Article

A Pre-Event Configuration for Biological Threats: Preparedness and the Constitution of Biosecurity Events

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Abstract

Drawing on an inquiry into Israel's preparedness for biological threats, in this article I suggest a new analysis of biosecurity events. A complex and dynamic assemblage emerges to prepare for biological threats, one that I call a “pre-event configuration.” The assemblage is composed of three core elements—the scientific element, the security element, and the public health element—each of which diagnoses threats and suggests appropriate solutions. This configuration also determines what will be perceived as an event for which preparation is needed and what will remain a nonevent. I maintain that the constitution of an event takes place beyond the actual time of its occurrence and is determined by the pre-event configuration in the “time of event.” Therefore, a comprehensive analysis of events should combine an examination of actual events and their aftermath with an inquiry into their potentialities as determined by the pre-event configuration. [biosecurity, preparedness, events, disasters]

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... The preparation process when viewed against this backdrop clearly goes beyond preparing, to defining and shaping those threats. In this, 'preparedness' represents a shift in the very logics behind the implementations over the last 20 years, with what various literature has described as a turn to preparedness (Caduff, 2008;Collier & Lakoff, 2008a;Keck, 2008;Lakoff, 2006;Samimian-Darash, 2009). The leading way of thinking about and facing upcoming disasters echoes a dominant logic now applied to a spectrum of events as wide as threats to infrastructure, security, environment, and health. ...
... At the same time, logics of preparedness tend to identify several sources of threat as a unitary threat, as mentioned in the previous section. Because of this, elements of public health, national security, and science (Collier & Lakoff, 2008b;Samimian-Darash, 2009) are thrown together into a melting pot of strategic approaches that configure the future event irrespective of the difficulties in apprehending its temporal and emergent dimensions. ...
... Therefore, imagining and performing events that have not yet taken place will render those events virtual, where 'virtual' here means that they are going to have an effect not only on the preparedness measures taken but also on the way we will construct and interpret future events that may come to pass. The virtual event is, therefore, a pre-event (Samimian-Darash, 2009) and has an effect even before it happens. Samimian-Darash (2009) uses preparedness work against an unknown strain of pandemic influenza as an example. ...
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In April 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared influenza A H1N1 a public-health emergency of international concern. This event was especially significant for marking the first pandemic outbreak to fall under 2005’s new International Health Regulations, an ambitious binding agreement to regulate international health. Since then, other communicable diseases have provoked similar international responses, with Ebola and Zika among the latest examples. Each of them has occasioned scrutiny of the ability of national and international health organisations – the WHO among them – to handle health threats and emergencies situated at global level. Among the issues recurrently rearing their head amid controversy are uniformity in enforcement of international regulations across contexts, promotion of specific lines of research, rapid development of new drugs, the management of local and international health-care workers’ activities, and engagement with local populations. One of the main ways in which health organisations respond to the uncertainty generally associated with pandemic threats is through biopreparedness policies – policies that articulate response and resource management mechanisms before a pandemic event is declared or even before its characteristics are known. The thesis examines the discourses and practices of institutional and scientific actors, for greater understanding of how knowledge is constructed and later carried into implementation in such conditions of uncertainty. The focus is placed on processes of boundary-making, categorisation, and identification. The analysis of how health and scientific institutions identify, categorise, and describe the various human and nonhuman actors involved in pandemic events employs theoretical tools from science and technology studies, Foucauldian approaches, and understandings of the more-than-human in the social sciences. These shed light on the boundaries, categories, and identities at play during pandemic processes as shared among the many humans, animals, and molecular forms of life involved in pandemic events. The approach of assemblage ethnography is engaged with as an aid to navigating digital and material networks of public health from an empirical perspective. Public documents, interviews with public-health professionals, and field visits linked with diverse international organisations are used in combination with items of scientific news and articles from various journals to illuminate how pandemic threats and emergencies unfold. The empirical work suggests that knowledge-making in institutional and scientific settings always involves notions of threat and protection. In the material analysed, there is a tendency to identify and categorise a given actor as threatening, vulnerable (in need of protection), or expert (able to protect). This argument is unfolded in tandem with discussion of three, interconnected areas of focus in pandemic preparedness and response wherein boundaries are made: 1) the establishment of governmental stand-by networks, 2) knowledge-making and knowledge distribution practices, and 3) the conceptualisation and governance of threatening life. Each of these areas connects with one of the three main lines of analytically grounded argument. Firstly, institutional boundaries are challenged in efforts to construct more prepared governmental networks that are able to protect societies from pandemic threats and emergencies. As these networks emerge mostly in a context of uncertain and virtual threats, they impose a need for threats’ identification and characterisation. Secondly, practices of making and distributing knowledge are productive in that they determine the boundaries between expert, vulnerable, and threatening assemblages, creating differentiated communities by regulating who can produce knowledge and who may access it. The third main area of discussion involves how, from a governmental perspective, certain life forms (both human and nonhuman) come to be identified as hybrid threats because of its sociotechnical interactions. Such hybridity is a key element for the design of pandemic governance and response measures. Accordingly, the way in which actors are categorised in terms of threat, vulnerability, and expertise is defined with regard to their engagement with elements such as space, technology, nationality, and gender. The thesis concludes with discussion of three ways in which boundary-making, categorisation, and identification processes interact with pandemic preparedness and response: 1) by shedding light on the establishment of more-than-human modes of pandemic governance; 2) by drawing attention to the need for portable, permeable, and flexible boundaries between threat and protection; and 3) by considering how boundary-making reinforces intersectional inequalities in international health. These conclusions point to a need to incorporate, from both an academic and a policy perspective, alternative pandemic narratives that pay heed to the intersectional, changing, and situated definitions of threat and protection.
... Such declarations draw the attention from the whole world, turning a local event into a global one. The IHR are characterized by three main features -all-hazards approach, no pre-set measures and tackling threats at their source -and are the main bearer of a general shift in how biological emergencies are addressed -the so-called 'turn to preparedness' (Caduff 2008(Caduff , 2015Collier and Lakoff 2008a;Keck 2008;Lakoff 2006Lakoff , 2007Samimian-Darash 2009). These principles have become the common denominator in policies for pandemic preparedness and response all over the world, exemplifying the interplay between locality and globality that has become one of the defining features of global health (Elbe et al. 2014;Tirado et al. 2015;Wolf 2016;Tirado and Cañada, 2011). ...
... At the same time, often the logics of preparedness identify several sources of threat as one unitary threat, i.e. a generic biothreat (Lakoff 2008). Because of this, elements of public health, national security and science (Collier and Lakoff 2008b;Samimian-Darash 2009) form a melting pot of strategic approaches that configure the future event despite the difficulties to apprehend its temporal and emergent dimensions. It is however important to remember that although preparedness is quite an extended shift, it is not a global shift but it is enacted diversely in different contexts. ...
