Performing Social Distancing: Culture, Scripts, and Meaningful Order in the Italian Lockdown

Abstract

This article aims to explore the relationship between symbolic action and critical junctures by looking at early responses to the Covid-19 epidemics that broke out in Italy in late February and March 2020. In this regard, Italy's lockdown in the context of the Covid-19’s pandemic that shook the world in Spring 2020 provide material for an analysis of what happens of the relationship between processes of meaning-making and the alignment to an emerging and progressively more generalized disaster culture in an extreme condition in which the room for symbolic action becomes more and more limited. I argue that the new politics of performance that was shaped during the lockdown, with huge limitations both to the spaces of expression and to the morality of performance, can be analyzed effectively in order to to gain insight on the collective dimension of social life in a case in which there is a programmatic, top-down intervention on one of the crucial requisites for the production of symbolic action, namely, the co-presence of participants. Keywords Cultural Sociology; Social Performance; Scripts; Covid-19; Contemporary Italy Funding This article was supported with funds from the “SOCDIST” strategic project of the University of Trento, 2020-2022.