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We write out of our shared concern over the current Zika virus epidemic in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean in the hopes of making useful interventions. Because of Zika’s adverse effect on fetal development and potential link to Guillain-Barré syndrome, the virus poses serious concerns for public health. The World Health Organization declared a Public Health Emergency in Brazil following the outbreak of microcephaly and Guillain-Barré syndrome cases, strongly suspected to be associated with Zika.

Puerto Rico is already in a state of political-economic emergency, while burdened with a preexisting Chinkungunya epidemic, as well as endemic Dengue virus. All three viruses share the same mosquito vector, Aedes aegypti. In late January 2016 an influenza epidemic was also declared on the island.

Because the main vector is an anthropophilic (domestic) mosquito, well adapted to the human made environment in areas where there are multiple opportunities for water to collect, we find the issue of access to clean water and waste management (especially plastic) to be of great urgency and importance in containing viral spread. We call on the government, as well as agricultural corporations and water-intensive industries in Puerto Rico to share responsibility for the ecologically sustainable restructuring and management of the public water systems, especially in view of the historic drought of 2015 on the island, during which Puerto Ricans suffered unprecedented water shortages for several months.

The potential for negative effects on the population, especially women and fetuses, highlights the urgency of improved access to and funding for public health. Since the virus can be sexually transmitted, reproductive health services offering multiple forms of contraception (i.e., including, but not limited to condoms), prenatal diagnostics, pediatric care, and abortion services are necessary. Despite the Pope Francis’ more liberal views, locally the Catholic Church has condemned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s recommendation that people use condoms during sexual intercourse to prevent Zika transmission. This has clear implications for Catholics who may be put at risk of infection by not using proper treatment. Access to and informed use of birth control, as well as reproductive and natal care should be strengthened for Puerto Ricans. People’s right to such access should be supported, and coercive public policy, as well as stigmatizing discourses avoided.

The implications of a Zika epidemic are onerous for public health, considering that Puerto Rico is structurally under-resourced due to the existing cap on congressional spending for health services on the island. This issue has been in the news due to congressional hearings on the fiscal crisis on the island, but no action has been taken to ameliorate the negative consequences of the situation with regards to public health care, which has rightfully been called a humanitarian crisis.

We wish to highlight the absolute necessity of updating the water distribution and treatment system in Puerto Rico, especially under the prospect of the imposition of a control board like the one imposed on Flint, Michigan. In that context, we insist on the protection of the local aquifers and watersheds as central to the control of Zika virus and its epidemiology on the island. We call for a response to Zika in Puerto Rico that accounts for the structural inequalities in health care that exist on the island and moves towards remediating the viral exposure now present.

By the same token, we wish to express concern over the possibility of the presence of high levels of toxic chemicals, including insecticides and experimental agents released by private companies such as Monsanto and Dupont, among others present on the island. We express concern over whatever products are being routinely used in the ecosystem, with which Zika or Aedes aegypti may be interacting and we call for accountability to the residents of Puerto Rico. Further, we call for the full disclosure of any transgenic organisms employed in control efforts.

News reports mention that the CDC is studying the possibility that some Aedes agyptae mosquitos have demonstrated tolerance for insecticides, and we call for public disclosure of any information about the usefulness of various insecticidal agents in use, under consideration for use, or having been shown to effectively prevent mosquito bites, especially for safe use by pregnant women (“Puerto Rico Braces for Wave of Mosquito-Borne Zika Virus,” by Danica Coto, AP). Excessive reliance on spraying insecticides as a mosquito control measure may do more harm than good by encouraging viral resistance.

Furthermore, we as a group of experts on the region call on the US federal government and the CDC to do more than just conduct experiments and issue recommendations with regards to Zika virus in Puerto Rico. The United States has responsibilities to Puerto Rico beyond using the island as a live laboratory. Zika in Puerto Rico is more than just a threat to US public health on the continent. Puerto Rican lives matter. Public health authorities must actively assist the population, and support Zika prevention efforts in Puerto Rico. Immediate actions include: provide and install window screens in homes and businesses, assist in water systems management, and distribute vector surveillance and control strategies (http://www.cdc.gov/chikungunya/resources/vector-control.html). In particular, public health authorities can assist with disposing of any waste that might collect water in order to minimize mosquito populations.

