The Embodiment of Hygiene and Safety: ways of sensing the world during the pandemic

The sensing of impurity differs from culture to culture, and it changes as time passes by. During the pandemic, unhygienic behaviour is regarded as unsafe and threatening to society. Through the concept of embodiment and habitus, this research seeks to discover how different cultures view the surrounding environment differently during the pandemic. And based on a phenomenological approach in the field of sensory anthropology, analyse how the sensory awareness of hygiene evolves in specific cultures. 

Instead of viewing the perception of impurity as a static representative of culture, this research seeks to identify the sensing of impurity as a cultural phenomenon that is formed through bodily practice and through the interaction with the surrounding environment. This research discusses that the sensing of impurity and unsafety during the pandemic is not determined only through mental calculation based on scientific evidence, or the conditioning lullabies of a saturated media, but by the practice of the body in the culture. It is made by body-sense and body learning and is obtained by the experience and the interaction with the environment of bodily practice.

This study will also discuss how the Cartesian legacy of dichotomized body and mind can allow a conceptualization of safety to spring from an unembodied, unexperienced, and even purely semantic relationship, as in the case of hearing or reading about danger in a distant land.

Keywords: Sensory Awareness, Body Technique, Body-Learning, Habitus