UC Berkeley

This thesis is an anthropological study of the making of global health on China's grounds, based on inquiry into the health programs assembled around China's poultry sector amidst outbreaks of avian influenza. Influenza pandemics are global in scale, but since the 1960s flu experts have hypothetically located the origin, or "epicenter," of flu pandemics in southern China. Drawing on extensive fieldwork among flu experts, Chinese veterinarians, and farmers, the thesis describes how the farmed ecology of Poyang Lake in southern China is being studied as a possible epicenter of influenza emergence. As global dangers are attributed to specific Chinese environments and agricultural practices, I follow flu experts as they move from the laboratory to the field and as they shift their scientific object from the sequence to the ecosystem. This movement outside the laboratory is also a movement onto China's grounds, a motion that I argue raises three anthropological problems.

First, emerging transnational scientific collaborations around avian influenza go well beyond the idea that China is a political obstacle to global health. These scientific transactions taking place on China's grounds reframe the historical problematization of China and modern science, as a rising China plays a fundamental role in shaping the contemporary global science of influenza.

Second, unlike other well-studied Asian biotech sites, bird flu research is grounded in transactions with farmers, livestock animals, and rural ways of life. The thesis analyzes how influenza experts adjust their scientific concepts and categories to account for historically and culturally specific practices of breeding and raising livestock, and shows how these livestock breeding practices continue to exceed and complicate scientific categories.

Lastly, the thesis concludes by showing how China's livestock veterinarians become controversial mediating figures between the lab and the farm, transforming the social break between the scientist and the livestock breeder into an ethical problem of vocation and "quality" (suzhi). As a result, the thesis argues that the movement from the lab to the field calls for an anthropology of science that attends to vocation and social relation as ethical problems, going beyond the sociology of scientific fact construction.