By Susanna Trnka
One thing that the recent Covid-19 lockdowns around the world have thrown into relief is the centrality of movement in our lives. The very word “lockdown” is indicative of immobility, forcing our attention to other ways in which we can and do still dynamically engage our bodies with and in the world.
With an etymology stemming from 1970s’ references to prisoners confined to their cells or patients to a psychiatric ward (O.E.D. 2020), “lockdown” conveys a (often fearful) sense of being penned in, unable to break out of a confined space, irrespective of how much mobility actually remains during any given “lockdown”. (And while the word “bubble” often evokes images of light, airy things floating through the air – the epitome of something that not only moves, but is impossible to pin down – for many of us in New Zealand, staying in “our bubble” frequently felt quite the opposite).
For those who could, indulging in a daily walk outdoors often felt like not just a form of exercise, but a mental health requirement. In Spain, where walking one’s dog was one of the few legally-allowable reasons to go for a stroll, pets were not only handed from one friend or neighbour to another but rented out to those desperate to get outside (Watson 2020). Moreover, as TikTok videos about dressing up to take the wheelie bins up the driveway suggest, movement outside of our domiciles is key to our sociality.
Walking, in particular, can be intensely inter-relational, a means of literally bringing us into, or out of, pace with others. As anthropologists Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst (2008:2) suggest,
“That walking is social may seem obvious … However to hold … that social life is walked is to make a far stronger claim, namely for the rooting of the social in the actual ground of lived experience, where the earth we tread interfaces with the air we breathe. It is along this ground, and not in some ethereal realm of discursively constructed significance, over and above the material world, that lives are paced on in their mutual relations.”
Even if we go at it solo, we move through spaces occupied by past, present, future others, traversing across landscapes that bear and will bear traces of those who have passed across them, connecting us together across time.
When outdoor areas are impossible or difficult to access, as they have been for some of us during Covid-19 lockdowns, we may find ourselves moving more creatively in interior spaces. We have now witnessed the phenomenon of Russian ballet dancers staging performances in their kitchens, marathons being run on balconies, as well scores of YouTube videos of gym enthusiasts working out by lifting food tins in their living rooms.
Social media, Zoom, Skype, mobile phone calls can go far to connect us, but there is something about embodied being-together and being-amongst others in real-life spaces that fills an essential need. Moving with or towards one another can be as small as the blink of an eye or twitch of a finger in gestured communication. It may also be accomplished via the stillness of presence, as when people sit or stand in togetherness. Embodied communication can occur in the most violent or subtle of ways.
Anthropologists are necessarily attentive to a range of movements. We have many ethnographies of dance, walking, running, sports of all kinds, as well as journeying and pilgrimage. There are pages devoted to examining ways of sitting, squatting, or standing at attention. But reflections on movement as a category in and of itself are less plentiful.
Anthropologist Sarah Pinto’s (2013) work on gender, kinship, the body and subjectivity in India is one exception. Drawing from a range of scholarly perspectives including dance theory, Pinto examines movement as indicative of simultaneous presence and absence, evoking possibility and its dissolution across space and time. Applying this to the situations of women confined in a psychiatric treatment centre in northern India (“lockdown” in another register), she evokes their daily lives as characterized by a precarious oscillation between potentialities – of release, of (re)connection with loved ones, of (self)realisation – and their dissipation when, as it often does, time passes and little or nothing of substance seems to change. Pinto thus shows how an analysis of movement and immobility is central to comprehending what it feels like to live one’s life in suspension.
Philosophy has also provided crucial insights into movement. The Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, whose work I have been drawing on to examine movement as part of Czech lifeworlds, suggests that via movement we come to truly inhabit a place, creating an embodied sense of not only where we stand, but who we are in relation. This can be as simple as a movement of our eyes, “grasping” an object by shifting view of it. We can do this remotely of course, be it via Google Maps or SecondLife. But there is something about being there, in Clifford Geertz’ felicitous phrasing, that conveys the sensorial power of feeling ourselves inter-connected with a place and to others, no matter how momentarily.
There were moments for some of us during lockdown, when the there we desperately wanted to be was anywhere, however briefly, than the places we were suddenly “bubbled wrapped” into. The various immobilities and mobilities we felt captured by, or drawn to, during lockdown provide an excellent point of departure for thinking about movement in all its various manifestations – movement through time and space, be it by walking along city streets, gliding across a living room turned dance floor, or clicking our way across digital landscapes; movement towards and away from one another, as family members, flatmates, erotic partners, or possibly fearful contagious “others;” reflective movement towards ourselves or the earth we live upon; conceptual movement of ideas; movement of our eyes as we adopt another line of vision.
Movement, as Patočka articulated, is how we comprehend the world – as well as how we change it: “Only by means of a body, and of a body which we control directly, can we be active in the world, taking a real part in the process of change of what it contains,” he wrote (1989 [1967]: 254-255). No wonder that we think of protests as social movements. Lockdown has given us an opportunity to reflect on and feel how movement is integral to our lives, be it via walking children to the playground or striding alongside others in a Black Lives Matter protest. And by referencing these examples I do not intend to suggest “two extremes” at opposite ends of a continuum as they are inherently intertwined (who you are, where you live, how you are viewed by others and how safe you are, and feel, in your surroundings are part of what determines whether walking to the playground is possible, or if there even is a playground in your neighbourhood).
How one moves through, on, or within the world is determined by culture, ethnicity, gender, class, geographic locale, familial configuration, occupation, disability, age, technology … the list is easily expandable. In other words, analysing movement is an ideal way of understanding not only one of our most fundamental dispositions, but also to grasp the variety of dimensions that mould our bodies, outlooks, and (successful and unsuccessful) attempts at dynamism. This is why anthropologists might want to look both more closely, as well as from further afield, at not only the various physical activities we engage in (sport, dance, etc.), but at movement more generally as a fundamental facet of our inclination towards, and engagement with, our world.
References:
Ingold, Tim and Jo Lee Vergunst. 2008. “Introduction.” In Ways of Walking Ethnography and Practice on Foot, edited by Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst, 1-20. Hampshire and Burlington: Ashgate.
Oxford English Dictionary. 2020. Online edition. www.oed.com
Patočka, Jan. 1989 [1967]. “The ‘Natural’ World and Phenomenology.” In Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings. Edited and translated Erazim Kohák, 239-273. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pinto, Sarah. 2013. “Movement in Time: Choreographies of Confinement in an Inpatient Ward.” In Senses and Citizenships: Embodying Political Life, edited by Susanna Trnka, Christine Dureau, and Julie Park, 79-98. New York: Routledge.
Watson, Fiona Flores. 2020. “Our Lives in Virus-stricken Spain: Locked Down but Still Rocking.” The Guardian. 21 March. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/21/life-in-lockdown-spain-curtailed-by-coronavirus-but-still-rocking
