Expertise,translation,and pandemics

These three recent books from anthropologists introduce us to a cast of characters that sociologists typically do not encounter in our fieldwork, such as duck doctors, birdwatchers, microbiologists, epidemiologists, farmers, public health officials, and local cadres. Moreover, these books take us to settings that sociologists tend to omit in our travels, including wet markets, chicken farms, duck farms, veterinarian offices, virology conferences, diplomatic compounds, and more. Then, of course, there were the animals and non-humans, for instance, the ducks, quails, chickens, geese, and migratory birds, that roamed the backyards of informants, fertilized the rice paddy fields, and populated the large-scale industrial farms that feed the growing demand for meat in East and Southeast Asia.

Despite the diverse set of actors and settings, all three books detail how recent attempts to implement global health biosecurity measures and zoonotic disease surveillance by global actors run up against alternate forms of local expertise on the ground. While one may presume that global scientists, policymakers, and pharmaceutical interests may dictate the terms in which these policies and practices are taken up by virtue of their power and influence, we find through these ethnographic accounts that the reality on the ground – and in the global periphery – is much messier. Without cooperation and alliances with local actors and the aid of localized knowledge practices, global health simply cannot function.

Following Latour (1987), we can come to understand how the types of knowledge on which the global scientific community and global health policymakers depend to prevent future pandemics are subject to a series of translations that displaces and distorts the initial pronouncements of far-flung actors and entangles them with the local material realities. As Latour (1987) writes, translation entails ‘the interpretation given by the fact-builders of their interests and that of the people they enroll’ (p. 109). This process of enrollment often entails new obstacles to be overcome, creating new alliances and resulting in hybrid and alternate networks of expertise that bring to the fore new and unexpected actors with their own knowledge and know-how (Eyal, 2013). Oftentimes, in alternative networks of expertise, ‘no single node could control and appropriate the exchanges . . . at its core was not a mechanism of monopolization, but, on the contrary, a generous exchange that extended the network’ (Eyal, 2013: 886). To implement principles of biosecurity, global health experts have had to co-opt the various logics, interests, and practices of actors on the ground.

The three studies reviewed build off of previous anthropological works on the emergence of biosecurity as a major objective of global health. Writing from the perspective of the Global North, previous studies have traced the conundrum that US experts faced when making ‘pandemic prophecies’ of catastrophe and disaster from limited evidence and fear of generating backlash and mistrust (Carduff, 2015). Yet, the post-September 11 security apparatus has framed all forms of biological threats as matters of national security has ushered in attempts to prepare for the uncertainty and to mitigate the risks of eventual pathogens (Lakoff, 2017). These efforts have also extended beyond the Global North, such as in China, where Mao-era Anti-Epidemic Stations were transformed and modeled after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, and Chinese public health researchers found themselves responding to at times contradictory ethics of services and open science (Mason, 2016). In other words, to achieve the goals of pandemic prevention, global health experts need to first attend to the at-times divergent agendas of local experts.

Our first book, Lyle Fearnley’s Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China’s Pandemic Epicenter (2020), takes us to the imagined center of zoonosis: Mainland China. Fearnley’s account begins with a historical overview to answer why it is that China has become the imagined source of future pandemics. This, Fearnley argues, is because of two reasons. First, historical episodes of pandemic flu that seemed to originate from China and were detected in its peripheries, such as the 1968 Hong Kong Influenza. Second, the lack of scientific knowledge about China’s ecology, due to its isolation from the international scientific community, such that its ‘territory had been largely absent from the purview of even the most global programs of influenza surveillance’ (p. 43). Scientific openness, it seems, may help dispel potential skepticism and doubt about the origins of pandemics.

