Being together as a body exercise. Ethnographic perspectives

In a multi-ethnic and multicultural city, being together is also a body exercise, a habit to different smells, tastes, skin colours, to heterogeneous ways of understanding proximity and distance. To understand how individuals and groups shape their existence in the city of differences, we cannot consider them as subjects without a body, but rather as actors who produce and receive sensory stimuli. A way of living together, sometimes of “disturbing” each other, which involves spaces and bodies. The body is one of the means through which knowledge is acquired, and the chapter makes an explicit positioning on ethnographic methodologies to explore the links between spaces and bodies, reconstructing the fundamental moments of the so-called “sensory turn” in anthropological studies. Several examples are mobilised to recount the extent to which the senses contribute to defining otherness, establishing tolerance thresholds, tracing material and symbolic boundaries between foreigner and native, but also between rich and poor. And again, the senses can be a register for giving or not giving value to people's lives, helping to construct norms and policies. The pandemic crisis has unequivocally highlighted how closely interrelated spaces and bodies are. But defending oneself “from the other” may have become an automatism: it is a drift to which we must pay attention so as not to lose the many conquests already achieved in so many gyms of coexistence that we call cities.