The Anthropology of Epidemics

Over the past decades, infectious disease epidemics have come to increasingly pose major global health challenges to humanity. The Anthropology of Epidemics approaches epidemics as total social phenomena: processes and events which encompass and exercise a transformational impact on social life whilst at the same time functioning as catalysts of shifts and ruptures as regards human/non-human relations. Bearing a particular mark on subject areas and questions which have recently come to shape developments in anthropological thinking, the volume brings epidemics to the forefront of anthropological debate, as an exemplary arena for social scientific study and analysis.

Ann H. Kelly is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, King’s College London, UK, and the Co-Deputy Director of the King’s Global Health Institute. Her work focuses on the socio-material practices of global health research and innovation in sub-Saharan Africa.

Frederic Keck is Director of Research at CNRS, attached to the Laboratory for Social Anthropology in Paris, France. He has conducted researches on the genealogy of social sciences, the ethnography of zoonotic diseases, and the microbial history of collections of human remains.

Christos Lynteris is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, UK. His work focuses on the anthropological and historical examination of infectious disease epidemics. He is the author of The Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China (2012) and Ethnographic Plague (2016).