Seminar #5 in the COVID-19 seminar series, co-hosted by the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation (ADI) and the Deakin Science and Society Network (SSN).
TITLE:
Flying Reservoirs: Virus hunters, birdwatchers and bat carers in Chinese sentinel posts
ABSTRACT:
I will present the Covid-19 crisis through the conceptual grid I have built in my book, Avian Reservoirs, which just came out at Duke UP. Starting fro speculations on the bat origins of the new coronavirus, I will ask questions on sentinels, simulations and stockpiling as techniques of preparedness for pandemics. I will then present the genealogy of pandemic preparedness in Hong Kong to ask the question : why were Hong Kong « virus hunters » more prepared « ontologically » to this pandemic ? How do techniques of anticipation of future epidemics depend on ontological relations between humans and non-human beings ? This will lead me to question Foucault’s definition of sovereign power as « make die and let live » through an ethnographic analysis of culling and releasing animals. The question I will ask then is : how are relations between humans and birds set up in Hong Kong through pandemic preparedness transformed when pandemic preparedness involves relations between humans and bats?
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Frédéric Keck is the head of the Laboratory for Social Anthropology (CNRS-Collège de France-EHESS) funded by Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1960. After studying philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, he has been researching the history of social anthropology and contemporary biopolitical questions raised by avian influenza. He was the head of the research department of the musée du quai Branly between 2014 and 2018.
