Science, Technology, and Medicine Seminars – Emergency Ecology: Birds, Blood, War, and the Figuring of Malaya as Australian-Siberian Borderland, 1947-1974

Emergency Ecology: Birds, Blood, War, and the Figuring of Malaya as Australian-Siberian Borderland, 1947-1974

Jack Greatrex

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Abstract

A metal band from the leg of a shot heron was sent to US epidemiologist Elliott McClure in 1964. The bird had been killed in Kota Bharu, Kelantan, on the east coast of tropical Malaysia. It had been banded, however, at distant Lake Kanka — some 3230 miles away in Primorsk, Siberia, bordering Manchuria and level with Hokkaido. As part of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway, such hemisphere-spanning flights by birds were not uncommon — they were seasonal events. But McClure’s attention to these flights marked something distinctive. Starting the year before and lasting till 1974, the Migratory Animals Pathological Survey (MAPS) attempted to elucidate the possible connexions between the avian flyway and zoonotic disease, investigating especially the “Group B” family of encephalitis viruses which were suspected to be seeded by birds in a hemispheric arc from Australia through Malaya to northern Japan and Siberia.

This talk analyses the work of the MAPS project at two scales, demonstrating the coproduction of disease ecology and counterinsurgency in Malaya and reconceptualising its region-spanning geography. It situates the Project amidst a post-1947 pivot from disease ecology funded by colonial plantations to research supported by the British and American militaries, as Malaya became embroiled in bloody counter-insurgency during the “Emergency”. This research entailed an unprecedentedly thorough investigation of the Malayan landscape: exploring caves, aboriginal villages, and rainforest canopies in the service of colonial and anticommunist war. At the same time, the talk follows the Project looking outward, as the hemispheric flights of birds opened up a new perspective on Malaya as a tropical borderland northward of Australasia and southward of the distant but entangled Siberian north.

Bio

Jack Greatrex is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He completed a PhD at the University of Hong Kong after an MPhil and BA at the University of Cambridge. He has worked on histories of infrastructural assemblages in Hong Kong, Cold War disease ecology in Southeast Asia, and networks of entomological and virological exchange between Southeast Asia and the islands of the south Pacific. His work has appeared in, or is due to appear, in Medical Anthropology, Roadsides, Somatosphere, Medical History, the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong, Urban History, and the Journal of Asian Studies.

The Science, Technology and Medicine Seminar (STMS) series, co-hosted by the Medical Ethics and Humanities Unit and the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong, promotes cutting edge cross-disciplinary research that straddles the arts, sciences, and medicine. The aim is to provide a friendly forum to debate and test new ideas, papers, chapters, book projects and grant proposals, as well as topical issues and individual research.

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