Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: 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).A perpetual concern with respect to long-distance travelling is that even when restrictions are lifted, there remains the possibility that travel bans could suddenly be reintroduced -as the latest spread of the Omicron variant evidently demonstrates.When the pandemic first spread globally, I could follow colleagues (online) who initially decided to stay in their fieldwork sites in Africa, but when uncertainties mounted, they quickly returned to Europe; probably understandably, as neither the impact of the virus itself was clear, nor the question of how long flight
Source: Journal of Business Anthropology
Author: Tijo Salverda
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4229000616