Carlo Caduff

Pandemic Prophecy, or How to Have Faith in Reason

In scientific discourse, as well as in public debates, scientists are often presented as charismatic prophets with a message for the people. My aim, in this article, is to explore the place of prophecy in today’s politics of pandemic preparedness in the United States. How is the category of the unknown invoked in scientifically inspired prophetic proclamations? At stake in such an inquiry are the ways in which a prophetic existence is capacitated or incapacitated at the threshold of the known and the unknown. What does it take for the prophet’s voice to be recognized as reasonable and accepted as authoritative? Charismatic personality and discursive authorization play significant roles, to be sure. But the efficacy of pandemic prophecy must also be situated in relation to the temporal sensibilities and anxieties to which they respond. What is the architecture of these sensibilities and anxieties?

Anthropology’s ethics: Moral positionalism, cultural relativism, and critical analysis

In a programmatic article, published in late 2008 in Anthropological Theory, the French anthropologist Didier Fassin explores the vexed question whether anthropology should be moral or not. Observing a general discomfort with the question of morality in the discipline of anthropology, Fassin argues that such a discomfort might actually serve a valuable heuristic function for the development of a moral anthropology in the near future. What Fassin means by moral anthropology is essentially a form of empirical inquiry that investigates how social agents articulate and negotiate moral claims in local contexts. In this response to Fassin’s article, I address a crucial challenge at the heart of moral anthropology, or the anthropology of ethics, as I prefer to call it. The challenge is to bring the anthropology of ethics into a productive relationship with the ethics of anthropology. Building on Fassin’s argument, I suggest that the discomfort with ethics indeed serves a valuable heuristic function because it is the spontaneous articulation of an ethics of discomfort.

New Media, New Publics? An Introduction to Supplement 15

In this special issue, we examine how publics are brought into being through historically specific media practices. We treat the question of new media as an invitation to explore changing conditions of communication across a number of ethnographic locations. We argue that these changing conditions have challenged our capacity to understand the nature of publics. It is important to emphasize that none of the contributors perceives new media as a coherent object of attention that can easily be isolated as an entity; nor do the contributors locate its novelty in its digital format. Instead, they examine modes of mediation that entail the technological but are not reducible to it. This approach allows anthropologists to keep the referent of new media open and remain attentive to emerging forms of public life that are working outside of or adjacent to the logics of both the digital and the technological. Our hope is that this collection of essays contributes to an anthropological understanding of media that illuminates important aspects of the political economic present, attends to the erosion and reanimation of anonymity in public life, and captures dynamics of staging, projection, and response within and across ethnographic sites.

Whose World? Which Health? What Security? The Facts and Fictions of Global Health Security

On 10 January 2003, the US National Academy of Sciences convened a meeting in Washington, DC, to address growing political concerns about the threat of bioterrorism. The next day, a group of editors met separately to discuss the implications of bioterrorism for the scientific publication process. At the end of the latter meeting, a statement emerged that was published in February simultaneously in three prominent journals: Science,Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). As the Statement on the Consideration of Biodefence and Biosecurity observed ‘the events of 11 September brought a new understanding of the urgency of dealing with terrorism. And the subsequent harmful use of infectious agents brought a new set of issues to the life sciences. As a result, questions have been asked by the scientists themselves and by some political leaders about the possibility that new information published in research journals might give aid to those with malevolent ends’ (Atlas et al, 2003a, 2003b). In their statement, editors rejected a formal role of the US government, instead advising authors and journals to take seriously their responsibility in determining what constitutes sensitive research by designing appropriate review procedures. ‘Scientists and their journals should consider the appropriate level and design processes to accomplish effective review of papers that raise y security issues’, the statement suggested. Only 2 years later, in October 2005, a group of scientists reported that they had reconstructed in the laboratory the influenza virus that killed between 20 and 50 million people worldwide between 1918 and 1919 (Tumpey et al, 2005). ‘This is extremely foolish’, futurologists Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy commented in a New York Times editorial (Kurzweil and Joy, 2005). ‘No responsible scientist would advocate publishing precise designs for an atomic bomb’, they underscored. Upon making the complete genetic sequence of the virus public, the scientists were accused of releasing a ‘recipe for destruction’. The controversy continued in 2011 when two teams of researchers submitted papers to the journals Science andNature respectively. In their submissions, the researchers independently reported results of a series of experiments conducted with H5N1 avian influenza viruses that had been modified in the laboratory. Security experts voiced concerns because the viruses had been manipulated to make them more transmissible among humans. According to the researchers, the purpose was to identify the pandemic potential of the virus. Would this virus be able to mutate and cause a deadly pandemic? To know more about the potential of the virus seemed to be important for pandemic preparedness purposes. In an ABCNews report, Laurie Garrett of the US Council on Foreign Relations commented: ‘My first reaction was ‘Oh, my God, why did they do this?’ She then added, ‘I’m not real comfortable with having this virus exist – anywhere!’ Security experts, the ABC report noted, ‘say it’s crazy to let these secrets get into the hands of terrorists’. Hundreds of journal articles, opinion pieces, newspaper reports and blog entries were published, offering a broad range of suggestions on what should or should not be done with the research.

