Viral Landscapes: Wild Boar and Other Wild Bodies after Covid-19

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed a vital-lethal entanglement of human and non-human bodies on a planetary scale. In this talk, anthropologist Aníbal García Arregui examines how seemingly independent viral processes in fact interact, both biologically and socially, within and across species. Drawing on an ethnography of the process of the urbanisation of wild boars in Barcelona, and connecting with the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and African swine fever epidemic, he argues that some of the most crucial viral interactions for contemporary ecologies and economies occur between humans, domestic pigs and wild boar. Aníbal defines this complex contemporary viral landscape as a planetary “wild” niche, a context of relationships that remixes human and non-human bodies in ways that render obsolete current techno-scientific paradigms of biosecurity, population control and domestication.

Aníbal García Arregui is an anthropologist at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Barcelona.

Website: https://ub.academia.edu/AníbalGArregui

Venue: Espai Finestres, La Capella

Prior registration at lacapella@bcn.cat.