The CDC has a Dengue station headquarters in San Juan, PR and should use that station as a base to conduct Zika prevention and mosquito mitigation campaigns. All prevention and research activities on the island should follow the principles of open access and collaboration appropriate for a public health emergency (see: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/02/plea-open-science-zika and http://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/zika_open/en/ ). Furthermore, given the strongly suspected association between Zika, microcephaly, and Guillain-Barré syndrome, the CDC should be on high alert for these cases in Puerto Rico and prepared to deal with these diseases as they arise.

Finally, care and support must be provided to pregnant women and their families who have or will experience Zika infection. Puerto Rico birth outcomes have been worsening since the advent of the economic crisis. The infant mortality rate climbed to 9.5 per 1000 live births for 2012 (Departamento de Salud, Informe de Salud en Puerto Rico, 2014). This burden is exacerbated by the large number of health professionals that have recently emigrated from the island (“SOS: Puerto Rico Is Losing Doctors, Leaving Patients Stranded,” by Greg Allen, NPR).

It is imperative that the Medicaid cap be removed for the island and resources mobilized immediately to fight this public health emergency, particularly in terms of prenatal and reproductive health care. Prevention of transmission, expanded medical care, reproductive rights, and long term sustainability of the water infrastructure should be the priorities, beyond the tourist and hotel areas. We call for assistance to local initiatives and support for already existing community structures, and affirm Puerto Rico’s right to defend the health of its population.

Links and Resources:

http://www.ksl.com/index.php?nid=235&sid=38304206&title=puerto-rico-health-officials-declare-flu-epidemic

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/03/12/469974138/sos-puerto-rico-is-losing-doctors-leaving-patients-stranded

http://www.primerahora.com/noticias/puerto-rico/nota/iglesiacatolicacondenaloscondonespeseaamenazadelzika-1135947/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/02/17/mexico-confirms-zika-virus-cases-in-pregnant-women-as-pope-francis-exits-the-country/

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/puerto-rico-braces-for-wave-of-mosquito-borne-zika-virus/ar-BBq5CPz

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/zika-is-expected-to-infect-1-in-5-puerto-ricans-raising-threat-to-rest-of-us/2016/02/29/c1288e30-db62-11e5-891a-4ed04f4213e8_story.html

http://news.yahoo.com/puerto-rico-faces-dry-season-emerges-drought-155634480.html

http://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2016/a0304-director-puerto-rico.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/12/business/test-of-zika-fighting-genetically-altered-mosquitoes-gets-tentative-fda-approval.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-puertorico-treasury-idUSKCN0SG1TB20151022

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/02/plea-open-science-zika

http://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/zika_open/en/

http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303114

http://www.cdc.gov/chikungunya/resources/vector-control.html

http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/204609/1/zikasitrep_10Mar2016_eng.pdf?ua=1

http://www.metro.pr/noticias/expresiones-de-religioso-ante-el-zika-pueden-interferir-con-la-salud/pGXpbi!7Ml1cHsYHrtUM/

http://www.sciencealert.com/argentinian-report-says-monsanto-linked-pesticide-is-to-blame-for-microcephaly-outbreak-not-zika

Sometimes, to do fieldwork is to write. This was the way first fieldwork went for me, in the years in the early 1990s when I was working in Bhopal India, at the site of the “world’s worst industrial disaster,” resulting from a massive release of toxic chemicals over a sleeping city. The devastation was horrific, but debatable from the outset. Dead people and animals were strewn across the city, rows of the dead covered in white sheets paved hospital courtyards. The sounds of coughing and grief were overwhelming, and unforgettable.  Disaster was blatant and flagrant, yet it was still was a struggle to account for in words and politics.

It was years later I was told and read about the sounds and sights of Bhopal in the days just after December 3, 1984. Journalists, activists, academics, poets, and many who were tangles of all these helped with the accounting. Stories about the plight of gas victims were also, always, stories about cover-up and denial. Even the basics – the numbers of dead, the number exposed, the number injured – were (and remain) in dispute.   At the 30^th anniversary of the gas leak in 2014, activists were still mobilizing to revise the death record.

I was in Bhopal six years after the gas leak, when the legal case was before the Indian Supreme Court.  It was a politically fraught, discursively dense time. The Indian state was neoliberalizing, Hindu nationalism was on the rise, left activists were mobilized against an increasingly ominous state-multinational complex, working to connect an array of people’s movements, linking farmers, fisherpeople, tribals, and those working again big hydroelectric projects in the Himalayas and Narmada Valley. Early use of computers at and on behalf of the grassroots animated and increased the sheer volume of writerly output.

