Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

In Social Anthropology, we are perhaps wearily aware now of certain dualities – nature and culture and subject and object amongst them - that ought long since to have been taken out of our analytical tool kits and treated ethnographically instead. Unsurprisingly perhaps, important elements of this were first effected by anthropologists studying Europe and then later refined and elaborated, albeit sometimes in a less ethnographic vein, by that largely ANT-fed beast known as STS (Science and Technology Studies) or more recently by AST (Anthropology of Science and Technology). At the same time, space has been made within both the social and natural sciences for the mutual articulations by which each might not simply incorporate the other but both can imagine themselves to be composing, together, some new middle ground.

This article considers how the brain has become an object and target for governing human beings. How, and to what extent, has governing the conduct of human beings come to require, presuppose and utilize a knowledge of the human brain? How, and with what consequences, are so many aspects of human existence coming to be problematized in terms of the brain? And what role are these new 'cerebral knowledges' and technologies coming to play in our contemporary forms of subjectification, and our ways of governing ourselves? After a brief historical excursus, we delineate four pathways through which neuroscience has left the lab and became entangled with the government of the living: psychopharmacology, brain imaging, neuroplasticity and genomics. We conclude by asking whether the 'psychological complex' of the twentieth century is giving way to a 'neurobiological complex' in the twenty-first, and, if so, how the social and human sciences should respond.

The introduction to this special section of the journal argues that while it is widely accepted today that infectious disease epidemics are the result of long-term and complex social, ecological, economic and political processes, outbreaks are, more often than not, experienced on the ground as unexpected eruptions. This introduction defends the position that the dialectics between the evental and processual aspects of epidemics are good to think with anthropologically, and points to the consequences of this for an analysis of epidemic temporality in the context of emergent infectious disease discourse and intensifying biopolitical surveillance aimed at averting the 'next pandemic'.

The main concern of this article is with the ways in which technologies of data-mining and crowd-sourcing have made it possible for citizens to contribute to the expansion of infectious disease surveillance as both a concrete practice and a compelling fantasy. But I am less interested in participation as such, and more concerned with the epistemological effects that this technological mediation might have for the possibility of epidemic events to become shared objects of knowledge. What happens with epidemic events when they become targets of data-mining and crowd-sourcing technologies?

This article discusses Paul Rabinow's notion of 'form/event' in the light of the current management of Avian Influenza in Hong Kong. While this notion allows the study of how life sciences produce events by turning scarcity of material into abundance of information, Paul Rabinow applied it to the scene of biotechnologies where values about life are suspended in what he calls purgatory. I suggest that, for the anticipation of epidemics from the animal reservoir, the form/event is not a suspension of values but a communication by signs in what I call, following Hong Kong microbiologists, a sentinel. Moving from purgatory to sentinel in the field of biosecurity opens a plurality of scales at which events happen, and transforms the model of subjectivity, from pastoral care to hunting relationships. This theoretical shift sheds light on the ethnography of Avian Flu in Hong Kong, where birdwatchers have allied with microbiologists to practise animal surveillance.

This article draws on Alain Badiou's notion of the event and on Michel Foucault's critique of the notion of crisis in comparing two pneumonic plague outbreaks in Manchuria. It is argued that the two epidemics, although apparently involving the same pathogen and geographical region, cannot be treated as analogous. The article approaches the Manchurian pneumonic plague epidemic of 1910–11 as an event, and the Manchurian pneumonic plague epidemic of 1920–21 as a crisis, stressing that the crucial difference between the two lies with the way in which they produced and reproduced biopolitical subjects.

This article explores the responses to the AIDS epidemic in Uganda as events and processes of projectification. AIDS projects became epidemic. Prevention and treatment projects supported by outside donors spread to an extent that made it hard for some to see the role of the Ugandan state and health-care system. We describe the projectified AIDS landscape in Uganda as projects make themselves present in the life of our interlocutors. We argue that the response in Uganda was syndemic; many different factors worked together to make an effect, and the epidemic of responses did not undermine the Ugandan state but played a crucial part in rebuilding the nation after decades of civil war. A problematic consequence of the projectified emergency response to epidemics such as HIV/AIDS, which is a long-wave event, is that projects have a limited time frame, and can be scaled down or withdrawn depending on political commitment.

Directly Observed Treatment – Short-course (DOTS) has been promoted by the WHO globally as the preferred standard approach to tuberculosis control and treatment since the mid 1990s. In India, DOTS has been gradually implemented as a national programme since 1997, covering the entire country by 2006. DOTS is a highly complex healthcare intervention that involves universal monitoring of all patients, access to high quality drugs and the adoption of an individually supervised drug intake by patients through a system of DOT-providers. This article discusses the gradual implementation of DOTS in India as an intervention based on politically agreed 'truths' that create 'successful treatment stories' and 'defaulters', and it explores dimensions of temporality linked to the understanding of 'event' at different ontological scales from the perspectives of 'defaulters' and the health care system respectively.

This invited comment, from a medical epidemiologist, discusses some of the relevance and the realities of selected anthropological critiques of epidemiology.

Animism and the Question of Life (Istvan Praet, 2013)

New Approaches to Resistance in Brazil and Mexico (John Gledhill and Patience A. Schell, eds, 2012)