ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

A Mauritanian Anademic: Pasteurian Science in the Search of Sylvatic Plague at the (Post)Imperial Frontier

• In Event: Science and Empire in the Anthropocene: Towards an Environmental Shift 3 - (Post)-Imperial Ecologies

English Abstract

The paper examines the ways in which a key Pasteurian scientist, Marcel Baltazard, approached the disease ecology of sylvatic plague in postcolonial Mauritania. Positioned between his more famous research on plague among wild rodents in Iran and Brazil, Baltazard’s Mauritania expedition and ensuing Pasteurian research in what was at the time a recently independent country (1969-1971) has been overlooked by historians. Yet it plays an important role in the emergence of Pasteurian approaches to disease ecologies. Key to these frameworks, the paper will argue, was Baltazard’s development and application of notion of the “anademic” (anadémie) (originally coined in 1959) to bring together ecological and ethnographic data from the Mauritanian-Spanish Sahara borderland and its nomadic communities and configure the existence of plague foyers in the absence of a scientifically ascertainable animal reservoirs or effective insect vectors. Developed in debate with recent studies of sylvatic plague science at imperial frontiers, and the critical study of the notion of disease reservoirs, the paper will examine how this neglected episode in Pasteurian science acted as an important bridge between the research that would establish Marcel Baltazard as a key player in the science of disease ecology during the Cold War.

Author

• Christos Lynteris, University of St Andrews