Informal Relationships as Resilience during Covid-19: The Case of an Informal Neighborhood in Dhaka City

Abstract

The paper explores the concept of “Social Distancing”
in its physical usage during the Covid-19 pandemic.
By providing ethnographic data, the study shows how
canceling large gatherings, closing schools and offices,
quarantining individuals and even sequestering entire cities
or neighborhoods were assumed to be the best ways to slow
the spread of the coronavirus. However, health measures
promoted by the World Health Organization (WHO) created
cultural problems in South Asia including Bangladesh due
to cultural features of collectivity against Western biological
assumptions. In addition, the paper shows how these health
measures were considered as a crude and costly public health
strategy. The paper argues that restricting shared spaces in
turn forced families or individuals to lose childcare, emotional
and social support. It also puts forth the argument that social
distancing measures were insufficient to protect older, sick,
homeless and isolated people who may have been the most
vulnerable to the virus. What they needed was extra care and
attention, social networks and relations as survival strategies
in the city.