Paper short abstract:

Archival research (and more generally the historiographic operation) is always a risky confrontation to the latent, even toxic, potentials of archives - and of other traces of the past. How do historians of epidemics - whether they literally exhume bodies or not - negotiate this risk?

Paper long abstract:

"Archives . . . constitute a type of sepulchre," wrote Achille Mbembe, an apparatus aiming to "ensure that the dead do not stir up disorder in the present". Following this perspective, archival research (and more generally the historiographic operation) is always a risky confrontation to the latent, disorder-stirring, even toxic, potentials of archives - and of other traces of the past.

To discuss this further, we will present a recent ethnographic research on the traces of a global health intervention in a remote region of the Cameroon-Congo borderland. In 1997-1998 an epidemic of severe illness was signalled in the small town of Ngoyla, killing close to 100 people. Red alert: the epidemic was locally called "Ebola", while the closest doctor (and derelict hospital) was more that a day of motorbike away. An international rescue mission was organized, which led to the elucidation of the cause of the epidemic, to the distribution of efficient antibiotics, and to a series of publication in high-impact factor journals. Our ethnography was an assessment and a parody of this global health success story. Returning on the site of the epidemic 20 years later, and tracking through Cameroon and France all of the actors of the rescue mission, we risked stirring up disorders and waking up a toxic past. Our paper will discuss how historians of epidemics - whether they literally exhume bodies or not - are exposed to this; their work inevitably oscillating between a profanation and a "safe burial" of the past.