What Does Distance Mean Now? Lessons from Old School Anthropology

By Erin Stiles

Humans are social creatures. We live in groups, we grow in groups, we raise our children in groups—we are utterly dependent on our social relationships. What happens to these relationships in a time when physical gatherings are limited or impossible due to “social distancing”?

This strange period in our lives has me reflecting on old classic in anthropology in which the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard considered ideas of social relationships, time, and distance among the Nuer people, of what is today South Sudan (The Nuer 1940). Last semester, right before the lockdown, students in my anthropology of Africa course read a chapter of The Nuer that addresses Nuer socio-spatial categories, or how Nuer conceive of time and space in terms of social relationships.

Image/Nuer homestead and cattle camp image courtesy of Pitt-Rivers Museum

Evans-Pritchard used the concept of “structural distance,” or how close groups of people are to one another in a social system, to explain Nuer ideas of space and time. Structural distance gave a “different set of distances” than mere physical distance, and the degree of distance between communities was not measured by miles or kilometers, but on how socially close one community was to another. Evans-Pritchard wrote, “A Nuer village may be equidistant from two other villages, but if one of these belongs to a different tribe and the other to the same tribe it may be said to be structurally more distant from the first than from the second” (1940). Distance is thus an idea that is determined by social relationships, not physical proximity. In a sense, then, social proximity collapses physical distance.

During our time of quarantine, I think this idea is useful to understanding our changing social relationships. And maybe our conceptions of distance are changing somewhat, too. When perhaps we once defined our closeness to others as a result of our potential for gathering together in physical proximity, our existence has shifted to Zoom, Facetime, Hangouts, or old fashioned texts and phone calls, and I think it has changed the way we think of our relationships.

My own family has found that some of our relationships have grown even as—physically—we’ve never been further apart. We spend more time with distant parents, siblings, and cousins than we did in the past, when we simply waited for moments of physical proximity to catch up. We’ve seen some friends more often in the past two months than in the past five years. My graduate school cohort, spread from Phoenix to Cleveland, now gathers regularly for cocktails and Zoom chats.

The physical distance we can measure in miles has become much less important than the social closeness that defines our friendships and family. Perhaps our new norms of social proximity are dismantling the meaning of physical distance and leading us to think about our relationships in new ways.

Erin Stiles is an associate professor of anthropology at UNR. She conducts research on religion, gender, and law in Zanzibar, Tanzania and in northern Utah.

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