Analysis of Social Science Research Into Cancer Care in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: Improving Global Cancer Control Through Greater Interdisciplinary Research

This analysis lays a framework for greater collaboration between the cancer community and social scientists in both research and policy. We argue that the growing cancer burden that low- and middle-income countries face is raising social, political, and economic challenges of global cancer that require interdisciplinary research beyond the traditional biomedical-clinical nexus. First, we briefly review some of the most important existing social science studies that have addressed cancer in low- and middle-income countries, including the main methods, approaches, and findings of this research. Second, we give an overview of recent interdisciplinary collaborations between social scientists and oncologists and demonstrate how qualitative research can help us to understand the distinct challenges of cancer care in low- and middle-income settings. Finally, we identify key areas for future collaboration and suggest possible paths forward for cancer research and policy that involve social science.

Leiden: Ein Gespräch zur Moral Anthropology

Janina Kehr: um zu verstehen, wie die themen leiden, gewalt und opferschaft in der ethnologie heute behandelt werden, ist es zunächst einmal wichtig, sich die Frage zu stellen, welchen fachlichen Konjunkturen sie unterliegen. Das heißt, es macht sinn, zeitlich zurückzugehen und sich zu vergegenwärtigen: Woher kommt eigentlich das interesse der ethnologie – genauer gesagt der Medizinethnologie – am thema leiden, war dieses interesse schon immer da, und wie hat sich die umgangsweise mit dem thema im laufe der Zeit gewandelt. selbstverständlich hat die Medizinethnologie sich per definitionem schon seit ihren frühen Anfängen in den 1930er Jahren mit Kranksein und unglück beschäftigt. Vorstellungen von unglück, Besessenheit oder Krankheit und deren Behandlung durch Heilung, Magie oder religion wurden als fundamentale Funktionen gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalts und kultureller ordnung angesehen. Bis in die 1970er Jahre geschah dies vor allem im Hinblick auf kulturelle unterschiede. ethnologen, die zum überwiegenden teil in außereuropäischen gegenden forschten, gingen der Frage nach, was andere gesellschaften unter Krankheit, leiden oder unglück verstehen, und welche Mittel der Heilung und Wiederherstellung von ordnung zur Verfügung stehen. Die grundlegende Frage war also: Wie unterscheiden sich Vorstellungen von leiden von einer gesellschaft zur anderen? erst in den späten 1970er Jahren fing man an, sich in der ethnologie auch damit zu beschäftigen, was leiden und Heilung eigentlich in der westlichen Welt bedeuten und wie mit Krankheit hier bei uns umgegangen wird. Die Medizinethnologie fing an, sich mit zeitgenössischer westlicher Medizin, also Biomedizin, zu beschäftigen. Zunächst war ihr interesse noch stark kulturell und von klinischer und psychologischer Anwendbarkeit geprägt. ethnologen wie Arthur Kleinman waren tonangebend in der sogenannten Clinical Medical Anthropology. sie arbeiteten vor allem mit dem Begriff des Krankheitsnarrativs und legten ihr Augenmerk auf die