Synopses & Reviews
Until recently, plagues were thought to belong in the ancient past. Now there are deep worries about global pandemics. This book presents views from anthropology about this much publicized and complex problem. The authors take us to places where epidemics are erupting, waning, or gone and to other places where they have not yet arrived, but where a frightening story-line is already in place. They explore public health bureaucracies and political arenas where the power lies to make decisions about what is, and is not, an epidemic. They look back into global history to uncover disease trends and look ahead to a future of expanding plagues within the context of climate change. The chapters are written from a range of perspectives, from the science of modelling epidemics to the social science of understanding them.
About the Author
Ann Herring is Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University. Alan C. Swedlund is Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Table of Contents
Charles L. Briggs
4.On creating epidemics, plagues and other wartime alarums and excursions: enumerating versus estimating civilian mortality in Iraq
James Trostle
5.Avian influenza and the third epidemiological transition
Ron Barrett
6.Deconstructing an epidemic: Cholera in Gibraltar
Lawrence A. Sawchuk
7.The end of plague? TB in New Zealand
Judith Littleton, Julie Park and Linda Bryder
8.Epidemics and time: Influenza and tuberculosis during and after the 1918-19 pandemic
Andrew Noymer
9.Everyday mortality in the time of plague: Ordinary people under extraordinary circumstances in Massachusetts before and during the 1918 flu epidemic
Alan C. Swedlund
10.The coming plague of avian influenza
D. Ann Herring and Stacy Lockerbie
11.Past into present: History and the making of knowledge about HIV/AIDS and Aboriginal people
Mary-Ellen Kelm
12.Accounting for epidemics: Mathematical modeling and anthropology
Steven M. Goodreau
13.Social inequalities and dengue transmission in Latin America
Arachu Castro, Yasmin Khawja, James Johnston
14.From plague, an epidemic comes: Recounting disease as contamination and configuration
Warwick Anderson
15.Making plagues visible: Yellow fever, hookworm, Chagas Disease, 1900-1950
Ilana Löwy
16.Malaria eradication's metaphors in cold war Mexico
Marcos Cueto
17.'Steady with custom': Mediating HIV prevention in the Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea
Katherine Lepani
18.Explaining kuru: three ways to think about an epidemic
Shirley Lindenbaum