Article
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Pandemic emergencies are one of the foremost examples of the turn to preparedness. In this article, I discuss how biological threats are conceptualized inside the frame provided by such turn, connecting with novel governance practices aimed at tackling the challenges posed by the constantly shifting boundaries of global health. First, I review existing literature related to the turn to preparedness. This turn has turned virtual biological threats into the main drivers for preparedness planning. Second, I use empirical material to argue a redefinition of biological threats as entities that go beyond the molecular boundaries of viruses, turning hybrid social networks into the main object of interest for global health response before infectious diseases. This reconceptualization is manifested in three different challenges to the boundaries of global health emergencies: (1) a temporal challenge, which forces institutions to struggle with situating the boundary between event and non-event; (2) an institutional challenge, which brings together different actors, institutions, and organizations redefining their internal and external boundaries; and (3) a spatial challenge, whereby the territorial lines of secure and insecure spaces become mobile and unstable. As a conclusion, I will argue that those three challenges and the redefinition of certain boundaries are ways to govern a wider divide constructed by preparedness that aims at separating the threat and an object of protection.
... Preparedness addresses uncertainties that cannot be calculated or assessed, and is aimed at unpreventable future catastrophic events that can only be managed once they happen. Preparedness interventions such as vulnerability mapping, exercises and stockpiling therefore seek to reduce or control damage rather than to prevent particular threats (Collier and Lakoff 2008;Cooper 2006;Diprose et al 2008;Samimian-Darash 2009, 2013Stephenson and Jamieson 2009). Indeed, a central assumption in preparedness thinking is that, while they cannot be calculated, disastrous events will certainly occur (Diprose et al 2008;Schoch-Spana 2004). ...
Article
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This article explores the connection between technology and temporality, and discusses specifically scenario technology and the temporality of urgency, in the context of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. It illustrates how, despite the inherent orientation toward the future potentiality in this technology, once an actual event occurs and the temporality of preparedness is overridden by a temporality of urgency, the scenario technology is adapted to the new temporality in terms of its form and content. In correspondence with the scholarship of ‘the anthropology of the future’, the article focuses on changes in temporal orientations – specifically, with a shift from a temporality of (future) preparedness to a temporal orientation of (immediate) urgency and how such a shift in temporality affects the technology of the scenario. Moving from preparing for potential future uncertainties to responding to an urgent event set in a present that is unfolding into an uncertain, immediate future provokes a new temporal orientation, for which the initial temporality of the scenario technology becomes its limitation. Cet article explore le lien entre technologie et temporalité, et discute spécifiquement de la technologie des scénarios et de la temporalité de l'urgence, dans le contexte de la pandémie de coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19). Il illustre comment, malgré l'orientation inhérente de cette technologie vers la potentialité future, une fois qu'un événement réel se produit et que la temporalité de la préparation est remplacée par une temporalité d'urgence, la technologie du scénario est adaptée à la nouvelle temporalité en termes de forme et de contenu. En correspondance avec la recherche de “l'anthropologie du futur ” , l'article s'intéresse aux changements d'orientations temporelles — plus précisément, au passage d'une temporalité de préparation (future) à une orientation temporelle d'urgence (immédiate) et à la manière dont un tel changement de temporalité affecte la technologie du scénario. Passer de la préparation à des incertitudes futures potentielles à la réponse à un événement urgent dans un présent qui se déroule dans un futur incertain et immédiat provoque une nouvelle orientation temporelle, pour laquelle la temporalité initiale de la technologie du scénario devient sa limite.
... Notes terms can generally be seen as part of the broader governmental rationality of preparedness (Lakoff and Collier 2008;Samimian-Darash 2009), but this is a discussion that remains outside the scope of the current article. 5. UK emergency management is built on three phases: preparation, response, and recovery. ...
Article
In this article, we analyze UK global health policy in the light of the 2014 Ebola epidemic. Specifically, we focus on the UK government’s intervention in the epidemic, reflections on the UK’s response in parliamentary committees and government-sponsored forums, and subsequent UK global health policy changes. Post-Ebola, we argue, UK global health policy turned into a pursuit of global health emergency-preparedness through development. This, we further suggest, resulted from what we identify as the specific structure of the UK’s emergency-preparedness configuration that creates a ‘spill-over’ between the immediate event (of emergency) and future preparedness. This configuration transmits problems between different temporalities – allowing immediate, urgent problems to become problems of future uncertainty (and future uncertainties to be enacted as urgent problems). In activating emergency-preparedness, furthermore, self-scrutiny is triggered – prompting the UK to assume responsibility for problems identified as threats regardless of their point of origin, thus internalizing external problems.
... Pese a que podríamos decir que la preocupación por lo que hoy llamamos transmisión de enfermedades infecciosas ha acompañado a la humanidad por siglos (a través de explicaciones míticas, religiosas o preclínicas), no es sino hasta el siglo XIX que, con el crecimiento masivo de las ciudades, la primera Revo-El hito de que la biovigilancia empezara a centrarse en la enfermedad en sí, la aparición de los primeros computadores, la proliferación y distribución de los sistemas de atención temprana ya comentados, junto al contexto de los años sesenta cuando la Guerra Fría era el marco de inteligibilidad cotidiano de los sistemas de vigilancia, formaron las condiciones idóneas para el surgimiento de una nueva racionalidad en el cálculo de riesgo, denominada preparedness (Anderson, 2010;Collier, 2008;Lakoff, 2009Lakoff, , 2015Samimian-Darash, 2009). ...
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La implementación de los denominados Early Warning Systems (Sistemas de Alerta Temprana) ha sido exponencial desde su nacimiento a mitad del siglo XX, tanto en número como en sofisticación y áreas de utilización (terremotos, inundaciones, calentamiento global, huracanes, etc.). En este trabajo analizamos el uso de Early Warning Systems en las lógicas contemporáneas de biovigilancia. Para ello, ofreceremos un análisis de material documental y de imágenes pertenecientes al estudio de caso sobre epidemias y bioseguridad que llevamos a cabo durante tres años para ilustrar las características de la biovigilancia actual. Por último, concluiremos afirmando que en estas lógicas de biovigilancia, se está gestando un profundo cambio en el modo de vigilar la vida, llamado biomonitorización: la vida ya no es solo controlada pasivamente por distintos dispositivos, sino que ahora también juega un papel activo, monitorizante y centinela. El ciudadano deviene biociudadano.
... Based on speculation about such factors as the environment, health, and capital, anticipation is intricately associated with a logic of disaster management and attempts to prepare for a future defined by risk. Anthropologists have shown that administrators and planners increasingly respond to this futurity and its dimension of risk through 'prognosis' (Mathews and Barnes, 2016), regimes of preparedness (Samimian-Darash, 2009), and manipulations of time (Guyer, 2007). When they conflate disaster with national security, regimes of anticipation increase government control over spaces, populations, and bodies (Lakoff and Collier, 2008;Collier and Lakoff, 2015). ...
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A landslide occurred in the region of Zanskar in the Indian Himalayas in 2015, damming the Tsarap River, creating a lake that effectively became a ticking time bomb, threatening villagers downstream. During the period between the discovery of the natural dam and the bursting of the lake, the state's approach to disaster management plunged the local population into a situation where 'technocratic time' ruled, as government experts handled the impending disaster at a rhythm dictated by the production of studies and reports. Analysis of the temporality of disaster mitigation and preparedness measures during this anticipated flood, as well as of the factors that surrounded the events, reveals how attitudes towards the state shaped people's perceptions of these interventions. In Zanskar, the technocratic pace and the state's lack of transparency were seen as a form of oppression that further marginalised the region, in particular by subjecting its population to the process of waiting.
