Title

Viral Sovereignty: Security and Mistrust in the Indonesian H5N1 Influenza Outbreak

Speaker

Celia Lowe (Professor, Department of Anthropology and Director, Center for Southeast Asia and its Diasporas, University of Washington)

Abstract

In the mid-2000s, Indonesia became ‘ground zero’ for an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza, the H5N1 strain, which global health experts feared could result in a devastating pandemic causing hundreds of millions of human deaths like the 1918 Influenza pandemic. This moment also coincided with an emerging set of biocentric fears: Iraq had been falsely accused of stockpiling biological weapons, anthrax had been sent through the U.S. mail killing five, the U.S. was vaccinating health care professionals preparing for a weaponized smallpox attack, and hand sanitizer had become commonplace. Across the global North, biological security was articulated in relation to issues of bioterror and biodefense, novel disease emergence, food safety, and invasive species. What happened as these Northern forms of securitization slid across disparate spaces and were introduced in other places, like Indonesia, with their own sets of security concerns? How were older forms of enlightenment aspiration, where Indonesians desired to be equal and respected participants in scientific and medical practice and analysis, affected? And what did this momentum say about the future of norms and forms of global health?

Bio

Celia Lowe is Professor of Anthropology and International Studies, and Director of the Center for Southeast Asia and its Diasporas, at the University of Washington. Her work in postcolonial science studies focuses on Indonesia and concerns the travels of scientific knowledge, especially biological knowledge, between EuroAmerica and Southeast Asia. Her first book, Wild Profusion: Biodiversity Conservation in an Indonesian Archipelago, published by Princeton in 2006, examined the role of Indonesia’s conservation biology in the creation of the new Togean Island National Park in Sulawesi. She currently studies viral outbreaks, especially the H5N1 avian influenza in Indonesia, and the Elephant Endotheliotropic Herpes Virus in Asian Elephants. Most recently she has written on Covid conspiracy, and the work of French philosopher Michel Serres.