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Paper short abstract:

Confronted by limitations related to ethnographic research amid the COVID-19 crisis, I deploy complementary methods to present a street-level view of people’s perceptions towards the pandemic in Pakistan.

Paper long abstract:

Based on 18 months of language-competent long-term fieldwork from the onset of the COVID-19 crisis in March 2020 up until vaccine rollout in August 2021, my research explores perceptions of the pandemic through the narratives of urban and rural dwellers in Lahore and Multan, two of Pakistan’s cities that were severely affected by the pandemic. Impeded by the pandemic to conduct ethnographic research due to multiple lockdowns in the country, I deployed alternative methods, such as telephonic and online interviews, online and in-person observations, and triangulation with surveys to collect 97 responses during the first 15 months of my fieldwork. However, owing to vaccine provision to all age brackets around June 2021, I transitioned to ethnographic research in the final 3 months and gathered data through 33 semi-structured interviews and participant observation. In this round table, I will discuss how I adapted my research methodology during the COVID-19 crisis to arrive at one of my findings entailing differences in perceptions towards the pandemic among the urban and rural poor who—contrary to popular research suggesting that poverty and poor health are proportional—believed that the outbreak did not physically affect them. For them, COVID-19 was a “disease of the rich” due to the following reasons: not following Islamic principles, improper diets and lack of immunity, “soft” lifestyles, and fear of death. Additionally, I will zoom in on how Pakistan’s socio-political history informs the perceptions of the rural and urban poor.