ABSTRACT: 

African Swine Fever (ASF) is a non-zoonotic, viral, porcine disease that has recently been shaking the world of pork production. In this talk I explore ASF epizootics beyond the farm by cross reading two instances in which it allegedly “jumped” between wild and domestic spaces. First, I closely read the original 1921 article that describes what would later be called ASF virus moving from warthog to settlers’ pigs via soft tick. Second, I analyze what veterinary epidemiologists titled the fourth epidemiological cycle of ASF which developed post 2007 in Eurasia and involves Eurasian wild boar. Focusing on the case of Czechia and its handling of ASF outbreaks in wild boar populations I will argue that the idea of ASF jumping from wild to domestic, from domestic to wild and back again is at closer look misleading, because in the porcine domestic-wild continuum there is hardly a place ‘beyond the farm’. Not only do ‘farm’s interests’ extend indefinitely, generating the ambition to monitor and ‘manage’ wildlife, also the tools of that management are typically modelled on farming logic.

BIO:

Ludek Broz is a researcher at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences where he heads the Department of Ecological Anthropology. After his undergraduate studies in ethnology at the Charles University in Prague, he obtained MPhil and PhD degrees in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge and held a postdoctoral position at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. Ludek heads an ERC-funded project VETERINAR-IZATION OF EUROPE? Hunting for Wild Boar Futures in the Time of African Swine Fever (BOAR). He is fascinated by what he coined ‘veterinarization of society’ and the way it shapes joined human-porcine futures. His ambition is to contribute with the BOAR project to better understanding of the role of veterinary expertise in contemporary societies—in human-animal relations and beyond—thus helping to build the emerging field of veterinary anthropology. Ludek is the author of Evil Spirits and Rocket Debris: In Search of Lost Souls in Siberia (Berghahn, 2024) and co-editor of Suicide and Agency: Anthropological Perspectives on Self-destruction, Personhood and Power (Routledge, 2016) with Daniel Muenster.

BIOrdinary 2024 Seminar Series