C Lynteris
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 70531 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | C Lynteris |
| NOMBRES | C |
| APELLIDO | Lynteris |
| FIRMA | LYNTERIS C |
| AFILIACIONES | University of St Andrews |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8397-0050 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 41 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 169 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 41 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2011 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
A Rat’s Progress
Whether referring to oceanic travel on board of ships or to movement in terra firma, framings of the “migratory rat” formed a key epidemiological component of approaches to the Third Plague Pandemic (1894-1959) as the first pandemic to be understood as caused by a zoonotic disease. In this article, I examine the emergence and development of scientific framings of the migratory rat in the first, explosive years of the third plague pandemic in Indi…
Introduction
Bringing together seven papers spanning Southern and Eastern Africa, North America, England, and India, this special issue explores the historically neglected connections between invasive species and health in the long twentieth century. Drawing upon perspectives from medical history, the history of science, environmental history, and environmental as well as medical anthropology, the papers analyze the entanglements of invasive species and zoono…
Contesting pandemic imaginaries and epidemic‐response spectacle
The Figure of the Staggering Rat
The image of dazed, plague-infected rats coming out of their nests and performing a pirouette in front of the surprised eyes of humans before dying is one well-known to us through Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947). This article examines the historical roots of this image and its emergence in French missionary narratives about plague outbreaks in the Chinese province of Yunnan in the 1870s on the eve of the Third Plague Pandemic. Showing that accou…
Afterword
O ne culture's villain is another culture's hero.Paraphrasing the tired political apho- rism was the first thing that came to mind when I was invited to write the afterword to this collection, in light of what anthropologists are generally expected to do when tackling a question such as this: first to culturalize it, then to relativize it.This is not, however, what the articles in this special section, "Heroes and Villains in the Anthropocene," s…
Afterword
Disease reservoirs, as the contributions to this multidisciplinary special issue show, form heterogeneous epistemic objects related to disease maintenance, which have attracted an array of epidemio
Aro Velmet. Pasteur’s Empire
A book that will no doubt receive a wide readership, especially among non-Francophone audiences that lack access to other secondary sources on the subject, Aro Velmet’s Pasteur’s Empire is an ambitious exploration of the imperial history of the Institut Pasteur and “Pastorianism.” The book sets out to demonstrate that Pasteurian bacteriology became the ruling principle in French (Third Republic) colonial settings. Coining this process “pastorizat…
Mahamari Plague
Colonial approaches to animal and zoonotic diseases are often scrutinized in terms of their recognition or dismissal of indigenous knowledge. In this article I examine British colonial approaches to "Mahamari plague" in mid-nineteenth century Kumaon and Garhwal, in the Indian Himalayas. Discussing two key colonial medical expeditions in the region, I argue that the eventual recognition of the validity of Kumaoni and Garhwali knowledge of Mahamari…
On ‘Pandemic Imaginary’
Sulphuric Utopias
How early twentieth century fumigation technologies transformed maritime quarantine practices and inspired utopian visions of disease-free global trade. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fumigation technologies transformed global practices of maritime quarantine through chemical and engineering innovation. One of these technologies, the widely used Clayton machine, blasted sulphuric acid gas through a docked ship in an effort …
The Imperative Origins of Covid-19
In an interview for the British newspaper The Observer on 6 June 2020, Bruno Latour reflected on whether « an idea can go viral like a disease » in the following manner : « Covid has given us a model of contamination. It has shown how quickly something can become global just by going from one mouth to another. That’s an incredible demonstration of network theory. I’ve been trying to persuade sociologists of this for 40 years. I’m sorry to have be…
The epidemiologist as culture hero
Concerns over the next pandemic as a projected microbiological catastrophe that poses an existential risk to humanity has come to generate a new mass-media figure at the antipodes of the superspreader: the epidemiologist as culture hero. This character is developed in films, video games, and comic books but also in US CDC preparedness campaigns, where the epidemiologist faces and battles not so much killer viruses but an infected and contagious d…
