Governing Future Potential Biothreats: Toward an Anthropology of Uncertainty

Author(s): Limor Samimian-Darash

Source: Current Anthropology , Vol. 54, No. 1 (February 2013), pp. 1-22
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research
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Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 1, February 2013 1

Governing Future Potential Biothreats

Toward an Anthropology of Uncertainty

by Limor Samimian-Darash

Through analysis of preparedness for pandemic influenza in Israel, I explore how future uncertainty is conceptualized
and the various practices put into action to deal with it. In particular, I discuss the emergence of a new type of
uncertainty—potential uncertainty—and three technologies employed to cope with it: risk technology, preparedness
technology, and event technology. Event technology emerges in the preparations for a potential uncertainty event—
such as pandemic influenza. In contrast with the other two technologies, it acknowledges the problem of potential
uncertainty and retains uncertainty through its action. Thus, uncertainty is not solely linked to the appearance of
new risks in the world, which is the basis of the risk society approach (e.g., Beck 1992; Giddens 2000), nor is it
related to the impossibility of calculating these risks, as the preparedness paradigm (e.g., Lakoff 2008) and science
and technology studies argue. Rather, uncertainty underpins a technology through which the future, although not
reducible to calculable forms, can still be governed. Employing the concept of potential uncertainty and considering
the various technologies applied to management of the future allow for a more thorough discussion of problems
of future uncertainty with which current societies are preoccupied.

In the winter of 2004, Dr. Gordon, a public health official
with the Israeli Center for Disease Control (ICDC) at the
Ministry of Health, head of the Unit of Bioterrorism, and a
senior figure in Israel’s overall preparedness apparatus, tried
to explain to me how the bioterrorism unit’s syndromic sur-
veillance system operated.1 One of the aims of the system was
to monitor seasonal influenza on a daily basis and to identify
epidemic outbreaks. Dr. Gordon elaborated on some of the
differences in the approaches of the various units within the
larger preparedness program as he detailed the work of the
system. He emphasized that the system’s advantage lay in its
ability to detect an exceptional biological event in its early
stages, whether an emerging infectious disease (natural event)
or a bioterrorism event (intentional occurrence). He pre-
sented this ability as different from the ability to predict an
event prior to occurrence and from the ability to identify the
first incidence of an event. In particular, he distinguished
between “early detection” and “first detection”:
Here you start asking what early detection is. Even when you
discover something, that there’s been an outbreak in Haifa,
say, and you identify it there, that doesn’t mean that the
whole system knows about it, the health system and the
security system. That is, it depends on the reports that are
made because people thought that it should be reported.
Limor Samimian-Darash is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the
Federmann School of Public Policy and Governance of the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem (Mount Scopus 91905, Jerusalem, Israel
[limor.darash@mail.huji.ac.il]). This paper was submitted 25 VI 10,
accepted 7 III 12, and electronically published 19 XII 12.
Now, early detection can also be the concept of central
detection. In other words, I detect it earlier than I would
have done if I’d waited for [the health and security systems’]
reports. So all these things are part of the thinking on which
you build a central surveillance system. . . . It’s like I can’t
tell you that tomorrow you’ll be ill, I mean, you need to be
ill before I can know. Again I say that if we want to highlight
the sharp differentiation between detection, which means that
you know right away, and so on. [And that’s not what we
are doing.] I say that events happen in the field, events that
are abnormal, but we don’t do much about [them] until
they become large-scale. So for me, early detection is when
I notice the outbreak at a national level, at a central level,
earlier than I would have noticed it if the system wasn’t in
place (emphasis added).
Dr. Gordon stressed that, although it is operating before
identification of an event, the surveillance system only reacts
after an event occurs. In saying, “You need to be ill before I
can know,” he meant that an actual event has to take place
1. From 2004 to 2006, I conducted multisited fieldwork on the State
of Israel’s preparedness for biological threats. In particular, I studied
preparedness practices for two events: the smallpox vaccination project
carried out during the winter of 2002–2003 and ongoing preparations
for pandemic influenza in 2005–2007, prompted by the spread of avian
influenza. Elsewhere, I have discussed Israel’s overall preparedness system,
which I call “a pre-event configuration,” for biological threats. It is com-
posed of three main elements: the scientific element, the security element,
and the public health element (see Samimian-Darash 2009a). In this
article, I use pseudonyms to refer to all individuals with whom I spoke
during my fieldwork.

䉷 2012 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2013/5401-0001$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/669114

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 2 Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 1, February 2013
for the system to respond; an exceptional event occurs, and
only then is it detected. In other words, the system does not
predict the disease event in advance or follow specific iden-
tified diseases, but rather, it monitors syndromes that might
help it detect an event after it has taken place. This distinction
reveals one mode of conceptualizing the problem of the un-
certain future and how to prepare for it.
In preparing for an outbreak of pandemic flu in Israel, I
argue, the system was forced to deal with what I term “po-
tential uncertainty.” This type of uncertainty is conceptually
distinct from what I call “possible uncertainty,” and it requires
a distinctive perspective on the future, the present, and the
relations between them. Whereas possible uncertainty derives
from the need to apply knowledge of known possibilities, that
is, information accessible through past events, potential un-
certainty derives from the variety of actualities that can emerge
from the virtual event and, thus, from a situation in which
no known possibility is sufficient to counter it.2
In this article, I discuss three solutions for dealing with the
potential uncertainty of a future influenza outbreak in Israel:
antiviral drugs, attribution scenarios, and the syndromic sur-
veillance system. I argue that these solutions designate three
different governmental technologies. The first is risk tech-
nology, usually discussed in the literature in relation to Michel
Foucault’s (2007 [2004]) security apparatus (see Castel 1991;
Dean 1999; Ewald 1991; Hacking 1991).3 The second is pre-
paredness technology (see, e.g., Collier, Lakoff, and Rabinow
2004; Cooper 2006; Diprose et al. 2008; Lakoff 2008; Lakoff
and Collier 2008). I term the third technology “event tech-
nology” and argue that it emerges specifically in preparations
for a potential uncertainty event—like a pandemic influenza.
Event technology does not operate by converting the future
into calculated, known risks, as risk technology does, nor does
it imagine an unknown future and then realize it, as prepar-
edness technology does. Rather, it creates multiple actual
events that enable it to detect the emergence of a new, ex-
ceptional biological event in its early stages. In that sense,
event technology acknowledges the problem of potential un-
certainty and retains uncertainty through its action.
Thus, uncertainty is not solely linked to the appearance of
new risks in the world, which is the basis of the risk society
approach (e.g., Beck 1992; Giddens 2000), nor is it related to
the impossibility of calculating these risks, as the preparedness
paradigm (e.g., Lakoff 2008) and science and technology stud-
ies argue. Rather, uncertainty underpins a technology through
which the future, although not reducible to calculable forms,
can still be governed.
Employing the concept of “potential uncertainty” and con-
2. I use the terms “virtual” and “actual” as Deleuze uses them, as will
be elaborated in the following pages (see, especially, Deleuze 1994 [1968]:
186–221; Deleuze and Parnet 2007:148–153; see also DeLanda 2002:9–
55).
3. Elsewhere I discuss Foucault’s security apparatus and its relevance
to the analysis of risks to health and security (see Samimian-Darash
2011a).
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sidering the various technologies applied to management of
the future allow for a more thorough discussion of problems
of future uncertainty with which current societies are pre-
occupied, such as environmental risks (e.g., Mathews 2011),
which will be elaborated on later. Moreover, it enables a re-
conceptualization (and better understanding) of future tech-
nologies such as “derivatives” that “render the future not only
possible but also virtual” (Arnoldi 2004:24), allowing them
to be seen as technologies of uncertainty. Similarly, it helps
to elucidate certain forms of action, such as “risk taking,”
that emphasize the “productive side of risks” (Zaloom 2004),
that is, that promote uncertainty as a mode of subjectivity.
Such analysis avoids, on the one hand, a metatheoretical
approach to risks and society (i.e., Ulrich Beck’s “risk society”)
and, on the other hand, the “cultural bias” claim regarding
differences in risk construction between cultures (i.e., Mary
Douglas). Instead, it advances an anthropological approach
to emerging problems in society through the analysis of con-
crete practices devised in response to those problems and of
the ways they both generate and treat uncertainty.
This approach and the diverse preparedness practices that
it considers invite a renewed reading of the literature on risk,
preparedness, and uncertainty. Most importantly, it facilitates
new analytical distinctions between “risk” and “uncertainty”
and related governmental technologies of the future in pre-
sent-day societies.
Concepts: Danger, Risk, and Possible and
Potential Uncertainties
In the following discussion, I do not offer a comprehensive
review of the literature on risk and uncertainty (for extended
discussion, see, e.g., Lupton 1999; Zinn 2006). Instead, I refer
to this literature to highlight the conceptual distinctions I
make between the objects of governmental action—danger,
risk, possible uncertainty, and potential uncertainty—on the
one hand, and the specific governmental technologies of risk,
preparedness, and event, on the other hand.
Risk–Danger
Many scholars have distinguished between risk and danger,
and this distinction has become the point of departure for
almost every discussion of risk. Ulrich Beck (1992) and An-
thony Giddens (2000) propose distinguishing between danger,
recognized in traditional societies, and risk, created by re-
flexive modernization. Whereas in traditional societies, haz-
ards were associated with the past and the loss of faith, risk
is linked to modernization and the desire to control the future.
“Risk is the mobilizing dynamic of a society bent on change,
that wants to determine its own future rather than leaving it
to religion, tradition, or the vagaries of nature” (Giddens 2000:
42). The risk society approach, then, mainly deals with the
production and transformation of “real” risks and with so-
Samimian-Darash Governing Future Potential Biothreats: Toward an Anthropology of Uncertainty
ciety’s attempts to control the future, which render that future
more “risky.” Put differently, according to Giddens, the dis-
cussion is about dangers (or risks as objects) in a particular
society and the ways they change over time.
Niklas Luhmann (1993), by contrast, treats risk not as an
object in a first-order observation (which he terms “danger”)
but as a concept in a second-order observation.4 Luhmann
defines risk not as the obverse of security, or as a synonym
for insecurity, but rather as the way in which the future is
contingent on present decisions. Thus, risk is a conceptual
part of the social system and is inherent in its decisions.
Accordingly, Luhmann draws a distinction between risk and
danger—whereas danger is external to the system, risk is gen-
erated by the decisions of the system.5
In this approach, the question is not about the quality of
new dangers in the world (more or less severe, calculable or
not) but about how the future is conceptualized in the present
and contingent on it, and how each decision, or abstention
from decision, concerning the future determines risk. My
argument draws on Luhmann’s distinction between risk and
danger and proposes an additional distinction with regard to
the concept of “uncertainty.” That is, I suggest taking un-
certainty as a concept that reflects a way to observe the future
and act on it, rather than seeing it as an object of the future.
My interest, then, is in examining how uncertainty is inherent
in the system’s perception of the future and how the system’s
conceptualization of the future engenders uncertainty and
operates in relation to it.
Possible Uncertainty and Potential Uncertainty
As Luhmann (1998) argues, given that the observer cannot
simultaneously occupy the present and the future because of
the linear nature of time, the future will always be perceived
as unknown. I argue that “possible uncertainty” stems from
this temporal gap and is comparable to Luhmann’s concept
of “risk.” Any decision in the present regarding the future
espouses one possibility as opposed to another. Therefore, the
action associated with this uncertainty is linked to the knowl-
edge that can be brought to bear on it. “Potential uncertainty,”
by contrast, derives from the variety of actualities that can
emerge from the virtual event rather than from the lack of
knowledge about the content of any specific possibility. Gilles
Deleuze’s discussion of the relation between a question and
its answers traces an analogous arrangement:
4. See also Collier, Lakoff, and Rabinow (2004); Lakoff and Collier
(2008); Rabinow (2007); and Zinn (2009).
5. “To do justice to both levels of observation, we will give the concept
of risk another form with the help of the distinction of risk and danger.
The distinction presupposed . . . the uncertainty [that] exists in relation
to future loss. There are then two possibilities. The potential loss is either
regarded as a consequence of the decision, that is to say, it is attributed
to the decision. We then speak of risk—to be more exact, of the risk of
decision. Or the possible loss is considered to have been caused externally,
that is to say, it is attributed to the environment. In this case we speak
of danger” (Luhmann 1993:21).
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3
The question is developed in problems, and problems are
enveloped in a fundamental question. And just as solutions
do not suppress problems but on the contrary discover in
them the subsisting conditions without which they would
have no sense, answers do not at all suppress, nor do they
saturate, the question, which persists in all of the answers.
