TOXIC SYNERGY: The Precarious Grasp of Human-Snake Entanglements in a Thai Venom Facility

Abstract

Venomous snakes offer unique insight into core topics of anthropological inquiry because they are both the cause of a disease, snakebite envenoming, and the source of the cure. At a Thai facility dedicated to venomous snake husbandry for the production of antivenom, the biological pharmaceutical used in the treatment of this disease, a team of staff manages a captive population of the snakes most likely to cause a medically significant bite. Here, both snakes and snake handlers face a significant risk of bodily harm. Drawing on twelve months of multisited ethnographic research, this essay shows how everyday acts of husbandry in service of antivenom production reconstitute the temporal processes of life through the interplay of biological necessity, lived experience, and economic limitation. Overall, I find that snakes and those who handle them with bare hands, caught in a two-way “precarious grasp,” are maimed in pursuit of treatment for speculative patients.