Zoonosis as a Historical and Anthropological Question

A notion scientifically formulated for the first time in the 1840s, zoonoses, or diseases that are transmissible from animals to humans, pose today a key global challenge. Never before since the high noon of the Third Plague Pandemic, in the early twentieth century, has the transmission of diseases from animals to humans caused so much public controversy, scientific study, economic investment or governmental action. From devastating regional outbreaks like Ebola to pandemics like COVID-19 to the ever-looming threat of an avian flu pandemic, zoonoses bring together epidemiological reasoning, pandemic imaginaries and epidemic governance in ever more intricate and impactful ways.

This renewed interest in zoonosis comes at a time when both historians and anthropologists have been forging new, nuanced approaches to non-human animals. The “animal turn”, debates on animal agency, the role of animals in colonialism, and how to write histories and ethnographies from the perspective of “more-than-humans”, and questions arising out of the surge of multispecies ethnographies have provided both rich and challenging grounds for rethinking history and anthropology.

The final conference of the Wellcome-funded project The Global War Against the Rat will examine how zoonosis gives rise to new historical and anthropological questions and to new perspectives on existing ones. The conference aims to go beyond the particular histories and ethnographies of zoonotic diseases so as to ask how, as both a phenomenon and a biomedical framework, zoonosis may help us to unsettle broader questions or approaches within and between history and anthropology. Such questions will relate to interspecies relations, technologies and techniques, colonial and postcolonial governance, spatialities and temporalities, ontologies and epistemologies, inter-imperial relations, infrastructural materialities and politics, as well as anthropological and historical methods.

Convenors:

Christos Lynteris, Jules Skotnes-Brown, Oliver French and Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva

Monday 16 June 2025
10:30-11:15	Introduction and Welcome
11:15-12:30	Panel 1: Reconsidering Zoonosis Chair: Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva (University of St Andrews) Discussant: Nils Christian Stenseth (University of Oslo) Absorbing Zoonoses, Slowly | Stephen Hinchliffe (University of Exeter) From Animal Affliction to Zoonosis: Imagining and Mastering Multispecies Relations | Christos Lynteris (University of St Andrews)
12:30-14:00	Lunch
14:00-15:30	Panel 2: Multispecies and Ecological Entanglements Chair: Jules Skotnes-Brown (University of St Andrews) Discussant: Rebecca Marsland (University of Edinburgh) Everyday Human-Animal Relations and Zoonotic Tuberculosis in Papua New Guinea | Benjamin Hegarty (UNSW Sydney) Ecological Fables, Ecologies of Blame: Zoonosis on the Liberia-Guinea Border | Emmanuelle Roth (Rachel Carson Centre) and Gregg Mitman (UW-Madison/ Rachel Carson Centre) When Plague Became Wild: Rethinking the History of Zoonosis and Disease Ecology from South America (1930-1975) | Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva (University of St Andrews)
15:30-15:45	Coffee Break
15:45-17:45	Panel 3: Controlling Zoonoses Chair: Bruno Silva Santos (University of St Andrews) Discussant: Lukas Engelmann (University of Edinburgh) ‘Nobody Here… Will Look at a Mosquito’: Entomo-Political Surveillance in Late Colonial India | Rohan Deb Roy (University of Reading) Understanding Rodent Traps as Time Machines | Jia Hui Lee (University of Bayreuth) Other’s Other: Shaving Brush, Anthrax and Animal Vaccination in Republican Turkey | Zeynep Akçakaya (Independent Researcher)
19:00	Dinner

Tuesday 17 June 2025
09:15-10:45	Panel 4: Zoonosis and Global Health Chair: Christos Lynteris (University of St Andrews) Discussant: Bridget Bradley (University of St Andrews) Blind Spots in Global Health: Lassa Fever, Zoonotic Disease and the Politics of Neglect in Global Health | Hannah Brown (University of Durham) Zoonosis and Epidemic Preparedness | Hayley McGregor (University of Sussex) Imagined, Wild and Free-Living: Securing Porcine and Canine Life at the Limits of Species and Health | Guillem Rubio Ramon (University of Edinburgh)
10:45-11:00	Coffee Break
11:00-13:00	Panel 5: Zoonotic Empires Chair: Oliver French (University of St Andrews) Discussant: Samuel K. Cohn Jr (University of Glasgow) Of Bedbugs and Beri-Beri | Jonathan Saha (University of Durham) Governing Unruly Populations: Politics of Zoonotic Disease, Public Health, and Interspecies Relations in Ottoman Istanbul | Nükhet Varlık (Rutgers University) A Labour History of Zoonosis? Plague in Johannesburg, Mauritius, and Sydney, 1899-1907 | Jules Skotnes-Brown (University of St Andrews) Mapping Rats: Epidemiological Ways of Knowing Zoonosis | Jacob Steere-Williams (College of Charleston)
13:00-13:30	Discussion and Conclusion
13:30	Lunch