I spent my time writing legal documents, press releases and pamphlets for students and journalists on behalf of gas leak survivor organizations. I also helped a former plant worker, T.R. Chouhan, write his account of what went wrong in the factory; he wanted his story in English so to be widely read around the world.  Bhopal had already been extensively written about. The challenge was to figure out what more needed to be said, in what forms, and with what timing. Writing more required thinking about the discursive terrain we were operating within, and how different forms of argument, evidence, and symbolism was likely to work, or go awry. Writing was a way to really work with my research “subjects” (emically), and a way to work together to understand the political and discursive conditions within which we worked – collaboratively producing “etic” perspective.

But I have written about this before. Indeed, writing was both subject and challenge of Advocacy After Bhopal, and of the PhD dissertation that came before – a dissertation painfully shaped, chapter by chapter, around the different genres in which advocacy in Bhopal was carried out. I wanted to convey how form mattered, encoding how fiction works differently than the legal affidavit or field reporting in the style of human rights activists. The harshly memorable stories of Mahasweta Devi, which Spivak had taught me to read, were an important catalyst.

What more needs to be said and written now, about writing as fieldwork, and writing as/in disaster?

I think it can be said that writing is an especially important way to participate in and observe the conditions of our times, times I have written about as “late industrial,” characterized by by discursive density and risk, expertise of remarkably high order, oiliness, and slow as well as fast disaster. Neoliberalism and fundamentalism now saturate the discursive terrain rather than work in oppositional terms. Computation enables both surveillance and slick-to-the-point-of-oily PR while also providing fundamentally new ways of accounting for and connecting people and problems. Big data, informatics and new visualization capabilities both feed the monster of commercialism, and provide ways to see and address problems previously discounted or disavowed. The granularity of insight enabled by new modes of producing and working with data poses special challenges for ethnographers. We must learn to read the formative influences of data and informatics, and learn to use data and informatics in/as we have learned to use ethnographic writing – tactically, reaching across scale, working against dominant systems of representation, working Otherwise.

It is thus a time of writing against, and of writing futures underdetermined by the present.

We write against the elisions of public relations machinery that (still, decades later) tells us that toxic sludge is good for you, that industrial chemistry is essential2life, and that high levels of ground level ozone are good for business. And we know what we write against more acutely in the very crafting of sentences and claims, through which we understand how deeply commercialism and what I think of as “industrial logic” has saturated available concepts, terms, and the very way we think about and practice language.

The 1995 book Toxic Sludge is Good for You describes how the waste management industry sponsored a contest to come up with the name “biosolids,” then “went about moving the name into the dictionary and insuring that the dictionary definition of the name would not include the word sludge.” The name stuck. As PR Watch reported in 2013, the U.S. Composting Council (USCC) a sewage sludge industry trade association now sponsors “International Compost Awareness Week, calling for “gardeners to celebrate by joining the USCC’s Million Tomato Compost Campaign, which connects community gardens, compost producers, chefs and food banks to grow healthy soil, healthy food, and healthy communities.” The “aggressive perkiness” of industry’s PR face continues to be formative today; greenwashers set the stage for many ethnographic projects.

Writing forward without overdetermination is even harder, depending on mixes of forms, deeply experimental sensibilities and practices, and technical as well as rhetorical creativity – creativity that literally creates, putting different issues, scales, data, and types of analysis together in new ways. Creativity that puts people – across geography, discipline and social standing – in new formations, leveraging different kinds of code (social as well technical), literally re-ordering things.

Philosopher Dan Price’s work is exemplary. Author of Without a Woman to Read   and Touching Difficulty, Price is an amazing reader of reading, writing, and formations of the ethical.  He’s also helped write the maps at the center of the Houston Clean Air Network. Houston has long had difficulty with its air, but it has taken high-end technology to make it visible and accountable.  And the difficulties are far from over. The State of Texas is leading an effort today to discredit the science supporting stricter ozone standards that would again put Houston (as well as many other cities) out of compliance. Price is not simply pushing information about levels and health impacts of ozone out to the public, merely correcting an information deficit. His goal in mapping Houston, with plans to draw in new data sets in coming years, is to refresh and re-order the semiotic field, and the ways people relate to both knowledge and each other – rebooting possibilities for sense making. The ends are thus underdetermined and inconclusive with purpose. It is arche-writing, with political purchase.

This, I think, is what it will take to write out a world that isn’t overdetermined by what has come before. It will take new kinds of work and writing, and an expansive sense of what writing can be and do. Old oppositions – between the theoretical and the practical, the literary and calculative, the hermeneutic and definitive – must shift and reformulate.