Fearnley then takes us to Sanlitun in Beijing to examine the efforts of global health diplomacy to bridge these barriers between global science and Chinese science. Fearnley details two strategies used by global scientists. First, strategies of affinity were used to gain access to Chinese scientific networks, which entailed an ‘indirect strategy of access as it passed through the detour of friendships in order to subsequently access biological materials or key information’ (p. 127). Second, strategies of stratification were deployed to distinguish scientific endeavors from the geopolitical concerns of the Chinese state over biological material obtained within its territory. Specifically, scientists engaged in ‘supplanting the geopolitical strata of territory with concepts such as ecosystem or habitat that occupy different scales and spatial forms’ (p. 127). In engaging in these strategies, global scientists were translating their interests in accessing Chinese biological materials, samples, and data so that it aligns with the interests of Chinese scientists: either by appealing to notions of friendship or the ideals of open and global science. These strategies, however, were only partially successful.

These scenes contrast with what scientists encountered at Poyang Lake, the largest freshwater lake in China where migratory birds co-mingle with domesticated poultry. Fearnley was struck by the incongruence of categories imposed on global scientists to make sense of duck farming in the region. Once scientists traveled to the hypothesized origin of zoonosis, they discovered that different and new types of knowledge were needed in order to understand the pathogenic zone, its landscape, and its inhabitants. Moreover, once the scientists were in the field, they discovered ‘other modes of creative practice that already inhabit the field site’ (p. 115). Farmers, market vendors, traders, and village veterinarians had already deployed their own practices and expertise to deal with disease and death among their poultry population. To translate their interests of biosecurity and disease surveillance, global scientists must then situate their own experiments within these existing practices. Unlike the laboratory, where detachment is possible, in the field, scientists find themselves having to sort out the various attachments that their research object is enmeshed within.

This is seen clearly when Fearnley encounters the geese of Poyang Lake, Fearnley asks the farmers whether these geese were ‘wild’ or ‘domestic poultry’, only to discover that these categories were meaningless and that geese fell under the purview of the State Forestry Administration (not the Ministry of Agriculture), and were considered ‘special type husbandry’ (p. 119). Governing the cultivation of geese using the rubric established by faraway experts would therefore be untenable. Scientific practice, Fearnley argues, must contend with these displacements within the field site and translate the various forms of local expertise so that it is legible to far-away policymakers and experts in global health. Relying on trusted intermediaries and local informants, it seems, is another strategy that scientists (and anthropologists) can use to generate forms of useable knowledge for global health that taps into local knowledge and practices.

Our second book, Frédéric Keck’s Avian Reservoirs: Virus Hunters and Birdwatchers in Chinese Sentinel Posts (2020), guides the reader to Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan to see how each locality deals with the problem of pandemic preparation and zoonotic disease surveillance. Comparing surveillance to historical repertoires of human-animal relations in hunter-gathering societies, Keck points to the various logics at work in global health. Through a genealogy of these practices, Keck draws a linkage between the modern-day ‘museums of virology’ (of genetic databases and biobanks) to the ‘accumulation of natural forms’ in ‘the ancient locus of the museum’ (p. 45). By calling attention to this genealogy, Keck shows how contemporary techniques in global health create ‘a form of accumulation that produces knowledge by connecting a center with its peripheries’ and how ‘professions have built knowledge to anticipate the future . . . [by] how they can curate the present – that is, display their objects’ (p. 59). The ability to marshal certain types of knowledge in global health thus depends on the position of the expert vis-à-vis these objects as well as power and various forms of ownership claims.

In Hong Kong, Keck highlights how certain birds have become sentinels that signal threats to human health. Tracing the legacy of the 1997 Avian Flu Outbreak and the 2003 SARS Epidemic, Keck looks at programs such as the Voluntary Surrender Scheme and the model farms to reform local chicken farming practices. In these reforms, emphasis is placed on ‘sentinel chickens’ (typically kept at the end of a row of chickens), whose health is monitored and would be sent to the markets with other chickens if they were healthy, and culled if they succumb to illness (p. 75). The mass culling of diseased chickens in response to these sentinel signals, became a regular fixture in post-1997 Hong Kong. Keck then also traces this sentinel logic at work in birdwatching (where behaviors of sick birds were observed) and in microbiology (where ‘sentinel cells’ were used to detect lethal strains of avian flu). Hong Kong’s system of sentinel surveillance thus brings together humans and non-humans, farms and laboratories, and different techniques of observation (of birds through a binocular, and microscopic inspection of cells).