Zeynep Akçakaya (Independent Researcher) Other’s Other: Shaving Brush, Anthrax and Animal Vaccination in Republican Turkey

In 1923, a French soldier in Istanbul infected with anthrax from a shaving brush of Japanese origin. This incident became a rhetorical tool in the early Turkish Republic to intensify animal vaccination campaigns inherited from late Ottoman policies, not merely as a public health measure, but to assert a modernist, scientific, hygienic state identity. This Japanese-origin case conveniently allowed the young Turkish Republic to distance itself from the notion of a “filthy Orient”, yet required the Republican state to control anthrax within national borders. Promoting this vaccination campaign, scientists, journalists, and state officials portrayed unvaccinated animals as inherently diseased, framing them as ‘natural reservoirs’ of the disease, and urged minimal contact between people and animals. This framing served to naturalize the assumption that animals should be shunned and can be culled upon suspicion of disease, unless subjected to medical intervention. However, for humans living with resilient anthrax (which can survive in soil for 60-70 years) for centuries, and had contextualized their mutual interaction through terms like cursed (melun) and inauspicious (menhus) fields, this medicalization process—which introduced a more detached approach towards the animals, excluding methods of detecting disease through touch and observation of long-familiar animals, and was also accompanied by pasture restrictions and the culling of “suspect” animals— was not readily accepted. Deeming these non-collaborative humans as cahil (ignorant), asi (rebellious), who maintains close and non-scientific ties with animals, the state, intellectuals and journalists constructed internal “Other”. Marginalizing their concerns, knowledge and mutual relationship with animals and environment, they created the Other’s Other—or the Orient’s Orient—within the national boundaries of the Republican regime.

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Hannah Brown (University of Durham) Blind Spots in Global Health: Lassa Fever, Zoonotic Disease and the Politics of Neglect in Global Health

For the last 50 years, generations of African, North American and European scientists and health workers have tried to fight Lassa Fever, a rodent borne disease that is endemic in parts of west Africa.  Research and responses to the disease have received substantial investment.  Yet the disease remains “neglected”; people who live in the region continue to be at risk from Lassa Fever and unlikely to receive good care and treatment in the event of infection. This talk draws on long-term ethnographic engagement and a collaborative book project that is close to completion.  In the book, Annie Wilkinson, Almudena Marí Sáez and I argue that, counterintuitively, scientific investments into Lassa Fever have helped to produce the very neglect that they aim to alleviate.  Following the zoonotic, health systems and laboratory geographies of Lassa in Sierra Leone, we show how similar kinds of blind spots animate these sites of global health science, and how the expertise of those most familiar with the disease and the rodents that spread it – health workers and people in who live in the region – is systematically overlooked.  The parallels across these different sites raise questions about what is at stake when we isolate “zoonoses” as a novel or distinct area of study and what we might miss when we view it separately from other dimensions relevant to global and national public health.

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Rohan Deb Roy (University of Reading) ‘Nobody Here… Will Look at a Mosquito’: Entomo-Political Surveillance in Late Colonial India

In the late colonial period, administrative observation of the colonised converged with entomological control of mosquitoes. Late colonial entomo-political surveillance was founded on the understanding that regulating the lives of the colonised was one way of regulating the number of mosquitoes. This paper aims to situate entomo-political surveillance involving mosquitoes as a recurrent theme in modern South Asian history. The theme of entomo-political surveillance has escaped the attention of historians of colonial governmental gaze, and as well as historians of insect control. This paper has three unequal parts. I begin by examining some of the features of entomo-political surveillance, and what they tell us about the late colonial state in India. The second part of this talk indicates the ways in which early post-colonial nationalist state in India inherited these frameworks of entomo-political surveillance. I end by explaining why the theme of entomo-political surveillance has featured in anti-state satire in contemporary India.  

