Christos Lynteris is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, UK. He is known for his work Human Extinction and the Pandemic Imaginary (Lynteris 2020), Anthropology of Epidemics (Kelly et al. 2019) and Plague and the City (Engelmann et al. 2018). The following interview was conducted via email.
Ishita: Thank you for agreeing to do this interview. Can you share with our readers your journey in the study of epidemics and pandemic?
Christos Lynteris: My engagement with epidemics as an anthropologist dates back to my PhD years at the University of St Andrews, when I studied the impact of three epidemics on state formation in modern China. After defending my PhD in 2010, I joined The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) of the University of Cambridge, where I first led a 2-year research on the social ecology of plague in Inner Asia under a Mellon/Newton postdoctoral fellowship, and then a 5-year European Research Council Starting Grant on the visual representation of the third plague pandemic. Currently, I am leading a 5-year Wellcome Investigator Award project at the University of St Andrews on ‘The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis’. Throughout this research trajectory, my main interest has been zoonotic diseases, that is, diseases that spread from animals to humans, with a particular focus on plague. Zoonotic diseases often lead to epidemics or pandemics, like the current COVID-19 pandemic, but I would like to stress that my interest is not solely on the epidemic phase of these diseases; equally, important are their endemic and maintenance patterns, and the ways in which humans interact and contribute to the wider disease ecology of zoonotic pathogens.
Ishita: In one of the interviews about your book project on Histories of Post-Mortem Contagion (Lynteris and Evans 2017), you comment that you were interested to know how have human histories buried the dead? Apart from ideas of the polluting body, do you think ‘contagion’ shaped ideas of the ‘social’ body?
Christos Lynteris: Ideas about contagion have a very long and complex history in Western medicine, with not only the notion of contagion we usually see people employing today being the product of the bacteriological revolution but also of the adoption of the notion by the social sciences at the end of the nineteenth century so as to describe a range of non-medical processes. I would maintain that we should not conflate ideas of contagion with ones of the ‘polluting body’. The two have different ontological and epistemological bases, and indeed historical origins, although, of course, there have been multiple interactions between them over the centuries. The idea of the polluting body arises within miasmatic rather than contagion-related frameworks, whose roots are to be found in ritual. While this no longer forms part of medical science, it continues to impact understandings and configurations of the ‘social body’. You would need to ask a historian of these terms for a more accurate and nuanced discussion. My own interest has been on the idea of the contagious corpse, which combines these two disease ontologies in a socially powerful symbolic materiality. In modern epidemic response, the preoccupation with what Nicholas Evans and I have coined ‘the epidemic corpse’ is evident well into the twenty-first century, with the recent Ebola epidemic in West Africa having led to a mediatisation of these concerns that rhyme with colonial coverages of epidemics of plague in Madagascar and Manchuria at the start of the twentieth century. What these highly visualised narratives share is a sensationalist gaze over the ‘epidemic corpse’ and an agenda that denigrates indigenous burial practices as pathogenic. Here, then, we have an example of the way in which contagion is used to frame non-Western cultures and bodies in an effort to control them. But this is not to say that this is some cynical ploy for power: as the studies in Histories of Post-Mortem Contagion (Lynteris and Evans 2017) come to show, medical concerns and anxieties over ‘post-mortem contagion’ are sincere, and this is because contagion is one of the foundational categories and experiences of modernity and its encounter with what its proponents see and configure as pre- or non-modern. What is particularly interesting, today, is to see how notions of virality, or ‘going-viral’ may come to transform the experience of contagion. What will the impact of framing human activity in terms of contagion in a positive way have on the mainly negative framing of contagion?
Ishita: How did you embark on the journey on writing about Human Extinction and the Pandemic Imaginary?
Christos Lynteris: The book Human Extinction and the Pandemic Imaginary initially arose within the project Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic as an effort to look into the ‘future’ of the historical period covered by the project, and diagnose persistent tropes of imaging and imagining epidemics. The trigger for this was a blockbuster film of what was then a very popular genre: the zombie apocalypse; World War Z. I was returning to the UK on a long flight, I think from Hong Kong, and watched the film on the airplane’s entertainment system in a curtailed version, which excluded some disturbing scenes, involving zombies attacking that sanctum sanctorum of air cabins: first class. I was immediately captivated by the political theology pervading the movie, as well as by the way in which the protagonist, Brad Pitt, embodied a new sort of ‘culture hero’; someone who does not simply save humankind as a species, but who inaugurates or restores humanity as an ontological condition (think Prometheus). From there, I endeavoured to cross-examine scientific approaches to and popular representations of the so-called next pandemic, understood as a pandemic that will threaten humanity with extinction. What proved vital for this was the analytical framework of the ‘imaginary’ as developed in the philosophical work of Cornelius Castoriadis: as a faculty that encompassed human societies in a dialectic of autonomy and heteronomy, stagnation and change. The main question of the book is thus, what is the work of the pandemic imaginary? Or in which ways does the imaginary of human extinction due to a global pandemic reproduce and/or challenges existing social forms? How does it allow or disallow us to think of humanity and its relation to the non-human as other than is?
