Zoonotic diagrams: mastering and unsettling human‐animal relations

Abstract

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.

Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017

“…They are sites of cohabitation, arranged and ordered through the experiences of sharing space, of living together in proximity” (368). These kinds of relations come into focus in a different way in Christos Lynteris's () analysis of how diagrams that show zoonotic disease transmission cycles figure human‐animal relations in ways that simultaneously assert human mastery while also representing mutual human‐animal permeability.…”

Archaeo-Ornithology: Towards an Archaeology of Human-Bird Interfaces

“…Bennett 1960;Wolch and Emel 1998;Philo and Wilbert 2000;Urbanik 2012). A key dimension of these entanglements is ecological and pertains to the position and function of different agents, human and animal, in larger ecosystems or smaller-scaled habitats; accordingly, some of these interrelationships may be analysed and interpreted with the help of 'zoonotic' diagrams (Lynteris 2017). Yet, the question here is not just what the ecological interlink, if any, between humans and animals is, whether the two actually meet in their living environment and whether this constitutes a rare event or not; it also, and perhaps more importantly, concerns what people precisely do and feel when these engagements occur, whether their actions modify and perhaps change the mode of interaction and whether the prominence and significance of the implicated animals is transformed in the course of these actions.…”

Zoonosis

“…Within the framework of disease ecology this model of infection would become formative for notions and research methods regarding zoonotic disease. Its focus lay on the threshold of enzootic, epizootic, and zoonosis, as well as, on a practical level, on the effective 'noise' that can prevent their development (Lynteris 2017). This was however always already a doubtful model of infection.…”