On the Verge of Death: Visions of Biological Vulnerability

Abstract

This article considers how anthropologists and other social scientists examine biosecurity as an object in the making. It suggests that scholars encountered this object in research projects concerned with questions of global health, capitalism, neoliberalism, humanitarianism, citizenship, science, medicine, technology, ecology, surveillance, and risk. This growing body of work explores emerging modes of government that are characteristic for the post–Cold War period of global capitalism. Ethnographic accounts demonstrate how actors and institutions located in the Global North and the Global South perceive the spread of dangerous biological things as a threat to the health of individuals and populations. This article aims to review this literature and supplement the current approach with a theory of security performativity.