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Paper short abstract

We explore the partial commensurability between microbial ecology and Colombo-Panamanian Kuna “shamanic” understandings of the body, the environment, and beings inflicting infectious diseases such as malaria and a mumps-like disease unrelated to MuV, and explore emerging infectious diplomacies

Paper long abstract

It starts examining perplexed biomedical efforts to translate Kuna understandings of malaria (which involve an elephant-like master of alligators but no mosquitoes), showing the shortcomings of One-Health-style approaches to non-Western knowledge, which are often reductionistic, instrumentalizing, and antagonizing. It proposes considerations for taking other knowledges seriously: a) Engaging ontologies, b) validating epistemologies, c) most importantly, reframing to address community interests, and d) acknowledging challenges to “western” perspectives. Kuna ontology describes how organisms and the environment are “holographically” constituted and permeated by multitudinous beings that have bodies, require nourishment, and reproduce. Some of these beings protect specific animals, plants, or places by inflicting specific infectious or mental diseases, i.e., pathogens. The master of alligators is also the master of specific swamps. Given that Kuna epistemology emphasizes subjective experiences, we explore means of phenomenological access to the microbial world and how they align with descriptions of the malaria master. Consulting with the community, we refocus on sacred sites: when plans for a national road cross the sacred site of the master of mumps materialize, road workers are afflicted by the disease, Westernized and Kuna ontologies turn out to be partially commensurable, as the national health system acknowledges bouts of an unidentified fever syndrome. The road was completed, the workers left, and the outbreak ended. Years later, the road turned the area into a scenario of a mass-scale human trafficking crisis, calling for a closer look at how more-than-human infrastructures. But also, suggesting sacred sites challenge Western approaches to pathogens, offering diplomatic alternatives.