We Still Make Meaning

Shanti Mathias | SHE/HER

I go running six days a week. I’ve always known it was important for me to feel good in my body, but as lockdown continues, it is vested with a new significance. I can’t see my friends, visit the library, and go to classes, but I can still move my body.

Running is my moment of continuity: something that is part of my life in ordinary circumstances that I can hold on to, and know that everything else will come back.

Going running is a habit, but it’s more than that; it’s also a ritual. Professor Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich, an anthropologist who teaches at Victoria, defines ritual as “a sequence of events invested with symbolic significance”. Anthropologists study ritual, and the role it plays in society. “Eating breakfast is a habit, not a ritual,” Bönisch-Brednich says, “but if you Instagram your food, then it might be a ritual.”

“[Rituals] make meaning out of time...so it’s not just one damned thing after another,” says Tim McKenzie, a vicar at St Michael’s Church in Kelburn. Rituals can be annual, like Christmas, Waitangi Day, Matariki. They can be weekly, like going to the mosque on Friday, Tuesday pub quizzes, Wednesday student nights in town. Any repeated action which contains symbolism and meaning can be a ritual; rituals mean different things to different people. 

Lockdown changes social patterns, which impacts many kinds of rituals, whether around religion, exercise, or food. “I’ve just had to improvise,” Raymond Pan, a fourth year law and English student said. His bubble is with his grandparents in Palmerston North so he can help them with shopping and their house. He’s lost his ritual of going to the gym at the end of the day; instead, he works out in the garden. 

Lots of people miss movement, and are realizing that the space of time it takes to get to uni or work is essential for their wellbeing. Raymond said, “I do miss walking to uni for forty mins each day as I could listen to music and get some fresh air before going to class.”

Selvi Balasubramanian, a fifth year commerce and history student, said that she missed her commute too. “The bus to uni, the walk to work, the walk home, that was my time to be by myself and listen to my podcasts… I miss that because there’s no equivalent now.”

Brigitte says the ritual of walking to work incorporates “an enormous significance.” In lockdown, there is an attempt to echo that. “[People] get dressed and walk around their block to emulate a walk to work; ‘I’m going outside, I’m looking after myself.’” She thinks movement is essential, too; she goes for a walk each morning before breakfast.

Under lockdown, the house is where we eat and sleep and socialize and work and study and exercise; where we despair, dream, demoralize, and debauch. It is difficult to demarcate between these activities when they all happen in the same space. Movement between activities can help.

Lockdown means new rituals, such as watching the 1pm press conferences. “A lot of people have developed free time at 1 o’clock to watch the update; they are streaming or recording it, watching it together, Zooming while they watch and talk to each other, have their lunch or cup of coffee,” Bönisch-Brednich says. This ritual is not about an individual or a bubble. It’s something that New Zealanders collectively engage in, connected in separation through a hunger for information.

Formal social structures also develop around “the bubble.” 

“Calling it the bubble was a stroke of brilliance; people can hang meaning onto that,” Bönisch-Brednich says. The term bubble helps remind me who these people are who I live with, and how we must act for collective safety. I watch my friends’ Facebook stories about their bubble parties and their bubble running onto the street in a rainstorm. 

Lockdown has most dramatically changed the shape of socializing. “Church, community groups, university, and veggie market shops maintain structure in my non-lockdown life,” says Maryeke Kok, a third year Health student. She is in lockdown with her family in Cambridge. She’s had to replace these activities digitally. “I’ve been on multiple video calls every day…it’s the next best thing to being in person.” This constant communication is new to her. “Before lockdown, I’d just wait until I next saw someone to catch up with them.”

“Lots of rituals develop around socialising,” Bönisch-Brednich says. “[There’s a need to] reassure yourself of relationships and friendships which becomes important, you reassure yourself that you have these connections because they don’t occur naturally at the moment.” She has an older friend who she calls every morning and asks the same questions, just to check in; calls with family members in Europe are also particularly important. She also watches concerts and performances with friends, then discusses it over Zoom. 

Whether it’s doing the Stuff trivia quiz online together, having a dance party over Zoom, or using Discord to play games with others, digital technology creates new rituals of socialising. It can be exhausting; after an hour-long video call and online church, I don’t feel like signing in to the Zoom dance party, to be alone and with other people at the same time. 

Brigitte notes that during lockdown, some rituals cannot be observed. This is particularly prominent for religious rituals, such as funerals. “There’s an incredibly high importance to being with people as they die,” she says. During lockdown, that’s simply not possible. While some funeral parlours offer to store the body until loved ones can gather to bury it, or others observe digital funerals, there is “no way to commemorate as a collective, gather around the body and make sure that everyone sees that person pass from the living to the dead.” 

As a vicar, Tim has had to think about the absence of rituals, although he hasn’t had to run a funeral service during lockdown yet, a fact for which he is grateful. “Funerals are about an absence, and if you’re not able to be with the body the grief may be intensified.” 

Clare Land, a first year anthropology student who is in lockdown in Northland, was unable to attend her grandfather’s tangi. “Going to tangi was such a big thing for me growing up...everyone comes together, mourns together, processes as a community,” she says. Instead, with her parents, she lit a candle in the garden and sang a song, posting a video of this to the whānau group chat.
“It was bizarre, because that is not how you usually do a tangi.” She’d been able to see him several weeks earlier, so felt like she’d done her grieving then. 

Communion, too—taking the bread and wine as Jesus’s body and blood—is different during lockdown. While some church traditions, such as the Baptist movement, are relaxed about people using ordinary bread and grape juice, Anglican’s and Catholics acknowledge that there is both a spiritual and physical element to communion, so require the bread and wine to be blessed by a priest. “We have to make do,” Tim says. “We are reminded that we can’t do the full ritual at the moment...but if the physical stuff is important, being reminded of the absence reminds us of what we are to
each other.” 

Some of the rituals emerging in lockdown will be resilient, and some will not. “[After lockdown] I’d enjoy keeping up with going on regular walks and exercising with my family,” Maryeke says. Selvi, too, will try to maintain some of the rituals she’s developed in lockdown. “I’d love to keep doing yoga and meditation, especially ten minutes of meditation in the morning when I just stare into space.” Rituals are resilient, Bönisch-Brednich says, when “they have meaning that can be mediated or manipulated; if it loses its meaning, it disappears.”

At the moment, I’m praying with other people in my bubble three times a day: in the morning, at midday, and evening. It is time to acknowledge that there is a world of hope beyond the walls; to find focus in the blurry days, of things achieved and unachieved. Once we have classes to virtually attend, more places to be outside of the house, this will not be sustainable. But the ritual has served its purpose. It has given me structure and meaning, something to clasp onto when the rest of the world is beyond reach.