There is therefore an aspect in which problems remain with-
out a solution, and the question without an answer. . . .
This problem does not at all express a subjective uncertainty,
but, on the contrary, it expresses the objective equilibrium
of a mind situated in front of the horizon of what happens
or appears (Deleuze 1990 [1969]:56–57).
Potential uncertainty is like a question no answer can sup-
press or saturate. In this sense, potential uncertainty is not
equivalent to the unknown future but is linked to the inter-
mediate space between what has occurred and what is about
to occur. In this space, a potential exists for the appearance
of various actualities. Potential uncertainty denotes the open-
ing for a variety of possibilities, such that no single possibility
constitutes an answer for the question it poses (nor does it
overlap the question).
In other words, potential uncertainty inheres in the rela-
tionship between the virtual and the actual. The virtual, De-
leuze explains, “is opposed not to the real but to the actual.
The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual” (1994 [1968]:
208).6 Whereas “the possible is opposed to the real” (211),
the virtual is opposed to the actual. That is, “the possible is
open to ‘realization,’ it is understood as an image of the real,
while the real is supposed to resemble the possible.” However,
“for a potential or virtual object, to be actualized is to create
divergent lines which correspond to—without resembling—
a virtual multiplicity” (212). Therefore, “the nature of the
virtual is such that, for it to be actualized is to be differen-
tiated” (211).
Whereas possible uncertainty derives from lack of knowl-
edge regarding the realization or nonrealization of a particular
possibility, potential uncertainty derives from a state of vir-
tuality in which various events can emerge simultaneously;
whereas the former is connected to the lack of content, the
latter is connected to the lack of form.7
6. Deleuze sees the virtual and the actual as two parts of the same
real object: “The virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the real
object—as though the object had one part of itself in the virtual into
which it plunged as though into an objective dimension. . . . There is
another part of the object which is determined by actualization” (1994
[1968]:208–209).
7. An example that helps highlight the difference between the possible
and the potential comes from the story of “Alice in Wonderland.” When
Alice stands in front of a road sign that points to two possible directions,
the potentiality of her situation derives not only from her ability to choose
one direction versus the other (from “freedom” of choice) but also from
the form of the event itself, in which both paths exist simultaneously
but neither actually exists until it is taken. As Deleuze puts it, there is
no “good sense” regarding the right direction (among multiple possi-
bilities) and no “commonsense as assignation of fixed identities” (1990
[1969]:3); the actualization of the virtual is not an action of representation
 4 Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 1, February 2013
Possible uncertainty, then, is dependent on past knowledge,
calculation, and evaluation (the chances of a particular risk
being realized). I claim that this uncertainty is comparable to
“risk” and that various risk technologies are available to act
on it. Potential uncertainty, by contrast, does not derive from
the question of whether one future possibility or another will
be realized (as in the case of possible uncertainty) but from
a virtual domain with the capacity to generate a broad variety
of actualizations.
Below, I examine various governmental technologies in
terms of the way they understand the problem of the uncer-
tain future and the particular solutions they provide in re-
sponse. I argue that these technologies display a concern with
uncertainty rather than risk and that they focus largely on
the ontology of the future (as increasingly uncertain) and not
on how the future is governed. Moreover, the way these tech-
nologies govern the future is still based on the perception of
the future as “possible uncertainty,” and, hence, the solutions
they propose still call for controlling the future. These tech-
nologies were all in play in Israeli preparedness for pandemic
flu, illustrating the multiplicity of ways of dealing with what
I define here as potential uncertainty, a problem no singular
logic can encompass, as the limits and resistances encountered
by each technology clearly show.
Technologies: Risk, Preparedness, and Event
Possible Uncertainty and Risk
In reaction to the symbolic cultural approach (Douglas 1966,
1994; Douglas and Wildavsky 1982)8 and the risk society ap-
proach (discussed below), some scholars have advocated a
governmental approach to risk. The related literature uses the
term “risk” not to represent the dangerous object (or “dan-
ger”) but to refer to a type of technology of governing and
control. I argue that risk technology, as it appears in various
fields and studies, is engaged chiefly with one type of uncer-
tainty: possible uncertainty. Risk technology works by con-
of something that existed before. The path is actualized only when it is
taken. There is no preexisting “event” or “direction.”
8. Douglas, together with Aaron Wildavsky, proposes that every society
has its own cultural perception of risk and “cultural bias.” Accordingly,
different dangers are selected for attention in different societies on the
basis of particular cultural criteria (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982). In
Purity and Danger (1966), Douglas describes the link between risk and
taboo—how taboo (as a socially constructed norm) preserves social
boundaries. A similar notion appears in Risk and Blame (Douglas 1994),
in which she shows how the connection between danger and prior blame
links cause and result such that undesirable behavior brings about the
occurrence of danger in a society. However, I argue that Douglas’s studies
of risk and culture deal, in fact, with the link between danger and cer-
tainty. Douglas does not investigate the question of how cultures cope
with uncertainty but demonstrates how they create certainty. She reveals
the cultural technology that links danger and blame, through which the
appearance of various dangers and the attempt to prevent them can be
explained. Thus, she shows how certainty regarding a particular danger
is created (when undesirable behavior has taken place) and not how
uncertainty about the future is treated.
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verting future uncertainty into concrete, known risks, or man-
ageable possibilities. Ian Hacking (1991), for instance,
examines the production of statistical knowledge involved in
creating a multiplicity of possibilities (i.e., the “emergence of
probabilities”; see also Hacking 1975) and argues that these
possibilities are then managed and controlled.9
Many other studies of risk as a governmental technology
draw a similar connection between possible uncertainty and
risk. Ewald (1991), for example, sees this connection in in-
surance technology. In what he terms “the art of combina-
tion,” he shows how insurance creates more combinations,
more possibilities, over which it ultimately exerts control. In
other words, this technology converts possible uncertainty
into calculated risks. “Insurance, through the category of risk,
objectifies every event as an accident. . . . By objectivizing
certain events as risk, insurance can invert their meanings: it
can make what was previously an obstacle into a possibility”
(Ewald 1991:199–200). Insurance is thus a technology of risk
(but not because of the real danger it deals with); it uses risk
as a way to deal with uncertainty, by changing it into possible
accidents (Dean 1999; Lupton 1999). This form of technology,
which turns something into risk to make it governable, also
appears in other areas of research, such as old age (Kaufman
1994), psychiatry (Rose 1996), pregnancy (Lupton 1999; Rapp
1995), AIDS (Lupton 1994), and crime prevention and drug
use (O’Malley 1992, 2004).10 In short, in risk technologies,
future uncertainty is turned into a variety of possible risks
and, in this way, managed and controlled.11
Potential Uncertainty and Preparedness
A different approach to uncertainty is found in risk society
theory and preparedness thinking. In his famous “risk society”
thesis, Beck (1992) describes the emergence of new risks as
an effect of contemporary society’s attempts to control the
future through science and technology. This process results
in “the return of uncertainty” (Beck 1994:10).12 In using the
9. As he puts it, “The erosion of determinism and the taming of chance
by statistics does not introduce a new liberty . . . the less determinism,
the more the possibilities for constraint” (Hacking 1991:194).
10. Recent studies analyze risk not only as a form of governing but
also as a form of subjectivity (e.g., Campbell and Shaw 2008; Livingston
2009; Zaloom 2004).
11. Mitchell Dean (1999) mentions three main types of risk technol-
ogy: insurance type—risk spreading; clinical type—reducing factors that
might cause individual harm; and epidemiological type—identifying and
reducing societal risks. Pat O’Malley similarly claims that the concern of
governmentality studies is “primarily to understand risk as a complex
category made up of many ways of governing problems, rather than as
a unitary or monolithic technology” (2004:7).
12. In this regard, Giddens (1999, 2000) emphasizes that risks in re-
flexive modern society are no greater than in the past but rather that
society is more concerned with the attempt to control them: “The idea
of a ‘risk society’ might suggest a world which has become more haz-
ardous, but this is not necessarily so. Rather, it is a society increasingly
preoccupied with the future (and also with safety), which generates the
notion of risk” (1999:3).
Samimian-Darash Governing Future Potential Biothreats: Toward an Anthropology of Uncertainty
term “risk,” Beck refers to hazards “which nowadays often
cannot be overcome by more knowledge but are instead a
result of more knowledge” (2009:5).13 Hence, Beck points to
the emergence of a new uncertainty problem in the risk so-
ciety—what I have defined here as “potential uncertainty”—
to which risk technologies cannot respond.
Similarly, science and technology studies criticize techno-
scientific practices as reflecting the idea that more knowledge
about future risk allows for its prevention or control.14 As
Brian Wynne argues, “Risk discourses have been fundamen-
tally shaped by an assumption that any uncertainties which
risk assessments might show will be resolvable by more sci-
ence. The basic discourse of modern science and technology
policy [assumes] that even if predictive control is not yet fully
in our grasp, it soon will be” (2002:359). However, in the age
of “post–normal science” (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1991, 1993;
Ravetz 1999), it is argued, the world has become more un-
certain, and risk assessment is not a sufficient solution for
such uncertainty. Thus, new techniques should be developed
to improve scientific practice in the age of uncertainty. One
solution suggested is “extended peer review” (Ravetz 2006),
which involves broader scientific observations.15
I see these approaches as evidence of a shift in perspective
vis-à-vis the future: rather than a space of knowledge-depen-
dent possibilities (accidents, risks) that are manageable by
means of risk technology, it is a space of potential uncertainty
that, paradoxically, derives from additional knowledge and
technological developments.
However, along with Mitchell Dean’s (1999) critics, I argue
that it is not sufficient for us, as scholars, to limit ourselves
to a general narrative of transition from calculable quantifiable
risks to global, virtual risks; we must provide an analysis of
governmental forms of risk and uncertainty and consider how,
13. Gary L. Downey, from a more constructed perspective, discusses
the authority of science in this regard. Nuclear threat, he notes, is a
“sufficiently complex” hazard that “no decisive scientific conclusion about
[its] risk could be researched” (Downey 1986:409). This complexity thus
enables those espousing both pronuclear and antinuclear approaches to
invoke the ontology of science for their ideologies.
14. More broadly, these studies discuss the link between risk and cul-
ture, in particular, the way scientific discourse cleans risk of its cultural
and political origins. Sheila Jasanoff, for instance, argues that the scientific
discourse on risk, which involves “translating ‘uncertainty’ into formal
quantitative language washes out the concept’s cultural and political or-
igins” (1999:144). Therefore, she suggests that scholars “restore the cul-
tural dimension” by comparing “the discussion of uncertainty in different
national settings” (144). Likewise, Brian Wynne identifies the need for
“the cultural reification of risk in late-modern society” (2002:468).
15. One can see this solution as a call for second- and third-order
observations, pointing at each stage to blind spots that were not seen
beforehand. In this regard, Luhmann (1998) argues that there are always
blind spots, and thus no observation can “avoid” the risk inherent in a
system’s structure. Instead of “acknowledging” the problem of the im-
manent lack of knowledge, experts approach it by increasing commu-
nication in what Luhmann calls “the ecology of ignorance” (see also
Rabinow 2007:51–72).
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5
through the related solutions, the future is problematized and
governed (see also O’Malley 2004).
Some scholars, among them, Ewald (2002), deal with risks
that cannot be calculated or assessed and that are therefore
defined as nonrisks (see also Alaszewski and Burgess 2007;
Zinn 2009). In addition, they identify new governmental tech-
nologies of precaution (Ewald 2002), preparedness (Lakoff
2008; Lakoff and Collier 2008), preemption (Cooper 2006),
or prudence (Diprose et al. 2008) to cope with the uncertain
future. I argue that, whereas risk technologies (e.g., as ex-
pressed in the logic of insurance, statistics, and psychiatry)
have dealt with possible uncertainty or with transforming
future uncertainty into possibilities (through information,
calculation, and assessment), preparedness technologies are
posited in relation to potential uncertainty, which cannot be
transformed in this way.
In this regard, Ewald is explicitly referring to the transition
from risk technology to uncertainty technology.16 This idea is
present in most contemporary writing about biosecurity and
preparedness. Melinda Cooper, for example, points out the
connection between the change in risks themselves and the
lack of an adequate theoretical approach to manage them:
“No mass information will help us pin-point the precise when,
where, and how of the coming havoc” (2006:119). As a result,
she adds, a new technology emerges, one of speculation and
preemption. Similarly, Roslyn Diprose and colleagues identify
the emergence of a new theoretical paradigm, the “paradigm
of prudence,” which “urges that societies be in a constant
state of readiness about possible high-consequence threats to
the physical security of a population, proactive in preparing
for the arrival of disaster and/or pre-emptive in anticipating
novel low-probability threats” (2008:269).
