The Prophetic Faculty of Epidemic Photography: Chinese Wet Markets and the Imagination of the Next Pandemic

Abstract

Dominant trends in epidemiological research and medical journalism today share a belief in the “next pandemic,” a microbiological catastrophe of Old Testament proportions that threatens to annihilate humanity. Expected to arise out of a zoonotic spillover, in most cases a newly emergent or mutant form of animal-to-human influenza, the ground zero of the “next pandemic” is located in so-called wet markets, live animal markets in East Asia and China in particular. Focusing on photographic representations of wet markets during the SARS outbreak of 2003, this article examines critically the visual regime constructed around and supporting this outbreak narrative. Examining the temporality of spillover events and the dialectic between their visibility and invisibility, the article argues that the photographic visualization of points of pandemic eruption sets in place a prophetic faculty. Imaging spillover as an inevitable destiny and, at the same time, as having always or already occurred, wet market photography constitutes a new biomedical temporality that institutes human extinction as a never-completed but always in process end-event.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article was presented in an abridged form at the Royal Anthropological Institute's conference “Anthropology and Photography” in May 2014. I would like to thank the participants of the panel on Medicine, Anthropology and Photography for their feedback, as well as Frédéric Keck and Carlo Caduff for many thought-provoking conversations on the subject of the next pandemic.

Notes

This is not to mean that the term had not been used before in medical research; yet its use was limited to campylobacters, salmonella and listeria, and unconnected to the notion of emergence or spillover [Hassan et al. 2001].

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Notes on contributors

Christos Lynteris

CHRISTOS LYNTERIS is a social anthropologist working on biopolitical and visual aspects of infectious disease epidemics. He is Senior Research Associate at CRASSH, University of Cambridge, and Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded research project Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic. He is the author of The Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China: Socialist Medicine and the New Man [Palgrave Macmillan 2012] and Ethnographic Plague: Configuring Disease on the Chinese–Russian Frontier [Palgrave Macmillan 2016], and editor of Cambridge Anthropology's special issue, “Epidemic Events and Processes” [2014]. E-mail: [email protected]