Conclusion
The Conclusion of the book launches a critique of the reduction of the pandemic imaginary to yet another form of “capitalist realism”. Discussing the works of Michaël Fœssel and Jean-Luc Nancy on the relation between catastrophism and loss under the light of the pandemic imaginary, the conclusion develops an approach that considers the instituted or conserving aspect of the imaginary in tension with, but not in opposition to, its instituting or g…
The end of the world as we do not know it
Examining the place of the next pandemic in visions of the “end of the world”, Chapter 1 explores how human extinction under the bane of the next pandemic raises questions about apocalyptic reasoning and about the very dichotomy of the apocalyptic/non-apocalyptic. The chapter takes up Danowski and Viveiros de Castro’s invitation for an anthropological engagement with the much-neglected work of the German philosopher Günther Anders, so as to refle…
The post-pandemic condition
Chapter 5 examines the anthropologically rich but hitherto unexplored terrain of the post-pandemic condition so as to ask whether it affords a radical new concept of that it is to be human. The chapter compares scientific studies, works of literature, and films that portray post-pandemic humanity with similar works related to the postnuclear condition. The chapter focuses on how the former imagine the world after the pandemic “end of the world” a…
Anthropogenesis reversed
Exceptional individuals, who are supposedly able to spread disease to an extraordinarily great number of people, hold a privileged placed in epidemiological reasoning. Chapter 3 examines the emergence of the figure of the “superspreader” during the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak of 2003 and its application since in epidemiological thinking and epidemic scares across the globe. By examining the science behind it, the chapter pro…
Zoonotic transformations
Chapter 2 focuses on the origin of the imagined end of humanity: animals. It explores how the loss of mastery over human/nonhuman relations is predicated upon a shift in epidemiological reasoning about zoonosis (animal to human infection) and interspecies relations as a whole. This shift entails an abandonment of a theory of infectious diseases as essentially belonging and reproduced in the animal realm and only accidentally or temporarily affect…
Introduction
Afterword
Philip Steadman’s epilogue suggests that the copying of drawings (and its study) by anthropologists, psychologists, architectural students, and Surrealists is revealing not only of processes of diagrammatization but also of the fact that there is something ‘diagrammatic’ about the way in which designs are represented mentally, which affects how they are seen and altered when they are reproduced. The work of diagrams, not only as visual objects bu…
Pestis Minor
Pestis minor is a pathological category that at the height of the third plague pandemic (1894-1959) fueled extensive debate and research among medical scientists. Referring to an attenuated or benign form of plague, evidence of pestis minor or pestis ambulans was produced in medical reports across the world so as to raise the question of whether the disease could survive measures against it by means of temporary transformation. Afflicting its vic…
Photography and the Unseen
Drawing on works such as Shawn Michelle Smith’s At the Edge of Sight (2013), we explore the idea that photography, in supporting new kinds of seeing, even more importantly provokes expanded cultural concern with that which is unseen. We explore different social, ideological, and epistemological presences beyond sight dealt with in Smith’s work on U.S. photographers, and in the ethnographic studies gathered in this themed section. The four article…
Vagabond Microbes, Leaky Laboratories and Epidemic Mapping
This article examines the epidemic mapping produced by the Pasteurian doctor Alexandre Yersin in the course of the outbreak of bubonic plague in the town of Nha Trang (French Indochina, 1898). Examining how Yersin responded to and reasoned about the outbreak as this unfolded around his laboratory, the article argues for a situated, processual approach of epidemic mapping. Considering four maps produced by Yersin during the outbreak, it is argued …
Human Extinction and the Pandemic Imaginary
This book develops an examination and critique of human extinction as a result of the 'next pandemic' and turns attention towards the role of pandemic catastrophe in the renegotiation of what it means to be human. Nested in debates in anthropology, philosophy, social theory and global health, the book argues that fear of and fascination with the 'next pandemic' stem not so much from an anticipation of a biological extinction of the human species,…
Zoonosis
The Anthropology of Epidemic Control
Peer reviewed
Plague Masks
Often described as "masks" face-worn devices are employed as personal protection equipment by health workers and the general public and considered to be an indispensable technology against epidemics. Simultaneously, they are potent symbols of existential risk. Could these material and visual aspects be more than simply indexically connected? In this article, I examine these apparatuses through a historical anthropological approach of their invent…
