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 affecting humans. Under the new paradigm, by contrast, humans and nonhuman animals are inextricably entangled, with nothing being able to block or avert animal-human infection. Marking a collapse of utopian visions of a disease-free humanity, this “emergence” model of zoonosis takes as its object the surveillance of interspecies spatialities and of so-called culture vectors of zoonosis (e.g., wet markets or bushmeat consumption). Focusing on shifting epistemologies and their visual trace in photographs, videos, and diagrams of recent outbreaks, the chapter examines the broader implications of this shift for the pandemic imaginary.

Geography · Zoonotic diseases and public health