Ishita: Do you think the repeated narrative of accidental transference of animal-to-human infection is part of a techno-scientific control over human life?
Christos Lynteris: No, diseases have been spreading from animals to humans (and some the other way around) since animals and humans have existed; they are an indispensable part of life. As part of nature, humans are necessarily exposed to pathogens that circulate between other species. Of course, shifting interactions with non-human animals over the centuries entail different risks of zoonotic emergence, maintenance and transmission, reducing some risks, increasing others and generating new ones in some cases. A most dangerous thing, however, as we can see from recent history, is the fantasy that zoonotic transmission can be blocked or halted through techno-scientific intervention. This is a late nineteenth-century, essentially colonial, fantasy, which is based on a simplistic understanding of disease ecology and has often fostered interventions entailing enormous financial cost, violent interventions in the lives of vulnerable populations and little or no impact on actual animal-to-human infection. The response to this mistaken framework is One Health, whose premise is that to have healthy humans, we need healthy animals and healthy ecosystems. There is, of course, an ongoing debate about the limitations of this approach, and the need to decolonise it should be clear to everyone.
Ishita: What lessons can we learn as anthropologists from the ‘spillovers’?
Christos Lynteris: Anthropologists have been very critical of the notion of the ‘spillover’. This is because this notion focuses too narrowly on a moment or event of animal-to-human transmission, from one animal to one human, and thus tends to obscure or draw attention away from what actually matters: the structural, long- to mid-term conditions and patterns of interspecies interaction, which cannot be reduced to an evental moment of ‘contact’. Anthropologists like Carlo Caduff and Frédéric Keck have demonstrated how the ‘spillover’ has a ‘mythic’ function in people’s imaginations of the epidemic. I would add that it is something that stops people from thinking about epidemic causality in a complex manner, such as proposed by Hannah Brown and Ann H. Kelly, who propose the notion of ‘material proximities’ as a key to understanding zoonotic transmission. Unfortunately, ideas of the ‘spillover’ are propagated by popular science authors, self-proclaimed virus-hunters as well as by pandemic films, creating a toxic environment for the scientific education of the public.
Ishita: In your work, you point out that the pandemic imaginary has a possibility of transformation—‘an alterity to the present’. Is this a possibility of a non-human world? How can one envision the idea of the social in a non-human world?
Christos Lynteris: My work follows Castoriadis in recognising the imaginary as the most fundamental faculty of human societies; this is because, following his philosophy, it is what allows societies to self-create themselves into something radically other than what they are; it is, in other words, the foundation, of social autopoiesis. And at the same time, following the Frankfurt School and Walter Benjamin, in particular, I would agree with the following diagnosis: what limits humanity’s ability for autopoiesis in this historical instance is the identification of humanity with a project for mastery over human/non-human relations. The latter cannot simply be reduced to techno-scientific management, although this plays an important role in the broader project for mastery. Rather, it must be expanded to include more broadly what Philippe Descola has identified as a naturalist ontology in modern societies. The end of the world as imagined within the framework of the ‘next pandemic’ is essentially a world without human mastery. While this is represented and, indeed, mystified as marking the end of humanity as such (thus identifying humanity with mastery), it may well be that detaching itself from this project for mastery (what Julietta Singh calls ‘unthinking mastery’) is the only chance humanity has to gain back its ability to be other than is, in other words, the necessary condition of autopoiesis. The project for mastery has, on the one hand, led to a world that is becoming speedily uninhabitable not only by humans but also by all other existing species. At the same time, it has trapped humans into an ontological cul-de-sac, where with each act of achieving what is imagined as the indispensable condition for being human (mastery), humanity, in fact, negates and retreats from emergence as a process of self-creation. It is a mass, ontological species-suicide unprecedented in history that can only be reversed through a radical reconceptualisation of our relation to the non-human world. And it is here that ‘end of the world’ imaginaries can be immensely helpful, as experimental systems of new relationalities, socialities and convivialities. The fact that the ‘pandemic imaginary’ as an instituted imaginary reproduced by the culture industry is an engine for heteronomy and identity does not mean that other pandemic imaginaries may not bear an instituting capacity that can foster processes of being other than is.