Human Extinction and the Pandemic Imaginary
This book develops an examination and critique of human extinction as a result of the 'next pandemic' and turns attention towards the role of pandemic catastrophe in the renegotiation of what it means to be human. Nested in debates in anthropology, philosophy, social theory and global health, the book argues that fear of and fascination with the 'next pandemic' stem not so much from an anticipation of a biological extinction of the human species,…
Zoonotic diagrams
This article approaches interspecies relations through an examination of the prevalent visual device employed in the representation of animal-human infection in the life sciences: the zoonotic cycles diagram. After charting its emergence and development in the context of bubonic plague, I explore how this diagrammatic regime has been applied in two distinct practical contexts: a plague warning sign on the Grand Canyon National Park hiking trail; …
The Prophetic Faculty of Epidemic Photography
Dominant trends in epidemiological research and medical journalism today share a belief in the "next pandemic," a microbiological catastrophe of Old Testament proportions that threatens to annihilate humanity. Expected to arise out of a zoonotic spillover, in most cases a newly emergent or mutant form of animal-to-human influenza, the ground zero of the "next pandemic" is located in so-called wet markets, live animal markets in East Asia and Chin…
Zoonosis
Sulphuric Utopias
How early twentieth century fumigation technologies transformed maritime quarantine practices and inspired utopian visions of disease-free global trade. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fumigation technologies transformed global practices of maritime quarantine through chemical and engineering innovation. One of these technologies, the widely used Clayton machine, blasted sulphuric acid gas through a docked ship in an effort …
Skilled Natives, Inept Coolies
Taking as its setting the great Manchurian pneumonic plague epidemic of 1910–1911, this article examines the construction of epidemiological blame that targeted migrant labourers from the peninsula of Shandong employed in the hunting of the Siberian marmot (Marmota sibirica), a natural reservoir of the disease. The article demonstrates how Chinese epidemiologists sought to pathologize marmot-hunting migrants from Shandong as unskilled pestilent "…
The Epidemiologist as Culture Hero
Concern over the “coming plague,” a projected microbiological catastrophe threatening the survival of humanity, has come to generate a new cinematic figure: the epidemiologist as culture hero. The visual narrative of the “coming plague” unfolds in recent films, where the biopolitical content of this symbolic form becomes clear. This article examines how, by merging fears regarding the next pandemic with apocalyptic fantasy, the films in question …
Introduction
The introduction to this special section of the journal argues that while it is widely accepted today that infectious disease epidemics are the result of long-term and complex social, ecological, economic and political processes, outbreaks are, more often than not, experienced on the ground as unexpected eruptions. This introduction defends the position that the dialectics between the evental and processual aspects of epidemics are good to think …
The Imperative Origins of Covid-19
In an interview for the British newspaper The Observer on 6 June 2020, Bruno Latour reflected on whether « an idea can go viral like a disease » in the following manner : « Covid has given us a model of contamination. It has shown how quickly something can become global just by going from one mouth to another. That’s an incredible demonstration of network theory. I’ve been trying to persuade sociologists of this for 40 years. I’m sorry to have be…
Anthropology and Medical Photography
The study of medical photography, inclusive of epidemiological and humanitarian applications of the genre, is a promising new field for visual anthropology. Focusing on the interlinked questions of visual witnessing and evidential ethics of medical photography, as well as on the entangled temporalities and dialectics of visibility and invisibility underlying this visual practice, the introduction to this special issue on medicine, anthropology an…
The Anthropology of Epidemic Control
Peer reviewed
Epidemics as Events and as Crises
This article draws on Alain Badiou's notion of the event and on Michel Foucault's critique of the notion of crisis in comparing two pneumonic plague outbreaks in Manchuria. It is argued that the two epidemics, although apparently involving the same pathogen and geographical region, cannot be treated as analogous. The article approaches the Manchurian pneumonic plague epidemic of 1910–11 as an event, and the Manchurian pneumonic plague epidemic of…
The Figure of the Staggering Rat
