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On the Verge of Death: Visions of Biological Vulnerability AN43CH08-Caduff ARI 11 September 2014 11:49 On the Verge of Death: Visions of Biological Vulnerability∗ Carlo Caduff Department of Social Science, Health, and Medicine, King’s College London, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom; email:
[email protected] Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2014. 43:105–21 First published online as a Review in Advance on July 18, 2014 The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at anthro.annualreviews.org This article’s doi: 10.1146/annurev-anthro-102313-030341 Copyright c© 2014 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved ∗This article is part of a special theme on Knowledge as well as a special theme on Risk. For a list of other articles in these themes, see http:// www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/ annurev-an-43 Keywords risk, danger, state, security, surveillance, disease Abstract This article considers how anthropologists and other social scientists ex- amine biosecurity as an object in the making. It suggests that scholars encountered this object in research projects concerned with questions of global health, capitalism, neoliberalism, humanitarianism, citizenship, sci- ence, medicine, technology, ecology, surveillance, and risk. This growing body of work explores emerging modes of government that are characteristic for the post–Cold War period of global capitalism. Ethnographic accounts demonstrate how actors and institutions located in the Global North and the Global South perceive the spread of dangerous biological things as a threat to the health of individuals and populations. This article aims to review this literature and supplement the current approach with a theory of security performativity. 105 A nn u. R ev . A nt hr op ol . 2 01 4. 43 :1 05 -1 21 . D ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g A cc es s pr ov id ed b y U ni ve rs ity o f C al if or ni a - L os A ng el es U C L A o n 03 /0 2/ 22 . F or p er so na l u se o nl y. http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-an-43 http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-an-43 http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-an-43 AN43CH08-Caduff ARI 11 September 2014 11:49 INTRODUCTION Over the past two decades, biosecurity has become an important site of political intervention, legal regulation, social mobilization, technological innovation, scientific analysis, and economic opportunity in the United States and elsewhere. Concerns with conditions of biological vulnera- bility have varied widely, ranging from panics about bioterror attacks (Guillemin 2001, King 2003, Lakoff 2007, Samimian-Darash 2009, Schoch-Spana 2004, Vogel 2006) and influenza pandemics (Caduff 2010, Kleinman et al. 2008, Lowe 2010, MacPhail 2010, Mason 2010, Porter 2013) to fears about livestock infections (Donaldson 2008, Enticott 2008, Hinchliffe 2010, Hinchliffe & Bingham 2008), invasive species (Buller 2008, Clark 2002, Comaroff & Comaroff 2001, Helmreich 2005, Moore 2012, Subramaniam 2001), and counterfeit drugs (Peterson 2014; J. Hornberger, unpublished paper, “On Fake Goods and Fake Cops. In the Business of Securing the Copy.”). In technical reports and public statements, biosecurity experts have described the growing mobility of biological things as a serious threat to society, the economy, and the environment. Newspaper stories, television reports, talk shows, computer games, thrillers, novels, tweets, blogs, and websites have contributed to the circulation and sedimentation of these alarming visions of vulnerability. Inspired, but not necessarily controlled, by experts, perceptions of biological threat are organizing reality as “fear and thrill” for mass audiences (Aretxaga 2002), promoting a political imaginary of infinite reach that increasingly saturates public culture with uncertainty and anxiety. This article explores how anthropologists and other social scientists have contributed to the critical investigation of contemporary materializations and mobilizations of biosecurity. Instead of providing a definition, anthropologists unpack the notion and analyze specific settings in which biosecurity discourses and practices have been articulated, negotiated, and contested. This body of work focuses on biosecurity as an emerging modality of governmentality, highlighting the role of affect (Lakoff 2008b, Major 2008, Masco 2014), uncertainty (Collier 2008, MacPhail 2010, Samimian-Darash 2013), indeterminacy (Barker 2008, Braun 2007, Cooper 2006, de Abreu 2013, Dillon 2003), technology (Breckenridge 2005, Fearnley 2008a, Parry 2012), bureaucracy (Barker 2012; Lentzos & Rose 2009; J. Hornberger, unpublished paper, “On Fake Goods and Fake Cops. In the Business of Securing the Copy”), and the mass media (Briggs 2011, Caduff 2014, Keränen 2011, Nerlich & Koteyko 2012). Genealogical considerations suggest that biosecurity must be seen as the most recent manifestation of an enduring cluster of modern concerns about epidemic disease, border protection, and global trade and travel (Bashford 2006, Gros 2012, King 2003, Wald 2008). These concerns intensified during the post–Cold War period, allowing biosecurity to acquire new subjects and objects as a rising number of actors and institutions appropriated the notion for themselves (Masco 2014). Biosecurity has become a popular term with a growing currency in academic discourse: In- stitutes have been established, journals and magazines have been published, seminars and work- shops have been organized, funding streams have been created, and