However, although all of these scholars perceive future un-
certainty in terms of nonrisk, the technologies they identify
still incorporate the idea of converting future potential un-
certainties into possibilities. Cooper, for example, describes
how “one of [the US Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency’s] current projects includes the creation of biological
sensors—living cells on chips or three-dimensional cell ma-
trices—that respond to both known and previously unchar-
acterized agents to give a warning sign of attack” (2006:128).
This project puts the agency in “a paradoxical situation of
having first to create novel infectious agents or more virulent
forms of existing pathogens in order to then engineer a cure”
(Cooper 2006:126).
Hence, to prepare for the future, concrete risks must be
created so as to develop the means to cope with them. Andrew
Lakoff expresses a similar idea in his analysis of preparedness
technologies. The practice he describes attempts to prepare
16. As Ewald puts it, “While the logic of insurance and solidarity had
reduced uncertainty to risk, in order to make the former systematically
assessable, the logic of precaution leads us once again to distinguish
between risk and uncertainty. Precautionary logic does not cover risk
(which is covered by prevention); it applies to what is uncertain—that
is, to what one can apprehend without being able to assess” (2002:286).
 6 Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 1, February 2013
for the virtual future (which is not assessable or measurable)
by an imaginary enactment (scenario or simulation) that ex-
poses vulnerabilities in the system that ought to be improved.
One goal of this action is “to generate knowledge about vul-
nerabilities in response to capability that could then guide
anticipatory intervention” (Lakoff 2008:401).
Below, I analyze the preparations made for an outbreak of
pandemic flu in the state of Israel (between 2005 and 2007).
I argue for the emergence of a preparedness technology to
cope with potential uncertainty, one that does not transform
it into possibilities created by the preparedness system or into
risks defined on the basis of the past but that acknowledges
its virtuality and keeps the uncertainty through its action.
This technology does not propose a solution for potential
uncertainty (because no solution can “resolve” it) but creates
the potential for a variety of events that, when actualized,
become discernible. The case of a future pandemic influenza
illustrates the problem of “potential uncertainty” and the var-
ious solutions that emerge in response.
Pandemic Influenza: The Problem of Potential
Uncertainty
The term “pandemic influenza” refers to a global and lethal
influenza epidemic in which mortality rates are higher than
in seasonal influenza epidemics. The epidemiological litera-
ture argues that a mutation in the avian influenza virus has
the potential to cause an outbreak of pandemic influenza that
is particularly lethal and infectious in humans. Preparedness
for a pandemic flu event in Israel in 2005–2007 was related
to the global outbreak of avian influenza (“bird flu”) at the
time. The avian virus appeared in Israel in March 2006.17
The Pandemic Is Here
On March 16, 2006, dead chickens were found in the coops
of Kibbutz Ein Hashlosha, in southern Israel. Several birds
were sent to a laboratory for analysis, to check whether avian
influenza had reached Israel. The next day, the following
newspaper account appeared:
“They are dropping like flies—I’ve never seen anything like
it.” Agur, who was in close contact with the suspected dead
birds, expressed concern about his health and that of his
colleague: “There are some people who are exposed to the
disease on the front line—veterinarians, poultry keepers,
people from the Fund for Insurance against Natural Dis-
asters who tested the poultry—we all need preventative
care.” Agur was also worried about the spread of the virus:
“On Ein Hashlosha, the henhouses are right on the kibbutz,
and the virus is probably in every corner” (Oni 2006).
Two days later, the first in a series of related reports began
to appear in Israeli newspapers. In Ma’ariv, on March 19
17. For more anthropological studies of pandemic flu, see also Caduff
(2008); Fearnley (2008); and Lakoff and Collier (2008).
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alone, no fewer than 16 articles covered the first three pages
under a common banner headline: “The Pandemic Is Here.”18
Most of the other pages of the paper were devoted to de-
scriptions of influenza and how it spreads and carried various
alarmist headlines: “Avian Flu: Botched”; “This Is How It
Spreads”; “A Biological Time-Bomb” (Mazuri and Binder
2006); “A Gloomy Forecast—Fear: A Billion Sick People in
the Case of a Global Pandemic” (Even 2006b); “Demand for
15 Million Medications” (Even 2006a); “A Reminder of the
Past: The Pandemic That Killed 50 Million People” (Even
2006c). These descriptions speedily linked the avian influenza
to the general fear of a pandemic influenza. Although pan-
demic influenza had not yet broken out, it was already con-
structed as taking place through the descriptions of the avian
influenza that had erupted in Israel and other parts of the
world.19
In addition, its location within statistical knowledge re-
garding past pandemics strengthened the sense of the likeli-
hood of its immediate occurrence. The following projection
appeared in a pandemic influenza preparedness report written
by the Israel Ministry of Health, in 2007:
On average, once every thirty years influenza morbidity in-
creases to the levels of a global pandemic. . . . During the
last 300 years, ten influenza pandemics have befallen hu-
manity, originating from avian influenza viruses that un-
derwent a process of genetic transformation and acquired
the ability to attack humans. These ten pandemics include
the “Spanish flu” epidemic (1918), which killed up to 100
million people across the world. . . . We have had a period
of over 25 years without a pandemic. Most experts believe
that the next pandemic is inevitable, but it is impossible to
predict when it will appear and how powerful it will be
(inevitable, and possibly imminent). (2007:101; emphasis
added)
Statistics regarding previous pandemics enable calculation of
how often outbreaks occur. Here, however, the calculations
were not aimed at predicting when the next outbreak would
take place but rather conveyed the certainty of such an out-
break occurring, as the report went on to say, “The emergence
of another pandemic cannot be called into question” (Israel
Ministry of Health 2007).20
The certainty that the danger already existed was also re-
lated to the speed of the preparations. Dr. Gordon from the
ICDC stated in December 2004, “The WHO says that they
18. Ma’ariv was one of three large-circulation daily newspapers at the
time. The other two were Yediot Aharonot and Ha’aretz. Ha’aretz printed
13 related stories on the same day.
19. The discourse promoting the idea that “the pandemic is here”
recalls Beck’s (2009) assertion that realization of risks occurs prior to the
occurrence of a catastrophe. A similar example of this discourse can be
found in the media coverage of avian flu in Australia (see Stephenson
and Jamieson 2009).
20. All preparedness approaches assume that, although it cannot be
calculated, a risk event will certainly occur and will be catastrophic (Coo-
per 2006; Diprose et al. 2008; Lakoff 2008; Schoch-Spana 2004).
Samimian-Darash Governing Future Potential Biothreats: Toward an Anthropology of Uncertainty
[influenza pandemics] appear once every 25–30 years on av-
erage, and we can say that nearly 40 years have passed since
the last one.” He went on, “Based on this statistical argument,
the Ministry of Health has asked for urgent funding of 150
million shekels in order to purchase and stockpile Tamiflu
drugs.” His point was that a pandemic influenza outbreak
was long overdue and that the State of Israel must prepare
for one as quickly as possible.
A Pandemic without a Virus
Although “the pandemic was already here,” the virus (or its
specific pandemic strain) had yet to appear. Until the pan-
demic influenza event took place, it was impossible to know
what actual virus strain would be involved. As explained in
the Ministry of Health’s preparedness reports from 2005 and
2007, pandemic influenza might result from the emergence
of a type A virus with a novel antigenic structure that has
adapted to be infectious in humans. Two main mechanisms
of genetic transformation can produce such a virus. The first
is gene reassortment between animal (mostly bird) and hu-
man viruses, leading to the creation of a new, hybrid virus
infectious in humans (the influenza viruses that led to the
pandemics of 1957 and 1968 most likely originated in this
way). The second is mutation of a bird virus to become in-
fectious in humans (the likely cause of the influenza virus in
the pandemic of 1918). Examinations of the genetic structure
of the H5N1 avian virus demonstrated that its genetic struc-
ture had already changed in ways that made it similar to the
virus of 1918. However, it had not yet become infectious in
humans.
Similarly, because the virus strain was not known, the dis-
ease’s clinical case definition could not be ascertained. The
case definition remained general and similar to that of sea-
sonal influenza. As the Ministry of Health’s 2005 preparedness
report stated,
Until the World Health Organization provides an alternative
definition, the clinical case definition of [pandemic] influ-
enza will be:
Temperature 139 and two or more of the following:
Shivering
Headache
Muscular pain
Respiratory symptoms (coughing, nasal mucus, shortness
of breath)
A case with laboratory validation will be defined as a
clinical case as defined above when laboratory tests positively
identify influenza.
There is a reasonable chance that the “case definition” will
need to be changed according to the characteristics of the new
virus once it has been identified. (2005:25; emphasis added)
Generally speaking, the Ministry of Health’s reports con-
sidered two stages of preparedness: prior to and after the
moment at which a defined virus appears. The Israel Ministry
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7
of Health’s 2005 report defined the first stage of preparedness
as the period of “avian influenza” and the second as the period
of “pandemic influenza” (which begins as soon as one human
infects another). The 2005 preparedness report referred to
three periods: “the inter-pandemic period” (the period when
a new influenza virus is found in animals), “the pre-pandemic
warning period” (when humans start infecting one another),
and the “pandemic” period (when infection is widespread
throughout the world).
This raises the question of which preparedness practices to
put forward before the nature of the actual event is known:
how is it possible to prepare for pandemic influenza when it
is still in a virtual stage and, thus, no predefined possibility
can overlap the range and diversity of actualities that may
eventually emerge? In this case, the epidemic was not a fab-
rication or a resemblance to an abstract thing; rather, the
potential for its appearance already existed, since a lethal avian
influenza virus had already emerged. However, although its
foundations already existed, the pandemic event had not yet
happened, and the object’s final form was not yet known.
This potential could actualize as different events (pandemic
or not) and as different viral strains that would require dif-
ferent types of treatment.
In this case, three main solutions were proposed to deal
with the problem of potential uncertainty: the purchasing and
stockpiling of antiviral drugs, the enactment of attribution
scenarios, and the operation of a syndromic surveillance sys-
tem. I argue that each of these solutions represents a dis-
tinctive approach to the problem and thus the application of
a distinctive technology.
Antiviral Drugs—Risk Technology
One attempt to prepare for future pandemic influenza in-
volved purchasing and stockpiling antiviral drugs. This strat-
egy relied on information about past epidemics to prepare
for the potential uncertainty and to narrow the risks it would
entail.
As the Israel Ministry of Health’s 2005 report noted, cre-
ating an effective vaccine for an unknown pathogen is ex-
tremely difficult:
It should be noted that processes are already underway
around the world to develop vaccinations that might be
efficient in case of a pandemic, including the possibility of
creating a sufficient stock of vaccines even before the pan-
demic breaks out. These processes include producing a spe-
cific vaccine against H5N1 avian influenza, which has been
isolated from humans in Asia. This vaccination is currently
at advanced stages of human trials. However, although the
virus is currently sensitive to the vaccine, because it con-
tinues to change quite frequently, it is unclear whether the
vaccination will still work by the time the clinical trials have
been completed. It is also impossible to predict what degree
of protection the vaccination will afford to a pandemic pro-
 8 Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 1, February 2013

Table 1. Graduated attribution scale

Seriousness of scenario (rank)

2 3 4 5
Type of scenario Scenario based on the 1957 model Intermediary Intermediary 1918 model
(prior attribution scenario) scenario 1 scenario 2
Mortality (rate) Up to 6,000 Up to 15,000 30,000 45,000
Note. The attribution scenario took into account many other factors, such as clinical morbidity, absences from
work, etc. However, for the comparison at hand it is sufficient to focus on diverging mortality rates to explain
how attribution scenarios work.

duced by a reassortment of this strain with a strain of in-
fluenza found in humans. (2005:8)
In other words, production of a vaccine based on information
available at the time could not take into account the possibility
that a new strain might appear. Hence, the decision was made
to use antiviral drugs that were not aimed at the unknown
virus but rather at the symptoms of the disease it produced.
As a report submitted to the Knesset (Israeli parliament)
Health Committee stated, “In fact, the only medicinal solution
that can reduce the extent of morbidity lies with antiviral
drugs” (Levy and Zolpan 2004).
Use of antiviral drugs that can treat a broad range of pos-
sible influenza events (based on information about known
viruses) assumes that a new event will be similar to previous
ones and that antiviral drugs will be effective. There are two
main types of antiviral drugs: first-generation drugs, or ion
channel inhibitors (amantadine and remantadine), and sec-
ond-generation drugs, namely, neuraminidase inhibitors, the
most common of which is oseltamivir, better known by its
commercial name, Tamiflu. The preparedness reports give
several reasons for considering second-generation drugs, and
especially Tamiflu, to be more effective than first-generation
drugs. The main difference between the two is that fatal in-
fluenza strains have yet to develop immunity against most
second-generation drugs, which cannot be said about first-
generation drugs. In addition, their effectiveness has been
tested in relation to prior influenza viruses. Although they
are known to be useful for treating a range of possible events,
should a pandemic strain be a new one, their effectiveness is
by no means guaranteed. For instance, when isolated, the
avian influenza virus, H5N1, was found to have undergone
a mutation that gave it a certain immunity to Tamiflu.
