“Almost nothing has changed”: ordinary ethics and forms of life in pandemics times

Abstract

In this article, we present the narratives of a middle class and white people family, residents at the South of Brazil, around
the daily life of their family relationships in times of the Covid-19 pandemic, highlighting care infrastructures in the domestic space, emphasizing the relevance of ordinary ethics notion, developed by Veena Das, which is not based on universal moral principles or values, but in real experiences and problems of people in their daily lives. Taking these aspects into account, one can see the invisible and invisible work of maintaining ordinary life in the coexistence of three generations in the same house, their momentary strategies in the scenario of the sanitary emergency caused by the pandemic of the new coronavirus, and the entanglements between the ordinary and the extraordinary. On the other hand, differences in gender, age, race and class, which cut the relations of care, are observed as devices by which forms of life are constituted. Inspired by the arguments of Veena Das, about the fundamental connection between ordinary ethics and ways of life, we emphasize the domestic space not only as a fundamental structure of care in the Brazilian scenario of social and political vulnerability, but also as an active
element that generates forms of life.