Pandemics

Bibliographic Data

ID4525669
AuthorsFrédéric Keck (0000-0002-7711-7288, corresponding author)
EditorsF Stein (0000-0002-0123-9895), Joel Robbins, Andrew Sanchez (0000-0001-8660-7505), M Candea (0000-0001-7260-4194), Rupert Stasch, Sian Lazar (0000-0002-0056-6333), Hildegard Diemberger (0009-0004-7655-6520)
Year2022
Publication date2022-03-07
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueOpen Encyclopedia of Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2398-516X • E-ISSN: 2398-516X
PublisherCambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.29164/22pandemics
OpenAlexW4220770892
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited19

Pandemics tend to be defined as large epidemics, i.e. as sudden and widespread rises in disease incidence that occur over a very wide area, cross international boundaries, and affect a great number of people. However, this conventional definition neglects the fact that some diseases that reach a global scale, such as influenza or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), are usually considered to be pandemics while other diseases that are similarly widespread, such as tuberculosis, are not. It is therefore necessary to investigate how scientific and medical knowledge led experts to frame only some pathogens as actually or potentially pandemic. The history of past pandemics shows the extension of both the human species and its parasitic microbes over the globe, foregrounding that humans and pathogens co-evolved and that immunity is as much a process as it is a state of being. As the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism have accelerated environmental change and caused the emergence of new pathogenic microbes, the medical concept of ‘emerging infectious diseases’ was developed in the 1970s. It relied on the technical possibility to track microbes as they cross borders between species and territories, turning microbes into objects of surveillance under a logic of security and emergency. Preparing for and responding to pandemics has since transferred technologies of anticipation from civil defence to public health, and the collective management of uncertainty associated with pandemic preparedness and response redefined the publics of medical care. Social anthropology improves our understanding of these publics and processes by enlightening the entanglements between species, the co-infections between diseases, and the structural violence of inequalities that drive pandemics, particularly in the Global South. Studying pandemics as fundamentally social phenomena also allows anthropologists to investigate figures such as the prophetic expert or the virus hunter, who question the efficacy of science at a time when infectious diseases become more and more commonplace

Development economics · Disease · Economic growth · Economics · Environmental ethics · Geography · Global health · Globe · Health care · Pandemic · Political economy · Political science · Preparedness · Public health · Sociology · Law · Medicine · Zoonotic diseases and public health