As I write here, for example, my student Pedro de la Torre also writes, in keeping with the work of Hanford Challenge and other organizations working to shape cleanup and a long range stewardship of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where the United States produced most of the plutonium used in its nuclear arsenal, including the plutonium used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. Today, Hanford Nuclear Reservation is the most contaminated nuclear facility in the United States, and the nation’s largest environmental cleanup effort. Like Bhopal, Hanford can and should be connected to an array of issues and movements – against nuclear weapons and power, for and against linkage between nuclear weapons and power, for recognition of the rights of indigenous nations, downwinders, downstreamers and exposed workers, and for what the U.S. Department of Energy calls Long Term Stewardship, and Legacy Management. Just imagine (or just imagine how hard it is to imagine) what needs to be written for this – for stewardship of forever toxic sites over the very longue durée– on the order of thousands (or tens of thousands or millions) of years. There is a large plume of Iodine-129 in Hanford’s groundwater, and I-129 will take millions of years to decay; its 1/2 life alone is 15.7 million years.

de la Torre has blogged for Hanford Challenge, helped develop materials for educational campaigns and given presentations about future land use maps and the challenge of visualizing Hanford, past, present and future. Like Bhopal, Hanford has been extensively photographed, mapped, filmed, drawn and painted, and written about. And much of the effort has been recognized as cultural work – aimed at changing the way people think about the problems at hand, at possibilities for collaborative action, and about how the future can and should be configured. Much of Hanford Challenge’s work, for example, fosters collaborations that strengthen capacity in various publics to understand and engage in the cleanup, raise questions, and help conceptualize long term stewardship. But there are enduring clashes of interest and interpretation. Together with one of Hanford’s unions, for example, Hanford Challenge recently announced a legal action against the Department of Energy that calls for DOE to finally deal with workers’ exposures to toxic chemical vapors from Hanford’s aging high-level nuclear waste tanks — after decades of reports, discussion, and disavowals. Hanford Challenge is thus writing against, while writing forward; de la Torre maps the dynamics by helping write the maps.

Many of Hanford’s injuries aren’t blatant and flagrant; the violences are slow and insidious, and make non-sense in usual terms. de la Torre, as an ethnographic fieldworker, will need to write in many ways to make sense of this, in process mapping and helping refigure discursive terrain. Such is what is called for by the many slow disasters of our times. Ethnographers need to be in the mix, not only writing about but also alongside, building code, big data, and play with visualization into ethnographic practice, as a way to better understand, write against and write past the formative conditions of our times.

How do scholars balance the need to write quickly and the need to write well? Pressures to “publish or perish” and the rise of “visibility indices” have led many of us to write in ways that will be recognized by our institutions, rather than in the other ways we also think and reflect. Some academics now are calling for a turn to slow scholarship, but this may be a luxury only the elite can afford. In a time of crisis, writing slowly does not work; instead, we need to write swiftly. Recently, I and many people who have conducted research in Nepal found ourselves under pressure to write quickly while still maintaining our academic integrity.

The April 25th earthquake in Nepal proved devastating for the country and spurred many in the anthropological world to action and comment. In the days after the quake, and propelled forward by the major May 12th aftershock, academics in the US, Europe and Asia found themselves overwhelmed by requests for interviews and op-eds, and many of us were eager to do something. I felt paralyzed and incompetent, sitting in Austin, Texas, trying to finish the semester, working closely with local student groups and NRN (Non-Resident Nepali) organizations and operating at a high level of distraction. Social media was afire with check-ins of who had survived, where the greatest damage had occurred and what resources were needed to keep people alive on a day-to-day basis. I found myself pulled into the social media world and addicted to email and messaging as I had never been before. Many of us sought to raise funds and awareness in our own communities, to establish contact with those we care about in Nepal, and to write brief articles as we felt able for media venues. After the initial flurry of media contacts, several of those who had written about the disaster were contacted by Anthropology News to write an article for their online forum. We hoped to get someone familiar with facts on the ground, yet many anthropologists who were in Nepal were dealing with everyday needs of seeking shelter, looking out for loved ones and trying to provide basic relief as they were able. AN Managing Editor Amy Goldenberg posted a brief piece that collected links to essays written by North American-based anthropologists for other venues, and there were promises from others to write more substantive articles when more research and reflection was possible. Then, Anthropology News—an official publication of the American Anthropological Association—found a respondent in anthropologist David Beine, Professor of World Missions and Evangelism at Moody Bible Institute.