Therefore, although antiviral drugs are able to act on a
wide range of possible events, they still only constitute a risk-
technology type of solution to potential uncertainty, knowl-
edge of which is based on known possibilities. As with risk
technology, future potential uncertainty is exchanged for pos-
sibilities (based on past events) that can thus be assessed and
treated. However, regardless of how comprehensive the drugs
are, an unpredictable event may occur against which these
drugs will be ineffective.
Attribution Scenarios—Preparedness Technology
Attribution scenarios provide real-time concrete realizations
of the potential uncertainty to enable the system to exercise
its reaction before an event becomes catastrophic (similar to
Lakoff’s [2008] scenario). Several influenza-related attribu-
tion scenarios have been created since the Ministry of Health
issued its first report and preparedness plan in 2005.
The attribution scenarios were constructed on the basis of
available knowledge regarding past occurrences of pandemic
influenza, current-day avian influenza, and the morbidity pat-
terns of seasonal influenza. First, a comparison was made
between seasonal influenza and pandemic influenza, from
which the data for the attribution scenario were extracted.
The 2005 Ministry of Health preparedness report stated:
From the influenza of the winter of 2004–5, which affected
about half a million people, we can deduce the hospitali-
zation and treatment needs for a pandemic scenario:
1. The influenza led to a rise of about 10–15% in the average
hospital bed occupancy rates. During the pandemic, the
consumption of hospitalization services in each general
hospital will rise by about 40–60% (assuming that the
indications for hospitalization are the same as for sea-
sonal influenza, and so the average hospital bed occu-
pancy rates will rise four-fold in relation to seasonal in-
fluenza).
2. A rise of 60% is expected in the number of daily ven-
tilated patients. During the pandemic the rate of patients
being ventilated in hospitals is liable to reach 200–250%
in comparison to months without influenza.
Predictions regarding the event were also based on knowledge
of morbidity and mortality rates during previous influenza
pandemics. Significant differences in these predictions are
found in the 2005 and 2007 Ministry of Health preparedness
reports. The scenario in the 2005 report estimated about 2,900
fatalities would result from pandemic influenza, in compar-
ison with about 500–1,000 deaths per year from seasonal in-
fluenza and related complications.
In 2007, the attribution scenario was presented as a sliding
scale, as in the table 1. The 2007 report considers four sce-
narios (in contrast to the single scenario of the 2005 report—
scenario 1), numbered 2 to 5, according to their severity.

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Samimian-Darash Governing Future Potential Biothreats: Toward an Anthropology of Uncertainty
According to scenario 2, which is based on the model of the
pandemic influenza of 1957, around 6,000 fatalities are ex-
pected. Scenario 5, which is based on the 1918 pandemic
influenza model, predicts 45,000 deaths (i.e., 2.5% of those
infected will die). Two scenarios (3 and 4) are termed “in-
termediary scenarios” and lie between the scenario derived
from the 1957 model and that derived from the 1918 model.
According to scenario 3 (intermediary scenario 1), there will
be 15,000 deaths, and scenario 4 (intermediary scenario 2)
talks of 30,000 fatalities. Summing up these figures, the report
says, “Of the four scenarios, the Director-General of the Min-
istry of Health, in accordance with the recommendation of
the Epidemic Treatment Team, has ordered full preparedness
for scenario 4, which from now on shall be defined as the
attribution scenario” (Israel Ministry of Health 2007:10).
What is particularly interesting about the type of prepar-
edness practice just outlined is the number of different sce-
narios it generates. Scenarios change in relation to new knowl-
edge. That is, expanding knowledge leads to the creation of
new scenarios, each of which is more severe than its prede-
cessor (cf. Schoch-Spana 2004). Each scenario creates a new
future possibility that is treated as real, and the system read-
iness for it is checked. Thus, when any new information ap-
pears, the scenario is updated to better “practice” what is still
in a virtual stage (as with Lakoff’s [2008] “imaginary enact-
ment,” the future must be realized to prepare for it). However,
because the potential future uncertainty could actualize as
one of an unlimited number of events, which are not known
in advance, no information in the present can portray the
real event before it takes place.
Syndromic Surveillance System—an Event Technology
A third preparedness approach to pandemic flu involves the
operation of a syndromic surveillance system. This system
monitors the syndromes of existing flu events and similar
diseases and uses the data collected to identify a pandemic
flu event when it eventually appears. Farzad Mostashari and
Jessica Hartman (2003) claim that errors can be made in
establishing a syndromic surveillance system because some
general indicators that are unrelated to surveillance are some-
times introduced and, conversely, others that are important
for syndromic surveillance are not included. They distinguish
between two main types of syndromic surveillance. The first
saves time and resources for physicians, who collect the data
in any case. The second facilitates the collection of more
specific information. The former is the more common of the
two and is the one in use in Israel.
Public health and security experts have discussed the use-
fulness of syndromic surveillance systems as biopreparedness
tools. Because such systems monitor both intentional and nat-
ural events (such as influenza), the relations between funding
for biological preparedness and public health funding are often
debated, especially in the United States. These discussions usu-
ally revolve around two main positions. One is associated with
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9
Arthur Reingold (2003), who sees syndromic surveillance as
inefficient because it cannot identify the event at an early
enough stage to enable a timely response. He thus recommends
reinforcing local (and not federal) public health infrastructures,
which will enhance preparedness for biological terror as well
as for new infectious diseases. The other position is represented
by, among others, Tara O’Toole (2001), who argues that syn-
dromic surveillance is efficient both in strengthening public
health infrastructures and in dealing with terrorism because the
information collected can serve both aims.
Similar discourses circulate among the three elements (sci-
entific, security, and public health) of the Israeli preparedness
system. For instance, the public health element highlights the
importance of the surveillance system in identifying both nat-
ural and intended events. By contrast, the security element
views the syndromic surveillance system as less efficient than
various governmental units’ ongoing work and as unable to
identify an exceptional event quickly enough to allow an ef-
fective response.
As Dr. Chasson, a Ministry of Defense representative, ex-
plained to me, using the example of water pollution: “[In
general, you always have to check things out.] If there is a
problem with the water because of sewage or pesticides, in
any event you have to constantly monitor the quality of the
water, without any connection to security or terrorism.” Fur-
thermore, Dr. Chasson argued, there is no need for special
preparedness systems to deal with water pollution. In his opin-
ion, ongoing standard testing can, and will, uncover pollut-
ants, whether they occur “naturally” or as a result of “ter-
rorism.” And, he added, “All this helps us to explain why
there is no need for special units to deal with this issue—
because the regular organizations are doing just that. You
don’t need something unique to deal with this issue.” He then
pointed out the gap between his own viewpoint, as a repre-
sentative of the Ministry of Defense, and that of other gov-
ernment organizations. Whereas he is convinced that there is
no need for separate systems to deal with the issue of pre-
paredness for biosecurity events, other government bodies are
broadening and reinforcing their apparatuses in the name of
preparedness (such as the case of the call to purchase antiviral
drugs, discussed above).21
In the following analysis my aim is not to judge the effi-
ciency of the syndromic surveillance system or to ask whether
it is more important to reinforce day-to-day systems or special
preparedness measures. Rather, I assess how the syndromic
surveillance system works and the kind of solution it creates
for the problem of the potential uncertainty of a pandemic
flu event.
In 2004, the ICDC set up a such a system with three main
aims: to monitor “exceptional morbidity” (before a specific
disease has been diagnosed), to detect “new events” as early
21. Elsewhere, I discuss the diverse elements within the Israeli pre-
paredness system and their distinctive threat diagnostics and related pre-
paredness solutions (see Samimian-Darash 2009a).
 10
as possible, and to provide “reliable information” following
the outbreak of an event to help in its ongoing management.
The system’s activities can thus be divided into two main
stages: those occurring before and those after the diagnosis
of an exceptional event. The first stage involves surveying
syndromes of influenza and influenza-like illnesses before a
diagnosis has been made.
The emphasis on syndromes is important, as they differ
from symptoms of previously diagnosed diseases. In this re-
gard, the work carried out by the ICDC is different from the
work of the Epidemiology Department of the Ministry of
Health. Whereas the Epidemiology Department surveys pre-
defined diseases, the ICDC (through its syndromic surveil-
lance system) focuses on detecting new diseases or new per-
mutations of preexisting diseases before an epidemic is
identified. As the following informants explained,
There’s the “traditional” system of the Epidemiology De-
partment, which, according to the public health ordinance,
is meant to gather information on 60 diseases. It is not a
system that can provide answers in real time. The system
cannot give a real-time response to biological terror. The
diagnosis and collection processes carried out by the tra-
ditional system only apply to pre-identified diseases, and
not to syndromes. (Mr. Zilberman, a professional statisti-
cian, and Dr. Shir, a public health physician, both from the
ICDC)
The syndromic surveillance system differs from the “tra-
ditional” system on the grounds that it gathers data before a
diagnosis has been made (regarding a given disease). In other
words, the aim is to recognize abnormal morbidity before
knowing what type of morbidity it is, before identifying the
disease or its causes. As Dr. Gordon of the ICDC noted, “The
whole idea here was before the diagnosis, I mean, the idea
behind this, was in fact to manage a surveillance system with-
out a diagnosis. Once you’ve got a diagnosis you can run
with it. You make the relevant investigations. But we built
this based on the concept of what is known as syndrome
surveillance” (emphasis added).
To this end, the ICDC gathers information about relevant
syndromes from various sources at the pre-event stage:
The unit approached a number of information sources; we
worked on a number of angles; everyone was charged with
making contact, with persuading them to cooperate. [One
source of information is] emergency rooms, for instance,
to set up a system for gathering data with diagnoses. [We
have] shared interests—the emergency rooms intended to
set up a national system of diagnoses in any case. [We try]
to market it to the emergency rooms so that they agree and
to select categories that the emergency rooms are interested
in too. The aim is for all information to reach the Ministry
of Health, the central system and for that you need the
cooperation of a lot of bodies.
[Another source of information] is data from the “com-
munity”—the health funds—we can look at the data from
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Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 1, February 2013
the outside and dissect them. [Other sources include] Magen
David Adom, the health funds, laboratories [blood cultures
at hospitals]—the aim is to identify abnormal events that
may be related to biological terrorism. Mortality rates are
also checked—Abu Kabir [forensic institute]—abnormal
cases. Health departments: mortality, infectious diseases, in-
tensive care, the veterinary institute. The number of hos-
pitalizations is checked too—how many patients are being
ventilated, what the bed occupancy rate is etc. (Dr. Shir,
from the ICDC)
After the system collects information from the various units,
it processes the data to produce new information.22 The in-
formation about the syndromes is computerized and run
through statistical calculations (the system reconfigures in-
formation that already exists in other parts of the health sys-
tem), which leads to detection of new events. As Mr. Zilber-
man explained to me, “All of the systems are meant to be
computerized, to be quality controlled, statistical proce-
dures—to join up groups of syndromes—the respiratory or
the digestive system, the neurological system—we’ve got to
run statistical tools that help us identify abnormal patterns of
morbidity” (emphasis added). The syndromic surveillance sys-
tem, then, gathers information about various syndromes and
enters it into computer programs that turn those data into
“events”—abnormal morbidity patterns—that alert the ICDC
when an exceptional event appears or a pandemic event has
actualized.
Another way of detecting abnormalities is through index
cases: features of abnormal morbidity are identified in a spe-
cific patient, the data are mapped, and a search is initiated
for similar cases. However, regardless of whether abnormal
morbidity appears in a single individual or whether there are
multiple cases of certain syndromes, the system will investigate
whether an event has actually taken place only after the ab-
normality has appeared. Even when abnormalities appear,
given that so much information is flowing into the system
(because analysts do not know what they are looking for), it
may be that nothing has actually happened (no real event has
occurred). Furthermore, even if a relevant event has taken
place, the system will struggle to identify it before cases start
to multiply. So the system not only is incapable of diagnosing
the event in advance but it also has difficulty meeting the
criterion of first discovery. As Mr. Zilberman, from the ICDC
explained, “To what extent are these systems suited to bio-
logical terrorism—no one knows. There hasn’t really been a
biological terrorism event to test them. Opponents of the
system argue that it failed to identify the anthrax event. The
22. On the one hand, this system is considered to be a special tech-
nology, embraced (initially) to prepare for bioterrorism. Hence, we see
the argument from the security element about the need for special pre-
paredness units. On the other hand, the system relies on regular day-to-
day collection of information by various governmental units. However,
the delivery of information to the syndromic surveillance system is not
mandatory but depends on local units’ cooperation.
