Lyle Fearnley’s Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China’s Pandemic Epicenter offers a gripping anthropological account of the search for the origins of influenza pandemics in China. As an outgrowth of the author’s field studies in Jiangxi’s Poyang Lake and in Beijing, this book focuses on the “displacement” of the widespread scholarly and media hypothesis that southern China is the influenza epicenter. (Here, “displacement” refers to unexpected changes to scientists’ research objects, whereby “epistemological assumptions were put in motion, experimental systems were adjusted, and norms of scientific practice were modified” [19]). This displacement can be understood on three levels. First, scientists’ “movement into the epicenter [in search for the origins of influenza] displaced the epistemic conditions of research on pandemic influenza.” Second, the movement into the epicenter “displaced the laboratory models of experimental practice.” Third, the movement into the epicenter “brought global health projects for pandemic preparedness onto China’s national territory, producing new reassortments of transnational science and ‘biosovereignty’” (194–96).
