Ethnography in Pandemic Times

Some months before the Covid-19 pandemic brought the world to a halt I last visited my research site in Zambia, where, a few hours’ drive from the capital Lusaka, I have been following a European agricultural (land) investment since 2015. Until the pandemic, I had been conducting research there every year. This offered me the chance to obtain a good understanding of how such a large-scale investment develops over time, and the impact it has on rural residents (see Salverda 2019a; 2019b; 2021; Salverda and Nkonde 2021). Since my last visit in 2019, however, I have not been able to return to Zambia. Covid-19 restrictions have prevented me from travelling, both because travel options have dwindled and because employers (the University of Vienna in my case) have prohibited employees from travelling to countries within a certain (Covid-19) risk category. As with many other cases, Zambia’s risk level has fluctuated (as seen from an Austrian perspective).