This paper focuses on two roles of anthropology in the control of infectious disease. The first is in identifying and describing concerns and understandings of disease, including local knowledge of cause and treatment relevant to disease control. The second is in translating these local concerns into appropriate health interventions, for example, by providing information to be incorporated in education and communication strategies for disease control. Problems arise in control programmes with competing knowledge and value systems. Anthropology’s role conventionally has been in the translation of local concepts of illness and treatment, and the adaptation of biomedical knowledge to fit local aetiologies. Medical anthropology plays an important role in examining the local context of disease diagnosis, treatment and prevention, and the structural as well as conceptual barriers to improved health status. National (and international) public health goals which respect local priorities are uncommon, and generic health goals rarely coincide with specific country and community needs. The success of interventions and control programmes is moderated by local priorities and conditions, and sustainable interventions need to acknowledge and address country-specific social, economic and political circumstances.
Format: Journal
Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent
In the last two decades one of the key questions that has occupied many feminist theorists is how should issues of historical and cultural specificity inform both the analytics and politics of any feminist project. Although this questioning has resulted in serious attempts at integrating issues of sexual, racial, class, and national difference within feminist theory, questions of religious difference have remained relatively unexplored in this scholarship. The vexed relationship between feminism and religious traditions is perhaps most manifest in discussions on Islam. This is due in part to the historically contentious relationship that Islamic societies have had with what has come to be called “the West,” but in part to the challenges contemporary Islamic movements pose to secular-liberal politics of which feminism has been an integral (if critical) part. In particular, women’s active support for a movement that seems to be inimical to their own interests and agendas, at a historical moment when more emancipatory possibilities would appear to be available to women, raises fresh dilemmas for feminists.
Viral Clouds
Through an index case in Tangerang, West Java, the Orthomyxoviridae virus H5N1 influenza became visible in Indonesia and propagated rapidly across the archipelago. This viral event incited fears of a human influenza pandemic, disrupting existing arrangements among species, peoples, institutions, and nations, and remaking their biopolitical relations and specific ontologies along the way. On the basis of ethnographic field work in technoscientific, agricultural, and security communities in Indonesia, this essay examines how a set of strains and species—the H5N1 influenza virus, wild birds, domestic poultry, and, finally, humans—combined with one another, and with ongoing Indonesian and transnational concerns over pandemic preparedness, biosecurity, and national integrity, to create a multispecies cloud. The concept of multispecies cloud refers to the narratives and material practices floating around the H5N1 event and its multiple species companions in Indonesia. As I conceptualize the cloudiness of H5N1, its key feature is the uncertainty of precisely what social and biological forms were interacting in the outbreak scenario or might consequently emerge as a consequence of entering into engagement with the virus. The influenza virus, as a quasi-species or cluster of genomes in any case of infection, is a potent source for exploring an array of biopolitical concerns in human communities that emerged alongside the virus. Risk, scale, and speculation are discussed in turn as rubrics for understanding the microbial and multispecies sociality of H5N1 influenza. Examples are drawn from the sciences of virology and ornithology, and the global health practice of disease communication, as well as from poultry agriculture.
Menopause, local biologies, and cultures of aging
Menopause marks the end of menstruation, once generally accepted as the closure of women’s reproductive lives. The current medical view of menopause, however, is as a pathological event with its own distinct set of symptoms and diseases. Researchers have described women as facing a dramatic increase in the risk of heart disease, osteoporosis, stroke, and Alzheimer’s, all as the result of the impact of changing hormone levels, particularly the decline in estrogen. The clinical literature has interpreted these findings in terms of the absolute necessity of replacing these lost hormones for all women who are menopausal regardless of any other physiological, social, or cultural characteristic they might possess. Using research done in Japan, Canada, and the United States, this paper challenges the notion of a universal menopause by showing that both the symptoms reported at menopause and the post-menopause disease profiles vary from one study population to the next. For most of the symptoms commonly associated with menopause in the medical literature, rates are much lower for Japanese women than for women in the United States and Canada, although they are comparable to rates reported from studies in Thailand and China. Mortality and morbidity data from these same societies are used to show that post-menopausal women are also not equally at risk for heart disease, breast cancer, or osteoporosis. Rather than universality, the paper suggests that it is important to think in terms of “local biologies”, which reflect the very different social and physical conditions of women’s lives from one society to another.
Globalisation in Practice
This paper is about ‘material politics’. It argues that this may be understood as a material ordering of the world in a way that contrasts this with other and equally possible alternative modes of ordering. It also suggests that while material politics may well involve words, it is not discursive in kind. This argument is made for the mundane and material practice of boiling pigswill that the 2001 UK foot and mouth outbreak showed to have a layered importance. Boiling pigswill was a political technique in at least three different ways. First it made difference, dividing the rich from the poor by separating disease free countries from those in which foot and mouth is endemic. Second, it joined times and places by linking past agricultural practices with those of the contemporary world, and linking Britain with the world. And third, it also showed a way of limiting food scarcity on a world wide scale because it allowed food to be recycled, albeit on a small scale, in a region of plenty. ‘Politics’ is often linked to debate, discussion, or explicit contestation. Alternatively, it is sometimes seen as being embedded in and carried by artefacts. For the case of boiling pigswill neither approach is satisfactory. The first privileges the life of the mind while in the second politics is linked too strongly to a single order. The version of politics presented here foregrounds both materiality and difference. And it involves articulation: the question is not whether something is political all by itself but whether it can be called political as part of the process of analysing it.
