Eben Kirksey: "Making Merit With Viral Theory in Thailand"

ABSTRACT: 

Viruses have lurked on the margins of cultural theory ever since Deleuze and Guattari suggested that “our viruses make us form a rhizome with other creatures.” Long before the internet was a thing, Jean Baudrillard described television as a “viral, endemic, chronic, alarming presence.”  The probiotic turn in multispecies studies and the environmental humanities has influenced more recent theoretical work related to viral politics and the symbiotic potential of infectious agents. This work in progress talk will deploy emergent concepts related to viral theory to understand the contact zones of northern Thailand where bats, cats, tourists, monks, and multiple species of viruses meet. At Thai Buddhist temples in caves where diverse kinds of coronaviruses are found monks are making merit by chanting, meditating, and helping with everyday labor like temple maintenance. As new knowledge emerges about viruses in these spaces, some monks are developing new approaches to making merit—they are learning how to better live alongside viruses in ways that protect their communities and the broader world.

BIO: 

Fellow of St Cross College  Eben Kirksey, professor of anthropology at Oxford University, is a cultural anthropologist who is perhaps best known for his work in multispecies ethnography—a field that situates contemporary scholarship on animals, microbes, plants, and fungi within deeply rooted traditions of environmental anthropology, continental philosophy, and the sociology of science. Questions related to science and social justice animate his most recent book, The Mutant Project (2020), which offers an insiders account of the laboratory in China that created the world’s first children whose genes were edited with CRISPR-Cas9.  Kirksey was a British Marshall Scholar at the University of Oxford, before he went on to earn his PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has taught at some of the most selective and innovative higher education institutions like Princeton University and Deep Springs College. In Australia he helped found the Environmental Humanities program at UNSW Sydney, and he maintains ongoing collaborations with colleagues at the Alfred Deakin Institute in Melbourne, Australia.  Personal website: https://eben-kirksey.space/