Samimian-Darash Governing Future Potential Biothreats: Toward an Anthropology of Uncertainty
counter-argument is that there were not enough cases, and
that’s why they weren’t identified.”
Because the system does not try to identify the virus or
diagnose the event, its success is measured in terms of the
speed with which it discovers that there has been an event.
Thus, as I note at the beginning of this article, a distinction
is made between “early detection” and “first detection.” That
is, the actual event has to take place—the abnormal event
appears—and then the issue becomes its early detection.
This distinction between “detection” (of the initial event)
and “early detection” is important for understanding how
different elements of the preparedness system relate to syn-
dromic surveillance. Thus, for instance, because the syn-
dromic surveillance system cannot detect the initial event, the
security element questions its usefulness. That is, the emphasis
in the security discourse is on identifying the initial event,
the point in time at which the virtual event becomes an actual
pandemic event. In contrast, the public health element is
concerned not with identifying the specific moment in time
at which a new flu virus breaks out but rather with discovering
as quickly as possible that an epidemic has, indeed, emerged.
In other words, the system’s existence is justified by its early
detection capabilities.
Only after the detection stage, when the system has iden-
tified the exceptional pattern, does the identification stage take
place. At this point, the detected pattern is interpreted: what
does the system consider an event, and what does not qualify
as one? This stage is distinguished from clinical surveillance
(of syndromes), or laboratory surveillance. Laboratory sur-
veillance is also part of ongoing preparedness but is under-
taken infrequently in the absence of an event.23
The syndromic surveillance system, then, by gathering syn-
dromes and turning them, under certain conditions, into in-
dicators of the emergence of actual events, recognizes future
potential uncertainty and works to indicate an event when it
is already actualized. The actual event is not predicted in ad-
vance; instead, through the surveillance of the potential units
that might compose them, actual events are discerned. Unlike
the attribution scenario and antiviral drug solutions, this system
does not aim to predict the actual event by converting it into
known possibilities, nor does it imagine events that have not
yet taken place. Rather, when the “future present” (Luhmann
1998) takes place, it aims at its early detection.
This system exemplifies an event technology rather than a
risk technology (to deal with possible accidents) or a pre-
paredness technology (to deal with imagined possibilities).
23. I am not concerned here with analyzing the actions produced once
an event actually occurs. In the case of an emerging actual (rather than
virtual) event, the first stage of response is to identify the specific causal
agent (viral strain) and then to employ appropriate security and disci-
plinary practices (i.e., vaccination, quarantine, and isolation), as occurred,
for example, during the SARS event (see also Samimian-Darash 2009b).
That is, preparedness practices are oriented toward the problem of what
to do today, before an event occurs, to reduce the damage once a disaster
happens (see, especially, Lakoff and Collier 2008).
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11
Through the detection of syndromes and the emergence of
exceptional morbidity patterns, this system produces new
events, a multiplicity of occurrences that can signify actual
events. That is, it increases the number of events, of possi-
bilities with which it is concerned, to better govern the future.
One can argue that the syndromic surveillance system is yet
another version of the probabilistic mode (of creating more
possibilities, based on past information, to control the future).
However, I argue that it works as a potentiality wherein mul-
tiple actualities exist simultaneously and no possibility is iden-
tified until it is actualized. Events that emerge from this system
are actual events rather than merely options known from the
past or future imaginaries (i.e., scenarios). That is, the system
retains uncertainty through its action rather than narrowing
future uncertainty as a means of controlling it. Thus, the
problem is not how to create more possibilities to better con-
trol what is unknown (to tame chance) but to retain the
potentiality (the variety of events that can be actualized). In
other words, another way to prepare for the future potential
uncertainty is to keep its potential, which cannot be reduced
to possibilities and can only be detected as soon as it has
taken place and shape, by increasing the multiplicity of events
that the system is detecting.
Conclusions
Analyzing the concept of “uncertainty” and highlighting the
distinctions between risk and uncertainty enable a better un-
derstanding not only of the changing ontology of risks (in
the world) but also of the governmental technologies for man-
aging risks. In this article, I distinguish between two types of
uncertainty—possible uncertainty and potential uncertainty.
I argue that not only has the object of risk changed, becoming
potential uncertainty, but the way future uncertainty is con-
ceptualized and managed through preparedness technologies
has also changed.
My analysis of the ongoing preparations for pandemic in-
fluenza in Israel points to a new technology related to the
problem of potential uncertainty, which I call “event tech-
nology.” An event technology shifts the focus from providing
a possible solution to the problem of potential uncertainty
(as antiviral drugs and attribution scenarios do) to a mech-
anism (syndromic surveillance system) that produces multiple
exceptional morbidity patterns. These events are not merely
possibilities (known in advance or realized in an imagined
future) but are actual events from which the emergent event
(the pandemic) can be discerned.
Put differently, the syndromic surveillance system, as an
event technology, works as an “abstract machine” (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987:140–142) that enables actualization and
differentiation of multiple events. This abstract machine is a
potential formation that does not contain a preknown event
or structure but rather an event “yet to come.” Nevertheless,
it does not represent “a transcendental idea” to be realized
 12
but, instead, “plays a piloting role” in the emergence of a
range of actual events.
In this regard, a conceptual distinction between “risk” and
“uncertainty” can enable different governmental technologies
obeying different logics to unfold. Nevertheless, it is impor-
tant to be cautious and not to accept uncertainty as merely
the mirror aspect of risk and, therefore, as representative of
a chaotic state beyond governance. Uncertainty can, indeed,
provide the rationale for a governmental technology, as it does
in event technology. What distinguishes this governmental
form from others is its incalculable, nonprobabilistic logic
(although there are different types of probabilities, as, e.g.,
Hacking explains), which tries to “delineate the emergence”
(Roitman 2005:7) rather than to anticipate the future.
The approach to uncertainty that this technology highlights
can also be seen in discussions of finance and economy. What
is most striking in related economic studies is how the view
of the future and the risks and uncertainty it has engendered
contrast with the risk society approach. Whereas risk society
theorists see the world as preoccupied with risks and risk
thinking that results in negative effects, economists such as
Peter L. Bernstein and Frank H. Knight (1921) see the de-
ployment of uncertainty as an opportunity and, in a very
optimistic view, as that which can “make us free” (Bernstein
1998:229). Thus, in contrast to the risk society approach, in
the context of economic theory, uncertainty does not equal
future danger but refers to the openness of the future and to
“freedom.” Following Knight (1921), it is uncertainty, not
risk, that enables entrepreneurship and profit.
Instead of asking whether bad or good uncertainty can
better represent the future, however, I draw on O’Malley’s
analysis to approach the risk-versus-uncertainty controversy
from a different angle. Whereas economic theorists still treat
risk and uncertainty as objects (referring to them in relative
terms like “more or less” or as “good or bad”), I ask, in a
second-order observation (Luhmann 1998), whether we can
make a conceptual distinction between risk and uncertainty.
How is it possible to observe and govern the future through
different technologies of risk and uncertainty? What logic do
they obey? What truth claims do they employ? And finally,
do risk and uncertainty offer similar or different governmental
forms? Thus, the question regarding the future is not what
the future entails but rather how these technologies facilitate
a dynamics either of imprisonment or of freedom (O’Malley
2004:27), and how the future emerges as a problem of po-
tential uncertainty to which these technologies are possible
solutions.
Few sociologists and anthropologists have attempted the
conceptualization of uncertainty in various technologies. Ja-
kob Arnoldi, for example, identifies derivatives as a new tech-
nology that “do[es] not simply create risks or future uncer-
tainties but in fact also use[s] such uncertainties as resource”
(2004:23). Moreover, “the financial technology of derivatives
is based on new probabilistic and non-linear forms of sci-
entific knowledge,” which uses “uncertainty by virtualizing
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Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 1, February 2013
it” (Arnoldi 2004:23–24). Hence, the virtualization of uncer-
tainty brings about more potential and more future options
to sell (Zaloom 2006 raises a similar claim). In other words,
at the core of this technology, as in the event technology, is
potentiality rather than possibility.
Caitlin Zaloom (2004, 2006), in her research on futures
markets, discusses the productivity of risks, which she em-
phasizes not only in the “object” of these markets but also
in the organizational form of action and in the self-creation
practices of traders. Thus, the ability to take risks and turn
them into profit is fundamental in thinking and acting in this
space. However, Zaloom, like many other researchers, does
not differentiate conceptually between risk and uncertainty.
She even claims that “the analytic distinction between risk
and uncertainty does not hold up under a consideration of
speculation as a practice” (Zaloom 2004:384). Yet, as she de-
scribes it, risk appears to operate differently than a risk tech-
nology does, as the focus is not on the “taming of chance”
but on “what there is to gain by risk taking” (Zaloom 2006:
336). Thus, one can see how different subjectivities are gen-
erated, which can be better explained by the concept of “un-
certainty” as I develop it here than by “risk.”
Another field in which the concept of “potential uncer-
tainty” and a distinctive associated technology emerge is en-
vironmental studies. In his study of Mexican environmental
projects, Andrew Mathews (2011) discusses the case of a “pos-
sible future carbon market.” That is “a payment for environ-
mental services program, which is linked to the possibility of
building a speculative carbon world, that will link new forms
of remote sensing and carbon inventories with state institu-
tions, financial regulations, non state academic actors, and
rural people who can protect trees, all with the aim of pro-
ducing a credible representation of Mexican forests as places
of carbon storage” (Mathews 2011:24). In this case, the prob-
lem of potential future uncertainty concerns “knowledge . . .
framed against non knowledge (no one knows how to mea-
sure environmental services) and uncertainty (about future
forests, about the probability of deforestation)” (24). Instead
of using the terminology of “risk” as Mathews does, one can
see that the “technology” presented in this case very much
reflects the form of a technology of uncertainty: when “danger
becomes a promise, [and] the uncertain future is calculated,
but never fully tamed, this uncertain risk might become a
source of value” (22). That is, maintaining uncertainty is part
of what the technology does, as “the uncertainty about the
possible carbon market future is itself important for stabilizing
the payment for services program in the present” (22). Hence,
through this technology, “uncertainty is lively, and possibly
valuable” (24).
This focus on uncertainty shifts the discussion on modernity
and governance from the risk society approach to the idea of
potentialities both in security and in profit. If, as Giddens and
Beck claim, modernization has constituted a state of perpetual
uncertainty of a particular kind (what I term “potential un-
certainty”), then understanding practice, subjectivity, and gov-
Samimian-Darash Governing Future Potential Biothreats: Toward an Anthropology of Uncertainty
ernmental technologies without tracing the evolution of con-
cepts of risk and uncertainty is impossible. However, instead
of attempting to define a new era of uncertainty or identifying
a new technology that has achieved dominance in the contem-
porary world (e.g., “preparedness”; Lakoff and Collier 2008),
I emphasize the importance of tracing the complexity of so-
lutions that emerge in response to the broad problem of po-
tential uncertainty and of examining how potential uncertainty
directs a distinct form of governing.24
Moreover, by accepting uncertainty as an element of a gov-
ernmental technology, I do not call for an all-encompassing
theory of uncertainty that attempts to explain any current
social forms and trends (e.g., militarization; Gusterson 2007;
Lutz 2001). This approach is usually adopted in security and
biosecurity studies. For instance, in her study of biodefense,
although she presents a new approach—preemption—for
conceptualizing future threats, Cooper still suggests that
“what is new about the current context . . . is the creeping
militarization of these sites of biopolitical tension. The do-
mains of life that neoliberalism sought to incorporate into
commercial and trade law throughout the last two decades
are now being forcibly recruited into an expansive politics of
military security” (2006:130). Thus, despite the change that
the object of preparedness has undergone (the risks them-
selves are different and, thus, are generative of potential un-
certainty, as I define it) and the concomitant change in the
perception of the future, Cooper sees the new preparedness
technology as a structure that replicates security and milita-
ristic procedures.
As Karin Knorr-Cetina argues, theories of social transfor-
mation of knowledge usually “follow what Dennett . . . calls
the ‘design strategy’ of interpretation in regard to knowledge.
From the design stance one ignores the details of the con-
stitution of a particular domain; on the assumption that the
domain is designed to produce a particular outcome, one
considers only its output and its particular relevance to one’s
purposes” (1999:7).
