Getting Lucky in Thailand: Or How to Coexist with Coronaviruses in Multispecies Contact Zones

Jonathan Yee, “Bizarre Wuhan Wet Market Menu Shows Over 100 Wild Animals Sold As Food, Link With Virus Unclear,” Must Share News, January 24, 2020 →.

Andrew Liu, “‘Chinese Virus,’ World Market,” n+1, March 20, 2020 →.

Eben Kirksey hosted an interdisciplinary forum during the pandemic, the “Coronavirus Multispecies Reading Group,” in collaboration with Rachel Vaughn. This group brought cultural theorists, historians, artists, and anthropologists into conversation with virologists, ecologists, and molecular biologists. A complete archive of these discussions is available on YouTube →. For a critical discussion of the primary scientific literature that traces the pandemic to “wet markets” of Wuhan, in conversation with the scientists who conducted the original research, see the discussions with Jonathan Pekar and Joel Wertheim (May 23, 2022), Stephen Goldstein (September 27, 2021), and Kristian Andersen (May 1, 2020).

K. Suwannarong et al. “Coronavirus Seroprevalence among Villagers Exposed to Bats in Thailand,” Zoonoses and Public Health 68, no. 5 (2021): 464–73. See also N. Wang et al., “Serological Evidence of Bat SARS-Related Coronavirus Infection in Humans, China,” Virologica Sinica 33, no. 1 (2018): 104–7; S. Virachith, “Low Seroprevalence of COVID-19 in Lao PDR, Late 2020,” The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific, no. 13 (2021).

C. A. Sánchez et al., “A Strategy to Assess Spillover Risk of Bat SARS-Related Coronaviruses in Southeast Asia,” Nature Communications 13, no. 1 (2022): 4380.

A. E. Gorbalenya et al., “The Species Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Related Coronavirus : Classifying 2019-nCoV and naming it SARS-CoV-2,” Nature Microbiology 5, no. 4 (2020): 536–44.

Celia Lowe, “Viral Clouds: Becoming H5n1 in Indonesia,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010): 625–49.

Suwannarong et al., “Coronavirus Seroprevalence among Villagers.”

Lyle Fearnley, Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China’s Pandemic Epicenter (Duke University Press, 2020).

Sánchez et al., “A Strategy to Assess Spillover Risk.”

For a meditation on the emergence of new forms of life at the intersection of oblique forces of power, see Eben Kirksey, Emergent Ecologies (Duke University Press, 2015).

Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, A History of Thailand (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Duke University Press, 2010); Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science (Princeton University Press, 2011); Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene, ed. Anna Tsing et al. (Stanford University Press, 2021) →.

R. M. Scott, Nirvana for Sale?: Buddhism, Wealth, and the Dhammakaya Temple in Contemporary Thailand (SUNY Press, 2009).

Marilyn J. Roossinck, “Move Over, Bacteria! Viruses Make Their Mark as Mutualistic Microbial Symbionts,” Journal of Virology 89, no. 13 (2015): 6532–35; A. G. Cobián Güemes et al., “Viruses as Winners in the Game of Life,” Annual Review of Virology 3, no. 1 (2016): 197–214; Merry Youle, Thinking Like a Phage: The Genius of the Viruses That Infect Bacteria and Archaea (Wholon, 2017).

Charlotte Brives, “Pluribiosis and the Never-Ending Microgeohistories,” in With Microbes, ed. C. Brives, Matthäus Rest, and Salla Sariola (Mattering Press, 2021).

See →.

James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009).

Nicholas Tapp, “Hmong Religion,” Asian Folklore Studies 48, no. 1 (1989): 59–94.

Nicholas Tapp, “Buddhism and the Hmong: A Case Study in Social Adjustment,” Journal of Developing Societies, no. 2 (1986): 68–88; Ian G. Baird, “The Emergence of an Environmentally Conscious and Buddhism-Friendly Marginalized Hmong Religious Sect along the Laos-Thailand Border,” Asian Ethnology 79, no. 2 (2020): 311–32.

Michel Serres, The Parasite (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 15–16.

Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 22.

A. T. Irving et al., “Lessons from the Host Defences of Bats, a Unique Viral Reservoir, Nature 589, no. 7842 (2021): 363–70.

Sánchez et al., “A Strategy to Assess Spillover Risk,” 4380.

Suwannarong et al., “Coronavirus Seroprevalence among Villagers.”

Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Greenwood Pub. Co., 1972).

Philip D. Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

G. A. Engel et al., “Human Exposure to Herpesvirus B–Seropositive Macaques, Bali, Indonesia,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 8, no. 8 (2002): 789–95; I Gusti Agung Arta Putra et al., “First Survey on Seroprevalence of Japanese Encephalitis in Long-Tailed Macaques (Macaca Fascicularis) in Bali, Indonesia,” Veterinary World 12, no. 6 (2022); L. Jones-Engel et al., “Diverse Contexts of Zoonotic Transmission of Simian Foamy Viruses in Asia,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 14, no. 8 (2008): 1200–8.

V. J. Munster et al., “Respiratory Disease in Rhesus Macaques Inoculated with SARS-CoV-2,” Nature 585, no. 7824 (2020): 268–72.

Pictures of the donations from the community can be viewed on the temple’s Facebook page. See → and →.

Mary Louise Pratt initially developed ideas about the contact zone in the 1990s to understand colonial encounters “where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.” More recently, around a decade ago, Donna Haraway characterized “naturalcultural contact zones” that involve subject-shaping encounters in multispecies milieus where power, knowledge, and moral questions are all in play. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (Routledge, 1992), 4; Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 205.