Framing Animals as Epidemic Villains

Histories of Non-Human Disease Vectors

Christos Lynteris

• Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030267957
• Thema: Storia
• Thema: Storia mondiale

This book takes a historical and anthropological approach to understanding how non-human hosts and vectors of diseases are understood, at a time when emerging infectious diseases are one of the central concerns of global health. The volume critically examines the ways in which animals have come to be framed as 'epidemic villains' since the turn of the nineteenth century. Providing epistemological and social histories of non-human epidemic blame, as well as ethnographic perspectives on its recent manifestations, the essays explore this cornerstone of modern epidemiology and public health alongside its continuing importance in today's world. Covering diverse regions, the book argues that framing animals as spreaders and reservoirs of infectious diseases – from plague to rabies to Ebola – is an integral aspect not only to scientific breakthroughs but also to the ideological and biopolitical apparatus of modern medicine. As the first book to consider the impact of the image of non-humandisease hosts and vectors on medicine and public health, it offers a major contribution to our understanding of human-animal interaction under the shadow of global epidemic threat.

© The Author(s) 2019

C. Lynteris (ed.)Framing Animals as Epidemic VillainsMedicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern Historyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26795-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Infectious Animals and Epidemic Blame

Christos Lynteris¹

(1)

Department of Social Anthropology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland, UK

Christos Lynteris

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The resurgence of zoonotic and vector-borne diseases in the course of the twenty-first century (SARS, bird flu, MERS, Ebola, Zika and Nipah) has fostered and complicated scientific framings of non-human animal and insect hosts and vectors of infectious diseases as ‘epidemic villains’. No longer seen as mere reservoirs or spreaders of disease, but as the very ground where new pathogens emerge, non-human animals are today conceived as the incubators of existential risk for humanity. Visually, ideologically and affectively inflected, these framings are often developed in the context of epistemic lacunas: a lack of scientific certainty about the true reservoir of SARS or Ebola is thus compensated by systematic and widespread representations of few select animals, such as bats or civet cats, as epidemiological ‘rogues’.¹ These framings are furthermore complicated by what has been described by Carlo Caduff as the ‘mutant ontology’ of viral pathogens carried by these animals and by the broader epistemological framework of ‘emerging infectious diseases’ (EID), which configures the rise of new diseases as carrying with it a potential for human extinction.²

This volume examines the history of the emergence and transformation of epidemiological and public health framings of non-human disease vectors and hosts across the globe. Providing original studies of rats, mosquitoes, marmots, dogs and ‘bushmeat’, which at different points in the history of modern medicine and public health have come to embody social and scientific concerns about infection, this volume aims to elucidate the impact of framing non-human animals as epidemic villains. Underlining the ethical, aesthetic, epistemological and political entanglement of non-human animals with shifting medical perspectives and agendas, ranging from tropical medicine to Global Health, the chapters in this volume come to remind us that, in spite of the rhetoric of One Health and academic evocations of multispecies intimacies, the image and social life of non-human animals as epidemic villains is a constitutive part of modern epidemiology and public health as apparatuses of state and capitalist management.³ Whereas the above approaches (including microbiome studies, and ‘entanglement’ frameworks in medical anthropology) do contribute to a much-needed shift in the intellectual landscape as regards the impact of animals on human health, their practical and political limitations are revealed each time there is an actual epidemic crisis. Then, all talk of One Health, multispecies relationships and partnerships melts into thin air, and what is swiftly put in place, to protect humanity from zoonotic or vector-borne diseases , is an apparatus of culling, stamping out, disinfection, disinfestation, separation and eradication; what we may call the sovereign heart of public health in relation to animal-borne diseases.⁴ For the maintenance and operation of this militarised apparatus, the framing of specific animals as epidemic villains is ideologically and biopolitically indispensable, even when blame of the ‘villain’ in question lacks conclusive scientific evidence (see Thys, this volume). Going against the grain of scholarship that in recent years has sought to portray the vilification of animals as hosts and spreaders of disease as a thing of the past, Histories of Non-Human Disease Hosts and Vectors aims to illuminate the continuous importance of this ideological and biopolitical cornerstone of modern epidemiology and public health.

Vermin and Noxious Animals

Representations of animals as enemies, antagonists or sources of danger have, in different forms, shapes and degrees, been part and parcel of human interactions with the non-human world across history. It is, however, only at the turn of the nineteenth century that, as a result of bacteriological breakthroughs, non-human animals began to be systematically identified and framed as reservoirs and spreaders of diseases affecting humans. To take one famous example, before the end of the nineteenth century, rats were not believed to be carriers or spreaders of plague or any other infectious disease.⁵ Whereas rats had long been considered to be damaging to human livelihood, due to consuming and spoiling food resources, their only redeeming characteristic was, erroneously, widely believed to be their supposed disease-free nature.⁶ Hence while mid-seventeenth-century plague treatises noted the rat’s destructive impact on fabrics and food, no mention of its connection with the disease was made.⁷ Equally, two centuries later, when in 1849–1850 British colonial officers in India observed that, at the first sight of rat epizootics, Garhwali villagers fled to the Himalayan foothills in fear of the ‘Mahamari’ disease, they dismissed this behaviour as merely superstitious.⁸

However, the bacteriological identification of rats as carriers of plague or mosquitoes as carriers and spreaders of yellow fever and malaria, at the end of the nineteenth century, was itself enabled and indeed complicated by an already-existing stratum of signification which, by the mid-seventeenth century, had led to the introduction of new symbolic, ontological and legal frameworks of thinking about animals as ‘vermin’. Vermin, in Mary Fissell’s definition, ‘are animals whom it is largely acceptable to kill’, not because of some inherent characteristic they possess, but because, in specific historical contexts, ‘they called into question some of the social relations which humans had built around themselves and animals’.⁹ Paraphrasing Fissell, we may say that, arising in early modern Europe, the category ‘vermin’ problematised animals which devoured or destroyed the products of human labour and the means of human subsistence in terms of an agency or intentionality that confounded human efforts to control them. Departing from the structuralist influences of Mary Douglas, which dominated animal studies in the 1980s (see, for example, Robert Danton’s work on the great cat massacre in 1730 France), and from Keith Thomas’ ‘modernisation’ reading of vermin as simply animals that were of no use in an increasingly utilitarian world, Fissell’s discourse analysis of popular texts on vermin from seventeenth-century England was the first to dwell in the social historical reality of the emergence of this notion.¹⁰ However, more recent studies have opposed Fissell’s idea that what made vermin a threat to ‘human civility’ was their perceived ‘greed and cunning’, or their overall ‘trickster’ character.¹¹ Lucinda Cole’s recent monograph Imperfect Creatures argues that, ‘what made vermin dangerous was less their breed-specific cleverness or greed than their prodigious powers of reproduction through which individual appetites took on new, collective power, especially in relation to uncertain food supplies’.¹² The two approaches are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, if approached anthropologically, they point to an entanglement between symbolic and economic aspects of vermin as threats to ‘social integrity’, something that is further supported by the association of vermin at the time with vagrancy and the poor.¹³

Medical historians have in turn noted the association of vermin with miasma in disease aetiologies and public health practices of early modern Eu...