Data Collection

Using the interview guide, we focused our interviews with the Dāyūn on our central questions for them: How do they practice in ordinary times, and how have they dealt with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in Pakistan? Each specific question we asked is listed below above their responses to that question. Additionally, we carried out content and document analysis of news reports and various surveys, mainly government reports, to contextualize the pandemic in Pakistan as background for understanding our interview results. Using the Sindhi language, the first three authors conducted the interviews with the Dāyūn and the mothers in person at homes and as telephone conversations. We conducted the interviews with the mothers in the same ways. Our primary questions for them had to do with their perceptions of the Dāyūn and their practices. Later, we first three authors transcribed the data verbatim into English.

This article forms part of a larger project on COVID-19 in Pakistan, principally led by Inayat Ali and approved by the National Bioethics Committee of Pakistan (reference No. 4-87/NBC-471-COVID-19-09/20/). The names of interlocutors have been anonymized to maintain confidentiality. Moreover, the three authors also draw on their previous long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Pakistan, mainly in Sindh Province—Inayat Ali (2005-present), Salma Sadique (2013-present), and Shahbaz Ali (2012-present)—to supply qualitative data as background information.