On the hereditary proximity to ell₁

In the first part of the paper we present and discuss concepts of local and asymptotic hereditary proximity to \ell_1. The second part is devoted to a complete separation of the hereditary local proximity to \ell_1 from the asymptotic one. More precisely for every countable ordinal \xi we construct a separable reflexive space \mathfrak{X}_\xi such that every infinite dimensional subspace of it has Bourgain \ell_1-index greater than \omega^\xi and the space itself has no \ell_1-spreading model. We also present a reflexive HI space admitting no \ell_p as a spreading model.