When caring and mourning threaten public health: the experience of Covid-19 preventive regulations in Zambia

Abstract

This article explores how Covid-19 regulations in hospitals and regarding funerals disrupted and limited the capacity of kin to care, and transformed the meanings of life and death, for Zambians. Nonetheless, patients and kin exercised their agency through disobedience, by bargaining with officials and by drawing on resources, such as social media and video calling, audio calling, and messaging via the mobile phone to express care and love. The article draws on ethnographically grounded accounts of my personal experiences of the Covid illness: the hospitalisation and loss of my maternal uncle; participant observation in hospital and community settings; and various formal and informal interviews with members of the general public. To understand people’s engagement with rules in the hospital, at funerals and at the graveyard, I draw on Alice Street’s notion of sociotechnical assemblage that takes these as places of total biopolitical management and a space where alternative and transgressive social orders emerge and are contested.