Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic

Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic is an interdisciplinary research project led by social anthropologist, Dr Christos Lynteris. The project is funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant (under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme/ERC grant agreement no 336564). The HI of the project between October 2013 and September 2017 was CRASSH (University of Cambridge). As of October 2017 the project's HI is the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, with CRASSH remaining a co-beneficiary until the project ends in September 2018.

The project will collect and analyse photographs as well as other visual documents of the third plague pandemic, which broke out in 1855 in Southwest China (Yunnan) and raged across the globe until 1959, causing the death of approximately 12 million people.

As Yersinia pestis spread from country to country and from continent to continent, it left behind it not only a trail of death and terror, but also a growing visual archive on the first global pandemic to be captured by the photographic lens. Rather however than forming a homogeneous or linear visual narrative, these photographic documents provided diverging perspectives on the pandemic, which, more often than not, were not simply different from region to region, but in fact conflicting within any single locus of infection.

The project’s hypothesis is that its visual representation played a pivotal role in the formation of both scientific understandings and public perception of infectious disease epidemics in the modern era.

While investigating the visual record of the third plague pandemic in East Asia, South Asia, Africa and the Americas, researchers will engage in a collaborative and interdisciplinary analysis of the entangled history of the visual representation of the pandemic, taking as a common analytical ground four different but vitally interlinked aspects of the visual representation of the pandemic:

• The Built Environment
• Civil Disturbance and Public Order
• Death, Corpses and Burial
• Race, Class and Discrimination

For further information on the project, please contact the Plague team or sign up to the project mailing list.

You can also visit the Visual Plague project blog for updates and news about the team's activities.

People

Principle Investigator

Dr Christos Lynteris, Senior Lecturer, Social Anthropology, University of St Andrews

CRASSH Post-doctoral Research Associates

Dr. des. Lukas Engelmann (2014 – 2017)

Dr Nicholas Evans (2014 – 2017)

Dr Branwyn Poleykett (2014 - 2018)

St Andrews' Post-doctoral Research Associates

Dr. Maurits Meerwijk (2018)

Dr. Abhijit Sarkar (2018)

Administrative support

CRASSH Samantha Peel

St Andrews Teresa Abaurrea

Advisory Board

Sam Barzilay, Creative Director, United Photo Industries/Photoville Festival, New York, USA

John Henderson, Professor of Italian Renaissance History, Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London; Fellow, Wolfson College, University of Cambridge

Frédéric Keck, Director of the Department of Research and Education, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris; Chargé de Recherche, CNRS/ EHESS, Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale.

David Napier, Professor of Medical Anthropology, Department of Social Anthropology, University College London, University of London

Notice

The images contained in Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic Photographic Database and their accompanying text should be read as a historical record of understandings of and responses to plague in the course of the third plague pandemic (1894-1959, following the established chronology of the World Health Organization). In the course of the pandemic, multiple theories about plague, its aetiology, transmission pathways, reservoirs and disease ecologies were developed, in many cases reflecting epistemic, social and/or political prejudices at the time. Portrayals of plague and of the ways of containing, treating and preventing it depicted in the images of this collection and accompanying texts do not necessarily reflect current scientific knowledge and may be biased, erroneous and/or inaccurate. Making these images available does not entail an endorsement of the social, political, moral or other views expressed by the historical producers, editors and/or annotators of these photographs.

The content of these images, and their accompanying text may be disturbing to some viewers. Particular caution is advised as regards photographs bearing the keywords “patient”, “symptom”, and “corpse”. In some cases images and their original captions or texts may express erroneous attributions of plague-related infection, involving racial, religious, gender, ethnic and/or class profiling. Individuals accessing these images should not use them in any way that may cause or incite discrimination and/or prejudice or in any way that may cause harm or distress to any person and/or the community depicted.