Ann
Kelly (LSHTM)
Will he be there? A Meditation on Projects, Immobility, and
Responsibility
This paper focuses on a particularly unsettling example of situated knowledge the Human Landing Catch (HLC). The HLC is a cheap and reliable technique to produce data on mosquito densities in a defined area: it requires only a human volunteer to sit over night with his legs exposed, a rubber tube and plastic cup to catch mosquitoes as they come to feed. The HLC was a key methodological strategy for a large-scale larval control trial that took place Dar es Salaam. Once a week at sunset and throughout the year, sixty-seven volunteers would make their way to a randomly selected sampling location in their neighbourhoods, roll up their pants and wait.
It certainly makes for a macabre vignette: foreign researchers employ poor Africans to sit half-naked in a chair outside over night and be bitten by potentially pathogenic mosquitoes. But for the purposes of this paper, I suggest that we momentarily suspend the visceral discomfort the experimental scenario provokes. Rather than focus on the ethical dimensions of the HLC, I would instead like to examine these painstaking labours as points of both integration and dissociation. Strategies of disease control and prevention introduce distinct epidemiological realities and rearticulate nature as a site of intervention: in this way, the fight against malaria can be understood as an ontological project. In transforming Dar es Salaam into a site of knowledge production the HLC produces a form of malaria that is at once abstracted and economized. This legibility comes about through a calibration of different modes of surveillance, regulation, credibility and trust. Here, control is a complex system of response and responsibility built between scientists, bureaucrats, CORPs and mosquito populations.
