Experimental Futures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. vii, 280 pp. (Graphs, maps, B&W photos.) US$26.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-1105-7.
Academic monographs are rarely timely because the writing and production process is so long. That long timeline paid off for Lyle Fearnley and his readers with the publication of his book Virulent Zones: Animal Diseases and Global Health at China’s Pandemic Epicenter. Who wouldn’t pick up such a title in the midst of a global pandemic that originated in China? The book is based on fieldwork conducted from 2010 to 2012, but Fearnley finished writing at the start of the coronavirus epidemic, which he discusses in the epilogue.
Virulent Zones calls into question what could have happened if we followed the coronavirus to its epicentre, the natural location where spillover likely happened—a poignant question as we watch the world grapple with debates of where this virus originated. Fearnley’s research focuses on the spread of pandemic influenza that originates in China and teaches us that displacing our efforts from the lab to the field, where spillover from wild to domestic animals and animal to human occurs, is crucial for preventing the emergence of a global influenza pandemic. In doing so, the book serves an important role of also trying to displace the blame for global pandemics, which are often associated with traditional ecologies, economies, and societies that are tagged as natural reservoirs of deadly viruses; this is an all-too-familiar tale over the past 18 months.
Fearnley’s fieldwork led him to the Poyang Lake region in Guangxi Province, an area that has been identified as an epicentre for many of the avian flu pandemics that have emerged in China. A multi-sited ethnographic approach takes us beyond that one fieldsite, though, following the global health policy that governs influenza outbreaks through the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Beijing and on to the archives at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva.
The book is broken up into three sections that address the ecology of pandemic outbreaks, the landscape of how and where they are investigated, and finally how scientists navigate through the local politics to control a pandemic outbreak. Overall, it gives us a renewed perspective over how pandemic preparedness should differ between those regions of the world that are marked as sources of disease and those that are working to protect themselves from epidemics that develop outside of their borders.
Much of the book focuses on the idea of displacement: displacing the locus of our attention in influenza research from the laboratory to the field, or to the epicentre of an epidemic, where we can pinpoint its spillover and perhaps stem transmission at “ground zero.” In part 1 of the book on ecology, Fearnley traces the epicentre of avian flus in the Poyang Lake region back to local farming techniques that utilize free-grazing duck husbandry in the rice paddies to protect the rice from pests like insects and shellfish, and to carry out weeding and manuring. This reduces the farmers’ dependence on chemical insecticides, herbicides, fertilizers, and mechanical farming aids. As poultry farming has become denser and more commercialized, ducks have come into more frequent contact with humans and influenza research based in the field started to displace research in the lab. Suddenly a rural centre for rice cultivation and waterfowl breeding becomes an unexpected centre of global health. Working in a natural environment rather than a laboratory presents lab scientists with the challenge of figuring out how they account for the practical variables they encounter in the field, something that can benefit from anthropologic inquiry.
Part 2 of the book takes us into Fearnley’s engagement with global health. He follows Vincent Martin, a French livestock veterinarian and career official with the FAO who runs the Emergency Center for Transboundary Animal Disease (ECTAD) that was established in Beijing in 2006. Here we are introduced to the intricacies that develop when global scientific revelations meet local needs. The scientists who discover the pandemic potential in Poyang Lake identify a certain potential uncertainty in the area as a potential source of a future pandemic. This revelation encroaches on local economic need, however, where the area represents a vital uncertainty to local farmers whose livelihoods depend on the profits they reap from raising ducks. This interaction between global health and local farmers increases the uncertainty for both and introduces challenges for controlling a pandemic at its source.
Some of the questions involved in these challenges are addressed in part 3 on territory. Looking through the lens of Martin of the FAO, Fearnley examines how a global health leader navigates issues of biosovereignty in addressing the challenges posed between international actors and local agents. This gets to important questions of how this global attention at a pandemic epicentre intersects with local sovereign authority. Martin finds himself having to navigate this space through the same local means that many international businessmen, governmental, and non-governmental officials have used: through ritual practices of banqueting and drinking, traditionally used to build relationships (guanxi) in China. This helps him navigate the local landscape and institute a training program for local veterinarians that is crucial for pandemic influenza control at the source.
All of this comes off as a very neat package that would seem to work in an ideal world. But I wonder if the story Fearnley portrays can happen in practice. It makes sense to locate and treat a pandemic at its source. But are scientists and local agents really willing to cooperate and work together in the way Fearnley constructs? He takes issue with the tensions between global health and local actors that are commonly portrayed in ethnographic accounts, instead showing a field of cooperation in Poyang Lake. But I wonder if this can really happen. Much of his account reflects the perspective of Vincent Martin, who represents the global health side of things, but we don’t hear much from his Chinese partners. Of course he would like people to think that he’s capable of navigating the local landscape and getting locals to cooperate with him. Is he so skilled at building guanxi that he is able to do what few other international representatives have done? Or is he just engaging in what seems like the wanton drinking and banqueting expected by his Chinese hosts and hoping his efforts will result in something? The rituals he engages in have a distinct cultural purpose that does not come across enough in Fearnley’s description, and only those who can appreciate and understand that purpose can benefit from them.
This book enlightens the reader about how a pandemic emerges and why so many avian influenza pandemics have originated in China. In the end I think it can be instructive for global health experts. As an anthropology text, it provides a lot of ethnographic detail—at times too much detail that often does not add to our understanding of why certain things occur. I often wished Fearnley would have placed more emphasis on using the theoretical tools anthropology offers to provide more explanation of why things happen rather than unnecessary nitty gritty details of what he was observing and experiencing.
Elanah Uretsky
Brandeis University, Waltham