Wild Goose Chase: The Displacement of Influenza Research in the Fields of Poyang Lake, China

Abstract

This article follows transnational avian influenza scientists as they move their experimental systems and research objects into what they refer to as the “epicenter” of flu pandemics, southern China. Based on the hypothesis that contact between wild and domestic bird species could produce new pandemic flu viruses, scientists set up a research program into the wild–domestic interface at China's Poyang Lake. As influenza comes to be understood in terms of multispecies relations and ecologies in addition to the virus proper, the scientific knowledge of influenza is increasingly dependent on research conducted at particular sites, such as Poyang Lake. What does this movement of influenza research from laboratory to field mean for anthropological concepts of scientific knowledge? A widely shared premise among anthropologists is that scientific knowledge is made in experimental practice, but this practice turn in science studies draws largely from fieldwork inside laboratories. In this article, drawing on fieldwork with both influenza scientists and poultry breeders, I show how scientific research objects can be displaced by the practices of poultry breeders rather than by experimental practice itself. For these poultry breeders, refusing to respect the distinction of wild and domestic, were breeding wild birds.

Baby pangolins on my plate: possible lessons to learn from the COVID-19 pandemic

“…With increasing close contact during and after the domestication process, and with the increasing densities of human communities, zoonotic diseases like measles emerged at that time. The sanctioning of wildlife farming by the Chinese Government has probably improved the livelihoods and economic conditions of wildlife farmers, many of whom have been pushed out of the livestock sector and into wildlife farming at the forest's hedge during the 1990s by the expansion of intensive livestock husbandry [97], but may have contributed in opening up an old Pandora's Box. Many of the diseases that have plagued humans over the last several thousand years derived from our close relationships with our domesticated species.…”

The Year 2015 in Sociocultural Anthropology: Material Life and Emergent Cultures

“…In light of Taylor Nelms's observation that “ethnographic examination of expert discourses and bureaucratic practices offers one way of getting inside the state” (2015:108), in this section I survey articles that consider how bureaucracies develop one tool of control: their discourses of measurement. The work on measurement is an outgrowth of anthropological studies of scientists (Fearnley ) and earlier work done on auditing, especially Marilyn Strathern's edited volume, Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy (). Audit cultures stress the importance of classification, enumeration, and the use of numbers to indicate quality or effectiveness; the principles, technologies, and rationale of financial accounting become central principles to assess organizational efficiency and effectiveness.…”

“…The second tension is the view of humans as prime movers of the world versus the view that sees humans as influenced by complex environments that include nature, nonhuman living beings, and inanimate objects. The view of humans as prime movers is especially important for those who analyze the effects of human action on the environment, a view not well represented in this article, despite work that touched on how human behavior has led to changes in species identification and behavior (Fearnley ; Govindrajan ; Singer ). This perspective is well established in environmental anthropology, however, especially in work that shows how poverty induced by inequalities has led people to use the environment in ways that compromise its regeneration.…”

Avian preparedness: simulations of bird diseases and reverse scenarios of extinction in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore

“…In the management of zoonotic pathogens, the notion of sacrifice seems even more obvious, since animals are massively killed to eradicate the reservoir of emerging infectious diseases; and in the management of wild animals, some individuals are sacrificed to protect the species (Van Dooren ). Other descriptions, however, have been proposed of the entangled relations between animals and humans in the ‘hotspots’ or ‘sentinel devices’ where emerging pathogens connect them in productive ways (Brown & Kelly ; Fearnley ; Keck & Lakoff ; Lezaun & Porter ; Lowe ). While sacrifice separates some living beings from others to eradicate pathogens, sentinels instantiate relations between living beings through the anticipation of future pathogens.…”