However, as I have attempted to demonstrate in this article,
forms of knowledge and practice are revealed in their emer-
gence, in concrete ethnographic cases. As the case I have
considered shows, multiple ways of dealing with uncertainty
emerge; they do not correspond to a singular logic or a grand
theory, and they encounter different resistances and limits.
Hence, my concern is to bring the various forms of preparing
for future potential uncertainty into analytical discussion and
yet to keep their heterogeneity alive.
In this regard, I draw on the Paul Rabinow’s work on the
“anthropology of the contemporary,”25 which stresses that
24. I follow Foucault’s concept of “problematization” here (see Fou-
cault 2003 [1984]; Rabinow 2003:15–20, 44–49; Rabinow and Rose 2003:
xvii–xix).
25. A work that has been developed over the past 2 decades, to which
I have not been able to do justice here. However, the entire mode of
thinking expressed throughout the article has been drawing on it. See,
especially, Rabinow (2003, 2007).
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13
an anthropologist of the contemporary is attentive to the
issue of “what difference does today make with regard to
yesterday?” This position by no means rejects the use of
older concepts; quite the contrary, but it does attempt to
look at them anew, to refashion them in light of new ele-
ments and new problems. The ethos of the anthropology
of the contemporary contrasts with that of the modern; it
is not fascinated with the new per se but concerned with
the emergence and articulation of forms within which old
and new elements take on meaning and functions. An an-
thropology of the contemporary thus faces the challenge of
finding a means to remain close to diverse current practices
producing knowledge, ethics, and politics, while adopting
an attitude of discernment and adjacency in regard to them,
thereby providing a space for a more precise and better
formulation of contemporary problems and risks. (Rabinow
2007:24, 29)
Thus, if scholars do not give in to a reproductive mode of
analysis or a normative approach, that is, if we “inquire into
what is taking place without deducing it beforehand” (Ra-
binow 2007:3), we will find that contemporary formations
and governmental technologies constitute a heterogenic and
dynamic problem space that requires new modes of analysis.
This means that, in studying uncertainties and their govern-
mental technologies or related human behaviors, one should
employ an analytical approach (hence, the contemporary as
a mode) that facilitates uncovering their complex formations,
their contemporaneous existence, and their diverse concep-
tualizations of the future in concrete forms of life, that is,
anthropologically.
Acknowledgments
The research on which this article is based was funded by the
Israel Foundations Trustees and the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem. I am thankful to Eyal Ben-Ari, Don Handelman,
Don Brenneis, Avi Shoshana, Irit Dekel, and Sagi Ginossar
for their constructive feedback on earlier drafts. I thank Meg
Stalcup and Austin Zeiderman for discussion of this work
when I presented it during sessions at the annual meetings
of the American Anthropological Association in 2008 and
2010. I am deeply grateful to Paul Rabinow for many in-
sightful conversations that both enriched my perspective on
life and anthropological inquiry and helped me develop the
ideas expressed in this article. Virginia Dominguez provided
me with a launchpad for this article at the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and James Ferguson hosted me
at Stanford University, where I completed this work. I am
grateful to them both. Finally, I extend my appreciation to
the editor of Current Anthropology and to anonymous journal
reviewers for thoughtful comments and stimulating critique.
 14
Comments
Jakob Arnoldi
Aarhus University, Business and Social Sciences, Department of
Business Administration, Haslegaardsvej 10, 8210 Aarhus V, Den-
mark (jaar@asb.dk). 10 VIII 12
What Type of Risk, and What Type of
Technology?
This is a very insightful article that both intelligently and
productively couples empirical observations with theory. And
even better, does it without subscribing to any particular the-
ory but instead intelligently and open-mindedly uses theory
as a tool for analyzing the empirical data. The article provides
compelling examples of how governments around the world
are struggling with attempts to govern future, possible dan-
gers, something that is obviously a difficult endeavor.
Given the variety of social theories that are employed, it is
inevitable that we are presented with a wealth of analytical
distinctions. To name a few: risk and danger, risk and un-
certainty, possible uncertainty and potential uncertainty, and
between risk, preparedness, and event technology. Very little
theoretical work would be possible without such conceptual
distinctions, but in this and in many other cases they may
also mask phenomena that, on the one hand, transcend the-
oretical distinctions yet, on the other, are of theoretical im-
portance. I would like to suggest that in the present case, the
many distinctions mask a rather fundamental change of which
nearly all the different phenomena and concepts analyzed are
examples. The different types of uncertainty and technologies
discussed as well as the case study may all be examples of a
changed perception of the future. As Helga Nowotny has
described (1994), the future increasingly has become an ex-
tended present, meaning that it has become something that
bears on the present and present decision making. This, in
turn, conceals a different perception of causation, both be-
cause increasingly human technology and action are seen to
be causally impacting the future and because this causation
is complex and unpredictable. We may draw on Luhmannian
systems theory to reformulate the notion of extended present
by saying that as society gains more and better knowledge of
causation, it simultaneously gains more knowledge of the fu-
ture consequences of present state of affairs and more aware-
ness of unpredictability (Luhmann 1990, 1993). Causation is
what connects the present with the future, so if something
can (potentially) cause more possibilities (think of chaos and
complexity theory or probabilistic theories of black swans or
fat tails), the future bears more on the present. Indeed, a
spiraling paradox is set off as such knowledge of cause and
effect alternatively fosters more technological effectiveness and
more side effects, more future possibilities and more fear, and
so on (Arnoldi 2009).
But back to the future. The thesis about the future as an
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Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 1, February 2013
extended present would incorporate almost all of the theories
referenced in the article with the notable exception of those
of Mary Douglas, who would be highly skeptical of the sug-
gestion of any epochal shift in future or causation perception.
It would incorporate both potential and possible uncertainty.
It would for sure mean an increased emphasis on incalculable
uncertainty, but it would not reject probabilistic calculus, es-
pecially not probabilistic causation and newer probabilistic
theories of fat tails. And it would encompass all of the three
technologies mentioned in the article: risk, preparedness, and
event. In all cases, the future, something extremely intangi-
ble—indeed, something not (yet) existing—is taking on some
form of existence, is being conjured up and acted upon. This
for me would be to virtualize the future in Deleuze’s sense
(Arnoldi 2004), making future virtual and thus to some extent
real as opposed to being merely possible. One of the article’s
great merits is that it draws attention to event technology as
an important virtualization technology. But maybe it already
has become clear that I harbor some doubts about whether
event technology is that conceptually distinct from other tech-
nologies for managing the future and, more importantly,
whether potential uncertainty is the only form of conception
of the future that is virtual in Deleuze’s sense. In other words,
the doubt is whether potential uncertainty is the defining
characteristic of a sea change in the perception of the future.
As Samimian-Darash does point out, probabilistic calculus
can take many forms and so can perhaps also possible un-
certainty. In short, I would agree that there has been a change,
at least in how much, but also how, governments are occupied
with the future and the uncertainties connected to that future.
New governmental responses are emerging as a result, but the
question is if not these developments and the aforementioned
change transcend the analytical distinctions between risk and
uncertainty and possible and potential uncertainty to a much
larger degree than what Samimian-Darash suggest?
Daniel M. Goldstein
Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University, Ruth Adams
Building 303, 131 George Street, New Brunswick, New Jersey
08901, U.S.A. (dgoldstein@anthropology.rutgers.edu). 18 VIII 12
This fascinating article by Limor Samimian-Darash takes se-
riously the question of uncertainty, showing it to be at once
related to yet distinct from the questions of security and in-
security that obsess governments and populations worldwide.
Uncertainty here is not merely a problem to be solved, a lack
of clarity that the penetrating anthropological eye will disperse
through critical analysis. Rather, uncertainty itself is an eth-
nographic object, a form of subjectivity and a mode of action
that enables, and is enabled by, a diverse set of epistemologies
and techniques that attempt to govern the uncertain future.
This insistence on the ethnographic is one of the great
strengths of this article. As Samimian-Darash makes clear in
Samimian-Darash Governing Future Potential Biothreats: Toward an Anthropology of Uncertainty
the conclusion of her piece, actual lived engagements with
uncertainty are characterized less by a singularity of style and
purpose and more by a multiplicity of techniques, operating
under a variety of competing logics. Her concern, then, is “to
bring the various forms of preparing for future potential un-
certainty into analytical discussion and yet to keep their het-
erogeneity alive”—a welcome corrective to approaches that
insist on the analytical priority of normative theoretical fram-
ings.
The recognition of ethnography’s importance is critical
here, given the curious relationship between the phenomena
identified in the article and the work of ethnography itself.
Samimian-Darash distinguishes “possible uncertainty”—the
more familiar sort, which stems from an insufficiency of
knowledge or information about a possible future eventual-
ity—from “potential uncertainty,” a concept with origins in
the work of Niklas Luhmann, Gilles Deleuze, and Paul Ra-
binow, among others whom the author acknowledges. This
is a terrifically useful concept, enabling us to identify “state[s]
of virtuality in which various events can emerge simulta-
neously”—an idea that permits a much more fluid contem-
plation of emergent futures than the ordinary temporality
within which most of us typically live and work. This inde-
terminate, emergent temporality was clearly in play at Israel’s
Ministry of Health, where the “syndromic surveillance sys-
tem” labored to recognize an as-yet-non-existent pandemic
event through the use of “event technology,” in the process
instantiating the event retroactively while surrendering none
of its potential diversity of effects. That is, the event tech-
nology “works as a potentiality wherein multiple actualities
exist simultaneously and no possibility is identified until it is
actualized.” Ethnography and ethnographic writing, it might
be argued, adopt a similar approach to temporalities and
potentialities, viewed through the recursive lens of the re-
search process. Legal anthropologists Susan Coutin and Bar-
bara Yngvesson, building on insights derived from the Aus-
trian physicist Erwin Schrödinger (whose famous thought
experiment about a simultaneously dead and alive cat has
inspired countless reflections, echoes of which resonate
through my reading of Samimian-Darash’s paper), note that
ethnographers in the field must remain open to a range of
possibilities, including that “the field” itself may be trans-
formed by their own presence in and actions upon it. In
offering their analyses of “data” collected in this field, eth-
nographers select from a range of potential interpretations,
without necessarily excluding the simultaneous existence of
other facts and analyses. As Coutin and Yngvesson put it (in
terms that would not be alien to Samimian-Darash): “eth-
nographic accounts retroactively instantiate realities that po-
tentially existed all along. By narrating versions of reality that
were there all along but that, without official recognition,
remained potentialities, ethnographers . . . perform the act
of measurement or assessment that enables social . . . reality
to resolve itself into a single outcome” (Coutin and Yngvesson
2008:63). Or, as Marilyn Strathern says about ethnographic
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15
analysis, “How does one argue back from an unforeseen event,
an unpredictable outcome, to the circumstances of its devel-
opment?” (1999:5).
This perspective on the curious recursivity of anthropo-
logical work underscores Samimian-Darash’s observations
about the critical role of ethnography in conceptualizing un-
certainty. There remains, however, the question of scale. The
protagonists in the present analysis are all part of “the system”:
as the author notes, her interest is in examining “how un-
certainty is inherent in the system’s perception of the future
and how the system’s conceptualization of the future engen-
ders uncertainty.” But even though “the system” here is a
specific ethnographic object, its limits are murky, and it is
unclear to me how it relates to other, more familiar sorts of
objects like the state. If we are to speak of the “governing”
of potential futures, as this article does, we need to consider
the forms of institutionalized power through which such gov-
ernance ordinarily occurs, lest the systems we study remain
mysteriously decontextualized. In our considerations of in-
security, uncertainty, and like phenomena, let us not lose sight
of the political and legal realms within which such phenom-
ena, and the “systems” that engage them, commonly operate.
Frédéric Keck
Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale (Centre National de la Re-
cherche Scientifique, Paris), 52 rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, 75005
Paris, France (frederic.keck@college-de-france.fr). 21 VIII 12
In 2004, Paul Rabinow, Stephen Collier, and Andrew Lakoff
proposed to consider “biosecurity,” the concerns about the
safety of circulating living material, as a new field of enquiry
for anthropology (Collier, Lakoff, and Rabinow 2004). In the
wake of the 9/11 attacks, legitimate questions have been raised
about the risk for anthropologists to be “embarked” in the
global war on (bio)terrorism and on the necessity of a dis-
tanced “second-order observation” (Langlitz and Helmreich
2005). Eight years after, it appears that this program has
opened a plurality of approaches for contemporary govern-
mentality (Lakoff and Collier 2008).
