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Paper short abstract:

This talk explores how commerce and trade in non-human primates, blood, and viruses reshaped lives and landscapes in the Guinean Forests of West Africa. In the manufactured, multi-species world of Vilab II, new livelihoods, new interspecies relations, and new valuations of life took form.

Paper long abstract:

This talk explores how commerce and trade in non-human primates, blood, and viruses reshaped lives and landscapes in the Guinean Forests of West Africa. Vilab II, established in Liberia in 1974 by the New York Blood Center, was home to more than 400 chimpanzees, a keystone species in the industrial ecologies of hepatitis B vaccine research and production, over the lab’s thirty-year lifespan. The complex relations of care and associated labors performed at Vilab II mutually sustained interdependent worlds: big pharma, biomedicine, ethics, conservation, animal rights, politics, and civil war. Vilab II was a complex global exchange economy of circulating blood, tissues, viruses, labor, and cash. Relationships with chimps, built on notions of viral kinship, gave rise to countervailing affects—joy and suffering, affection and disdain, benevolence and exploitation, compassion and violence. Innuendos and rumors swirled around blood, infection, and vaccine like dust devils sustained by surface frictions and heat. Lives and livelihoods, once unrelated, became intertwined, dependent upon one another for mutual survival. In the quest for a hepatitis B vaccine, new livelihoods, new interspecies relations, and new valuations of life took form.