Beine’s piece “Earthquakes and Culture” appeared on the AN website less than two weeks after the disaster. Beine discussed how certain cultural memes had, if not caused the earthquake, exacerbated the disaster and hampered response efforts. The cultural touchstones Beine pointed to are familiar to those who have visited Nepal – clichés about responses to inaction (ke garne) or claims to community insularity that are part of the oft-touted tropes of Nepal. After the Tohoku triple crisis in Japan, “collectivist culture” was often mentioned as a reason for the vigorous post-disaster mobilization, and a reason to celebrate the Japanese community spirit, but new stereotypes and politics also emerged as the crisis lingered on. In post-quake Haiti, stereotyped “culture of poverty” arguments also circulated. Many of Beine’s stereotypes of Nepal are deployed in negative ways, e.g. pointing to aphno manche (“own people”) as an idea of why aid might be unevenly distributed, rather than as a potentially effective form of networking and community support. He cited important historical phenomena that might complicate rebuilding and resilience after the quake, including Kathmandu’s expanding urban population and the oversized role that international aid has played in the last half century of Nepal’s history. But much was missing: the intricacies of bureaucracy in Nepal, local and national level political turmoil, social and economic inequalities, Nepal’s devastating civil war, issues of privilege and politics in international development, the great diversity of the country and any sense of actual, on-the-ground Nepali efforts in the post-quake period. As a result, his article fell far short of the standards expected of contemporary cultural anthropology, relying more on outdated themes one might find in Kiss, Bow, Shake Hands than in an official AAA publication. The article seemed to blame the victim, noting that the earthquake was exacerbated by “cultural features that have led to unpreparedness.”

In light of the earthquake, I too felt compelled to write quickly but (I hope) with reflection and in areas about which I have research experience to bring attention and knowledge to the global agenda of earthquake relief. When Dr. Beine’s article was shared with me by a graduate student who was aghast at his culturism and objectification, I had hoped that it would be buried online, or overwhelmed by other articles with a more sophisticated view of Nepal, articles that highlighted the diversity of the country and the complexity of response to a disaster of this scale. And for a time it was, but I was naive. Two Nepali anthropologists found the piece and wrote their own response questioning the role of anthropologists in speaking to the field in times of crisis. Gaurab KC and Mallika Shakya, respected scholars and researchers in Nepal, found much to criticize—appropriately so—in Beine’s article. While the authors note that Beine’s article was likely written in haste and that it was intended for a mainly non-Nepali audience, they nonetheless take it as representative of American anthropology. And why not given that it was published by the American Anthropological Association’s official newsletter? We are living in a connected world, one in which scholars from all over the globe can access information and contribute to the scholarly conversation, although not in Anthropology News, as one must be a member of the AAA to post comment on their website.

KC and Shakya’s article concludes with several provocative questions, including asking if “the anthropology on Nepal has kept pace with emerging anthropological movements elsewhere, especially within South Asia and the Global South?” I have long been proud to work in Nepal, and found the anthropological discourse on the Himalayas to be one that seeks to go beyond fetishism, Orientalism, and objectification in asking questions about “virtual Sherpas,” Prisoners of Shangri-la, and “Little America in Kathmandu,” and in thinking reflectively and reflexively about the role of anthropology in Nepal, especially in relation to aid work and cultural exoticization. Yet, as it now stands, the voice of the American Anthropological Association on the earthquake in Nepal suggests that if Nepalis had only been in well-constructed Christian churches, rather than decrepit Hindu temples, maybe fewer would have died on April 25.

All this prompts me to ask a question about editing decisions and peer review in Anthropology News. I write in Savage Minds, not because it is “peer reviewed,” but because I read the work of my peers there. Each year, I send hundreds of dollars to AAA, and yet I learn little of what goes into vetting the articles that are put up in “my name” and which are read by scholars around the world. I fully understand the offense taken by KC and Shakya regarding this article that purports to explain the “culture of Nepal.” There is far more at stake than “good methods and data” in vetting an academic article, but I wonder what editorial vetting was done of “Earthquakes and Culture.” As relief and recovery continue, aid organizations and journalists will still be clamoring for sound bites and quickly digestible “truisms” about Nepal’s culture. The discipline has been through this before, evidenced by guilt/shame culture from Benedict’s remote scholarship for Chrysanthemum and the Sword on to more recent adventures with the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System. Shakya and KC present anthropologists with an important admonition, to think before we write, to be aware of our limitations, and to avoid playing to the stereotyped paradigms in which media and development agencies wish to slot our knowledge. But I hope that they and others will understand that Dr. David Beine does not speak for me, and certainly does not speak for all anthropologists concerned for Nepal.