Livestock Revolution and Ghostly Apparitions: South China as a Sentinel Territory for Influenza Pandemics

摘要

This article develops three ethnographic scenes in Hong Kong reflecting three narratives of pandemic influenza as a side effect of the livestock revolution: an expert's view of the Hong Kong territory as a sentinel post on the edge of the epicenter for pandemic flu, a farmer's view of Hong Kong as a colonial experimentation on ways to raise chickens industrially, and a bird-watcher's view of Hong Kong as a place full of bird spirits. In these different settings, I contrast the logic of indicators with the logic of sentinels and ask what it means to release a bird on the threshold of domestication, considered not as an evolutionary step but as a space of friction where humans and birds enter into an uncertain interaction.