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 dehumanized humanity. Chapter 4 examines how, by merging fears regarding the next pandemic with the symbolic repertoire of disaster fantasy, the trope in question institutes the epidemiologist as responsible for the re-pastoralization and re-pasteurization of humanity – a goal achieved by setting self-limitation of individual freedoms as the condition for the ontological perseverance of the human species. Bringing in dialogue anthropological works on immunology with Grégory Chamayou’s dialectics of cynegetic (specifically, man-hunting) and pastoral technologies of power, the chapter asks: What in humanity itself and in its relation to the world is rendered sacrificeable in the name of the continuation of human mastery over human/nonhuman relations? And what are the anthropological consequences of the interrelation between biological and ontological self-preservation being represented as an existential conflict?

Art · HERO · Literature · Historical and modern epidemiology studies · Obesity and Health Practices · Public Health Policies and Education