Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the epistemographic dimensions of hospitality by describing a group of experimental huts used to model malaria transmission and pilot public health policy in Tanzania.

Paper long abstract:

Because their hosts tend to sleep indoors, Anopheles gambiae are highly domestic. During the 1940s in East Africa, British researchers built mud-walled, thatched-roofed huts with exit-traps fitted over the windows to model malaria transmission at population and ecosystem scales. Designed as an intermediary between the field and the laboratory, experimental hut architecture consists of ingeniously assembled inscription devises. Screened verandas, exit traps, entry baffles, raised foundations and concrete moats render the biting patterns of mosquitoes visible; local materials, built-in structural imperfections, and villagers paid to spend the night ensure the huts' representative authority. The experimental huts provide a frame to forecast the 'typical'.

Focusing on a series of experimental huts recently constructed in south-west Tanzania, this paper explores the kinds of hospitalities elicited by the home turned laboratory. From the colonial period and the advent of DDT to independence and the Gates Foundation Grand Challenges, the experimental hut has yoked international research to state governance and public health policy to domestic praxis. This paper suggests how configured experimentally, dwelling provides a framework to put science in its place: it analyzes how 'the home' spatially integrates the empirical relations of scrutiny with the epidemiological relations under scrutiny. Exploring how the huts configure the intractable guest-host relation that exists between the human and non-human, this paper describes malaria control as hospitable vectors drawn between man, mosquito and science.