Paper short abstract:

We give an account of the course of, and state response to, the 2017 avian influenza outbreak in Cape Town, South Africa, considering how ideas of enforcement, containment, compensation, and value are mediated across forms of life and death.

Paper long abstract:

In mid 2017, a highly-pathogenic avian influenza (H5N8) outbreak swept across southern Africa, devastating the poultry industry in the Western Cape and affecting supplies and prices of eggs and meat in the province. State services struggled to contain the outbreak, and by the end of 2017 more than three million birds had died or had been culled nationally. In this paper, we present a thick ethnographic account of the state response to the outbreak, tracing the course of the outbreak and the technologies deployed by veterinarians, health officials, politicians, and ordinary citizens, in order to consider how ideas about enforcement, containment, compensation, and value are mediated and translated across forms of life and death.

We focus on a set of relations made visible by the outbreak, between medium-sized commercial farmers and an informal market for live layer hens at the end of their productive lives. In the translation of industrial laying poultry into imileqwa (tough, wiry, tasty, rural chickens at the heart of urban consumption of protein) by means of "a cull-buyer market" lies a complex economy of containment and compensation. The case illustrates how the biopolitics of avian influenza in this postcolonial urban setting elicits ambivalent concerns about security and readiness, the value of life and the place of animals in the city. Following unstable lines of transmission, infection, and consumption, we argue that informal economies and local institutional arrangements are important factors that shape local technologies of biosecurity and preparedness.