Among the multiple forms of living material raising bio-
security issues, the H5N1 Influenza virus has taken a prom-
inent position. Since its emergence in Hong Kong birds in
1997, it has spread to Asia, Europe, and Africa, raising con-
cerns that it could cause a pandemic if it transmitted suc-
cesfully from humans to humans. Scientific efforts have been
dedicated to anticipate the genetics reassortments and mu-
tations that would allow the flu virus to replace the seasonal
flu virus and cause a worldwide pandemic (Peiris, de Jong,
and Guan 2007). These efforts at the microbiological level
were correlated with technologies at the governmental level
to prepare the human population for such a catastrophic
event.
Relying on an ethnography of Israel Public Health policy,
 16
Limor Samimian-Darash shows that these technologies of pre-
paredness must be distinguished from classical rationalities
of risk. While risk supposes to anticipate the future based on
the knowledge of probabilities from the past, preparedness
projects an event with low probability and catastrophic con-
sequences. It relies on worst-case scenarios, shaping a place
in the present for a future event whose probability cannot be
calculated but whose consequences are highly dreaded.
Within preparedness technologies, Limor Samimian-Dar-
ash makes another distinction. Antivirals stockpiling and at-
tribution scenarios act once the catastrophic event has been
identified, but syndromic surveillance gathers signs of abnor-
mal morbidity before the actual disease has been identified.
Rather than discussing whether syndromic surveillance works
or not, Samimian-Darash asks what relation it builds between
the present and the future. She relies on the Deleuzian notion
of the virtual to make a distinction between possible uncer-
tainty, based on calculation, and potential uncertainty, creating
a place for the virtual in the actual.
If Samimian-Darash widens the scope of this notion of
“potential uncertainty” to other domains of risk management,
such as financial trade or environmental threats, I would ask
how this notion relates to the domain of life. If “event tech-
nology” is part of biosecurity, what does it tell about the new
forms of life that emerge?
I have proposed the notion of “sentinel” to describe new
relations to living beings in the field of avian influenza (Keck
2010). This notion is used by Hong Kong experts to describe
unvaccinated chickens that send early signals of the flu virus
in a poultry farm, but it also catches the position of Hong
Kong as the first territory where pandemic flu might appear,
following the hypothesis of South China as an influenza epi-
center. A sentinel is a living being that sends signals on a
front line to other living beings at the back line. The virtuality
of the anticipated event becomes actual through the difference
between species. Biosecurity then becomes a space for multi-
species relationships in the face of a catastrophe that affects
them in common.
Israel could occupy the position of a sentinel in a way
analogous to that of Hong Kong. Poultry farms are enclosed
in kibbutzim, but the virus, coming from Central Asia, tells
a lot about the relation between the territory and its frontiers.
The virtual for Israel is actual outside of its frontiers (both
political and ontological), but it becomes real through the
constant monitoring that Israel does on its territory. When
Dr. Chasson tells Samimian-Darash “you have to constantly
monitor the quality of the water, without any connection to
security or terrorism,” he says a lot about how biosecurity
has extended to the environment.
The Israelian ornithologist Amotz Zahavi (Zahavti and Za-
havi 1997) has described sentinel behavior among birds send-
ing “costly signals” to predators and mates. While his theory
has been discussed and confirmed, it remains grounded in its
context of production in the Neguev desert, a frontier where
several kinds of threats are perceived. I was struck, reading
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Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 1, February 2013
Samimian-Darash’s paper, how it also reflected the ethno-
graphic singularity of Israel while drawing potentially uni-
versal distinctions out of it—what I would call Israel as a
sentinel of biosecurity.
Andrew S. Mathews
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Room 325,
Social Sciences Building 1, Santa Cruz, California 95064, U.S.A.
(amathews@ucsc.edu). 13 VIII 12
This is a fascinating article that has forced me to clarify my
own thinking. Samimian-Darash helpfully links the literatures
on risk and risk society, classic anthropological discussions of
risk and culture, and more recent discussions of technologies
of risk and preparedness. In doing so, she provides us with
important definitions and distinctions between various kinds
of future uncertainty; most importantly and originally, she
highlights the ways in which irreducible future uncertainty is
nevertheless treated in different ways by different govern-
mental technologies. There is an important connection be-
tween her discussion of various forms of future uncertainty
and contemporary thinking about nonknowledge and un-
knowns, as in Gross’s discussion of the cycling between var-
ious forms of unknown knowledge (Gross 2007). Perhaps it
would be interesting to think in a bit more detail about the
kinds of pressures that might lead officials and technoscien-
tists to shift from one orientation toward future uncertainty
to another, so that governmental risk technologies cycle from
one form to another. These pressures might come from pub-
lics (the national newspaper audiences that Samimian-Darash
implies in her reading of media accounts of avian flu); com-
peting bureaucracies, which she describes in some detail; or
perhaps from forms of knowledge and practices that engage
with the materiality of the future itself (Ingold 2012).
In this article, Samimian-Darash describes what might be
called three competing institutional orientations toward fu-
ture uncertainty: a risk technology that relies upon antiviral
drugs to address calculable epidemics and is addressed by the
Ministry of Health, a military orientation that relies upon
attribution scenarios, and syndromic surveillance that is
linked to public health institutions and that actualizes and
differentiates indeterminate events. There is some hint of rival
officials jockeying to construct future uncertainty in particular
ways in order to support their particular institutions, as in
the interview with Dr. Chasson, who claims that there is no
need for special monitoring systems. I would like to know
more about why a particular orientation toward irreducible
future uncertainty nevertheless becomes successfully if only
provisionally entrenched in institutions and practices. This is
different from accepting that uncertainty has been fully tamed
and institutionalized, for example as danger, in classic dis-
cussions of risk and culture (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982).
Samimian-Darash distinguishes between an analysis of un-
Samimian-Darash Governing Future Potential Biothreats: Toward an Anthropology of Uncertainty
certainty, which shows risk technologies or attribution sce-
narios as replicating security and military apparatuses, and
her own analysis, which tries to follow the details of how a
syndromic surveillance technology comes to matter for offi-
cials and things without eliminating uncertain futures. Here
Samimian-Darash calls for an anthropology of the present
that takes seriously the ways in which particular forms of
knowledge and practice emerge in relation to the future rather
than as the result of economic or military interests. I think
this is right, but I would like to know a bit more about how
institutions, practices, and forms of knowledge emerge in
relation to each other. Perhaps a more detailed natural history
of how particular events fail to be epidemics, and others come
to count, of “failed” and “successful” syndromes, and of the
institutional configurations and practices that come into being
in relation to these events would do this.
Finally, I thank Samimian-Darash for her term “event tech-
nology”—which focuses on the way that syndromes can link
multiple morbidity events as being singular, local epidemics,
or globally threatening pandemics. This could, I think, be an
important model for helping us understand how scales come
to be made, and for how small things become, often retro-
spectively, of large significance. The unsettled nature of scales
is by now well established in the science and technology stud-
ies (Latour 1993) and anthropological (Tsing 2000) literatures;
this particular ethnographic location is a fascinating place to
trace the making and unmaking of things and scales, and of
the institutional configurations that come into being in re-
lation to them. Perhaps our own understandings of scale as
being large or small are retrospective, like the backward-look-
ing syndromic detection system that Samimian-Darash de-
scribes.
Peter Redfield
Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, 301
Alumni Hall, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599-3115, U.S.A.
(redfield@unc.edu). 22 VIII 12
I read Limor Samimian-Darash’s interesting paper through
the lens of humanitarianism rather than security, the second
of what Andrew Lakoff (2010) identifies as “two regimes of
global health.” From this vantage point a set of questions
arises about the framing of both threat and governance.
Which combinations of condition and populace elicit con-
cern? How do potential threats align with actual threats? And
to what degree might uncertainty extend beyond the temporal
horizon of the future into the given landscape of the present?
My response is thus less directly concerned with her intriguing
argument than with the lines that structure it, in particular
that connecting a state and a national population. Given that
she does not claim to identify an epistemic shift, one central
question would be the degree to which the form of “event
technology” she describes resonates with similar problems.
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17
Where might potential uncertainty fit in an anthropology
broadly attentive to Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous “unknown
unknowns” and the array of anticipations they engender?
As a point of comparison then, I offer a related example
from the fixture of humanitarian health I know best: Médecins
Sans Frontières (MSF). During the summer of 2009 an in-
ternal sounding board of the organization featured an ex-
change about swine flu. A team member located in the Dem-
ocratic Republic of Congo first wrote to express concern over
MSF’s silence in the face of this “quasi-pandemic” and to
inquire about the group’s standards and preparations for it.
The medical headquarters of the French branch replied that
it had nothing planned in Paris, since it deemed the prepa-
rations of the national health ministry quite adequate. It was,
however, urging all mission heads to check on the response
plan for the country in which they were based and build a
stock of supplies to protect staff following WHO estimates.
Two other responses followed: a brief one questioning tech-
nical details of this approach to preparedness and an extended
one calling for access to generic medicine to combat H1N1
in poor countries. The latter noted that populations there
were likely to be more vulnerable, due to inadequate prep-
aration by medical authorities and the prevalence of other
conditions such as malnutrition and malaria, and emphasized
the need to lobby the WHO and patent holders to assure that
medications would be available. It closed with a call to rec-
ognize the importance of existing diseases, arguing that con-
ditions that had “already killed millions” deserved equal at-
tention to a potential flu pandemic (MSF 2009).
This brief episode both parallels Samimian-Darash’s case
and diverges from it. Although casting governance in terms
of national space, these humanitarian actors perceive suffering
along a global frontier, and, if concerned about emerging
diseases, they ultimately worry about familiar threats. Not
only does the set of such possible dangers loom large, but
the capacity of state response also remains unclear. An or-
ganization like MSF works in settings where systems for syn-
dromic surveillance are themselves incomplete and their re-
sults far from sure. Rather than inspiring a mechanism that
incorporates uncertainty into the response, H1N1 here pro-
vokes anxiety about preparedness, subsequently displaced
onto national governments. The discussion then recognizes
inequities between populations and concludes by reemphas-
izing the importance of actual threats, as understood through
the record of past and present conditions. Unsurprisingly,
these actors ultimately stress “known” knowns and unknowns,
highlighting the likely and the possible over the potential.
There is a sense, however, in which the entire humanitarian
field might constitute something like a “surveillance system
without a diagnosis” where “success is measured in terms of
the speed with which it discovers that there has been an
event.” Certainly the spasmodic designation of humanitarian
crisis can operate this way, highlighting facts of suffering at
the expense of any detailed analysis of their cause. All too
often in the eyes of critics, humanitarian interventions erase
 18
the politics of life in gauzy assertions of its moral value. Yet,
as Didier Fassin (2011) has extensively illustrated, humani-
tarian reason also engenders forms of government in both
domestic and international settings. Some of these are cal-
culable, some not. In its formation as a sector of international
aid, humanitarian biomedicine faces the problem of knowing
when an emergency ends. Against a backdrop of endemic
poverty and material need, an answer to this simple question
can prove elusive. What constitutes a truly exceptional event?
How do we anticipate (mostly undesirable) plural futures in
relation to present actions? In this regard, humanitarian doc-
tors may encounter something like the uncertainty of Israeli
public health officials, if positioned against a different prob-
lem and within a different frame.
Ute Tellmann
University of Hamburg, Department of Sociology, Allende-Platz 1,
20146 Hamburg, Germany (ute.tellmann@wiso.uni-hamburg.de). 9
IX 12
In her thought-provoking article, Limor Samimian-Darash
argues for a more differentiated empirical and theoretical ac-
count of uncertainty. Following Pat O’Malley (2004), who has
argued that uncertainty should neither be regarded as char-
acteristic of an epoch nor as the “chaotic” counterpart to the
calculations of risk, Samimian-Darash makes uncertainty into
an object of analysis in its own right. The article works “to-
ward an anthropology of uncertainty” in three ways: on the
empirical level, it offers an analysis of a distinct type of gov-
ernmental technology of uncertainty, called “event technol-
ogy”; on the theoretical level, it proposes a reconceptualization
of different forms of uncertainty, termed “potential” versus
“possible” uncertainty; and finally, it promises to make the
theoretical concept of potential uncertainty applicable to “fu-
ture technologies such as derivatives.” All of this is exciting
and promising, even if the ambitious program requires mov-
ing very quickly between these parts of the argument without
having the time to explore each in depth. Each part of the
argument raises interesting questions, to be explored below.
