Within days of discovering SARS-CoV-2, laboratory scientists and epidemiologists were speculating on whether the virus might take fecal passage, and thereby spread through contamination with bodily waste. But the fecal-oral route of transmission quickly proved a dead end, an etiological cul-de-sac. The pressure to inquire into shit, however, is always difficult to resist. Before long, experts in wastewater …
Tag Archives: Colonialism
“The Measles from the Time of My Grandfather”: Amazonian Ethnocide Memories in Times of Covid-19

Two weeks ago, Kanari Kuikuro called me from Canarana, a small town in the Brazilian Amazon, where he now lives with his wife and many children. He is originally from the Xingu Indigenous Land, which lies …
Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga’s The Mobile Workshop: The Tsetse Fly and African Knowledge Production

The Mobile Workshop: The Tsetse Fly and African Knowledge Production.
Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga
MIT Press, 2018. 412 pages.
Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga’s latest book, The Mobile Workshop,is a historical examination of attempts to control the mobilities of the tsetse fly in Zimbabwe (formerly Southern Rhodesia, then Rhodesia). It is also an experiment in writing – hence, a ‘workshop’ – …
Rohan Deb Roy’s Malarial Subjects: Empire, Medicine and Nonhumans in British India, 1820–1909

Malarial Subjects: Empire, Medicine and Nonhumans in British India, 1820–1909. (Open Access).
Cambridge University Press, 2017. 332 pages.
Malaria has long garnered no shortage of interest among global health experts and the medical anthropologists periodically at their sides. The sustained concern owes in one part to the fact that malaria remains a major threat, and in …
Vampires, Cannibals, and Sorcerers on the Loose
On February 8, 2019, a symposium organized by Nancy Rose Hunt on the scholarship and career of Luise White was held at the University of Florida. In the nearly twenty years since the publication of White’s Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (University of California, 2000), her thinking at the intersection of anthropology and history continues to …
Omar Dewachi’s Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq
Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq
Stanford University Press, 2017. 239 pp.
Every year, tens of thousands of Iraqi patients leave their country seeking healthcare, and Iraqi physicians move abroad seeking asylum and work. Omar Dewachi writes elsewhere about this crisis and the “therapeutic geographies”* it sets in motion, but in his book Ungovernable …