Avian Reservoirs: Virus Hunters & Birdwatchers in Chinese Sentinel Posts by Frédéric Keck (review)

Abstract

P shortly before the COVID-19 outbreak, Frédéric Keck’s multisited, multispecies ethnography offers a wealth of insight into the science of emergent infectious disease and the ways influenza pandemics have transformed human-bird relations. Although Avian Reservoirs concentrates on avian influenza, the study deepens our understanding of investigations into zoonotic threats in general, no matter the species source. The book will hold particular interest for scholars of Science and Technology Studies, One Health, and biosecurity. But anthropologists interested in the history of theory will also appreciate how Keck breathes new life and relevance into the ideas of the discipline’s canonical figures. Keck argues that the rise in emergent zoonotic diseases due to anthropogenic environmental change has yielded a variety of novel techniques of pandemic preparedness, and these techniques, which focus on the “animal level,” have transformed humans’ relations to birds and other species. Like us, birds face threats of mass death by disease, and their recruitment into techniques of pandemic preparedness towards mutual biosecurity works to blur species boundaries. Yet, unlike us, they may participate in these techniques and scenarios as sacrificial animals, revealing the intransigence of our moral hierarchy of species. Keck depicts transformations in human-bird relations with ethnographic data collected over the course of six years in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, territories whose people “found with avian influenza a language to talk about the problems they have with mainland China” (3). The nature of each territory’s political relationship to China has shaped scientists’ research not only with regard to access to virus samples and funding sources, but also in the ways simulations of bird diseases have been carried out.