The Viral Creep: Elephants and Herpes in Times of Extinction
Across the world, elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus is increasingly killing elephant calves and threatening the long-term survival of the Asian elephant, a species that is currently facing extinction. This talk presents several open-ended stories of elephant care in times of death and loss: at places of confinement and elephant suffering like the zoos in Seattle and Zürich as well as in the conflict-ridden landscapes of South India, Myanmar, and Indonesia where some of the last free-ranging Asian elephants live. These stories of deadly viral-elephant-human becomings remind us that neither human care, love, and attentiveness nor techniques of control and creative management are sufficient to fully secure elephant survival. The talk introduces the concept of “viral creep” to explore the ability of a creeping, only partially knowable virus to rearrange relations among people, animals, and objects despite multiple experimental human regimes of elephant care, governance, and organization. The viral creep exceeds the physical and intellectual contexts of human interpretation and control. It reminds us that uncertainty and modes of imaging are always involved when we make sense of the world around us.
Date: 5/9 (Tuesday)
Time: 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 n.n.
Venue: Room 271338, South Wing, General Building
Speaker: Celia Lowe (Department of Anthropology, University of Washington)
About Speaker: Celia Lowe is Professor of Anthropology and International Studies, and Director of the Center for Southeast Asia and its Diasporas, at the University of Washington. Her work in postcolonial science studies focuses on Indonesia and concerns the travels of scientific knowledge, especially biological knowledge, between EuroAmerica and Southeast Asia. Her first book, Wild Profusion: Biodiversity Conservation in an Indonesian Archipelago, published by Princeton in 2006, examined the role of Indonesian’s conservation biology in the creation of the new Togean Island National Park in Sulawesi. She currently studies viral outbreak, especially the H5N1 avian influenza in Indonesia, and the Elephant Endotheliotropic Herpes Virus in Asian Elephants. Most recently she has written on Covid conspiracy, and the work of French philosopher Michel Serres.
