Frédéric Keck - Böcker

Over the past decades, infectious disease epidemics have come to increasingly pose major global health challenges to humanity. The Anthropology of Epidemics approaches epidemics as total social phenomena: processes and events which encompass and exercise a transformational impact on social life whilst at the same time functioning as catalysts of shifts and ruptures as regards human/non-human relations. Bearing a particular mark on subject areas and questions which have recently come to shape developments in anthropological thinking, the volume brings epidemics to the forefront of anthropological debate, as an exemplary arena for social scientific study and analysis.

Over the past decades, infectious disease epidemics have come to increasingly pose major global health challenges to humanity. The Anthropology of Epidemics approaches epidemics as total social phenomena: processes and events which encompass and exercise a transformational impact on social life whilst at the same time functioning as catalysts of shifts and ruptures as regards human/non-human relations. Bearing a particular mark on subject areas and questions which have recently come to shape developments in anthropological thinking, the volume brings epidemics to the forefront of anthropological debate, as an exemplary arena for social scientific study and analysis.

After experiencing the SARS outbreak in 2003, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan all invested in various techniques to mitigate future pandemics involving myriad cross-species interactions between humans and birds. In some locations microbiologists allied with veterinarians and birdwatchers to follow the mutations of flu viruses in birds and humans and create preparedness strategies, while in others, public health officials worked toward preventing pandemics by killing thousands of birds. In Avian Reservoirs FrÉdÉric Keck offers a comparative analysis of these responses, tracing how the anticipation of bird flu pandemics has changed relations between birds and humans in China. Drawing on anthropological theory and ethnographic fieldwork, Keck demonstrates that varied strategies dealing with the threat of pandemics-stockpiling vaccines and samples in Taiwan, simulating pandemics in Singapore, and monitoring viruses and disease vectors in Hong Kong-reflect local geopolitical relations to mainland China. In outlining how interactions among pathogens, birds, and humans shape the way people imagine future pandemics, Keck illuminates how interspecies relations are crucial for protecting against such threats.

After experiencing the SARS outbreak in 2003, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan all invested in various techniques to mitigate future pandemics involving myriad cross-species interactions between humans and birds. In some locations microbiologists allied with veterinarians and birdwatchers to follow the mutations of flu viruses in birds and humans and create preparedness strategies, while in others, public health officials worked toward preventing pandemics by killing thousands of birds. In Avian Reservoirs FrÉdÉric Keck offers a comparative analysis of these responses, tracing how the anticipation of bird flu pandemics has changed relations between birds and humans in China. Drawing on anthropological theory and ethnographic fieldwork, Keck demonstrates that varied strategies dealing with the threat of pandemics-stockpiling vaccines and samples in Taiwan, simulating pandemics in Singapore, and monitoring viruses and disease vectors in Hong Kong-reflect local geopolitical relations to mainland China. In outlining how interactions among pathogens, birds, and humans shape the way people imagine future pandemics, Keck illuminates how interspecies relations are crucial for protecting against such threats.

This book examines how the Covid-19 pandemic can be described as a biopolitical crisis, taking into account a fact often overlooked by commentators: Covid-19 is a zoonosis, a disease transmissible between animal species. The Sars-Cov2 virus causing this respiratory disease circulated in bats before passing to humans under as-yet mysterious conditions, and it was transmitted from humans to other species, notably mink and deer.Building on Michel Foucault’s revival of the term “biopolitics” and related notions (disciplinary power, pastoral power, cynegetic power), this book traces a set of public health measures taken over the last two centuries to control epidemics. It underlines how the need to conserve virus strains in order to identify and anticipate their mutations has given rise to cryopolitics, a set of techniques aimed at suspending the living in order to defer death. The book then questions the emancipatory scope of this cryopolitics by examining interspecies solidarity built by the warning signals sent by animals to humans about coming threats, be they pandemics, natural disasters, or climate change. By blurring the boundaries between the wild and the domestic resulting from the process of domestication, the politics of zoonoses relies on sentinels who preserve the memory of signs from the past to prepare living beings for future threats by involving them in a common ideal.

This book examines how the Covid-19 pandemic can be described as a biopolitical crisis, taking into account a fact often overlooked by commentators: Covid-19 is a zoonosis, a disease transmissible between animal species. The Sars-Cov2 virus causing this respiratory disease circulated in bats before passing to humans under as-yet mysterious conditions, and it was transmitted from humans to other species, notably mink and deer.Building on Michel Foucault’s revival of the term “biopolitics” and related notions (disciplinary power, pastoral power, cynegetic power), this book traces a set of public health measures taken over the last two centuries to control epidemics. It underlines how the need to conserve virus strains in order to identify and anticipate their mutations has given rise to cryopolitics, a set of techniques aimed at suspending the living in order to defer death. The book then questions the emancipatory scope of this cryopolitics by examining interspecies solidarity built by the warning signals sent by animals to humans about coming threats, be they pandemics, natural disasters, or climate change. By blurring the boundaries between the wild and the domestic resulting from the process of domestication, the politics of zoonoses relies on sentinels who preserve the memory of signs from the past to prepare living beings for future threats by involving them in a common ideal.