The epidemiologist as culture hero : visualizing humanity in the age of “the next pandemic”

Concern over the “coming plague,” a projected microbiological catastrophe threatening the survival of humanity, has come to generate a new cinematic figure: the epidemiologist as culture hero. The visual narrative of the “coming plague” unfolds in recent films, where the biopolitical content of this symbolic form becomes clear. This article examines how, by merging fears regarding the next pandemic with apocalyptic fantasy, the films in question institute the epidemiologist as responsible for the re-pastoralization and re-pasteurization of humanity—a goal achieved by setting self-limitation of individual freedoms as the condition for the biological and ontological perseverance of humankind.

Citation

Lynteris , C 2016 , ' The epidemiologist as culture hero : visualizing humanity in the age of “the next pandemic” ' , Visual Anthropology , vol. 29 , no. 1 , pp. 36-53 . https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2016.1108823

Publication

Visual Anthropology

Status

Peer reviewed

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2016.1108823

ISSN

0894-9468

Type

Journal article

Rights

© 2015 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created accepted version manuscript following peer review and as such may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2016.1108823

Description

Research leading to this paper was unded by a European Research Council Starting Grant (under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme/ERC grant agreement no 336564)

Collections

University of St Andrews Research

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15683