Kelly, Ann, Frédéric Keck and Christos Lynteris. The Anthropology of Epidemics. Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2019, 182 pages

How can we talk about a book whose subject matter—epidemics—now saturates our imagination and social life? How can we account for a collection of works drawn from epidemics that predate SARS COV 2, yet deals with technoscience issues that are at the heart of global health policies today: the imperative of preparation, the anticipatory and speculation of risk, the viral ontogenesis regime, and the interspecies entanglement that renews the way to think zoonosis? While The Anthropology of Epidemics brings together ethnographies on the different ways in which biomedicine responds to contemporary epidemics, the core of the book is to situate the way in which history and anthropology treat epidemics as an object. The epistemological, theoretical, and methodological issues raised by the epidemic as an object are thus at the heart of each chapter. The social science scholars brought together in this book have been mobilized on emerging diseases that have strongly shaken the Global South: Ebola, Zika, and AIDS, a meta-pandemic that has durably reconfigured the discourse and practice of medical. Two lexical fields dominate the book: zoonosis, a disease of animal origin and transmitted to humans, and infrastructures, a complex assemblage of platforms and both visible and hidden networks and what they allow to circulate. The book’s chapters are divided into three main themes: first the ontological turn—a true epistemological renewal—allows for the consideration of animals as actants. The chapters document a reevaluation of our co-evolution with species in social areas marked by their inherently transient nature on the borders of large political areas or in a context of economic transition. The interest of critical social sciences in zoonosis as an object of study is recent and challenging, and the complexity of interspecies networks (microbes, animals and humans, and plants are missing) raise important sociohistorical, political, and ecological questions. This renewal of the dialectical interaction between humans and animals is magnified by the globalization process and the politicization of public health. The unavoidable quest for the origin of the virus is one of the markers of this politicization. It represents geopolitical stakes that do not succeed in hiding a number of scientific uncertainties, false leads and sometimes dead ends, leading to a reconsideration of the scientific paradigm that underpins it. Christos Lynteris, a medical anthropologist, writes about a scientific expedition to southern Siberia and Manchuria in search of the origin of the bubonic plague that struck these territories at the end of the nineteenth century. The plague is part of the uncertainties that run through the search for the origin of a virus and the geopolitical (Sino-Russian rivalries) and moral stakes that surround this search. This chapter also represents an important issue for the framing of animal diseases. The tensions between representations, the researchers’ hypotheses and uncertainty come up against the complex experience of the field, whose photographic supports are part of an epistemological and methodological approach to renewing visual anthropology. Yet, in the end, it is difficult to bring evidence for the circulation of viruses and the spillover hypothesis. Nathalie Porter provides a vivid ethnography of a human-animal-virus circularity. She analyzes how family networks and the flow of cash during migration from cosmopolitan cities to rural areas of northern Vietnam disrupt the economy of rural livestock farming by introducing new paths of exposure to risk and emerging diseases. The field chosen is significant: Bac Giant is a Vietnamese hot spot for disease, and Vietnam has seen a considerable increase in its poultry market, where a number of enzootic diseases affecting birds and humans intersect—chickenpox, Marek’s disease, Newcastle disease, avian influenza, cambylobacteriosis, etcetera. Intensive breeding increases the risk of …