Christos Lynteris

Skilled Natives, Inept Coolies: Marmot Hunting and the Great Manchurian Pneumonic Plague (1910–1911)

Taking as its setting the great Manchurian pneumonic plague epidemic of 1910–1911, this article examines the construction of epidemiological blame that targeted migrant labourers from the peninsula of Shandong employed in the hunting of the Siberian marmot (Marmota sibirica), a natural reservoir of the disease. The article demonstrates how Chinese epidemiologists sought to pathologize marmot-hunting migrants from Shandong as unskilled pestilent “coolies”, while at the same time valorizing Mongol and Buryat marmot hunters as a “native” counter-paradigm; a binary anthropology of skill and sanitation, which instituted “coolies” as an anthropological type essential to the construction of hygienic modernity in China.

Zoonotic diagrams: mastering and unsettling human-animal relations

Research leading to this article was funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant (under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme ERC grant agreement no. 336564) for the project ‘Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic’ at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities of the University of Cambridge.

The Epidemiologist as Culture Hero: Visualizing Humanity in the Age of “the Next Pandemic”

Concern over the “coming plague,” a projected microbiological catastrophe threatening the survival of humanity, has come to generate a new cinematic figure: the epidemiologist as culture hero. The visual narrative of the “coming plague” unfolds in recent films, where the biopolitical content of this symbolic form becomes clear. This article examines how, by merging fears regarding the next pandemic with apocalyptic fantasy, the films in question institute the epidemiologist as responsible for the re-pastoralization and re-pasteurization of humanity—a goal achieved by setting self-limitation of individual freedoms as the condition for the biological and ontological perseverance of humankind.

Anthropology and Medical Photography: Ethnographic, Critical and Comparative Perspectives

The study of medical photography, inclusive of epidemiological and humanitarian applications of the genre, is a promising new field for visual anthropology. Focusing on the interlinked questions of visual witnessing and evidential ethics of medical photography, as well as on the entangled temporalities and dialectics of visibility and invisibility underlying this visual practice, the introduction to this special issue on medicine, anthropology and photography explores key issues arising out of recent work in the area. While reviewing the contributions of history, STS and photographic theory to the study of medical visual cultures, regimes and economies, we explore what a distinctively anthropological approach—through its ethnographic and comparative scope—offers to the topic.

The Prophetic Faculty of Epidemic Photography: Chinese Wet Markets and the Imagination of the Next Pandemic

Dominant trends in epidemiological research and medical journalism today share a belief in the “next pandemic,” a microbiological catastrophe of Old Testament proportions that threatens to annihilate humanity. Expected to arise out of a zoonotic spillover, in most cases a newly emergent or mutant form of animal-to-human influenza, the ground zero of the “next pandemic” is located in so-called wet markets, live animal markets in East Asia and China in particular. Focusing on photographic representations of wet markets during the SARS outbreak of 2003, this article examines critically the visual regime constructed around and supporting this outbreak narrative. Examining the temporality of spillover events and the dialectic between their visibility and invisibility, the article argues that the photographic visualization of points of pandemic eruption sets in place a prophetic faculty. Imaging spillover as an inevitable destiny and, at the same time, as having always or already occurred, wet market photography constitutes a new biomedical temporality that institutes human extinction as a never-completed but always in process end-event.

Introduction: The Challenge of the Epidemic Corpse

The epidemic corpse has long been understood as a locus of social, moral, and biological danger. In various historical and contemporary settings, it has been seen to pose a challenge to society to which there is no easy response. We ask how the epidemic corpse might also be seen to challenge and threaten central presumptions within social theory. This introduction begins the task of sketching a comparative history of the epidemic corpse as a generative feature of social debate and contestation, from ancient Greece to the present. We take this comparative approach as the basis for rethinking the notion of contagion within the medical humanities more broadly, and we propose a new reading of epidemics as episodes of material production.

Suspicious Corpses: Body Dumping and Plague in Colonial Hong Kong

Between 1894 and 1926 bubonic plague raged on almost annual basis in Hong Kong, causing thousands of deaths, mainly among the Chinese population of the British colony. In the course of this long epidemic, British authorities took drastic and often draconian measures against the disease, whose pathogen was identified in 1894. These measures elicited the resistance of both the Chinese elites and the lay population of the colony. Although historians have extensively discussed these colonial dynamics as regards the initial outbreak of 1894, later outbreaks and their social impact have been largely ignored. This chapter examines a practice that resonates with recent events in Ebola-stricken West Africa: body dumping. Seen as a potential cause of infection (what contemporary epidemiologists would call a ‘cultural vector’) as well as a political problem of civil disobedience to public health policy, body dumping was systematically studied and problematized by the British, who believed that the practice stemmed from native suspicion towards intrusive anti-plague measures. The paper explores shifting ideas and policies surrounding colonial suspicion of corpse dumping as a practice supposedly fueled by Chinese mistrust of the British anti-plague apparatus in Hong Kong. These ideas, the chapter will argue, were crucial in the colonial inter-constitution of native bodies and city as sites of pestilence and disorder.