Containing Schistosomes: On Questing for Containment among Overspilling Bodies, Latrines and Lakes in Rural Uganda

• In Event: Opening up Containment: Spaces, Trajectories, and Forms of Life - I

Abstract

Schistosomiasis is a neglected tropical disease that cycles through the bodies of lake-dwelling snails and humans: contact with ‘contaminated’ lake water facilitates the flow of schistosomes into human bodies; open defecation facilitates the flow of schistosomes from human faeces into the water. Current efforts to manage transmission rest on two contrasting impulses: expulsion and containment. In the consumption of the no-cost, easy-to-access medicine praziquantel, schistosomes are expelled from the body with force. Yet this expulsion lies in tension with, and produces particular challenges for, strategies of containment.

In this ethnography of schistosomiasis transmission, efforts at containment occur in three key spaces: bodies, latrines, and the lake. The containment of faeces within bodies as solution rests on the idea of bodily control as (feasible) alternative to the “promiscuous defecation” of colonised Others (Anderson 2006). Yet, the orderly discharge of waste across bodily boundaries depends on the intersection of ideas about digestion, seasonal availability of foodstuffs, and technologies of food preparation and preservation. It also depends on the existence and accessibility of pit latrines. Unfortunately, like bodies, pit latrines frequently resist containment, overspilling their bounds when the water table is higher than the depth of the latrine or when flooding during rainy season. Efforts to contain schistosomes within the lake are similarly hampered by human movements in and out of the water. ‘Breaking the cycle’ thus requires interrogation of often-unexamined ideas about what bodies, water and land are and whether and how they can be ‘contained’ and by what forces.

Author

• Lucy Pickering, The University of Glasgow