Global Panic, Local Repercussions: Exploring the Impact of Avian Influenza in Vietnam

Abstract

Despite deliberately marked and guarded political and cultural boundaries, the current global state is one where epidemic is the norm and disease travels across the globe through the transnational movement of people and international trade. While developing countries or countries receiving foreign aid are at the centre of disease fatality and transmission, the rhetoric of blame serves to strengthen socio-economic divisions that divide East from West and North from South with adjectives like “modern” and “primitive,” “hygienic” and “unhygienic.” Using chicken as a metaphor, this paper draws attention to the paradoxes and misconceptions of avian influenza in Vietnam and through the exploration of local voices, comes to a better understanding of how the disease rhetoric has affected the social and cultural landscape. This research is situated in the discipline somewhere between the anthropology of infectious disease and the anthropology of food, while also incorporating themes from anthropological theory pertaining to borders, hegemonies and race. Moving beyond the epidemiological study of avian flu, I draw attention to the phenomenology or lived experience in a state of disease as residents voluntarily omit chicken, a valuable source of protein, from their diet in order to stay healthy.