Viral Ethnographies: Humans, Animals, and One Health Governance in a Zoonotic Age

While theories continue to proliferate about the emergence of SARSCoV-2, epidemiologists remain unsure about the origins of the virus.¹ All that is clear is that it must have made its way into the human population via an animal vector, much like the Ebola, Zika, and avian influenza viruses. Zoonoses—illnesses caused by those trailblazing pathogens that jump across the species barrier into humans—comprise more than 60 percent of all infectious diseases and 75 percent of all new or "emerging" diseases. Climate change and deforestation, among other factors, drive the growing emergence of zoonotic illnesses, causing stressed-out animals to "shed" new viruses and pass them into other creatures nearby.

Acknowledging the threat posed by the rising tide of zoonoses, global health agencies continue to tout the importance of the multisectoral One Health approach to disease control, which seeks to secure "optimal health outcomes recognizing the interconnection between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment" (CDC 2020). Formally unveiled in 2008, the One Health framework has guided global health policy for over a decade, including the ongoing COVID-19 response. But does this approach actually lead to "optimal health outcomes" on the ground? As we watch a constellation of public health agencies scramble to adapt policy to the social, political, economic, and biological threats posed by COVID-19, what can we learn from past One Health policies aimed at eradicating zoonoses?

Two recent monographs shed light on how the One Health approach has governed responses to zoonotic outbreaks in Asia: Natalie Porter's Viral Economies: Bird Flu Experiments in Vietnam (2019) and Deborah Nadal's Rabies in the Streets: Interspecies Camaraderie in Urban India (2020). In Viral Economies, Porter examines One Health responses to the spread of avian influenza (also known as H5N1), which began to ravage Vietnam's livestock economies during the early 2000s. Nadal, on the other hand, turns attention to the relationships between humans, animals, and one of the world's oldest and deadliest pathogens: rabies. Despite efficient rabies vaccines, over 30,000 humans and countless non-humans die from the disease each year across South Asia, a death toll recently exacerbated by vaccine shortages in the region.

Following trends in medical anthropology which emphasize the more-than-human nature of health, both Nadal and Porter look across species, turning an ethnographic eye to "the host of organisms whose lives and deaths are linked to human social worlds" (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010:545). Multispecies ethnography, much like One Health governance, is an interdisciplinary venture that acknowledges the deeply intertwined nature of humans and non-humans—among them animals, plants, microbes, and beyond. While viruses evade traditional ethnographic methods, these lethal pathogens can be located in the proliferation of new attachments, relationships, and life forms that crop up in response to their emergence. These books join a growing number of "viral ethnographies," that is, multi-sited ethnographic studies which foreground a range of more-than-human actors who affect and are affected by the spread of a given pathogen (Lowe 2017).

In this essay, I trace how Nadal and Porter organize their viral ethnographies around conceptual frameworks of entanglement and multispecies exchange relations. Next, I examine how these scholars draw connections between vernacular categories and histories of power, animalization, and resistance in their respective field sites. In the final section, I compare Nadal and Porter's conclusions about the aims, efficacy, and possibilities of One Health governance, and I ask what these approaches might offer future endeavors in public health and critical medical anthropology.

Entangled Economies

Porter centers Viral Economies around "multispecies exchange relations," tracing how One Health interventions are changing the ways humans, non-humans, and economies intersect across Vietnam (16). As Porter moves between rural farms and city markets, local and global health arenas, and micro- and macro-interactions among people, poultry, and pathogens...