research programs have been launched (Dobson et al. 2013, Rappert & Gould 2009). Geographers Nick Bingham and Steve Hinchliffe emphasize that the scope of biosecurity practices—that is, the scope of the social, political, and technological efforts to control the circulation of dangerous biological things—is expanding today, ranging from seemingly mundane habits of hygiene, such as hand-washing and disinfection, to complex systems of surveillance and cutting-edge biomedical research (Bingham et al. 2008; Bingham & Hinchliffe 2008; Hinchliffe 2013a,b; Hinchliffe et al. 2012; Hinchliffe & Lavau 2013). Typically, biosecurity interventions highlight the uncertainty of the future, the unpredictability of events, and the difficulty of controlling life itself. But biosecurity refers not only to a contemporary cluster of discourses and practices concerned with the perilous present and the uncertain future; it has also become a brand, and some observers have suggested that 106 Caduff A nn u. R ev . A nt hr op ol . 2 01 4. 43 :1 05 -1 21 . D ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g A cc es s pr ov id ed b y U ni ve rs ity o f C al if or ni a - L os A ng el es U C L A o n 03 /0 2/ 22 . F or p er so na l u se o nl y. AN43CH08-Caduff ARI 11 September 2014 11:49 the brand “has brought public health political attention and financial resources it would never have received otherwise” (Fidler 2006, p. 204). Other scholars have cautioned that concerns about biological weapons and catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease have generated an avalanche of national and international programs that are narrowing the scope of the public health mis- sion (Fee & Brown 2001). As Masco (2014) underscores, these programs have also facilitated the militarization of public health and the construction of new infrastructures of state power. At the heart of today’s biosecurity concerns are global threats that are assumed to exceed the territorial boundaries of the modern state. Despite the constant invocation of the “global” as a compelling sign of the “common,” biosecurity has often expressed the narrowly conceived interests of a small number of nations concerned predominantly with the problem of border protection under conditions of rapid globalization. Indeed, biological nationalism is what such policy prescribes when it requires citizens in settler societies to eradicate “alien” plants, which are presumably infiltrating the country, and to cultivate “native” species in the nation’s garden (Clark 2013, Subramaniam 2001). What the growing appeal of biosecurity clearly indicates is that modernity’s “risk society” (Beck 1992) is increasingly mutating into a society of security, that is, into a society of control and containment, detention and deportation. Anthropological research suggests that the articulation of this society and the systematic identification of deportable bodies are implicated in broader problematizations of citizenship, community, and national sovereignty, which are characteristic of the post–Cold War period of global capitalism (Barker 2010, Comaroff & Comaroff 2001, Povinelli 2011). Social studies of security are, by and large, constructivist, highlighting the ways in which threats are conceived in particular contexts. The critical aim of such studies is to denaturalize hegemonic understandings of the kinds of dangerous objects and events that populations are facing today: why this particular threat rather than another? What kind of life and whose security are we talking about? This approach has been successful insofar as it has revealed both the political dimension of the scenarios that experts, journalists, and politicians emphasize as well as their exclusions and era- sures. The aim of this review is to discuss the literature—which draws predominantly on discourse analysis, science and technology studies, biopower and biopolitics, political economy, multispecies ethnography, and governmentality more generally—and supplement the constructivist approach with a theory of security performativity. The latter allows us to understand better the extent to which security can operate outside of the framework of truth and falsity, a feature that has made it almost impermeable to critical inquiry. SECOND-ORDER OBSERVATIONS Two edited volumes, Lakoff & Collier’s Biosecurity Interventions (2008) and Chen & Sharp’s Bioin- security and Vulnerability (2014), offer important insights into the ways in which biothreats are conceived today in specific contexts. Both volumes demonstrate how the anthropological interest in biosecurity has emerged from recent research focusing on questions of global health, capitalism, neoliberalism, humanitarianism, citizenship, science, medicine, technology, ecology, surveillance, and risk. Noticeably, and similar to the expanding anthropological scholarship on security more generally (Albro et al. 2012; De Genova 2002; Goldstein 2010, 2012; Gusterson 1996; Gusterson & Besteman 2009; Holbraad & Pedersen 2013; Masco 2006), both volumes struggle with the difficulty of taking biosecurity seriously as an object of analysis while simultaneously resisting the political demand to authorize strategies of intervention promoted in the name of prevention, precaution, and preparedness. A critical analysis of biosecurity is crucial in a world where surveil- lance, containment, and control efforts are continuing to expand; these two volumes suggest two different ways of developing such an analysis. www.annualreviews.org • On the Verge of Death 107 A nn u. R ev . A nt hr op ol . 2 01 4. 43 :1 05 -1 21 . D ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g A cc es s