Somewhat different logics were at work in Singapore, in part due to its different proximity and geopolitical relationship with Mainland China. The focus in Singapore with pandemic preparation was on the use of simulation, which involves ‘moving from virtual imagination to actual performance’ and the ‘combining of fiction and reality in an intriguing way’ (p. 115). The first national exercise for potential pandemic influenza was in 2006, after suspected human-to-human transmission of H5 N1 from Thailand. Public health policymakers and experts were engaged in a tabletop discussion and a practical real-ground exercise at six hospitals. Through this, participants were able to ‘produce new knowledge on the management of mass casualties among the medical staff’ and allowed for the ‘identification of gaps in coordination between actors who manage epidemics’ (p. 116). The types of knowledge that is generated, is thus necessarily local – of the institutional and organizational arrangements of the Singaporean hospitals – but becomes useful ultimately for the goals of global health.

Taiwan, in contrast, looked to strategies of stockpiling to prepare for the next pandemic. A wide range of things is stored such as viruses (to trace past mutations) as well as stockpiled such as drugs (for instance, Tamiflu) and vaccines (for humans and animals). In contrast to the mass vaccination of poultry in Mainland China, Taiwan’s avian vaccines are only distributed when there is an outbreak so as not to mark the poultry as ‘positive’ when conducting monitoring (p. 143). Stockpiling, Keck argues, ‘produces a new form of biovalue in the sense of a relation between living beings and a future state of the world’ (p. 139), as well as questions of equity and distribution, on who gets what, when, and how much. In sum, by linking these forms of pandemic preparation to the material realities of these three localities, Keck thus urges further reflection on the histories, infrastructures, and geopolitics of pandemic expertise.

Our third book, Natalie Porter’s Viral Economics: Bird Flu Experiments in Vietnam (2019), looks at the implementation of One Health Governance – the multidisciplinary management of human, animal, and environmental health – in rural and urban Vietnam. Similar to the previous two books, Porter approaches global health ‘as a collection of situated, intersecting practices and perspectives that local, state, and multinational actors use to address problems affecting worldwide populations’ (p. 13). Porter looks at the many experiments that are conducted – not just by scientists, but also by farmers and traders – to ‘produce knowledge about life forms while simultaneously valuing and transforming them’ (p. 21). How far such knowledge generated by unsanctioned and unofficial experiments travel, however, is of course dictated by the status of the experimenter.

Similar to what Fearnley and Keck finds with backyard poultry farming in Mainland China and Hong Kong, Porter finds that local tastes for certain types of poultry are sometimes at odds with the goals of biosecurity. Despite attempts to promote ‘model ducks’ and chicken produced on Naturally Vietnam’s biosecure industrial farms, consumers in Vietnam still preferred gà ta, the local breed which were raised primarily in backyards and rice fields. Poultry bred in biosecure facilities, Porter argues, would likely only cater to ‘an emerging niche market that catered primarily to expatriate consumers and the mall group of elite Vietnamese living among them’ (p. 54). How marketable various types of poultry are to the Vietnamese public, thus shapes the ability of Vietnamese farmers to take on biosecurity as a feasible practice. This suggests that perhaps, in order to prevent future avian flu outbreaks, scientists, farmers, and other industry entrepreneurs must account for these subjective tastes in their (re)design of local farming practices.

And so, perhaps more than the previous two books, Porter takes on an additional set of concerns: how economic and market relations shape the uptake of biosecurity measures. This is particularly vivid (Porter takes the reader along bumpy countryside motorcycle rides) when Porter relays the challenges that local veterinarians face in order to vaccinate poultry in the many traditional rural farms in their jurisdiction. Local veterinarians have to contend with vaccine supply shortages, negotiate relations with recalcitrant farmers, and cover vast (and muddy) terrains. From the perspective of the farmers, poultry vaccination also fails to become a priority, when we consider the fact that ‘H5 N1 is only one of a range of pathogens’ and when ‘the death of a pig outweighs that of a chicken or duck many times over’ (p. 74). The failure to consider the perspective of the farmer, and his or her priorities, thus contributes to the potential for future pandemics. As Porter writes, the inability of global health policymakers to fully implement their vaccination goals was ‘a symptom of a larger disjuncture in One Health agendas to incorporate human and animal health without fully considering the political ecologies, livestock economies, and social relations – forms of life – in which life forms meet’ (p. 84). In other words, expertise must be localized if it is to successfully implement the goals of global health.

