Biosecurity: Towards an anthropology of the contemporary

3 We have been working for a number of years now on developing methods, concepts, and means of identifying appropriate objects for an anthropology of the contemporary. Recently, we have chosen to focus collectively on one significant domain of enquiry, ‘biosecurity’ – the genealogies, imaginaries and emergent articulations of biological weapons and biodefence. Security issues are widely identified as significant. The challenge for critical scholars is to move beyond platitudes and to identify with more precision domains which merit sustained investigation. As an initial framing, we here focus on how biosecurity has been ‘problematized’. ‘Problematization’ is a technical term that suggests a particular way of analysing an event or situation. As Michel Foucault has written, ‘a problematization does not mean the representation of a pre-existent object nor the creation through discourse of an object that did not exist. It is the ensemble of discursive and non-discursive practices that make something enter into the play of true and false and constitute it as an object of thought (whether in the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc.)’ (1994: 670). The reason that problematizations are problematic, writes Foucault, is that something prior ‘must have happened to introduce uncertainty, a loss of familiarity; that loss, that uncertainty is the result of difficulties in our previous way of understanding, acting, relating’ (1994: 598). The mode of enquiry into problematizations proposed by Foucault is not that of a first-order observer who seeks, as Rabinow puts it, ‘to proceed directly toward intervention and repair of the situation’s discordancy’ (2003:18). Rather, it is that of a second-order observer whose task is to achieve a ‘modal change from seeing a situation not only as a given but equally as a question’, to understand how, in a given situation, there are ‘multiple constraints at work[…] but multiple responses as well’ (ibid.: 18-19). Thus, to investigate bioterrorism and biosecurity as a site of problematization is to ask questions such as: What kind of ‘uncertainty’ or ‘loss of familiarity’ has been introduced by the threat of bioterrorism, and in what domains? What ways of understanding, acting and relating are disrupted? What forms of political analysis, moral reflection and techno-scientific practice are being mobilized by actors (scientists, policy-makers, planners) in shaping – and operating in relationship to – something called biosecurity?