... 5 Instead of focusing on content (what is next?), this chapter draws attention to form; it highlights a structure (the structure of the next) and illuminates a pattern (the serial nature of the next). This shift of focus from content to form moves the scholarly discussion beyond an epistemological concern with the production of knowledge that tends to dominate in the literature (Anderson 2010;Aradau and van Munster 2011;Barker 2012;Briggs 2011;Briggs and Hallin 2016;Lakoff 2007;Lakoff 2008;Samimian-Darash 2009;Samimian-Darash 2013). Using a series of numbers to present a series of insights, this chapter imitates the form that is under examination. ...
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... Research in microbiology has traced the rise of antibiotic resistant and highly adaptive microbes in high density poultry flocks (Nhung 2017). And research by anthropologists of science trace the ways in which emerging epidemics challenge state-of-the-art virology (MacPhail 2014;Caduff 2015;Keck 2014), as well as existing disease surveillance and preparedness infrastructures (Lakoff 2008;Lakoff 2012;Elbe et al. 2014;Samimian-Darash 2009). 3 It is important to note that these movements are not always straightforward, legal, or safe. ...
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... Pero esta tesis no es ni mucho menos el primer acercamiento a este campo de investigación. Así, dentro de los propios STS, autores como Lakoff (2006aLakoff ( , 2008Lakoff ( 2009), Collier (2008), Carlo Caduff (2015), Collier y Lakoff (2008), Dobson, Barker y Taylor (2013), Limor Samimian-Darash (2009, 2011) o Fearnley (2005, 2006; han tratado de responder a preguntas relacionadas con las implicaciones psicosociales y semiótico-materiales del cambio de la noción de vida en las últimas décadas en materia de seguridad y vigilancia. Pero, ¿Qué entendemos exactamente por seguridad y vigilancia de la vida? ...
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El presente trabajo es un extracto-resumen de la tesis doctoral que defendí el pasado septiembre titulada Seguridad y Vigilancia. Gestión de la Vida en el Siglo XXI, enmarcada en un marco teórico que mezcla los Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Tecnología, la Teoría del Actor-Red y otros conceptos de la filosofía, la antropología y la sociología. Desde una metodología cualitativa, utilizando un estudio de caso centrado en el análisis semiótico-material de la bioseguridad y la biovigilancia en la Unión Europea, ofrezco un repaso del concepto de biopolítica indicando la obsolescencia del mismo y su insuficiencia para dar cuenta de los eventos ocurridos durante los primeros años del siglo XXI. Por este motivo, en este artículo compilo el concepto central de la tesis: la observación sindrómica, exponiendo tanto el campo donde se origina como los motivos que me han llevado a acuñarlo como una mejor respuesta que la biopolítica como herramienta para analizar cómo la vida es gestionada contemporáneamente
... I draw attention to form, highlighting a structure (the structure of the next) and a pattern (the serial nature of the next). This shift of focus from content to form moves the scholarly discussion beyond an epistemological concern with the production of knowledge that tends to dominate in the literature (Anderson 2010;Aradau and van Munster 2011;Barker 2012;Briggs 2011;Briggs and Hallin 2016;Lakoff 2007Lakoff , 2008Samimian-Darash 2009. Using a series of numbers to present a series of insights, this essay imitates the form that is under examination. ...
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The mass media fascination with mass death and mass disease has a long history. But what makes a disease communicable in our culture of media? In this think piece, I argue that the mass media has found in the idea of the next pandemic an ideal opportunity to corroborate its own discursive problematic.
... Dentro de la anterior lista, destacan los fen?menos vinculados con las pr?cticas de bioseguridad y biovigilancia . La primera, siguiendo a Darash (2009), se encargar?a de las reglas y directrices que gu?an el contacto con agentes biol?gicos infecciosos y donde existe un riesgo que vulnera la seguridad de las personas. ...
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El concepto de ciudadanía es seguramente, uno de los más estudiados en la historia desde una perspectiva social: desde Aristóteles y la polis griega hasta la ciudad liberal del siglo XX. En este sentido, posteriormente han emergido una serie de estudios como los de Nikolas Rose o Kezia Barker donde el énfasis es puesto en la biociencia y la biotecnología para entender al ciudadano y donde el apego a un territorio ya no es una característica importante para la ciudadanía. En este trabajo, nos adherimos a esta línea y presentaremos el concepto de ciudadanía biovigilante para enmarcar una serie de políticas, acciones y acontecimientos que rodean a la ciudad actual en un campo donde los estudios sociales no han llegado con intensidad: la biovigilancia y las prácticas de bioseguridad en nuestra vida cotidiana. Mediante un estudio de caso de material documental sobre biovigilancia, presentaremos la novedad de nuestro trabajo frente a otras propuestas como las ya mencionadas utilizando de soporte teórico el concepto de paraskeue (equipamiento) de Michel Foucault. Finalmente, discutiremos acerca de las implicaciones biopolíticas de este nuevo tipo de ciudadanía y resaltaremos la importancia del concepto de escenario en las políticas de biovigilancia.
... An assemblage, in contrast, is heterogeneous, dynamic, and does not represent a major response. Rather, it can be characterized by numerous sub-structures that exist simultaneously (see also Samimian-Darash, 2009). 3. Explanations for each category are as follow. ...
Article
In this article we propose a mode of analysis that allows us to consider security as a form distinct from insecurity, in order to capture the heterogeneity of security objects, logics and forms of action. We first develop a genealogy for the anthropology of security, demarcating four main approaches: violence and state terror; military, militarization, and militarism; para-state securitization; and what we submit as ‘security assemblages.’ Security assemblages move away from focusing on security formations per se, and how much violence or insecurity they yield, to identifying and studying security forms of action, whether or not they are part of the nation-state. As an approach to anthropological inquiry and theory, it is oriented toward capturing how these forms of action work and what types of security they produce. We illustrate security assemblages through our fieldwork on counterterrorism in the domains of law enforcement, biomedical research and federal-state counter-extremism, in each case arriving at a diagnosis of the form of action. The set of distinctions that we propose is intended as an aid to studying empirical situations, particularly of security, and, on another level, as a proposal for an approach to anthropology today. We do not expect that the distinctions that aid us will suffice in every circumstance. Rather, we submit that this work presents a set of specific insights about contemporary US security, and an example of a new approach to anthropological problems.
... One way into this question is through a growing body of anthropological literature on rationality and expertise (Boyer 2005;Rudnyckyj 2011;MacPhail 2014), especially as it pertains to issues of security and biosecurity: the truth claims they articulate, the forms of embodied rationality upon which they are buttressed, and the practical regimes they enact. In the broadest sense this approach has provided trenchant specificity to the rationalities employed in contemporary governance, constellations of 'preparedness' (Lakoff 2008;Samimian-Darash 2011), 'vigilance' (Langlitz 2009;Stalcup 2015), and 'biosecurity' (Fearnley 2008;Lakoff & Collier 2008;Maguire 2009;Samimian-Darash 2009). More concretely, it can offer empirical grounds on which to understand the nature of power/knowledge in policing today (Brodeur & Dupont 2006). ...