The image of dazed, plague-infected rats coming out of their nests and performing a pirouette in front of the surprised eyes of humans before dying is one well-known to us through Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947). This article examines the historical roots of this image and its emergence in French missionary narratives about plague outbreaks in the Chinese province of Yunnan in the 1870s on the eve of the Third Plague Pandemic. Showing that accou…
Mahamari Plague
Colonial approaches to animal and zoonotic diseases are often scrutinized in terms of their recognition or dismissal of indigenous knowledge. In this article I examine British colonial approaches to "Mahamari plague" in mid-nineteenth century Kumaon and Garhwal, in the Indian Himalayas. Discussing two key colonial medical expeditions in the region, I argue that the eventual recognition of the validity of Kumaoni and Garhwali knowledge of Mahamari…
Photography and the Unseen
Drawing on works such as Shawn Michelle Smith’s At the Edge of Sight (2013), we explore the idea that photography, in supporting new kinds of seeing, even more importantly provokes expanded cultural concern with that which is unseen. We explore different social, ideological, and epistemological presences beyond sight dealt with in Smith’s work on U.S. photographers, and in the ethnographic studies gathered in this themed section. The four article…
The State as a Social Relation
Based on the theoretical legacy of Gustav Landauer, this polemic proposes an anthropological critique of the state, which approaches the latter not as Leviathan composed of the bodies of its subjects, nor as mere fiction, but as a social relation and at the same time as a mystification of this relation, which allows it to endure as a pervading apparatus of capture of social relatedness
Biopolitics, militarism and development
Marta E. Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine
Journal Article Marta E. Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China Get access Marta E. Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China, London; New York: Routledge, 2011. Pp. xi-265. £ 85. ISBN 978 0 415 60253 2. Christos Lynteris Christos Lynteris University of Cambridge [email protected] Search for other works by…
David Riches (1947–2011) (Respond to this article at http
The Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China
Assuming power in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party was soon faced with a crucial problem: how to construct the socialist 'New Man'? Using Foucault's theory of 'technologies of the self', Lynteris exa
Ten Comments on ‘Eight Theses on Phantasmagoria
These ten comments on Marc Berdet’s ‘Eight Theses on Phantasmagoria’ approach the problem from an anthropological perspective underlining the materialist and psychodynamic interrelation between mystification, reification and myth
The State as a Social Relation
Based on the theoretical legacy of Gustav Landauer, this polemic proposes an anthropological critique of the state, which approaches the latter not as Leviathan composed of the bodies of its subjects, nor as mere fiction, but as a social relation and at the same time as a mystification of this relation, which allows it to endure as a pervading apparatus of capture of social relatedness
Skilled Natives, Inept Coolies
Taking as its setting the great Manchurian pneumonic plague epidemic of 1910–1911, this article examines the construction of epidemiological blame that targeted migrant labourers from the peninsula of Shandong employed in the hunting of the Siberian marmot (Marmota sibirica), a natural reservoir of the disease. The article demonstrates how Chinese epidemiologists sought to pathologize marmot-hunting migrants from Shandong as unskilled pestilent "…
Introduction
The introduction to this special section of the journal argues that while it is widely accepted today that infectious disease epidemics are the result of long-term and complex social, ecological, economic and political processes, outbreaks are, more often than not, experienced on the ground as unexpected eruptions. This introduction defends the position that the dialectics between the evental and processual aspects of epidemics are good to think …
Epidemics as Events and as Crises
This article draws on Alain Badiou's notion of the event and on Michel Foucault's critique of the notion of crisis in comparing two pneumonic plague outbreaks in Manchuria. It is argued that the two epidemics, although apparently involving the same pathogen and geographical region, cannot be treated as analogous. The article approaches the Manchurian pneumonic plague epidemic of 1910–11 as an event, and the Manchurian pneumonic plague epidemic of…
Agitating Images
The Prophetic Faculty of Epidemic Photography
Dominant trends in epidemiological research and medical journalism today share a belief in the "next pandemic," a microbiological catastrophe of Old Testament proportions that threatens to annihilate humanity. Expected to arise out of a zoonotic spillover, in most cases a newly emergent or mutant form of animal-to-human influenza, the ground zero of the "next pandemic" is located in so-called wet markets, live animal markets in East Asia and Chin…
