Caduff, Carlo (Author)
University of California, Berkeley
Rabinow, Paul
Edition Details: Advisor: Rabinow, Paul
Physical Details: 342 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation explores the recent scare over the threat of pandemic influenza from the perspective of an anthropology of the contemporary. It is based on eighteen months of fieldwork among biomedical scientists and public health professionals in the United States. Since the emergence of an avian influenza virus in Asia in late 1997 and its subsequent spread across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, a growing number of scientists, politicians, and journalists have been warning that a devastating pandemic may be imminent. Although the pandemic has failed to materialize so far, the predicted public health emergency has nonetheless been incredibly generative. In this dissertation, I critically investigate a set of scientific truth claims about pandemic influenza produced by experts for quick public consumption. Rather than to reproduce these ready-made narratives of the normal and the pathological, I engage some of the experimental practices and conceptual frameworks on which researchers base their authoritative claims. The purpose of such an analysis is not to debunk science, but to take science seriously, to engage it in its own terms, and to provide an account of pandemic influenza that is closer to what infectious disease researchers are actually doing in their laboratories. In my work I am deliberately resisting the hegemonic language of "uncertainty" and its contemporary power effects. The concept of "error," by contrast, hints at a different kind of language, a language that I find much more compelling. Rather than to assume that we already know what pandemic influenza is, I foreground a set of biological and epistemological discontinuities that characterize both the past and the present existence of that object. With a virus that is ever-evolving and a knowledge that is ever-shifting it is unlikely that the day will come when scientists will finally know what pandemic influenza is. The crucial question in terms of ethical practice, therefore, might be the following: What form of preparedness would be adequate to a scientific discourse which recognizes the inevitable possibility of error, both biological and epistemological?
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 70/08 (2010). Pub. no. AAT 3369040.
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