Chapter
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... as they are thoughts about a body parallel to those conjured by molecular biology, tissue culture, and reproductive technology: a body electric. 1 Recent anthropological consideration of the concept of potentiality has been bundled with attention to how people grappling with biomedical and biotechnological promise and peril act on and speculate about "the future" (e.g., Fortun 2008;Franklin 2006;Kaufman et al. 2010;Samimian-Darash 2009;Svendsen 2011;Thompson 2005). As the introduction to this special issue of Current Anthropology suggests, claims about "potential" often point both to putatively "natural," possibly teleological, forces considered to be latent within organisms as well as to those possibilities that might be socially realized as people select how to direct such forces in the near and not so near term. ...
Article
Physics tells us that potential energy is the capacity to do work that a body possesses as a result of its position in electric, magnetic, or gravitational fields. Thinking of “potentiality” in an electric idiom and with reference to its place in human biological processes that implicate electric phenomena, such as the pulses of action potentials that animate the heart and brain, can afford novel angles into contemporary biomedical enactments of humanness. This paper explores the material and rhetorical power of electric potential in cardiac and neurological medicine, paying attention to how discourses of “waves” of energy format the way scientists apprehend bodies as emplaced in time—in a time that can be about both cyclicity and futurity. Attention to electrophysiological phenomena may enrich the way anthropologists of the biosciences think about potentiality, taking scholars beyond our established attentions to the genetic, cellular, or pharmacological to think about the body electric.
... . Elsewhere, I discuss the diverse elements within the Israeli preparedness system and their distinctive threat diagnostics and related preparedness solutions (seeSamimian-Darash 2009a).This content downloaded on Thu, 7 Feb 2013 02:06:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ...
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In this article, I examine several expressions of imaginative practices to unpack the umbrella term scenario. Drawing on my long-term fieldwork on Israel’s annual Turning Point exercises, I examine actual uses of scenarios and distinguish between two different logics of imaginative practices and the modalities in which the future is governed by them, which I refer to as the scenaristic and the simulative. As I demonstrate, these two modalities can be distinguished from each other in terms of their approaches to future uncertainty, their temporalities and the role of imagination within their enactment. To further conceptually develop the logics of imagination, I draw on Deleuze’s and Bergson’s discussions of the concept of fabulation, and I suggest that scenarios and simulations represent two different logics of future-governing that are based on practices of imagination.
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In the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, many countries across the world have developed new health surveillance technologies using digital tools and communication data to monitor and manage confirmed and suspected carriers of the virus. This article demonstrates the growing centrality of mobile network operators in managing global health crises through a case study of South Korea’s epidemic governance. In South Korea, KT, one of the country’s three telecommunications companies, has been actively developing and investing in health surveillance platforms since 2015, promoting that its big-data-based surveillance and ICT infrastructures may prevent the spread of infectious diseases. Conducting a situational analysis of archival materials, I document the process through which such mobile network operators emerge as essential producers of the data infrastructures that shape the understanding and management of public health emergencies. The article also addresses the sociocultural implications of such private technology corporations’ capturing of emergency power. In the end, I argue that Korea’s public health surveillance systems are increasingly constructed within the capitalist logic of the telecom industry, mainly via ‘platformization’ – a shift that offers telecom firms to transform from network to platform operators by extracting and aggregating subscribers' data. The case analyzed here demonstrates how granting such extraordinary authority to ICT companies during national emergencies becomes routinized, and even instrumentalized for economic purposes.
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How do individuals and institutions make sense of epidemics in time, before, during and after outbreaks? This concise review follows a linear chronology of outbreak ‘events’ to explore debates in medical anthropology on epidemic temporalities. It excavates key notions relating to the technologies, imaginary and governance of epidemic anticipation, epidemic emergency and epidemic aftermaths. Building upon ethnographic works which depict how epidemic temporalities are constructed, and how they travel and affect social life, it argues that they are an integral component of the evental construction of epidemics.
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From 2008 to 2017, the Israeli Ministry of Interior's attempts to create a national biometric identification system comprised of a digital database and ‘smart' national ID cards containing the index fingerprints and facial recognition data of all Israeli citizens and residents generated significant political debate. Usually, security is offered as a justification for biometric identification. In the Israeli debate, security was foundational to both claims for and against the system. Security is a major priority in Israel, and by putting it at the center of their arguments, opponents and proponents tried to lay claim to one of the most powerful legitimating tools in Israeli policymaking. They did so by articulating sociotechnical imaginaries of the system that both drew upon aspirations for security, yet offered contrasting visions of the biometric future. These imaginaries existed in a dialectical relationship; both sides used practices of imagining the future to influence the system's policy framework and technological design, and to contest the meaning of security itself by defining it and its relationship to biometric IDs and databases in different ways. Ultimately, the system's implementation in 2017 entailed a legislative and technological compromise that incorporated both sides’ visions of the future and definitions of security.
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Our current ecumene is governmentalistically plural. The biopolitical technology of the regulation of one or another bounded population remains active among many other such technologies. The mode of veridiction proper to biopolitics is actuarial; it has a proper epistemology. In these two respects, it stands beside and apart from the mode of veridiction proper to a parabiopolitics, which is scenaristic and grounded in a sophiology. I extract the lineaments of parabiopolitical reason from two sources. One is an exercise undertaken in Greece between 2002 and 2004 under the mandate of the European program of FORESIGHT. The other is the work of Pierre Wack, whose methodology of scenario planning brings the difference that makes a difference between biopolitical epistemology and parabiopolitical sophiology most brightly to light.
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From the beginning of our civilization, the existence of infectious and contagious diseases required a search for solutions for both an individual and medical-health problem, and political interventions that involve a territory and population that must be managed. In this respect, epidemiology constitutes a strategic dimension in analysing the complex relationships established between scientific conduct and the political management of a territory. With this focus, we will provide a short historic genealogy of the links established between medicine and politics in European societies since the 18th century. From this, we should be able to see a movement from the concepts of healthiness/unhealthiness common to the ‘public hygiene’ managed by the 19th-century nation-state, towards the imperative of ‘public health’ operating with the ‘global health’ concept promoted by our current global institutions.
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This article analyzes the emergence of biocapitalism from an examination of biosafety. Thus, this text demonstrates how biosafety is a mechanism for which the production of fictional scenarios is the main means of intelligibility, and describes how those scenarios operate to transform what is living into a deterritorialized, global and fluid stream. In this regard, it affirms that biosafety generates a suspension of the scientific standard, which reconfigures the relationships between both the techno-science and political-legal paradigms.
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This article outlines an approach to security that explains its phenomenal growth by examining a peculiarity of its semantic field. In contrast to notions like ‘war’ and ‘violence’, whose antonyms, ‘peace’ and ‘non-violence’, have positive connotations and are therefore well suited to discursively opposing ‘war’ and ‘violence’, the antonym of ‘security’ ‘ namely ‘insecurity’ ‘ does not achieve the same effect. I suggest that this peculiarity leads to situations in which those in the political field who oppose ‘security’ find themselves in the predicament of having to come up with alternative antonymic constructions such as ‘security vs freedom’ or ‘security vs human rights’ to argue their case. Yet, this produces an asymmetric constellation: while ‘security’ tends to be presented as a self-evident category, most of its opposites require more explication and substantiation when they are used to denaturalize security. Thus, my argument is that it is difficult to speak out against security without becoming enmeshed in complex questions of what a desirable social life should look like.
