Abstract
The shared provenance of ‘contact’ and ‘contagion’ amounts to more than a linguistic curiosity: they risk becoming one and the same in practice. Contact of one people with another always risks contagion, and even deliberate contagion, say, in germ warfare from afar (by missiles or pox-infected blankets) is always also contact and therefore posits link or alliance. However, the contingency at the heart of the sometimes unintentional transmutation from one to the other is not purely stochastic. Rather, surviving the contingencies of contact and contagion is always a matter of power: of contestations, struggles, resistances, adaptations, equilibria and reversals among forces in a particular milieu — in short, the deliberate and tacit strategies that living beings undertake to live on. Writing of the question of what counts as a ‘successful’ form of life, the philosopher of medical sciences Georges Canguilhem insists that
Just as in war and politics there is no definitive victory, but only a relative and precarious superiority or equilibrium, so in the order of life there are no successes that radically devalorize other attempts and make them appear failed. All successes are threatened, since individuals and even species die. Successes are delayed failures; failures are aborted successes.1
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Notes
Georges Canguilhem, ‘The Normal and the Pathological’, in Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg (trans.) Knowledge of Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 126.
Cf. Jacques Derrida, ‘Living On: Border Lines’, in Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, and J. Hillis Miller (eds.), Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), pp. 75–176.
Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003)
Jimmy Casas Klausen, ‘Of Hobbes and Hospitality in Diderot’s Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville’, Polity 37:2 (April 2005), pp. 167–92.
Georg Cavallar, The Rights of Others: Theories of International Hospitality, the Global Community, and Political Justice since Vitoria (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).
Jacques Denida, Of Hospitality and Forgiveness, Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (trans.) (London: Routledge Press, 2001)
Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009)
Gideon Baker, ‘The “Double Law” of Hospitality: Rethinking Cosmopolitan Ethics in Humanitarian Intervention’, International Relations 24:1 (2010), pp. 87–103.
Gideon Baker’s consideration of hospitality as involving differential ‘risks’ (especially when imperial power is involved) is consonant with my emphasis on vulnerabilities here. See Baker, ‘The Spectre of Montezuma: Hospitality and Haunting’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39:1 (2010), pp. 23–42.
Immanual Kant, ‘Toward Perpetual Peace’, in Mary J. Gregor (trans. and ed.), Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 329.
Francisco de Vitoria, ‘On the American Indians’, in Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance (eds.), Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 278–84.
Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthome (eds. and trans.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 3–4.
Cf. Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, in Hans Reiss (ed.) and H. B. Nisbet (trans.) Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 41–53.
E.g., Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 50–65.
Jeremy Waldron, ‘Redressing Historic Injustice’, University of Toronto Law Review 52 (2002), pp. 135–60, 140 qtd.
Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State, Robert Hurley and Abe Stein (trans.) (New York: Zone Books, 1987)
James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
On’ state space’, see Scott, Art of Not Being Governed, Chapter 2. I should specify that, since I am analysing the issue of societies’ self-quarantine from the perspective of infectious disease vulnerability, I concentrate only on the case of indigenous self-isolating peoples, not other self-isolating societies (such as maroon societies). This focus is admittedly problematic, seeming to turn on a concept of purity or origin I consider suspect (On such issues, see James Clifford, ‘Indigenous Articulations,’ The Contemporary Pacific 13:2 [fall 2001], pp. 467–90).
Survival International, Disinherited: Indians in Brazil (London: Survival International, 2002), p. 21.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, Robert Hurley (trans.) (New York: Vintage, 1978), p. 138.
William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Anchor, 1998 [1976]), p. 77.
Ibid., passim; Alfred W. Crosby, ‘Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America’, The William and Mary Quarterly 33:2 (April 1976), pp. 289–99
Marshall T. Newman, ‘Aboriginal New World Epidemiology and Medical Care, and the Impact of Old World Disease Imports’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 45 (1976), pp. 667–72.
Ann Ramenofsky ‘Diseases of the Americas, 1492–1700’, in Kenneth F. Kiple (ed.), The Cambridge World History of Human Disease (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 317–28
Suzanne Austin Alchon, A Pest in the Land: New World Epidemics in a Global Perspective (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), p. 143.
Cf. Jane E. Buikstra, ‘Diseases of the Pre-Columbian Americas’, in K.F. Kiple (ed.), Cambridge World History of Human Disease (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 305–17.
Austin Alchon, A Pest in the Land, 3; Henry F. Dobyns, ‘Disease Transfer at Contact,’ Annual Review of Anthropology 22 (1993), pp. 273–91.
Qtd. in David Noble Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. vi.
Stuart B. Schwartz and Frank Salomon, ‘New Peoples and New Kinds of People: Adaptation, Readjustment, and Ethnogenesis in South American Indigenous Societies’, in Richard E.W. Adams and Murdo J. Macleod (eds.), Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, Vol. III: South America, Part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 443–501
Paul Kelton, ‘Avoiding the Smallpox Spirits: Colonial Epidemics and Southeastern Indian Survival’, Ethnohistory 51:1 (winter 2004), pp. 45–71
Hilary M. Carey and David Roberts, ‘Smallpox and the Baiame Waganna of Wellington Valley, New South Wales, 1829–1840: The Earliest Nativist Movement in Aboriginal Australia’, Ethnohistory 49:4 (fall 2002), pp. 821–69.
Daniel T. Reff, Disease, Depopulation, and Culture Change in Northwestern new Spain, 1518–1764 (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1991), p. 208
Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, Regions of Refuge (Washington, DC: Society for Applied Anthropology, 1979).
On controversies associated with authenticity of accounts of ‘lost tribes’ in New Guinea, see Edward L. Schieffelin, ‘Early Contact as Drama and Manipulation in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea: Pacification as the Structure of the Conjuncture’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37:3 (July 1995), pp. 555–80
Piene Lemornnier, ‘The Hunt for Authenticity: Stone Age Stories out of Context’, The Journal of Pacific History 39:1 (June 2004), pp. 79–98.
Survival International, Disinherited, p. 21; Pierre Clastres, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians, Paul Auster (trans.) (New York: Zone Books, 1998), p. 113
Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Labor’s Lot: The Power, History, and Culture of Aboriginal Action (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 27.
Magdalena Hurtado, Kim Hill, Hillard Kaplan, and Jane Lancaster, ‘The Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases among South American Indians: A Call for Guidelines for Ethical Research’, Current Anthropology 42:3 (June 2001), pp. 425–40
Tess Lea, Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts: Indigenous Health in Northern Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008), p. 16.
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Klausen, J.C. (2013). Reservations on Hospitality: Contact and Vulnerability in Kant and Indigenous Action. In: Baker, G. (eds) Hospitality and World Politics. Palgrave Studies in International Relations Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137290007_9
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