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ABSTRACT
The recent global spread of COVID-19 alongside a plethora of other growing phenomena of the Anthropocene increasingly affected by human activity – fires, flooding, droughts – urgently invites a reconsideration of the concepts of epidemics and pandemics. To date however, research into pandemics has focused almost entirely on biomedical aspects such as rate of contagion, origin of the offending organism, and lethality. This article seeks to suggest that whilst these foci appear logical and necessary, research must be expanded to include pandemic under the Foucauldian canon of biopower. Whilst socio-political geographies of power and control have been neglected hitherto, not only is there a case for considering epidemics/pandemics as anthropogenic epiphenomena, the importance of human socio-political dispositifs, cultures, and transport networks of consumption is sufficiently important to both the origins and spread of biomedical illness, that they merit a different and more inclusive appellation, anthropandemic. This article outlines why this might be so and deploys relevant methods of analysis such as biopower and ANT to suggest ways in which a holistic research methodology might be developed.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. “A thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions–in short, the said as much as the unsaid” (Foucault Citation1980).
2. Called infectious bronchitis virus, IBV (Estola Citation1970).
3. National Geographic – “The Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems.” https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/anthropocene/, accessed 10/9/20.
5. “The number of people in the developing world with diabetes will increase by more than 2.5-fold, from 84 million in 1995 to 228 million in 2025 (5). On a global basis, 60% of the burden of chronic diseases will occur in developing countries. Indeed, cardiovascular diseases are even now more numerous in India and China than in all the economically developed countries in the world put together (2). As for overweight and obesity, not only has the current prevalence already reached unprecedented levels, but the rate at which it is annually increasing in most developing regions is substantial (3). The public health implications of this phenomenon are staggering, and are already becoming apparent.” WHO, accessed 8/6/20 at https://www.who.int/nutrition/topics/2_background/en/.
6. Michel Foucault, “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” (Citation1998, 140).
7. “The ensemble formed by institutions, procedures analyses and reflections, calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of a very specific, albeit very complex, power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and dispositives of security as its technical instrument” (Gudmand-Høyer and Hjorth Citation2009).
8. March 31st, 2020 – https://www.fsw.uzh.ch/foucaultblog/essays/254/understanding-corona-with-foucault.
9. Since the 1960s meat production quadrupled to 320 million tonnes a year by 2013; poultry production grew from 12% of the global total in 1961 to 35% in 2013 – https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production.
10. David Quammen, “We Made the Coronavirus Epidemic”, New York Times,January28 2020.
12. For example, American Samoa, which kept the flu away until 1920 by forbidding boats to dock, and then suffered no fatalities when the flu eventually arrived in 1920 – https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181023-the-places-that-escaped-the-spanish-flu.
13. See this interesting article on that theme by the Chinese media outlet CGTN – https://newseu.cgtn.com/news/2020-05-08/Can-we-compare-the-COVID-19-pandemic-to-a-world-war–Qhw25Ig9Fe/index.html, accessed 11/9/20.