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In the aftermath of the 2009 outbreak of H1N1 influenza, scientists in Mexico sought to develop bioseguridad, that is, to protect biological life in Mexico by safely conducting research on infectious disease. Drawing on ethnographic research in laboratories and with scientists in Mexico, I look at how scientists make claims about local differences in regulations, infrastructure, bodies, and culture. The scientists working with infectious microbes sought to establish how different microbial ecologies, human immune systems, and political and regulatory systems made the risks of research different in Mexico from other countries. In developing bioseguridad, the idea of globalized biology that animates many public health projects was undermined as scientists attended to the elements of place that affected human health and safety. Scientists argued for the importance of local biologies, generating tension with global public health projects and regulations premised on the universality of biology. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
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El presente art culo analiza la emergencia del biocapitalismo a partir de un examen sobre la bioseguridad. Para ello, muestra c mo la bioseguridad es una actividad en la cual la producci n de escenarios ccionales es el principal mecanismo de inteligibilidad, y describe c mo operan los escenarios al transformar lo vivo en un ujo desterritorializado, global y m vil. En este sentido, constata que la bioseguridad genera una suspensi n de la norma cient ca, con lo cual se recon guran las relaciones establecidas entre tecnociencia y paradigma pol tico-jur dico.
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The triple disaster of March 11, 2011 posed a formidable challenge for Japanese society in general, and for affected coastal communities in particular. In the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe, there was widespread support for the construction of high seawalls to protect communities. However, many communities began questioning this approach. In Maehama, the question of land reconstruction and protection gave rise to a set of complex responses. The government aimed to put in place even higher seawalls; however, the local community proposed instead to mark the boundary of high water with trees and stakes. These solutions instantiate different ways of infrastructuring the post-tsunami environment for safety; they carry different assumptions about infrastructure itself. Whereas the seawall solution was technical and quantitative, centering on the question of height, the boundary markers embedded qualitatively different assumptions about what makes a workable infrastructure. In particular, this difference centered on issue of visibility. On the one hand, the seawall was meant to slowly become unremarkable, whereas the boundary markers were specifically intended to maintain community memory. On the other hand, the seawall would make the sea itself invisible, whereas keeping the sea in sight is very important to villagers. However, the opposition between these forms of infrastructuring the environment was not total. A solution was gradually negotiated in which the sea wall and the boundary markers could complement each another. This situation highlights the intricate, transformable relation between visible and invisible forms of infrastructure.
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From risk management to the production of security This article considers the history of preparation for flu pandemics since 1976, with a particular focus first on the action of international organizations and then on the French case. Apart from sanitary threats as such, the planning involves a redefinition of “minimal life” in complex contemporary societies, taking into account the relations of internal and external interdependence, and simultaneously shaping risks and security measures to reduce them. The abundant criticism of public action taken to deal with the 2009 pandemic has not resulted in preparation being scrapped. Instead, it has led to a more in-depth approach to preparation, taking into account the endogenous risks in planning (closure of hypotheses, irreversibility) in order to produce ever more security.
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The publication of Malinowski's fieldnotes sheds an interesting light on the relationship between field experience, literally speaking, and the writing of ethnography. Anthropological research is, in the final analysis, an endeavor to decode socio-cultural life, but in ethnographic practice it involves the discovery of codes embedded in the actual flow of everyday events and processes. In a field study in Dongshih, Taiwan, I encountered the complexity of lived experience in the wake of a massive earthquake. That particular complexity played out along the fine line between the legal and the illegal in people's negotiation of everyday life, and it forced me to rethink my historical analysis of certain formal codes. During this crisis, the plight of one extended family with jointly owned land made manifest a whole range of unforeseen issues that prompted me to question various existing legal processes. Thus, the 9/21 earthquake of 1999 not only highlighted specific actions that challenged the legal system through social contestation, it also revealed underlying processes that regulate the complexity of social conduct.
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This article considers how anthropologists and other social scientists examine biosecurity as an object in the making. It suggests that scholars encountered this object in research projects concerned with questions of global health, capitalism, neoliberalism, humanitarianism, citizenship, science, medicine, technology, ecology, surveillance, and risk. This growing body of work explores emerging modes of government that are characteristic for the post-Cold War period of global capitalism. Ethnographic accounts demonstrate how actors and institutions located in the Global North and the Global South perceive the spread of dangerous biological things as a threat to the health of individuals and populations. This article aims to review this literature and supplement the current approach with a theory of security performativity.
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Political action is frequently conceptualised as starting from the ground up. Plausible as this point may be, it pays insufficient attention to well-established arguments that we inhabit administrative society, implicitly contrasted against political society, with technocrats operating the requisite power/knowledge grid away from the street. Like Foucault's ‘specific intellectuals’, technocrats work in pivotal positions in apparatuses of population regulation, but nevertheless can potentially recognise the plight of the marginalised ‘masses’ as they themselves are also alienated subject-objects of population regulation. This article draws on a range of ethnographic encounters with technocrats working in diverse areas of migration management in the European Union to prompt an examination of the historical and social conditions that impede, and often render unthinkable, direct engagement between technocrats and the migrants whom they are paid to regulate. The article draws explicitly on Hannah Arendt's work on the vita activa, compassion, thinking, judging and revolution (1) to explain how the apparatus's systemic isolation of both its policy experts and policy targets impedes political action and (2) to identify a form of ethnographic engagement that might help to overcome it.
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Healthy women who are at hereditary risk for developing breast and ovarian cancer are surgically enacting the disease in material registers on their flesh in order to survive cancer in advance. In this practice of "previval," the disease becomes itself, or gains biomedical substance, through its own theatrical gesture.
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Physics tells us that potential energy is the capacity to do work that a body possesses as a result of its position in electric, magnetic, or gravitational fields. Thinking of “potentiality” in an electric idiom and with reference to its place in human biological processes that implicate electric phenomena, such as the pulses of action potentials that animate the heart and brain, can afford novel angles into contemporary biomedical enactments of humanness. This paper explores the material and rhetorical power of electric potential in cardiac and neurological medicine, paying attention to how discourses of “waves” of energy format the way scientists apprehend bodies as emplaced in time—in a time that can be about both cyclicity and futurity. Attention to electrophysiological phenomena may enrich the way anthropologists of the biosciences think about potentiality, taking scholars beyond our established attentions to the genetic, cellular, or pharmacological to think about the body electric.
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This article presents an embedded analysis of how scientists and federal officials scrambled to get a handle on the deepwater blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. Taking the environment as a compelling ethnographic question, it shows how the oil spill and the environment are not given objects that then collide during a disaster, as is commonly assumed in “disaster studies.” Rather, crude oil and the environment are unstable fields instantiated and made politically operable in relationship to one another. The BP Oil Spill went from a sprawling mess into a manageable problem by being lodged within a refined deployment of the environment. The ocean was, in a way, transformed into a scientific laboratory within which the true size and scope of diffuse hydrocarbons could finally be mastered. Such placement not only objectified the oil spill, it also quietly defined what knowledge of the disaster and what relations to it could have credibility. The revised environment fully contained the disaster, insulating the biological reach of this oil spill from human considerations and rendering personal accounts of sickness implausible and illegible. Techniques of sequestering and inspecting the oil spill came to underwrite a new regime of disconnection between the disaster and the public.