The Actor-Enacted
This chapter analyses the question of agency considering the animal agency of Cumbrian sheep in the uprising of foot-and-mouth disease in the UK in 2001. The article explores the conditions required for an actor to be able to act as such. In that direction it shifts the usual meaning of the concept of actor separating it from the anthropocentric model and making it distant from the ideas of “intentionality” and “dominance” to emphasise how actors not only act, but they are habilitated and produced as such as a result of complex relations with other actors. That is, to become actors they have to be enacted. To do so, the article analyses some of the multiple forms in which Cumbrian sheep were enacted in the context of the uprising of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001. Finally the article considers what types of agency perform the Cumbrian sheep in each of them.
The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological literature that seeks to theorize infrastructure by drawing on biopolitics, science and technology studies, and theories of technopolitics. I also examine other dimensions of infrastructures that release different meanings and structure politics in various ways: through the aesthetic and the sensorial, desire and promise.
Antibiotic Resistance and the Biology of History
Landecker’s (2015) work on antibiotics explores how the meanings associated with terms such as ‘antibiotic resistance’ or ‘microbes’ can shift both historically, but also in different contexts, demonstrating the effects of scientific knowledge on the world, its potential limitations, and the way alternatives can be side-lined or ignored as a consequence. In this paper, Landecker draws attention to how the promotion and use of antibiotics for human and animal health (and growth) is now evident as biological fact, not only in the bacterias that they were designed to target (i.e. through creating selection pressures for resistance strains), but also the biology and ecology of soils, water, and animals, as well as our own guts. In other words, antibiotics have transformed human-bacteria relations and associated infections, which has in turn changed the biology of bacteria (resistance or death) itself, potentially rendering the sustainability of current antibiotic-related practices ineffective. In short, antibiotics transformed humans and bacteria, which has consequently required humans to transform their relations to antibiotics; and also, potentially, to bacteria.
The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography
The term ‘Multi-species ethnography’ represents a new field of anthropology that takes seriously the lives and points of view of other-than-humans, whose lives are caught up in complex relations with human lives, politics, economies and cultures. As Eduardo Kohn writes on “the anthropology of life”, this is a mode of anthropology that exceeds a singular focus on human life, instead concerning itself “with the effects of our entanglements with other kinds of living selves” (2007:4). In this piece by Kirksey and Helmreich (2010) the reader is carefully introduced to these conjoined worlds and invited to consider how culture in the Anthropocene unfolds in our “mutual ecologies and coproduced niches” (546) with a diverse set of living things, be they mushrooms (Tsing 2015), meerkats (Candea 2010) forests (Kohn), marine microbes (Helmreich), plants (Hayden 2003; Archambault 2016), or the microorganisms that enliven our cheese (Paxson).
Much of this work – and more – has been collected at The Multispecies Salon.
Works cited:
Archambault, Julie Soleil. 2016. Taking Love Seriously in Human-Plant Relations in Mozambique: Toward and Anthropology of Affective Encounters. Cultural Anthropology, 31(2):244-271.
Candea, Matei. 2010. “I Fell in Love with Carlos the Meerkat”: Engagement and Detachment in Human-Animal Relations. American Ethnologist, 37(2):241-258.
Hayden, Cori. 2003. When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Helmreich, Stefan. 2009. Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kohn, Eduardo. 2007. How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Natures and the Politics of Transspecies Engagement. American Ethnologist, 34(1):3-24.
Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Paxson, Heather. 2008. Post Pasteurian Cultures: The microbiopolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese in the United States. Cultural Anthropology, 23(1):15-47.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Swann Song
Antibiotics have played a significant yet ambivalent role in Western livestock husbandry. Mass introduced to agriculture to boost animal production and reduce feed consumption in the early 1950s, agricultural antibiotics were soon accused of selecting for bacterial resistance, causing residues and enabling bad animal welfare. The dilemma posed by agricultural antibiotic regulation persists to this day. This essay traces the history of British antibiotic regulation from 1953 to the influential 1969 Swann report. It highlights the role that individual experts using bacteriophage typing played in warning about the mass selection for bacterial resistance on farms and the response of a corporatist system, whose traditional laissez-faire arrangements struggled to cope with the risk posed by bacterial resistance. In addition to contextualizing the Swann report’s origins, the essay also discusses the report’s fate and implications for current antibiotic regulation.
