Come a Teatro. Etnografie della vita quotidiana al tempo di un'epidemia

This paper draws from an academic experience that took place in the context of a distance learning Cultural Anthropology course during the two months of Covid-19 lockdown. Students were encouraged to write an ethnographic diary in order to record their everyday life, their feelings and their insecurities in a time of suspension and in a domestic space where fragile bodies and universal affections are obliged to be together with an alteration of conflicts and sharing, with crisis and fixing. Ethnographic writing shed light on the impossibility of metabolizing an experience not yet fully elaborated and thus still not transitive and transformative; it will also show how a narrative of events can be examined through the anthropological category of “social drama” as proposed by Victor Turner. According to this purpose, diaries will be presented and discussed considering the four phases which are essential for the the resolutionof an ongoing social drama: breech, crisis, redressive action and reintegration.