Lyle Fearnley-Dissertation-11-26-2013 1
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Life at the Influenza Epicentre: Transactions of Global Health and Animal Disease in Contemporary China By Lyle Arthur Fearnley A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Joint Doctor of Philosophy with University of California, San Francisco in Medical Anthropology in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Paul Rabinow, Chair Professor Xin Liu Professor Dorothy Porter Professor Massimo Mazzotti Fall 2013 Abstract Life at the Influenza Epicenter: Transactions of Global Health and Animal Disease in Contemporary China By Lyle Arthur Fearnley Joint Doctor of Philosophy in Medical Anthropology with University of California, San Francisco University of California, Berkeley Professor Paul Rabinow, Chair This thesis is an anthropological study of the making of global health on China's grounds, based on inquiry into the health programs assembled around China's poultry sector amidst outbreaks of avian influenza. Influenza pandemics are global in scale, but since the 1960s flu experts have hypothetically located the origin, or "epicenter," of flu pandemics in southern China. Drawing on extensive fieldwork among flu experts, Chinese veterinarians, and farmers, the thesis describes how the farmed ecology of Poyang Lake in southern China is being studied as a possible epicenter of influenza emergence. As global dangers are attributed to specific Chinese environments and agricultural practices, I follow flu experts as they move from the laboratory to the field and as they shift their scientific object from the sequence to the ecosystem. This movement outside the laboratory is also a movement onto China's grounds, a motion that I argue raises three anthropological problems. First, emerging transnational scientific collaborations around avian influenza go well beyond the idea that China is a political obstacle to global health. These scientific transactions taking place on China's grounds reframe the historical problematization of China and modern science, as a rising China plays a fundamental role in shaping the contemporary global science of influenza. Second, unlike other well-studied Asian biotech sites, bird flu research is grounded in transactions with farmers, livestock animals, and rural ways of life. The thesis analyzes how influenza experts adjust their scientific concepts and categories to account for historically and culturally specific practices of breeding and raising livestock, and shows how these livestock breeding practices continue to exceed and complicate scientific categories. Lastly, the thesis concludes by showing how China's livestock veterinarians become controversial mediating figures between the lab and the farm, transforming the social break between the scientist and the livestock breeder into an ethical problem of vocation and "quality" (suzhi). As a result, the thesis argues that the movement from the lab to the field calls for an 1 anthropology of science that attends to vocation and social relation as ethical problems, going beyond the sociology of scientific fact construction. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 PART ONE: On China's Grounds Chapter One: Into the Epicentre 9 Chapter Two: Techniques of Consanguinity and Affinity 39 Chapter Three: The Lake as Pilot 61 Chapter Four: A Wild Goose Chase 80 PART TWO: Vocation and Relation Chapter Five: The Office Veterinarian 103 Chapter Six: The Duck Doctor 128 i List of Figures FIGURE 1: Wallace's Map 44 FIGURE 2: Empty your cup 49 FIGURE 3: Hao Weidong's sociology 142 ii Acknowledgements This thesis is a reciprocal prestation to the many who have put me in their debt during the time of my education, fieldwork, and writing. I am particularly obliged to the many interlocutors and hosts who graciously spoke with me or tolerated my presence during my fieldwork, as well as those who did not. I am grateful to friends and family for inspiration and help in so many ways. I thank Stephen Collier for setting me on the pathway to the anthropology of the contemporary over a decade ago. I am grateful to the members of my dissertation committee, Massimo Mazzotti and Dorothy Porter, for critical engagement and support of my writing. Liu Xin helped me find my branch in the anthropological lineage, for which I am enormously thankful. I offer deepest gratitude to my dissertation chair, Paul Rabinow, for conceptual and ethical equipment. iii Introduction In a 1982 paper, Kennedy Shortridge, the director of the microbiology lab at the University of Hong Kong, and C.H. Stuart-Harris, an English virologist, identified southern China as a possible "epicentre" of influenza pandemics. Due to the "interchanges of virus" between animals and humans in the heavily populated region, they