Introduction:
Originally, I’d hoped this research project to be an analysis of the Western media response to the Ebola outbreak. As my research carried on, I focused the study on the stark limitations and biases of the popular discourse present in regards to the cultural epidemiology and understanding on the situation. Understanding the media response is critical to understanding how Westerners construct Ebola and it terms their response to the disease. Moreover, a persistent theme of the limited capabilities of anthropological applications to developing solutions is present in much of the mainstream discourse. In this paper, I seek to map the discursive contours of Ebola’s emergence, contextualize these trends within a larger debate about …show more content…
Irregardless of the subject matter: whether it be the pathology of the virus, the regional politics, and in particular the customs and cultures that have supposedly fueled the virus’s entrance to human populations and spread, the subtext is the same. The region is represented as unknowable from the outside and nonsensical from within and the appearance of peoples’ practices being pre-modern and irrational. It is a West African storyline that started back in the 1990s and early 2000s when war and political instability presented the world with a seemingly inexplicable crisis to be resolved. The only difference in the writing is that now it is about disease (Durham, 2007). In both cases the image construed is of a catastrophe removed from the historical context, and a challenge to be solved via appropriation of Western technology and support but again, severely lacking the socio-political and economic …show more content…
Indeed, culture is reconfigured into a “risk-factor.” Accounts of the disease paint African culture as an obstacle to prevention and epidemic control, such a linking the eruption of the disease to practices such as burial traditions or consumption of bushmeat. But this emphasis is misleading and propels a sense of African “otherness,” rather than evidence, and underpins dominant culturalist logic that “beliefs” motivate behaviors which increase the likelihood of Ebola’s emergence and spread. Absent from both popular and official rhetoric has been attention to larger structural political and economic determinants of the epidemic. Yet global forces condition the emergence of Ebola far more than culture does. Inequality and inadequate provision of healthcare, superpower geopolitics are responsible for much of Ebola’s spread. This is not to say culture does not matter, as structural forces alone don’t account for the destruction Ebola has wreaked. But the focus on culture comes at the expense of attention to sociopolitical and economic structures, hiding the reality that global forces affect epidemics in
Originally, I’d hoped this research project to be an analysis of the Western media response to the Ebola outbreak. As my research carried on, I focused the study on the stark limitations and biases of the popular discourse present in regards to the cultural epidemiology and understanding on the situation. Understanding the media response is critical to understanding how Westerners construct Ebola and it terms their response to the disease. Moreover, a persistent theme of the limited capabilities of anthropological applications to developing solutions is present in much of the mainstream discourse. In this paper, I seek to map the discursive contours of Ebola’s emergence, contextualize these trends within a larger debate about …show more content…
Irregardless of the subject matter: whether it be the pathology of the virus, the regional politics, and in particular the customs and cultures that have supposedly fueled the virus’s entrance to human populations and spread, the subtext is the same. The region is represented as unknowable from the outside and nonsensical from within and the appearance of peoples’ practices being pre-modern and irrational. It is a West African storyline that started back in the 1990s and early 2000s when war and political instability presented the world with a seemingly inexplicable crisis to be resolved. The only difference in the writing is that now it is about disease (Durham, 2007). In both cases the image construed is of a catastrophe removed from the historical context, and a challenge to be solved via appropriation of Western technology and support but again, severely lacking the socio-political and economic …show more content…
Indeed, culture is reconfigured into a “risk-factor.” Accounts of the disease paint African culture as an obstacle to prevention and epidemic control, such a linking the eruption of the disease to practices such as burial traditions or consumption of bushmeat. But this emphasis is misleading and propels a sense of African “otherness,” rather than evidence, and underpins dominant culturalist logic that “beliefs” motivate behaviors which increase the likelihood of Ebola’s emergence and spread. Absent from both popular and official rhetoric has been attention to larger structural political and economic determinants of the epidemic. Yet global forces condition the emergence of Ebola far more than culture does. Inequality and inadequate provision of healthcare, superpower geopolitics are responsible for much of Ebola’s spread. This is not to say culture does not matter, as structural forces alone don’t account for the destruction Ebola has wreaked. But the focus on culture comes at the expense of attention to sociopolitical and economic structures, hiding the reality that global forces affect epidemics in