Department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
Infectious Diseases Research Collaboration, Kampala, Uganda.
Med Anthropol Q. 2023 Dec;37(4):382-395. doi: 10.1111/maq.12809. Epub 2023 Sep 13.
In siloed discussions of antimicrobial resistance, antibiotic use on farms in the Global South has emerged as a key site for intervention. The antibiotic consumption targeted is not all consumption, but "irrational" consumption. This concept of irrationality is neither new, nor true, but rather is a long-standing form of maintenance work within global health systems. Via an attention to chickens and the antibiotics farmers use to raise them in the suburbs of Kampala, we suggest that claims of irrationality are a central part of constituting what Tania Li has called the 'deficient subject'. In other words, irrationality, like the chicken and the antibiotic, is itself a humanitarian device that maintains a certain condition of governance where 'Africans' are imagined as being in deficit of rationality and good behavior. Claims of irrationality justify (and mask the political nature of) intervention.
在对抗生素耐药性的孤立讨论中，抗生素在全球南方农场的使用已成为干预的重点。目标抗生素消费并非全部消费，而是“不合理”消费。这种非理性的概念既不新鲜，也不真实，而是全球卫生系统中长期存在的一种维持工作形式。通过关注坎帕拉郊区的鸡和农民用来饲养它们的抗生素，我们认为，不合理的说法是构成塔尼亚·李所说的“有缺陷的主体”的核心部分。换句话说，非理性就像鸡和抗生素一样，本身就是一种人道主义手段，它维持着一种治理状态，在这种状态下，“非洲人”被想象为在理性和良好行为方面存在缺陷。非理性的说法证明了（并掩盖了干预的政治性质）干预的合理性。
