Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with grassroots responses to Covid-19 health crisis in Zambia. Attention is focused on how the initiatives of traditional health practitioners, Pentecostal and spirit-type churches cooperate with both non-governmental and state health organizations in tackling the Covid-19 pandemic.

Paper long abstract:

The paper deals with grassroots responses to Covid-19 health crisis in urban setting of Zambia, namely the capital Lusaka and Livingstone, where the ethnographic research was carried out in January and February 2022. Attention is focused primarily on how the particular grassroots initiatives of traditional health practitioners, Pentecostal and spirit-type churches cooperate with both non-governmental and state health organizations in tackling the health crisis of Covid-19 in contemporary Zambia. Healers and pastors act as gatekeepers of the local communities and cooperate with health institutions by disseminating medical knowledge on Covid-19 among members of local communities in poverty-stricken compounds. The same actors share and internalise local cultural perceptions of Covid-19 that radically differ from state-orchestrated medical explanations and recommendations, that are often unattainable to those communities. The paper attempts to show on specific ethnographic examples how these state, civic and community-level coping strategies differ but at the same time interact and negotiate within the contested realities – that of medical and spiritual conceptualisation of the disease and pandemic. The paper also focuses on how this "politics of the commons" that brings these initiatives together responds to situational threats to survival or well-being. We argue that traditional cognitive schemes and local cultural epistemologies (based on moral economy of witchcraft and spiritual conceptualisation of misfortune that are activated in times of crisis) are not necessarily counterproductive to the state-health politics but might be interpreted as creative and co-productive strategies in both systemic and executive responses to Covid-19 pandemic.