Avian Reservoirs is a fascinating and timely ethnography on bird flu prevention in East Asia. The author, Frédéric Keck, has taken a unique approach to the field of global health that is rich with theoretical insights and fresh methods. He also enriches our understanding of how global health concerns have shaped relations between China and its neighbors. The publication of this ethnography in early 2020, just as the novel coronavirus was emerging in China, makes it an important text for thinking about the current crisis in global health.
The avian flu preparations in East Asia that are central to this book were conducted in the shadow of the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) epidemic in 2003. This viral predecessor to the current pandemic began in southern China, where the virus jumped from bats to humans and spread to twenty-nine countries in total, infecting more than 8,000 individuals before being contained. Although it is far less infectious than COVID-19, the relatively high mortality rate of SARS left many East Asian societies fearful of the next zoonosis. Moreover, the ecological and political dynamics of the region suggested that such an outbreak might follow a pattern similar to SARS, perhaps with an avian influenza virus making the next interspecies leap to humans in China before spreading into adjacent territories and around the world. This is the unique historical backdrop to the pandemic preparations that Keck traces in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore.
The book's greatest strength is its theoretical innovations, which may also be a source of consternation for some readers. Keck is committed to a renewal of Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralist approach to anthropology. He seeks to situate the work of epidemic preparation in East Asia within a broad structural framework for analyzing human-nonhuman relations.
In part one, Keck focuses on the theoretical dimensions of this topic, exploring sociological writings on animal diseases, current debates on biosecurity, and techniques of museum classification and conservation. In part two, the ethnographic heart of this book, he turns to the work of avian flu prevention and preparation in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. He divides his investigations into three themes, to which he devotes a chapter each. In a chapter focused on “sentinels,” he explores technologies of early warning systems in Hong Kong used by poultry farmers, bird-watchers, and microbiologists, all looking for signs of an avian flu outbreak. In a chapter addressing “simulations,” Keck compares strategies for anticipating catastrophic events in all three areas, examining computer simulations of future viral mutations, public health rehearsals for announcements of human infections of avian influenza, and actions by bird-watching societies to prevent species extinctions. In the third theme of “storage,” Keck focuses on Taiwan and Hong Kong and theorizes parallels between ornithology collections, vaccine and drug stockpiling, and Buddhist practices of releasing captured birds.
As this summary suggests, the sweep of this book is ambitious. This multisited, multispecies ethnography depends on its structuralist framework for coherence. Drawing on the anthropology of hunter-gather and pastoralist societies, Keck argues that the work of preparing for a bird flu pandemic involves two basic modalities of human-nonhuman relations. In the first modality, which he calls “preparedness,” humans try to identify with the ontological perspectives of their nonhuman objects of pursuit. Drawing on recent ethnographic work on Amazonian and Siberian hunting societies, Keck argues that microbiologists—also known as “virus hunters”—and bird-watchers are attempting to see the world through the perspectives of the viruses and birds they study. In the second modality, which he calls “prevention,” he argues that pastoralism, which he equates with Foucauldian regimes of biopower, dominates human-animal relations. In this modality, often adopted by public health officials and other government agents, the task of managing human health may require sacrificing animals, through culling or other means. Keck argues that both modalities operate together, in tension with one another, in the work of anticipating emergent infectious diseases.
Keck's structuralist framework can both delight and frustrate. At his most nimble moments, he is able to illuminate dimensions of avian flu preparations in East Asia that will surprise his readers. He reveals fascinating analogies between cutting edge microbiology research and the perspectivism of Amazonian hunters. Hong Kong poultry farmers, bird-watchers, microbiologists, and politicians are all reimagined as “sentinels” for various kinds for dangers believed to be emanating from China. But at other moments, the structuralist analysis seems to be divorced from ethnographic realities or too convoluted to follow. For example, only some elements of the theoretical chapters in part one seem to really inform the more ethnographic materials of part two. Even in the more descriptive part two, the reader can easily lose track of the analytic thread. New concepts proliferate in each chapter but it is not always clear how they relate Keck's two main modalities of human-nonhuman relations. Adding to the confusion, Keck sometimes adds intermediary terms and shifts to a triadic form of analysis. Despite these limitations, there is a great deal to learn from this rich, innovative, and timely book.