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Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva (University of St Andrews) When Plague Became Wild: Rethinking the History of Zoonosis and Disease Ecology from South America (1930-1975)

Historians have singled out the Swiss-born and California-based Karl Meyer as one of the founding fathers of our current disease ecology paradigm, given Meyer’s claim that the animal kingdom was a reservoir of human disease. Historians have paid less attention to other explanations for disease reservoirs constructed at the same time as Meyer’s. In some alternative explanations, humans were not only infected by diseases coming from wild animals, but humans could be directly or indirectly responsible for creating disease reservoirs among these animals. In this presentation, I compare these two ways of reasoning regarding the same scientific and historical question – the arrival of plague to the Americas. To Meyer, plague was probably an ancient disease among wild rodents in North America, although its reservoir had only been detected in the twentieth century. Brazilian and South American doctors suggested that plague had arrived in the Americas among infected rats and humans via maritime traffic. From different ports, rats and humans spread the plague towards the hinterland. From rural villages, plague threatened to jump to wild rodents in wild settings. By comparing these two ways of reasoning, I will describe a more nuanced and global history of the emergence of disease ecology. Moreover, I will suggest that historians should pay more attention to the history of disease ecology and zoonosis in the Global South.

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Benjamin Hegarty (UNSW Sydney) Everyday Human-Animal Relations and Zoonotic Tuberculosis in Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea has one of the highest prevalence of tuberculosis, including multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, in the world. The Australian government, concerned about the risks posed by inter-island travel in the Torres Strait, has played a crucial role in research and eradication efforts. One thread of this concern, part of a resurgent international interest, has been to investigate what proportion of tuberculosis can be attributed to zoonotic tuberculosis. Zoonotic tuberculosis, first identified in the late 19th century, is a broad phenomenon used to describe several different strains of tuberculosis spread between animals and humans. This paper examines how the concept of zoonosis circulates in tuberculosis research in Papua New Guinea. It draws on findings from a clinical and social scientific study of the possible presence and transmission of zoonotic tuberculosis in the country. Descriptions of human-animal relations by Papua New Guineans can help to interpret zoonosis in the context of a specific history of colonial interventions in the name of health.

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Stephen Hinchliffe (University of Exeter) Absorbing Zoonoses, Slowly

Within contemporary accounts, zoonoses imply transmission. Attention is focused on transgressions and transgressors. Jumps and spills frame a spatial order that is policed by a One Health security apparatus. Recent work has disturbed these accounts. Zoonoses can be more mundane, marked by enzootic and endemic episodes rather than discrete events. In the zoonotic dance of agency, things may be slow, slow quick. Normal rather than exceptional. Flare ups or sick geographies are the result of broader sets of perturbations than spatial transgressions of species and pathogens. The implications for making life safe require further consideration. In this paper, I use the term absorption to emphasise mutual involvements and the possibility for changing forms of attention and action.  Absorption is the tendency for environments and bodies to mingle and “draw attention to each other and even shift definitional parameters in the process” (Solomon, 2016). Absorbing zoonoses can re-frame zoonoses as slow emergencies, changing human-nonhuman configurations and what we mean by security. But it can also make us hesitate around the process through which ideas of sharing, immunity and “living with” are taken up in a polarised world. Absorbing zoonoses will need slow forms of consideration.

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Jia Hui Lee (University of Bayreuth) Understanding Rodent Traps as Time Machines

In the agricultural spaces of Morogoro, Tanzania, rodents are rarely encountered except through the traces they leave behind, due to the different temporalities that people and rodents inhabit. Drawing on several interviews with rodent trappers and trap-makers, I suggest that rodent traps produce a shared temporality between rodents and humans, enabling the creation of knowledge essential for reconstructing rodent ecology and behaviour. Rodent traps also enable scientists to generate time series of rodent population fluctuations in the hopes of making predictions about outbreaks of Mastomys natalensis rats as well as about the emergence of potential zoonotic diseases, such as the Morogoro arenavirus, which is genetically related to the Lassa virus that currently causes viral haemorrhagic fever in humans. I bring scholarship in history that propose new ways for thinking about animal traces in conversation with the anthropology of technology to show how rodent traps may function – for farmers and scientists alike – as time machines for creating past and future temporalities of possible, yet unwanted, human-rodent encounters.

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Christos Lynteris (University of St Andrews) From Animal Affliction to Zoonosis: Imagining and Mastering Multispecies Relations

In the first half of the nineteenth century a new medical and epidemiological concept began emerging in continental Europe: zoonosis, or diseases transmissible from animals to humans. The paper examines the ways in which this new framework and its later bacteriological and disease-ecological transformations relied upon but also challenged pre-existing, non-medical notions and experiences of animal-borne or animal-related affliction. Focusing on how multispecies relations became re-imagined and re-mastered in the longue durée of this process, the paper considers how today’s Emerging Infectious Diseases approach to zoonosis brings these traditions together at what Theodor Adorno called the perilous “crossroads between magic and positivism”.

