A Genealogy of Animal Diseases and Social Anthropology (1870–2000)

Abstract

Culling, vaccinating, and monitoring animals are the three main techniques used in contemporary veterinary public health to manage animal diseases that can be transmitted to humans. Each technique is underpinned by different ontological understandings of how microbes figure in relations between humans and animals. Therefore, animal diseases are not only a question for an applied anthropology but also involve the theoretical core of the discipline: that is, understanding how social causality emerges out of physical causality. To defend this argument, the article describes what Herbert Spencer wrote about foot-and-mouth disease; what William Robertson Smith thought about sacrifice in the context of bovine tuberculosis; how Emile Durkheim took vaccination for smallpox as a metaphor for the pathologies of the social; and what Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote about mad cow disease. The conceptions of the social in the writing of these four authors are analyzed through their understanding of the risk of transmission of animal diseases to humans, moving from prevention to precaution to preparedness.

Veterinary anthropology: Samples from an emerging field

“…The problem for behaviorists is how to shift from moments when humans and animals share behaviors to moments when they need to be different species: for instance, euthanasia of experimental animals is described as passing from attachment to detachment ( 29 , 30 ). When veterinarians face ethical dilemmas in the management of animal death, they use forms of thinking that are common in non-Western societies and that have been marginalized by biomedical science ( 6 ).…”

“…Animals are present in anthropological descriptions of various cultures/societies, due to their roles in forms of human subsistence (be it hunting or agriculture) as well as in kinship, sacrifice, witchcraft, divination, and other phenomena in which they are endowed with value and meanings far beyond basic utility. Moreover, animal diseases are not only a question of applied anthropology but also involve the theoretical core of the discipline: that is, understanding how social causality emerges out of physical causality ( 6 ). We believe that veterinarians and anthropologists may learn a lot from each other on what it means for animals to participate in human social life that is always already more-than-human.…”

“…Finally, we suggest that, as veterinary expertise and its roles in contemporary societies is becoming an object of anthropological enquiry, a new space for collaboration unfolds that enables veterinarians to see themselves through that reflexive lens of anthropological attention. Veterinary anthropology can therefore be defined as an anthropology of veterinarians and with veterinarians ( 7 ).…”

Containment and conversion

“…Indeed, much of this literature takes inspiration from Latour's ( 1988 ) analysis of pasteurization, in which diverse actants are brought together across scales of space and time, mediated by technologies and techniques, and situated within broader social and political currents. Keck's ( 2018a ) historiography of animal diseases and social anthropology takes this point a step further, suggesting a structural relationship between the social demands of zoonotic outbreaks and the kinds of concepts and analyses developed in the science of the social to respond to and contain them.…”

One Health of Peripheries: Biopolitics, Social Determination, and Field of Praxis

“…Despite criticisms from critical epidemiology to the WHO proposal for being in practice more complicit with the status quo structuring inequities ( 1 , 125 , 126 ), both positions point to the need to transcend biologism and individualism in health, but they also reduce the social to the human domain. However, some approaches to One Health show that reducing social relations to humans is misleading ( 23 , 52 , 127 ), whereas biopolitics and sociology set background to think a more-than-human social determination of health ( 9 – 11 , 30 , 128 – 130 ).…”