From balcony concerts to cyber drinks — the power of ritual in the corona age

Last year, Kristina Jacobsen, an American musical anthropologist, moved to Sardinia to do ethnographic (or fly-on-the-wall) research into the island’s vibrant street life and music culture. Fate, in the shape of Covid-19, intervened: Sardinia was placed in lockdown and its noisy street culture vanished.

So Jacobsen pivoted — and is now studying how Sardinian households have started to use online and at-home musical rituals to cope with the stress of coronavirus.

“Into [the] void of daily scents and sounds, a multitude of melodies has been born: balcony concerts, recordings and in-home videos,” she explains in an article for social science magazine Sapiens, noting that a plethora of performances have appeared online with hashtags such as #flashmobsonoro, #iorestoacasa (“I’m staying home”), #lamusicanonsiferma (“the music doesn’t stop”), and #tuttoandràbene (“everything will be OK”).

These offerings, she adds: “Wail about corona, express defiance towards the disease and communicate the sense of hostility that some locals feel towards the influx of wealthy northern Italians who have been rushing to their summer houses.”

Necessity has sparked cultural invention, which is also reinforcing community ties — and resilience. It is a striking point to consider as many parts of the world endure yet more weeks of the Covid-19 lockdown.

In normal circumstances, most of us never stop to ponder how rituals and symbols shape our daily lives. That’s no surprise. As the 20th century British anthropologist Victor Turner noted, a ritual is essentially “a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words and objects, performed in a sequestered place”; typically, it either marks the passage of time, defines a community, highlights a changed state, expresses our sense of identity, reaffirms shared memories — or does all of these at once.

It is precisely because rituals are so “stereotyped” — in the sense of being habitual or inherited from people around us — that we tend not to think about them. Therein lies their power, their ubiquity and sometimes their sanctity.

The coronavirus lockdown, however, has tossed us into a new landscape of profound uncertainty. We are, as some have cleverly identified, living in a state culturally akin to the “Schrödinger’s cat” problem (where the cat was famously neither dead nor alive). Our communities seem simultaneously to have and to not have Covid-19; we expect normality to resume, but also not to resume, all at once. In the meantime, we are self-isolating but also connected to a vast online world.

In normal circumstances, most of us never stop to ponder how rituals and symbols shape our daily lives

In this confusing kaleidoscope, many have responded, by instinct as much as design, by refashioning their rituals in striking ways. Sardinia’s at-home and online musical performances are just one case in point.

So, in a sense, are the digital events that companies are launching to enable their dispersed staff to bond remotely, or that social groups are creating. My own diary is increasingly defined by a new cycle of ritualised daily video calls with colleagues and weekly cyber “drinks” with friends.

Online rituals are even emerging to mark the passage of the seasons: last weekend I took part in a virtual Easter church service with my brother’s family (followed by Easter “tea” with 10 cousins around the world).

More tragically, of course, and by necessity, some funeral rituals are moving online. New rituals are emerging to salute healthcare workers and create community solidarity: just look at the evening pot banging and cheering that originated last month in northern Italy, which has now been emulated in London and (very noisily) in Manhattan.

Inside our homes, meanwhile, many families are using rituals once reserved for childhood — such as changing clothes — to divide the endless days into “play time”, “work time” and “family time”, observes business anthropologist Martha Bird. “With so many of us at home, notions about time have begun to (re)formalise into discernible moments or rituals,” she says.

This cultural flux can be disorientating. Jeremy Bailenson, a professor of communications at Stanford University who studies what happens when humans shift their interactions into cyberspace, notes that this new terrain is so unfamiliar that we need to learn a new “language” of communication.

Most of us are not used to staring directly into enlarged faces on a screen for hours on end. This can be exhausting, since it requires us to actively engage our brains, like being immersed in a new language.

Of course, some might consider it distasteful or defeatist to even create coronavirus rituals. After all, new rituals suggest we are adapting to this new life — and thus cannot ignore it as just a temporary nightmare. But I prefer to see what is happening in Sardinia — and elsewhere — as a sign of how innovative humans can be under stress, even in a peculiar “Schrödinger’s cat” cultural world.

That prompts two further questions: when this lockdown finally ends, what coronavirus rituals will we maintain? And how will we mark the end of this stressful scourge? Ponder this the next time you feel bored at home; better still, discuss it in a video chat.

Follow Gillian on Twitter @gilliantett and email her at gillian.tett@ft.com

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