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Daily practices of bioterrorism preparedness are producing a security community in which citizens are bound together by common biological risk, access to care during times of crisis, and the ability and authority to provide care in an emergency. Through the study of national-level exercise programmes and city-wide preparedness plans in Albuquerque, New Mexico, this ethnographic research asks how communities are materially and ideologically organized around the idea of mitigating biological risk. The dual acts of planning for bioterrorism and simulating a response prescribe a distinct role for government in caring for a population, and not just during times of crisis. This paper explores the outcomes of publicly rehearsing the care practices of government through bioterror simulation by considering how restructuring health systems around the idea of biopreparedness confounds the specter of war with life-giving acts of health care, offering citizens a way of living within the state of emergency.
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The article analyzes the heterogeneous forms of action within the state’s preparedness assemblage for biological threats in Israel. By examining preparedness practices in two biological preparedness events — the smallpox vaccination project (a possible event) and the ongoing preparations for pandemic influenza (a virtual event) — the analysis maintains that there are a number of simultaneous state practices that emerge in response to various events. This multiplicity points to the complexity of the state not only institutionally (as a form) but also in terms of its (forms of) action. A focus on complexity contrasts with dominant anthropological approaches, which conceive of the state as a monolithic imaginary tending toward homogeneity rather than as heterogeneous, dynamic and constantly changing in practice. To study the state’s dynamic form of action, I highlight a particular analytical mode that I term the ‘conceptual mode’. This mode of analysis lies between the object mode of analysis (concerned with the structure and form of the state) and the idea mode of analysis (interested in how the state, as an imaginary encompassing entity, increases its power).
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Responses to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, and criticisms of those responses, were framed by issues endemic to the meeting of 'health' and 'security' as governing domains. Offering an editorial introduction to the selection of papers in this special issue, it is suggested that existing scholarship in the emerging field of 'health security' can be categorized according to realist-advocacy, historical-analytic, problematization and critical-inequality approaches. In contributing to this literature through an event-based focus on the pandemic, the papers embrace the opportunity to examine health security architectures acting and interacting 'in the event', to not only speculate over the possible implications of this governing trope, but to review them. Questions of the scales of governance and associated forms of expertise, the implications of differing modes of governance (from preparedness to surveillance to forms of intervention), and the role of health inequalities in the patterning of the pandemic are identified as key themes running across the papers.
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During preparations for the Second Gulf War, Israel considered universal smallpox vaccination. In doing so, it faced a problem: how to legitimise carrying out a security action against an uncertain future danger (smallpox pandemic), when this action carried specific, known risks (vaccine complications). To solve this problem, the Israeli preparedness system created a new domain through which the security action could reach its goal with minimum risk: first responders (a group of medical personnel and security forces). First-responder vaccination represents a shift in the form of 'securing health' and in the governmental technology applied to this goal, in which past, present, and future occurrences are governed to enable the execution of a security action. Through this practice, risks are not located in the present or in the future but in a 'shared' temporal space and thus can be seen as existing simultaneously. Preparedness for emerging future biological events, then, involves more than questioning how the future is contingent on the present and how the present is contingent on the future's perception; it also recognises the need for a new time positioning that allows operating on both present and future risks simultaneously. Governing these risks, then, means governing through time.
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A sanitary look out post on the frontier of lifeBird flu experts in Hong KongThe paper concerns a group of experts who sent out a warning of a flu pandemic based on their observation of birds and humans in Hong Kong. It shows why this place has served as a look out post for a new pandemic caused by a catastrophic mutation of the flu virus in an avian population. It traces the different crises which alerted the local population and which led to global mobilisation involving ever higher levels of medical authorities. The conclusion deals with the issue of the frontiers of biosecurity, a frontier that is at once biological, social, natural and political which reveals the appearance of catastrophes and where a temporal dynamic leads to collective action.
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At a time of increasing globalization and worldwide vulnerability, the study of disasters has become an important focus for anthropological research-one where the four fields of anthropology are synthesized to address the multidimensionality of the effects to a community's social structures and relationship to the environment. Using a variety of natural and technological disasters-including Mexican earthquakes, drought in the Andes and in Africa, the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Oakland firestorm, and the Bhopal gas disaster-the authors of this volume explore the potentials of disaster for ecological, political-economic, and cultural approaches to anthropology along with the perspectives of archaeology and history. They also discuss the connection between theory and practice and what anthropology can do for disaster management.
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Saddened, surprised, shocked. By now these words are everywhere, brought to us by the media in OpEd pieces, newspaper editorials, interviews with caring observers, consultants, and celebrities. The sadness and the shock are, to be sure, in part about the physical collapse and devastation of a battered, flooded city. But it is the other part that concerns me. People say they are surprised to see the U.S. looking so "Third World." It is clear from what they say and how they say it that the surprise is often deep and very genuine. This is revealing. It is also troubling. When social studies teachers, sociologists, demographers, geographers, social anthropologists, historians, and economists tell people about existing, palpable inequalities in the U.S., is there little or no audience? The research exists. The experts are there. It is true that some social scientists exclusively do research projects that are highly technical and require advanced knowledge of math and statistics, or specialized expert terminology to understand. But many social scientists, both in their writings and in the classroom, do not. There are powerful films, photoessays, life histories, family tales, maps, and readable textbooks that tell the story. And this is not new. Surprise should not really be the typical reaction, and yet it is a widespread one.
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Technology is always limited to the realm of means, while morality is supposed to deal with ends. In this theoretical article about comparing those two regimes of enunciation, it is argued that technology is on the contrary characterized by the `ends of means' that is the impossibility of being limited to tools; technical artefacts are never tools if what is meant by this is a transmission of function in a mastered way. Once this modification of the meaning of technology is accepted, then it is possible to relate technology, in a totally different way, to morality which is not about values, but about the exploration of ends.
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▪ Abstract Recent perspectives in anthropological research define a disaster as a process/event involving the combination of a potentially destructive agent(s) from the natural and/or technological environment and a population in a socially and technologically produced condition of vulnerability. From this basic understanding three general topical areas have developed: (a) a behavioral and organizational response approach, (b) a social change approach, and (c) a political economic/environmental approach, focusing on the historical-structural dimensions of vulnerability to hazards, particularly in the developing world. Applied anthropological contributions to disaster management are discussed as well as research on perception and assessment of hazard risk. The article closes with a discussion of potentials in hazard and disaster research for theory building in anthropology, particularly in issues of human-environment relations and sociocultural change.
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This essay concerns the current intersection of national security and public health in the United States. It argues that over the course of the past three decades, a new way of thinking about and acting on the threat of infectious disease has coalesced: for public health and national security officials, the problem of infectious disease is no longer only one of prevention, but also—and perhaps even more—one of preparedness. The essay describes the process through which a norm of preparedness came to structure thought about threats to public health, and how a certain set of responses to these threats became possible. The story is a complex one, involving the migration of techniques initially developed in the military and civil defense to other areas of governmental intervention. The analysis is centered not on widespread public discussion of biological threats but, rather, on particular sites of expertise where a novel way of understanding and intervening in threats was developed and deployed. It focuses in particular on one technique, the scenario-based exercise, arguing that this technique served two important functions: first, to generate an affect of urgency in the absence of the event itself; and second, to generate knowledge about vulnerabilities in response capability that could then guide intervention. More broadly, the scenario-based exercise is exemplary of the rationality underlying the contemporary articulation of national security and public health.
