterised by competition to maintain equilibrium. It was later on criticised for naturalising ideas of conflict and being ideologically biased as responses to industrialisation and urbanisation in the twentieth century (Castells 2002)[v]. 

Little Italy, a ghetto of migrant Italian workers in New York City, 1900. 

Later, Emory Bogardus, founder of the Department of Sociology, University of South Carolina, developed the social distancing scale. He defined social distancing as ‘the grades and degrees of understanding and intimacy which characterize pre-social and social relations generally’ (Bogardus 1925)[vi]. Bogardus’s empirical research on social distance was primarily an experiment to measure racial distance between communities. This scale has been used to measure ‘prejudice’ over the years[vii]. It has also been criticised for having oversimplified interracial relations and created a common scale to measure different forms of ‘prejudice’. 

The coronavirus has turned out to be a crisis not only in health but also in the society at large. It has fissured the city, the product of capitalist development. People stuck at homes, factories shut down and a general state of stagnation exits. The crisis has made no exceptions, but the worst hit are those at lowest echelons of the society. The invisible workers, now suddenly visible. Visuals of them walking home pile up with each increasing day. As disturbing as these visuals are, from cities and suburbs, they capture the predicament of the migrant, the outcast labour as the Dutch sociologist Breman (2010)[viii] would call them. These workers leave the hinterland for cities to get absorbed at the bottom of the urban social structure. The lockdown is witnessing their exodus from cities, delineating the perils of the city life. 

When, the plight of the migrants, the others, the strangers to the urban, is brought out in the open, one is compelled to think whether the language of policy, in this case social distancing is accidental or a carefully chosen one to serve its social purpose? In this case, the measure of class prejudice. 

                                                                       

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[i] Ethington, Philip J. (1997) The Intellectual Construction of "Social Distance": Toward a Recovery of Georg Simmel’s Social Geometry, Cybergeo : European Journal of Geography [Online], Epistemology, History, Teaching, document 30, Online since 16 September, http://journals.openedition.org/cybergeo/227;DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/cybergeo.227

[ii] Simmel, G. (1908). The Stranger. 

 http://www.dartmouth.edu/~germ43/pdfs/simmel_stranger.pdf

[iii] Park, R. (1928). Human Migration and the Marginal Man. American Journal of Sociology, 33(6), 881-893. Retrieved May 11, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/2765982

[iv] Park, R and Burgess, E. (1921). Introduction to the Science of Sociology, University of Chicago Press 

[v] Castells, M. (2002) Urban Sociology in the Twenty First Century. file:///C:/Users/Deepali/Downloads/9160-Article%20Text-25978-1-10-20160502.pdf

[vi] Bogardus, E. S. (1925). "Social Distance and Its Origins." Journal of Applied Sociology 9, 216-226 https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Bogardus/Bogardus_1925b.html

[vii] Young-Bruehl, E. (1998) The Anatomy of Prejudices, Harvard University Press 

[viii] Breman, J. (2010). Outcast Labour Circulation and Informalization of the Workforce at the Bottom of the Economy, OUP