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Hayley McGregor (University of Sussex) Zoonosis and Epidemic Preparedness

Covid-19 focused renewed attention on epidemic “preparedness”, a paradigm characterised by Lakoff (2017) as “anticipatory imagination” in relation to possible future disease threats. In the standardised approach to preparedness as elaborated by the World Health Organisation, preparedness is instantiated in a set of technologically oriented strategies, including therapeutic platforms, evaluation exercises, and pathogen surveillance (such as in animal reservoirs). Whilst I argue that the experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic largely reinforced this technological orientation to preparedness, it has also prompted reflection from practitioners in global and regional health institutions about the priorities for preparedness and how these might differ across localities. Furthermore, a key anthropological question remains salient, namely: who is being prepared for what and by whom? Does the very notion of preparedness for future threats have purchase in places considered “hotspots” for zoonotic disease (re)emergence? How do epidemiological categories of epidemic / endemic hold up and equate with people’s experiences of disease and conditions of life and livelihood? I will discuss the meanings, practices and temporalities of “preparedness” across scales, with reference to the disease mpox, a current public health emergency of international concern and one that challenges the fixity of epidemiological categories, unsettling ideas of what constitutes an “emergency”, where and for whom.

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Emmanuelle Roth (Rachel Carson Centre) and Gregg Mitman (UW-Madison/ Rachel Carson Centre) Ecological Fables, Ecologies of Blame: Zoonosis on the Liberia-Guinea Border

Zoonosis has become a kind of attractor for ecological fables of our time. The 2013–2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa was seized upon by some conservation biologists, for example, to instill fear and stigmatize bushmeat hunting in the name of biodiversity protection. Others, including epidemiologists and political ecologists, looked to its spread to critique the environmental and social impacts of commodification of oil palm production across the region. Certain mining companies in the area laid blame on slash- and-burn agriculture as the main driver of habitat fragmentation, often cited as a contributing factor in wildlife-to-human disease spillovers. Such fables harness evidence and affective labor that aim to reform socio-ecological relations. They bring into view different notions of causality, responsibility, governance, and resource rights, which, while starting from divergent positions on capitalism and its discontents, have become united in preventing zoonotic disease emergence at its source rather than responding to outbreaks. In this essay, we attend to “power and hierarchy imbalances between human and nonhuman species,” in the words of geographers Rosemary-Claire Collard and Jessica Dempsey, that arise where zoonosis reworks multispecies relations through different ecologies of blame. Through an interdisciplinary approach drawing upon methods from history, anthropology, and political ecology, we take notice of changing socio-ecological relations among humans, wildlife, forest, and capital in a region on the Liberia-Guinea border, implicated in, and altered by, ecologies of blame.

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Guillem Rubio Ramon  (University of Edinburgh) Imagined, Wild and Free-Living: Securing Porcine and Canine Life at the Limits of Species and Health

This paper investigates wild pigs in Catalonia (Spain) and free-living dogs in India to map geographies at the limits of species-specific imaginaries and health. In doing so, the paper explores how (1) wild pigs are discursively mobilised as potential viral disruptors of the Catalan pig farming industry and (2) how Indian free-living dogs are understood as a rabies “menace” for human health. Pictured as unruly or pestilent creatures, wild pigs and free-living dogs are seen as zoonotic risks to the health of economic agricultural projects and human populations. This article, therefore, explores how porcine and canine lives are materially and discursively shaped as objects of biosecurity interventions when they challenge or exceed particular species-specific imaginaries, disrupting the agricultural economies and health projects that rely upon them. Finally, the paper also analyses how wild pigs and free-living dogs might help us reimagine possibilities for non-anthropocentric understandings of more-than-human belonging and multispecies healthy publics.

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Jonathan Saha (University of Durham) Of Bedbugs and Beri-Beri

 In the late-nineteenth century, beri-beri emerged as a disease of colonial confinement. Outbreaks were reported in prisons, plantations, ships and labour camps. In part because of the marginality of those most at risk, the colonial state in India did little to combat the disease. Before a biomedical consensus emerged that beri-beri was the result of a vitamin deficiency, there were a range of competing explanations. One was that the disease was caused by bedbugs. Rather than seeing this incorrect zoonotic explanation as a dead end, I treat it as generative misapprehension. It reveals that the coercive institutions of colonial rule in monsoon Asia were ecological niches in which both insects and illnesses thrived.