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Les interventions dans les ≪ cas d'urgences humanitaires complexes ≫ sont devenues une partie essentielle de la société planétaire. Le texte fournit un compte rendu de la conception des ≪ urgences ≫en termes d'imaginaire social qui procure une caractéristique à la fois de la perception et de l'action. Cet imaginaire moule la définition et la rhétorique des urgences, les façons dont elles se présentent et sont reconnues, et l'organisation de l'intervention. II reflète à la fois l'anxiété face au risque et une foi moderne envahissante en la capacité de gérer les problèmes. Quoique les événements exigeant ces interventions – par exemple, au Soudan – soient souvent rapportés comme étant manifestement convaincants, l' « imaginaire social des urgences » organise conceptuellement ce système. Interventions into “complex humanitarian emergencies” have become a central part of global society. This article provides an account of the construction of “emergencies” in terms of a social imaginary that gives characteristic form to both perception and action. This imaginary shapes the definition and rhetoric of emergencies, the ways in which they are produced and recognized, and the organization of intervention. It reflects both anxiety in the face of risk and a pervasive modern faith in capacity to manage problems. Though the events demanding these interventions–for example, in Sudan–are often presented as transparently compelling, the “social imaginary of emergencies” conceptually structures this system.
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In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a controversy emerged in the U.S. public sphere over the use of the word refugee to characterize the displaced residents of New Orleans. In this article, I explore the significance of the concept of “the refugee” for U.S. citizens, and I discuss what the failure to find an appropriate term to describe stranded New Orleanians reveals about the experience of poverty. I argue that the conceptual void uncovered by the crisis reflects the larger social void in which poor New Orleanians have long been confined and I examine the role of public discourse in defining and helping justify the inequalities uncovered by Katrina.
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This 1999 book presents a variety of exciting perspectives on the perception of risk and the strategies that people adopt to cope with it. Using the framework of recent social and cultural theory, it reflects the fact that risk has become integral to contemporary understandings of selfhood, the body and social relations, and is central to the work of writers such as Douglas, Beck, Giddens and the Foucauldian theorists. The contributors are all leading scholars in the fields of sociology, cultural and media studies and cultural anthropology. Combining empirical analyses with metatheoretical critiques, they tackle an unusually diverse range of topics including drug use, risk in the workplace, fear of crime and the media, risk and pregnant embodiment, the social construction of danger in childhood, anxieties about national identity, the governmental uses of risk and the relationship between risk phenomena and social order.
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During the winter of 2002-2003, the Israeli health authorities launched a campaign to vaccinate first responders against smallpox. In an open study, 159 healthy, preimmunized adults, 24-52 years old, who participated in the campaign were vaccinated with the Lister strain of vaccinia virus by the multipuncture technique. The safety, immunogenicity, and reactogenicity of the vaccine were assessed. Successful vaccination rates were 61% and 56%, on the basis of clinical take and seroconversion, respectively. Adverse events among the vaccinees were minor. Seventy-nine (88%) of the 90 vaccinees with clinical take also seroconverted ( kappa =0.779). The level of preexisting antibodies inversely correlated with the rates of clinical take and seroconversion (P</=.0098). In the group of vaccinees with the lowest preexisting levels of antibodies, 89% and 86% developed clinical take or seroconverted, respectively. The time since last vaccination was significantly associated with the rates of clinical take and seroconversion (P</=0.001). These rates of successful vaccination in previously immunized individuals are consistent with the historical experience of use of this vaccine in Israel. The rate of occurrence and the severity of local and other reactions in the vaccinees were within the expected range. Levels of preexisting antibodies and the time since last vaccination played a major role in determining success rates.
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Studies of the military that deal with the actual experience of troops in the field are still rare in the social sciences. In fact, this ethnographic study of an elite unit in the Israeli Defense Force is the only one of its kind. As an officer of this unit and a professional anthropologist, the author was ideally positioned for his role as participant observer. During the eight years he spent with his unit he focused primarily on such notions as "conflict", "the enemy", and "soldiering" because they are, he argues, the key points of reference for "what we are" and "what we are trying to do" and form the basis for interpreting the environment within which armies operate. Relying on the latest anthropological approaches to cognitive models and the social constructions of emotion and masculinity, the author offers an in-depth analysis of the dynamics that drive the men's attitudes and behavior, and a rare and fascinating insight into the reality of military life.
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The discipline of anthropology is, at its best, characterized by turbulence, self-examination, and inventiveness. In recent decades, new thinking and practice within the field has certainly reflected this pattern, as shown for example by numerous fruitful ventures into the "politics and poetics" of anthropology. Surprisingly little attention, however, has been given to the simple insight that anthropology is composed of claims, whether tacit or explicit, about anthropos and about logos--and the myriad ways in which these two Greek nouns have been, might be, and should be, connected. Anthropos Today represents a pathbreaking effort to fill this gap. Paul Rabinow brings together years of distinguished work in this magisterial volume that seeks to reinvigorate the human sciences. Specifically, he assembles a set of conceptual tools--"modern equipment"--to assess how intellectual work is currently conducted and how it might change. Anthropos Today crystallizes Rabinow's previous ethnographic inquiries into the production of truth about life in the world of biotechnology and genome mapping (and his invention of new ways of practicing this pursuit), and his findings on how new practices of life, labor, and language have emerged and been institutionalized. Here, Rabinow steps back from empirical research in order to reflect on the conceptual and ethical resources available today to conduct such inquiries. Drawing richly on Foucault and many other thinkers including Weber and Dewey, Rabinow concludes that a "contingent practice" must be developed that focuses on "events of problematization." Brilliantly synthesizing insights from American, French, and German traditions, he offers a lucid, deeply learned, original discussion of how one might best think about anthropos today.
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A Different Kind of War Story takes us to the frontlines of one of the most brutal wars in recent history. The setting is Mozambique during the fifteen-year war of terror that took a million lives-mostly civilian-and completely destroyed homes, crops, hospitals, schools, and even access to water. The characters are the soldiers who fought it, the thieves and opportunists who profited from it, and the ordinary people whose lives were shattered by it and from whose ranks emerged the heroes and healers who created peace. Combining contemporary theory and innovative methodology, Nordstrom explores the nature and culture of terror warfare and raises thought-provoking questions about state power, civilian resistance, and the politics of identity. She compares the conflict in Mozambique with similar conflicts and offers a new way of looking at political violence, showing that just as violence is learned, it can be unlearned.
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Alluding to Sierra Leone’s recent violent history, this paper argues that storytelling events offer insights into the ways that people evaluate, discuss, and negotiate social and ethical strategies for making communal life viable in war as well as in peace. At the same time, it explores some of the theoretical implications of Michael Oakeshott’s assertion that “there are not two worlds—the world of past happenings and the world of our present knowledge of those past events—there is only one world, and it is the world of present experience” (Oakeshott 1933:108). [ethics, events, history, Sierra Leone, storytelling, violence]
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The American Diabetes Association currently recommends that all youth with type 1 diabetes over the age of 7 years follow a plan of intensive management. The purpose of this study was to describe stressors and self-care challenges reported by adolescents with type 1 diabetes who were undergoing initiation of intensive management. Subjects described initiation of intensive management as complicating the dilemmas they faced. The importance of individualized and nonjudgmental care from parents and health care providers was stressed. This study supports development of health care relationships and environments that are teen focused not merely disease-centered and embrace exploring options with the teen that will enhance positive outcomes.
