Global Pandemic and Local Communities
Global Pandemic and Local Communities

Summary/Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has created a new and unprecedented situation in the world at large and the smaller national, regional, and local communities. This text focuses on the last-mentioned, offering an analysis of data from interviews and focus-group discussions conducted in two Bulgarian localities that were among the first to be quarantined and to react after the pandemic was declared: the towns of Bansko and Karnobat in Bulgaria. Accordingly, for the two mentioned settlements, the contexts of reaction at the community level are examined and compared with those at the levels of the family, kinfolk/neighbourhood, and rural/urban community. This perspective allows tracing how the pandemic has disrupted the normality of existence and created a cognitive imbalance in people’s perceptions, in response to which corresponding concepts and explanations of the disease and the pandemic are built to help people cope with the stress of the unknown. Processes occurring in individual cognitive structures, as well as attitudes towards institutions and collective human communities, are explored, and ways of finding a rational explanation and possible solution to the pandemic problem are studied.

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