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Jules Skotnes-Brown (University of St Andrews) A Labour History of Zoonosis? Plague in Johannesburg, Mauritius, and Sydney, 1899-1907

This paper proposes a labour history of zoonosis through examining the connections among rats, plague, and labour in the Witwatersrand mines, Mauritian sugarcane plantations, and the Sydney docks. These three sites, connected by extensive shipping across the Indian and Pacific Oceans, as well as the circulation of knowledge about plague and rat-control, experienced significantly disruptive plague outbreaks in the first decade of the twentieth century, leading to the demolition and reconstruction of entire neighbourhoods to render them “rat-proof”. In each region, cases of the disease were concentrated among working class labourers employed by or indentured to major extractive industries. Synthesising the historiography of the political economy of health with multispecies history, this paper explores how labour and plague were connected via the intermediary of the rat. It argues that although commercial practices in each region led to the importation and spread of plague-carrying rats, the relationship between labour and plague was obfuscated to varying degrees. Rats served as a convenient tool to deflect attention away from the exploitative nature of these industries and the framing of a “rat problem” placed the solution to plague in the hands of technocrats, rather than those wishing to uplift the living conditions of the impoverished. Ultimately, although plague was eliminated in each location, it came at the cost of the working classes, who were forcibly removed from their homes, forced to carry out expensive renovations, and in some cases racially segregated. Meanwhile, for the major industries, building out rats was a strategy through which they could protect themselves from the economic fallout caused by plague, while continuing to provide the bare minimum for their workers.

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Jacob Steere-Williams (College of Charleston) Mapping Rats: Epidemiological Ways of Knowing Zoonosis

Disease maps proliferated from the second half of the nineteenth century as critical techniques of visualizing complex epidemiological phenomena: human, non-human animal, environmental, and ecological. Maps thus emerged and remain vital ways of knowing both sickness and death, but also components of the land and built infrastructure—rivers, lakes, cemeteries, ships, ports, slaughterhouses, canals, drains, dairies, ports—entangled in the origin and spread of disease. But what happened when epidemiologists first attempted to map zoonosis? In this paper I examine a collection of maps created by British colonial public health officials during the Third Plague Pandemic in South Africa. In Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London, and King William’s Town, colonial officials created maps in order to both understand the spread of plague and its configurations in human and non-human animals, and to direct anti-plague African labor. The South African plague maps reveal, I argue, the uneasy ways that epidemiological maps produced and obfuscated zoonotic knowledge. These maps provided a new way to visualize anti-epidemic labor, particularly identifying and killing rats, and destroying parts of African homes. Mapping rats was both a practice of visualizing the interactions between human and non-human animal disease interactions, and a tool to legitimize colonial public health work.

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Nükhet Varlık (Rutgers University) Governing Unruly Populations: Politics of Zoonotic Disease, Public Health, and Interspecies Relations in Ottoman Istanbul

Ottoman Istanbul was home to a diverse array of animal populations (e.g., stray dogs, rats, hyenas, and monkeys) that shaped urban health, infrastructure, and governance. These animals were both integral to the city’s ecology and key actors in zoonotic disease transmission. Stray dogs, as carriers of rabies, faced periodic culling and deportation. Urban rats, linked to plague outbreaks, were aggressively targeted. Hyenas, feared for their grave-digging behaviors, were suspected of spreading disease through contact with human remains. The presence of monkeys—both as exotic pets and urban dwellers—culminated in a sixteenth-century massacre, ostensibly driven by religious and moral anxieties but also reflecting broader concerns over human-animal interactions. Moreover, early modern Istanbul also housed newly introduced exotic species, including elephants and rhinos, brought from distant lands—among them, the New World—for display in imperial and elite festivities. These animals symbolized Ottoman engagement with global trade and diplomacy but also raised questions about the logistical challenges of their maintenance. By centering these animal populations within Ottoman Istanbul’s disease ecology, this presentation will question zoonotic disease management as an infrastructural and political issue. The regulation and eradication of specific species reveal the entanglement of urban planning, imperial governance, and evolving understandings of public health. Through this lens, zoonosis offers a framework for rethinking interspecies relations and the material politics of urban life in the Ottoman Empire.