Interpretation of a microbe: Historicizing anthrax in Bangladesh
Date
2021-11-30
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Abstract
This discursive essay considers the role of interpretation in the modern public health laboratory through the lens of biopolitics, and analyses with a case study of anthrax in Bangladesh, the consequent social effects incurred by the global health in-security dispositif. The laboratory blazes a trail between the unknown chaotic world of disease with a sensorially perceptible, structured and ordered world. The findings of the laboratory became part of a narrative structure where healers interpret a coherent set of symbols through emplotment that involves the roles of performance and social action in healing enactments. The laboratory is shown to be an inscription device that transform bodily specimens into text that are symbolically represented and imbued with contextual interpretation. Public health laboratories have traditionally been seen as spaces where disinterested scientific inquiry yield objective facts for the protection of the population against infectious diseases. As such, the laboratory has continued to occupy a sacred position, its knowledge generating work – the social effects of science - escaping analysis. The historical development of the public health laboratory is traced from its inception, making visible it’s efficiency as a tool for the political administration and policing of life that has culminated in the post 9/11 phantasm of global health in-security. I show how discourses and the in-security dispositif shape the things of which they speak, reflecting a Northern fear and anxiety projected onto everyday life of the South, resulting in what can be described as an epidemiology of affect.
A case study of anthrax in Bangladesh is used to illustrate the influence of particular power/knowledge relationships effected through the globalized health security agenda and how Northern fears and anxieties contaminate local conceptions and beliefs. Could the emerging infectious disease and health in-security dispositif reveal the affective spectrum of the North’s attraction to the exotic South and simultaneous repulsion by it, reminiscent of the eroticized narrative of New World imperialism? Has the biology of everyday life in the South become interpreted in the North in the symbol of the black woman?
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Dispositif, Interpretation, Anthrax, Global Health Security, Laboratory