Roth, Emmanuelle. “Researching the Ebola Reservoir with the Heuristic of the Fetish in Guinea.” Medical Anthropology 42, no. 4 (2023): 369–82.
The unprecedented character of the 2013–2016 epidemic of Ebola in West Africa paved the way for a wave of investigations into the reservoir of the disease. A novel economy of health projects arose, which employed Guinean professionals to sample animals and fortify a hypothesis: that the disease spilled over from a bat. Through exploring virology research and its dangers in post-Ebola Guinea, I argue that the hypothesis of a bat reservoir has taken on a heuristic role that can be compared to the way that a fetish polarizes relations between the people who manipulate and fear this idea. (Abstract)
This article is part of the project “Fragments of the Forest: Hot Zones, Disease Ecologies, and the Changing Landscape of Environment and Health in West Africa,” which received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant agreement No. 885120).
This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.