argued that southern China was a hypothetical "point of origin" for new influenza viruses that could spread throughout the world's human population. "The closeness between man and animals could provide an ecosystem for the interaction of their viruses," they wrote. This "closeness" between human and animal was a consequence of long-term agricultural transformation of the natural environment, and in particular the wet-rice paddy system, which produced " a close bird/water/rice/man association." A dangerous pathology lurked in southern China's unique configuration of nature and culture, they suggested, or more specifically, in the "age-old" Chinese techniques of cultivating nature.1 Although locating pathology in cultures and environments, Shortridge investigated the influenza epicentre at a molecular scale. Much like Bruno Latour's rendition of Pasteur2, Shortridge made the agricultures and ecologies of southern China pass through his laboratory, identifying and distinguishing pathological forms based on the quality and quantity of viruses brought back inside the walls of the Pathology Compound, Queen Mary's Hospital, University of Hong Kong. As Frédéric Keck has argued, Shortridge constructed his laboratory--and ultimately, Hong Kong itself--as a "sentinel" for pandemic influenza viruses, a device able to isolate new viruses as they emerged in southern China but before they spread to the world.3 When, in 1997, members of his laboratory attributed the cause of a three year old boy’s death to a highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (typed as "H5N1") that had recently been isolated during outbreaks among Hong Kong's poultry farms, scientists widely saw a confirmation of Shortridge's hypothesis and raised alarm about an imminent pandemic.4 As the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 virus continued to spread outward from southern China into southeast Asia and beyond, however, Shortridge's formulation of the object and the problem began to show its limitations. New agencies and actors, with different forms of expertise and objectives, began to join the now increasingly publicized and well-funded battle against the next flu pandemic. In particular, a "framework" known as "One world, one health" became a powerful, if often vague, motto for organizing new forms of interdisciplinary research on influenza, joining virologists, veterinarians, wildlife specialists, and 1 Kennedy Shortridge and C.H. Stuart-Harris, "An influenza epicentre?" The Lancet (October 9, 1982): 812-813. 2 Bruno Latour, "Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world!" in Mario Biaogioli, ed., The science studies reader (New York: Routledge, 1999); Latour, The pasteurization of France (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1988). 3 Frédéric Keck, "Une sentinelle sanitaire aux frontières du vivant. Les experts de la grippe aviaire à Hong Kong" Terrain No. 54 (2010): 27-41. Cf. Keck, Un monde grippé (Paris: Flamsarrion, 2010). 4 JC de Jong, EC Claas, AS Osterhaus, RG Webster, WL Lim. "A pandemic warning?" Nature Vol. 389, No. 6651 (Oct 9 1997): 554–554. 1 social scientists, among others. 5 Most importantly, China's governmental and scientific institutions began to participate actively and collaboratively in the making of influenza science, inviting international organizations and influenza researchers to work in China, as well as developing their own large-scale research and control programs. This dissertation is about how the science of influenza changed when scientists moved into the influenza epicenter and onto China's grounds. Without necessarily abandoning the tools and insights of virology or molecular biology, these scientists made the cultivated nature of the influenza epicentre, rather than the viruses it produced, into a scientific object in its own right. This was something Shortridge had never done: remarkably, his claims about China's agriculture and ecology are attributed either to anecdotes or in one case to Joseph Needham's classic historical epic, Science and Civilization in China. Now, new research was initiated into the flight patterns of wild birds, poultry market-chains, or the geography of wet-rice paddy cultivation in southern China. Scientists began to localize the influenza epicentre within southern China, honing in on the Poyang Lake in Jiangxi Province and developing an "integrated pilot study" at the lake. Put simply and practically, and in a form that will have to be subsequently defended, I argue that when scientists moved inside the influenza epicentre, they also left the laboratory. This dissertation analyzes the stakes of this simultaneous entry and exit for science, for China, and for the ethics of truth and life. Life outside the laboratory Life, it is often said, was redefined at a molecular scale