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This article introduces some of the challenges of doing ethnography in contexts such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea—places where violence and the certainty of uncertainty have become the backdrop for social interaction. It also considers the potential contributions to anthropological theory of such an undertaking. In particular it outlines a fundamental re-orientation towards the concept of "the event." Drawing contrasts with conventional anthropological understandings of how small scenarios (social situations) and paradigmatic social events (rituals) speak to broader processes, this piece argues for an analytical recasting of the "event" as a moment in which cultural creativity is harnessed to the tasks of effecting and legitimizing the social transformations that crises often demand. Such "events" affirm the continuity of social groups even as they participate in the re-organization of social practice and are thus ultimately relevant to any anthropology of actors who confront and seek to effect change.
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Like many other states, Israel was forged through the struggle of a national liberation movement that likely drew inspiration from an ethnic past and that certainly worked to establish a political framework. Once the state existed, however, its leaders did not regard the ethnie as an objective category that would in large measure determine whether a nation would emerge. Instead, they viewed the ethnie as a subject susceptible, in varying degrees, to manipulation, invention, domination, and mobilization. As the prime minister of Piedmont said, “We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians”; or as Israel's first prime minister, Ben-Gurion, put it in April 1951 during the election campaign: “I see in these elections the shaping of a nation for the state because there is a state but not a nation.”
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ABSTRACTI examine three ethnographies of the U.S. military and of militarization in the contemporary United States. These phenomena have hitherto received little scholarly attention by anthropologists. After describing the contents of the three volumes, I suggest that their wider import for anthropology lies in their demonstration of the usefulness of the discipline's theories and analytical tools for analyzing the political economy of militarization and the unique character of an organization specializing in violence.
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Using observations from recent participation in post-Katrina recovery efforts in New Orleans, I make the case in this article that taphonomic processes such as trash removal, deposition, earthmoving, and demolition are a primary medium through which individuals and communities reconstitute themselves following a disaster. Taphonomy, or the formation of the archaeological record, does not simply reflect social processes, it is a social process. The taphonomic processes currently underway through the clean-up and rebuilding efforts in New Orleans dramatically illustrate this point. I recommend that both ethnographers and archaeologists undertake a fine-grained ethnoarchaeology of disaster. I engage with the literature of disaster to illustrate the potentials I see for this type of study, particularly as it pertains to the culture–nature nexus, perceptions of vulnerability, and the revelatory power of disasters.
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In this introduction, I briefly compare anthropological notice of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 to that of the more powerful Hurricane Camille in 1969 and note pertinent developments in the intervening 36 years, especially the emergence of an anthropological specialty in the study of natural disasters. An overview of the collection follows with comments on particular strengths of each article and suggestions for some of their wider implications for research and public policy. I conclude with a consideration of possible avenues for further anthropological research on hurricanes in general and questions on recovery from Katrina, Rita, and ensuing floods specifically, thus providing a wide-angle perspective on this “In Focus” endeavor—impacts of hurricanes, disaster anthropology, and both short-term and long-term culture change.
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Anthropologists' selections of topics and field sites have often been shaped by militarism, but they have been slow to make militarism, especially American militarism, an object of study. In the high Cold War years concerns about human survival were refracted into debates about innate human proclivities for violence or peace. As new wars with high civilian casualty rates emerged in Africa, Central America, the former Eastern bloc, and South Asia, beginning in the 1980s anthropologists increasingly wrote about terror, torture, death squads, ethnic cleansing, guerilla movements, and the memory work inherent in making war and peace. Anthropologists have also begun to write about nuclear weapons and American militarism. The war on terror has disturbed settled norms that anthropologists should not assist counterinsurgency campaigns, and for the first time since Vietnam, anthropologists are debating the merits of military anthropology versus critical ethnography of the military.
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This analysis was prepared for the ‘Bioterrorism: Historical contexts, long-term consequences’ conference held at the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, on 8 May 2002. A revised version was presented at the panel ‘A plagued future? Emerging diseases, bioweapons, and other anticipated microbial horrors’ at the 2002 American Anthropological Association Meetings, 23 November. I thank meeting participants for their comments, as well as Nick King, Joe Masco and the anonymous referees for AT. I am indebted to colleagues D.A. Henderson, Tara O'Toole, Tom Inglesby and Michael Mair for their reflections on the humanitarian and public policy dilemmas posed by bioweapons, and to Onora Lien and Ari Schuler for research assistance.
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Recent changes within social and cultural anthropology have made history a key issue, but in this essay I argue that the field has yet to develop the resources that are required to deal with temporality. This point is made through an extended examination of Jean and John Comaroffs work on Christianity and colonialism in southern Africa. Arguably, the Comaroffs read history backward and then present its unfolding as a kind of inexorable logic. In doing so, they homogenize missionary and Tswana "cultures" and attribute agency to abstractions rather than to people acting in particular material contexts. In contrast, I argue for a narrative approach to historical anthropological explanation. The emergent qualities of events—and the variable ways in which capitalism, hegemony, Protestantism, and vernacular modernisms relate—require narrative for explanation, narrative that encompasses within itself the narratives of social actors themselves, [historical anthropology, narrative, the modern, South Africa]
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This book examines how the social and cultural paradigms of contemporary Israel are articulated through the body. To construct a panoramic view of how the Israeli body is chosen, regulated, cared for, and ultimately made perfect, the author draws upon some twenty years of ethnographic research in Israel in a range of subjects. These include premarital and prenatal screening, the regulation of the body and its imagery among appearance-impaired children and their families, the screening and sanctifying of the body as part of the bereavement and commemoration of fallen soldiers, and the discourse of the chosen body as it surfaces during terrorist attacks, military socialization, war, and the peace process.
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In this study of Hutu refugees from Burundi, driven into exile in Tanzania after their 1972 insurrection against the dominant Tutsi was brutally quashed, Liisa Malkki shows how experiences of dispossession and violence are remembered and turned into narratives, and how this process helps to construct identities such as "Hutu" and "Tutsi." Through extensive fieldwork in two refugee communities, Malkki finds that the refugees' current circumstances significantly influence these constructions. Those living in organized camps created an elaborate "mythico-history" of the Hutu people, which gave significance to exile, and envisioned a collective return to the homeland of Burundi. Other refugees, who had assimilated in a more urban setting, crafted identities in response to the practical circumstances of their day to day lives. Malkki reveals how such things as national identity, historical consciousness, and the social imagination of "enemies" get constructed in the process of everyday life. The book closes with an epilogue looking at the recent violence between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi, and showing how the movement of large refugee populations across national borders has shaped patterns of violence in the region.
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Marshall Sahlins centers these essays on islands—Hawaii, Fiji, New Zealand—whose histories have intersected with European history. But he is also concerned with the insular thinking in Western scholarship that creates false dichotomies between past and present, between structure and event, between the individual and society. Sahlins's provocative reflections form a powerful critique of Western history and anthropology.
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