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The first sense in which the examples might be understood to be social is in their involvement of other people and in their denoting of the social circumstances to which humans respond; crying in response to a film is, whether the people about whom one is crying are present or not, a social act, and it is one that indicates that the crier in some way relates to the situations of others. The desire to stifle an emotional reaction in front of an other—a friend—might in itself be understood as a kind of recognition of the sometimes uncomfortable social connectivity of emotion; the desire not to cry might here constitute a pulling out from a connection too close for comfort, which the expression of emotion might otherwise make.
The second way in which Milton’s examples might be considered social has to do with how sociality itself is understood. Casey (1996), Abram (1996) and Jackson (1983) have all understood sociality to refer to and to include the relationships formed between persons and persons and between persons and world. Birds, animals, landscapes—especially landscapes—are inextricably intertwined with persons, to such an extent that persons, to Casey, are best described as ‘placelings’, for so linked are they with the habitual and inescapable ‘where’ of being. Far from being the backdrop to human activity, places are the very constancy of life, and because they are it is difficult, in my view, to understand them as ‘non-social’. Perhaps it is the case that Milton can see place as unsocial because she takes a literal view of the environment, one in which an environment is, as she says, quoting Ingold, ‘that which surrounds’ (Ingold 1993, p. 31). But environment, in my view at least, does so much more than surround. To simply or only surround, one would have to identify the place at which individual began and environment ended—an impossible task when one considers, as Casey (1996) does, that human beings are sensually connected with place in ways that are not preventable, that are unstoppable, that are indivisible from environment. Abram (1996) probably stated this idea best when he noted that perception itself is characterized by reciprocity between person and world; it is ‘an ongoing interchange … my animal and the fluid, breathing landscape that it inhabits’ (pp. 52–53). This reciprocity between person and world can happen in breathing, happen in the very act of seeing, hearing and touching.