Anthropology and Medical Photography
The study of medical photography, inclusive of epidemiological and humanitarian applications of the genre, is a promising new field for visual anthropology. Focusing on the interlinked questions of visual witnessing and evidential ethics of medical photography, as well as on the entangled temporalities and dialectics of visibility and invisibility underlying this visual practice, the introduction to this special issue on medicine, anthropology an…
The Epidemiologist as Culture Hero
Concern over the “coming plague,” a projected microbiological catastrophe threatening the survival of humanity, has come to generate a new cinematic figure: the epidemiologist as culture hero. The visual narrative of the “coming plague” unfolds in recent films, where the biopolitical content of this symbolic form becomes clear. This article examines how, by merging fears regarding the next pandemic with apocalyptic fantasy, the films in question …
Infectious Change. Reinventing Chinese Public Health after an Epidemic. Katherine A. Mason, Stanford CA
Zoonotic diagrams
This article approaches interspecies relations through an examination of the prevalent visual device employed in the representation of animal-human infection in the life sciences: the zoonotic cycles diagram. After charting its emergence and development in the context of bubonic plague, I explore how this diagrammatic regime has been applied in two distinct practical contexts: a plague warning sign on the Grand Canyon National Park hiking trail; …
Zoonosis
The Anthropology of Epidemic Control
Peer reviewed
Plague Masks
Often described as "masks" face-worn devices are employed as personal protection equipment by health workers and the general public and considered to be an indispensable technology against epidemics. Simultaneously, they are potent symbols of existential risk. Could these material and visual aspects be more than simply indexically connected? In this article, I examine these apparatuses through a historical anthropological approach of their invent…
The epidemiologist as culture hero
Concerns over the next pandemic as a projected microbiological catastrophe that poses an existential risk to humanity has come to generate a new mass-media figure at the antipodes of the superspreader: the epidemiologist as culture hero. This character is developed in films, video games, and comic books but also in US CDC preparedness campaigns, where the epidemiologist faces and battles not so much killer viruses but an infected and contagious d…
Conclusion
The Conclusion of the book launches a critique of the reduction of the pandemic imaginary to yet another form of “capitalist realism”. Discussing the works of Michaël Fœssel and Jean-Luc Nancy on the relation between catastrophism and loss under the light of the pandemic imaginary, the conclusion develops an approach that considers the instituted or conserving aspect of the imaginary in tension with, but not in opposition to, its instituting or g…
The end of the world as we do not know it
Examining the place of the next pandemic in visions of the “end of the world”, Chapter 1 explores how human extinction under the bane of the next pandemic raises questions about apocalyptic reasoning and about the very dichotomy of the apocalyptic/non-apocalyptic. The chapter takes up Danowski and Viveiros de Castro’s invitation for an anthropological engagement with the much-neglected work of the German philosopher Günther Anders, so as to refle…
The post-pandemic condition
Chapter 5 examines the anthropologically rich but hitherto unexplored terrain of the post-pandemic condition so as to ask whether it affords a radical new concept of that it is to be human. The chapter compares scientific studies, works of literature, and films that portray post-pandemic humanity with similar works related to the postnuclear condition. The chapter focuses on how the former imagine the world after the pandemic “end of the world” a…
Anthropogenesis reversed
Exceptional individuals, who are supposedly able to spread disease to an extraordinarily great number of people, hold a privileged placed in epidemiological reasoning. Chapter 3 examines the emergence of the figure of the “superspreader” during the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak of 2003 and its application since in epidemiological thinking and epidemic scares across the globe. By examining the science behind it, the chapter pro…
Zoonotic transformations
Chapter 2 focuses on the origin of the imagined end of humanity: animals. It explores how the loss of mastery over human/nonhuman relations is predicated upon a shift in epidemiological reasoning about zoonosis (animal to human infection) and interspecies relations as a whole. This shift entails an abandonment of a theory of infectious diseases as essentially belonging and reproduced in the animal realm and only accidentally or temporarily affect…
Introduction
History (19 obras) · Sociology (17 obras) · Geography (14 obras) · History (14 obras) · Medicine (14 obras) · Political science (13 obras) · Biology (11 obras) · Ancient history (10 obras) · Law (10 obras) · Archaeology (9 obras)