These economic relations are also present in the process of sharing viral genomes. Porter looks at the sets of relations that are created from the biological sample and sequence data that contribute to concerns about ‘viral sovereignty’. Porter focuses on three different ‘tethering effects that anchor virus samples to specific territories and geopolitical bodies’ (p. 153). First is territorial or ‘ownership claims [that] tether biological materials to their territorial origins’ (p. 154). Second is temporal, or how these materials have ‘potential to become valuable as they move through biomedical markets’ (p. 154). Third is distributive or critiques of ‘how paradigms of open science continue to disadvantage those with less authority in global biomedicine’ (p. 155). As such, if policymakers and scientists want to promote the openness that enables the sharing of potentially life-saving viral data (as with the sharing of the genome of SARS-CoV-2 by Chinese scientists), it needs first to attend to these barriers that prevent global science from living up to its name. Again, without the cooperation of local scientists, global scientists working on pandemic prevention in global health cannot achieve their goal.

After these recent works from anthropology, how then should we make sense of the logic of biosecurity and zoonotic disease surveillance that has pervaded global health and pandemic preparation pushed by global experts in recent years? Three observations can be made. First, The picture painted by these three authors is one that is fragile assemblage of actors, technologies, and relationships that hold together the enterprise of global health. But this fragility is only observed when we zoom into the local contexts and realities of life in the global periphery. From the vantage point of the Global North, these fissures and cracks may not be as visible until it is too late. Much like the scientists that Fearnley follows to the imagined epicenter of future pandemics at Poyang Lake, the surety and certainty that the scientists had quickly dissipates when they encounter the landscape and actors that populate their field site and research object. While various techniques are used to stabilize their knowledge claims and expertise, in order to accomplish the task of imposing biosecurity, these experts have had to enlist new allies to tame the human and non-human subjects of global health governance.

Second, these three books also raise questions about the collective and cumulative effect of these alternate forms of local expertise on the enterprise of global health. Instead of replacing or supplanting local practices, how can global health experts incorporate these localized forms of knowledge in their endeavors to prevent future pandemics? Keck’s account of birdwatching also brings to the fore a form of local expertise that – despite its colonial roots – has contributed to the surveillance of migratory bird populations. Birdwatching, while recreational, connects to citizen science and the study of ornithology. This provides a pathway for these local forms of expertise to be codified and accumulated by scientists located farther away from the field site. Birdwatchers, in Keck’s account, can also serve as sentinels in global health governance, who keep watch for sick birds in hard-to-access field sites. One can imagine other forms of local expertise that can come to the aid of global health: from wet market vendors, village officials, local veterinarians and pharmacists, and so on. Of course, in order to secure the help of local expertise, one needs to also imagine new forms of solidarity that can motivate and incentivize constructive action.

Finally, these three books also offer provocations on how we think about cooperation and openness for our preparation for future pandemics. Instead of asking whether local expert are cooperating with global experts, we should examine how the terms of cooperation is dictated and by whom. As Porter points out, in the case of the sharing of viral genomes, it is not simply a matter of knee-jerk techno-nationalist protectionism that makes Global South actors reluctant to share the viral genome. There are legitimate concerns articulated by local actors over how materials supplied by them in the name of openness and transparency will then be exploited and monetized by global actors, such as pharmaceutical companies. To resolve this problem necessarily calls attention to questions of equity and justice. To secure the cooperation of local expertise, global experts must therefore consider how to redistribute the benefits derived from their cooperation in ways that benefit their local partners. In doing so, we can begin to imagine a form of pandemic preparedness that is perhaps more inclusive, just, and open to a wider range of expertise.