Often described as "masks" face-worn devices are employed as personal protection equipment by health workers and the general public and considered to be an indispensable technology against epidemics. Simultaneously, they are potent symbols of existential risk. Could these material and visual aspects be more than simply indexically connected? In this article, I examine these apparatuses through a historical anthropological approach of their invention during the 1910-11 Manchurian plague outbreak. Arguing that they should be taken seriously as masks, I demonstrate that their emergence was rooted in their configuration as transformative agents of medical reason.Assuming the form of a diagonal band spanning the interior of a white circle, a cotton facemask appears to be "stamped" on the cover of the Sunday magazine of Hong Kong's leading journal, the South China Morning Post. On the murky blood-red background, behind this striking visual device we can read in alternating order, like a genetic sequence of doom, the ominous acronyms of three emerging infectious diseases: H7N9 (avian flu), SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome). This peculiar visual assemblage functions as an epidemiologically inflected "STOP" sign. Printed in smaller letters under it, the cover title of the Post Magazine's December 1, 2013 issue explains: "Stress and strains. Hong Kong's never-ending fight against viruses." The issue's cover story, like similar feature articles that, in that same year, paid homage to Hong Kong's SARS epidemic decennial, contains striking images. The majority portray individuals in different settings donning a range of face-worn personal protection equipment (PPEs): "a member of staff at the Beijing Centre for Disease Control put[ting] on a decontamination suit" (Lazarus 2013:11); a seven-year-old girl (the first H7N9 human case in Beijing) wearing a blue surgical mask while lying in a hospital bed with her toy bunny while an eerie figure donning goggles and a latex face-worn device faces the camera; "a haj pilgrim near Mecca, in Saudi Arabia wear[ing] a mask to avoid catching Mers [sic]" (21); five hooded, white overalls and goggle-wearing "health workers carry[ing] away bags containing dead chickens during a culling operation near Kathmandu" (21). 1 In relation to these images, the facemask sign on the front-page functions as an accumulative second-order signifier. Assembling and entangling emerging pathogens as an existential risk, it provides an essentially apotropaic promise of scientific control vis-à-vis the "next pandemic."In terms of remembering SARS and preparing Hong Kong's population for what Laurie Garrett (1994) has coined the "coming plague," the facemask in this publication thus appears to carry certain talismanic properties, allowing humanity to persist on the edge of a pandemic "end of the world." At the same time, in the 15 years since the 2003 global outbreak, the use and efficacy of PPEs in epidemic control has become the subject of intense scientific d...

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Nested in debates in anthropology, philosophy, social theory and global health, the book argues that fear of and fascination with the "next pandemic" stem not so much from an anticipation of a biological extinction of the human species, as from an expectation of the loss of mastery over human/non-human relations. Christos Lynteris employs the notion of the "pandemic imaginary" in order to understand the way in which pandemic-borne human extinction refashions our understanding of humanity and its place in the world. The book challenges us to think how cosmological, aesthetic, ontological and political aspects of pandemic catastrophe are intertwined. The chapters examine the vital entanglement of epidemiological studies, popular culture, modes of scientific visualisation, and pandemic preparedness campaigns. This volume will be relevant for scholars and advanced students of anthropology as well as global health, and for many others interested in catastrophe, the "end of the world" and the (post)apocalyptic.

As a projected human extinction event, the 'next pandemic', generated according to prevalent scenarios by a newly emerged zoonotic virus (Quammen 2012; 2013), has in the last two decades assumed the role of the ultimate, world-ending catastrophe. The return of such end-of-the-world scenarios after a long lull, which followed the dissolution of the US-Soviet nuclear standoff, is a topic that has been extensively discussed in studies of Western popular culture (Keane 2006; Perkowitz 2010; Cantor 2012). What has, however, remained outside the scope of these analyses is that, represented as the ultimate catastrophe, the 'coming plague' (Garrett 1996) necessitates its very own culture hero. This twenty-first-century Gilgamesh is no other than the

This article approaches interspecies relations through an examination of the prevalent visual device employed in the representation of animal-human infection in the life sciences: the zoonotic cycles diagram. After charting its emergence and development in the context of bubonic plague, I explore how this diagrammatic regime has been applied in two distinct practical contexts: a plague warning sign on the Grand Canyon National Park hiking trail; and the on-line public information campaign launched by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the wake of the Ebola outbreak of 2014-16. The article demonstrates the principal ontological and biopolitical operations of these diagrams, arguing that, far from simply summarizing epidemiological narratives of animal-human infection, they function both as pilots of human mastery over human-animal relations and as crucial sites of unsettlement for the latter.Diagrams form one of the most persistent and pervasive tools of anthropological thinking. From Alfred Kroeber's 'tree of cultural evolution' to rendering house and village plans into analytical charts of social life, and from kinship diagrams to the complex diagrammatic analytics developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Alfred Gell or, more recently, in the context of ontological debates, there is hardly a key moment or turn in the discipline which is not accompanied or supported by what we may call diagrammatic pilots of anthropological reasoning. And yet, with few notable, and mostly kinship-focused, exceptions (Banks 2001;Bouquet 1996;Grimshaw 2001;Hage & Harary 1983), anthropologists appear largely uninterested in the way in which diagrams have influenced the development of ideas and debates in our discipline. Given the latter's record of reflexivity, this cannot be said to be the result of a lack of self-inspection. Rather, it seems to stem from an invisibility of the diagram as a unique mode of drawing out forms, patterns, and relations across epistemic fields and cultures. Hence diagrams constitute a blind spot for anthropology not only as regards its own practices but also as an ethnographic object.