To a large extent, this article presents a governmental ap-
proach to studying uncertainty. Samimian-Darash distin-
guishes event technology from governmental technologies of
“risk” and “preparedness.” While the latter are both con-
cerned with the “unknown” future, Samimian-Darash argues
that event technology is different because it cannot be de-
scribed by its relation to an unknown future. Event technol-
ogies are dealing with events that have already occurred. What
remains uncertain is the trajectory of development: will sin-
gular incidences of infections give rise to a pandemic situa-
tion? The surveillance methods employed to answer this ques-
tion seek to collect data about “syndromes” in real time,
centralize them, and hence assemble the “pandemic event”
from singular incidences. The temporality of the surveillance
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Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 1, February 2013
in “real time” seems to be a specifically salient feature of event
technology. Unfortunately, it is only hinted at briefly. But it
seems to deserve more attention if one is interested to study
“technologies of futurity.” Real time observations certainly
shape our “operative time frames” of the future (Guyer 2007).
One might expect that they shift the temporal framing to the
nearest future as they wait each moment for a new incidence
to occur. But would such relation to the operative time frames
of the near or far future be at all of interest to an anthropology
that focuses on uncertainty as an object of its own? What
changes if one addresses uncertainty from the vantage point
of a broader anthropology of futurity? What are the unwitting
conceptual limitations of isolating uncertainty as an object of
inquiry?
Samimian-Darash seems to be implicitly aware of these
questions. On the theoretical level, the article not only uses
governmentality studies for studying uncertainty, it also mod-
ifies and hybridizes this theoretical perspective in order to
address uncertainty from a broader vantage point. Putting it
briefly, Samimian-Darah argues that event technologies are
not about epistemology but about social “ontology,” as one
might call it. Event technologies are not attempting to render
the future imaginable or knowable but are concerned with
the virtual trajectories that an event harbors. In order to de-
velop this point, Samimian-Darash draws on Niklas Luhmann
and Gilles Deleuze. Speaking with Luhmann, Samimian-Dar-
ash is concerned with both, how the “present future” is imag-
ined but also how “future presents” will unfold from the given
moment. The distinction between the virtual and the actual,
as developed by Deleuze, helps her to clarify what kind of
uncertainty she focuses on: potential uncertainty targets pre-
cisely the virtuality of an event on the ontological level, while
possible uncertainty addresses the knowing or ignorant sub-
ject that is forever separated from the future by a “temporal
gap.” Samimian-Darash is interested in the former type of
uncertainty without wanting to ignore the latter; she clearly
tries to combine both approaches—rightly so. But the way in
which the historical epistemology of governmentality studies
and the differential ontology of Deleuze are to be combined
while taking a theoretical clue from Niklas Luhmann’s ac-
count of temporality is not clarified. It seems to me that more
work is needed for developing this conceptual frame.
The third part of the argument tries to demonstrate how
the concept of potential uncertainty can be used for under-
standing the family resemblances between event technologies
in public health, security, and finance. It promises a “recon-
ceptualization of future technologies such as derivatives.” But
after cursory discussion of derivatives and stock trading, eco-
nomic potential uncertainty appears only as a type of prof-
itable potentiality that is used and embraced on stock markets.
This finding falls short of the promised reconceptualization.
I suspect that a different picture would emerge if one were
indeed to explore the similar operative times frames (Guyer
2007) that emerge as “surveillance systems” in these fields
follow syndromes in real time. Philip Bougen (2003) has
Samimian-Darash Governing Future Potential Biothreats: Toward an Anthropology of Uncertainty
pointedout that the trading of weather derivatives and catas-
trophe bonds incorporate real time observation of an evolving
hurricane and its path of destruction. Focusing on these com-
monalities seems to offer a better foundation for conceptu-
alizing the family resemblances of event technologies in dif-
ferent fields. But making the reader to think about these family
resemblances in this way is already an achievement.
Reply
I am grateful to the commentators who so thoughtfully en-
gaged this discussion. Their observations, suggestions, and
critiques have pointed the conversation in provocative direc-
tions.
Toward a Theory of Time?
Jakob Arnoldi challenges the concept of “uncertainty” I pre-
sent and offers a theory of time as an alternative mode of
analysis. The future, in his view, has become an extended
present. That is, the future bears on the present and on current
decision making; the more numerous the possibilities (for a
future event), the more the future will bear on the present.
This thesis, he argues, could encompass the concepts and
technologies I present, which are, in his view, evidence for a
contemporary change in the perception of the future. From
this theoretical perspective, Arnoldi asks specifically “whether
potential uncertainty is the defining characteristic of a sea
change in the perception of the future,” that is, whether po-
tential uncertainty is just one expression of his broad theory
of time.
Instead of seeing potential uncertainty merely as an on-
tological element, that is, a new object in the world, I ask, in
a second-order observation, how uncertainty, as a concept,
reflects a way of observing the future and how it facilitates
particular truth claims about and actions on that future. That
is, I ask how this observation makes particular forms of
knowledge and governmental technologies available. Whereas
Arnoldi’s concern is ontological and epistemological, I prob-
lematize how particular observations about risk and uncer-
tainty come to circulate in contemporary society and how the
application of certain technologies are deemed appropriate to
their solution. Moreover, rather than offering a theory that
could encompass all conceptual distinctions, I propose a
framework, a set of concepts extracted from a particular in-
quiry, that aims “to bring the various forms of preparing for
future potential uncertainty into analytical discussion and yet
to keep their heterogeneity alive.” Or, following Paul Rabi-
now’s argument in his approach to the anthropology of the
contemporary, “I present the barest liniments of this concept
cluster that I have found to be promising as a tool to advance
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19
inquiry rather than as ends in themselves or as steps in theory
building” (Rabinow 2011:122).
Another theory of time is offered by Ute Tellmann, who
is concerned with the question of how “real time” observa-
tions shape future operative time frames. She develops the
idea that the temporality of event technology is the real time
present and asks how present observations affect future events.
This theory of time, she further argues, has wider implications
than does an anthropology that merely takes uncertainty as
an object.
In this article, I give limited attention to the broad issue
of time per se. Elsewhere, I have focused more directly on
temporal concepts, discussing, for instance, how the entire
preparedness assemblage (which I term a “pre-event config-
uration”) affects the emergence of future events (Samimian-
Darash 2009a). My intent here has not been to develop a
broad theory of time or to consider uncertainty merely as an
object but rather to problematize uncertainty as an object and
a concept within a particular field of study. The analytical
framework I have constructed may be generalizable beyond
the particular case presented but only with care. It is not
intended to be used as a broad theory of time that can en-
compass all cases. Instead, I distinguish between three gov-
erning technologies that seem to express diverse temporalities.
Risk technology is mainly anchored to the past and assumes
a linear relationship between past and present. Preparedness
technology looks to the future and promotes a particular
imaginary future (the “present future”) instead of an actu-
alized one (the “future present”). Event technology is em-
bedded in the present (as Tellmann also notes) or the con-
temporary, which appears as an equilibrium departure to a
multiplicity of events. Thus, I propose, no one temporality
or “theory” of time but rather take time as one element or
dimension in diverse forms of governing.
Uncertainty as a Mode of Analysis
Daniel Goldstein suggests implementing the concept of “po-
tential uncertainly” in ethnographic work, noting that the
form of action presented in event technology could inform
anthropological ethos. That is, the idea that event technology
“works as a potentiality wherein multiple actualities exist si-
multaneously and no possibility is identified until it is ac-
tualized” could be implemented in ethnographic practice in
dealing with temporality and potentialities in the field. In
other words, if event technology is one form of governing
the problem of potential uncertainty, the anthropologist could
apply a similar mode of jurisdiction in “governing the field,”
acknowledging its multiplicity of forms and meanings. As
Goldstein notes: “Ethnographers in the field must remain
open to a range of possibilities, including that ‘the field’ itself
may be transformed by their own presence in and actions
upon it. In offering their analyses of ‘data’ collected in this
field, ethnographers select from a range of potential inter-
 20
pretations, without necessarily excluding the simultaneous ex-
istence of other facts and analyses.”
This comparison is fascinating and triggers reflection on
the logos of anthropological practice. I sympathize with this
application of uncertainty; however, I would rework it some-
what. The concept of potential uncertainty does not assume
a preexisting milieu of events, from which the anthropologist
can “select” and “interpret.” Rather, it incorporates a mul-
tiplicity of potentialities that could be actualized. An event
technology approach thus does not assume “preexisting ob-
jects,” but rather, the anthropologist’s work actualizes a pos-
sibility from which she or he extracts “an event,” a problem,
or a concept.
Moreover, as Goldstein suggests, staying attentive to the
potentiality of the field requires ethnographers to understand
that “‘the field’ itself may be transformed by their own pres-
ence.” Here, I would add that the ethnographer needs to
expect not only transformation of the field but also of oneself.
That is, uncertainty may also work as a mode of subjectivity
through which one seeks change not only in the object but
also in the relations between the thinker and object as they
interact.
The Question of Scale: Governance,
Event, and Time
Goldstein ends by asking a more empirical question regarding
the scale of governance. Specifically, he asks about the rela-
tionship between various scales of governmental formations
in my study and how the “system,” as I describe the prepar-
edness form of governing, functions in regard to “the state”
and other forms of institutionalized power.
How to refer to the preparedness form was a significant
question I faced during writing. I chose to call it a “system,”
preserving a sense of generality, as I knew that I could not
comprehensively address the complex forms of governing in
which preparedness issues arise. Elsewhere I argue that this
preparedness system is, in fact, a state assemblage, the “pre-
event configuration” mentioned above (Samimian-Darash
2009a). The pre-event configuration is composed of three
main elements: scientific, security, and public health—all of
which involve state actors (most of the informants in my
study, indeed, worked in Israeli governmental ministries). I
further argue that this state formation expresses a dynamic
assemblage rather than an institutionalized apparatus and that
it, in turn, expresses a complexity of forms of actions (as
reflected, for example, in the distinct technologies I consider).
In that sense, my analysis does not point to one form of
institutionalized power of “the state,” but rather with its “fo-
cus on complexity [it] contrasts with dominant anthropo-
logical approaches, which conceive of the state as a monolithic
imaginary tending toward homogeneity rather than as het-
erogeneous, dynamic and constantly changing in practice”
(Samimian-Darash 2011b:284).
Whereas, for Goldstein, the question of scale pertains to
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Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 1, February 2013
power relations, governance, and jurisdiction, Andrew Ma-
thews asks about the scale of events, particularly how small
things acquire, retrospectively, larger significance or how ac-
tualities develop into what is considered an event (or pan-
demic). The event technology form of action, Mathews argues,
represents a retrospective look that translates something
(small and insignificant) into an “event.” This observation
triggers a set of questions about the work of event technology:
What happens when an exceptional pattern is detected? How
does the system translate this exceptional pattern into a “real”
event? Because of the scale-of-events thesis, we can under-
stand how something is retrospectively transformed into an
event.
I argue that although the syndromic surveillance system
monitors actual events and thus does not realize the future
until it is taking place, this does not mean that an event is
produced only retrospectively. The syndromic surveillance
system is, after all, an experimental system; although it does
not deduce multiplicity and potentiality in advance, it still
works within parameters that define what an exceptional pat-
tern is. I further argue, as I explain above, that the pre-event
configuration (the entire preparedness assemblage, which in-
cludes the syndromic surveillance system) also affects the ac-
tualization of events before they take place. That is, what will
be designated at the secondary stage (after an exceptional
pattern prompts an alert) as a possible or impossible event
is determined by the conceptualization originating in the pre-
paredness assemblage (the pre-event configuration).
Peter Redfield combines questions about the scale of event
or threat and the scale of time with the problem of gover-
nance. The scale of event is a function of a temporality that
“highlight[s] the likely and the possible over the potential.”
Additionally, “rather than inspiring a mechanism that incor-
porates uncertainty into the response, H1N1 here provokes
anxiety about preparedness, subsequently displaced onto na-
tional governments. The discussion then recognizes inequities
between populations and concludes by reemphasizing the im-
portance of actual threats, as understood through the record
of past and present conditions.”
Redfield’s discussion reminds us that forms of governing
are particular to certain problems. That is, connections be-
tween type of event, population, and form of governing
should be inductively derived and addressed. We learn that
humanitarian actors work in a milieu of actual (rather than
potential) events, in which the problem is when an actual
event ends rather than when a potential event starts. Addi-
tionally, for this particular population, what are considered
events or threats are “existing diseases,” that is, conditions
that have “already killed millions,” not a potential flu pan-
demic. Redfield’s example, then, underscores the limits of the
conceptual framework I offer, which I do not intend to be,
and which cannot be, implemented as an all-encompassing
theory.
Samimian-Darash Governing Future Potential Biothreats: Toward an Anthropology of Uncertainty
From Populations to Forms of Life
Frédéric Keck’s comments move from the question of the
particularity of governmental population to that of the effects
of biosecurity on the emergence of new forms of life. He asks,
“If Samimian-Darash widens the scope of . . . ‘potential un-
certainty’ to other domains of risk management, such as fi-
nancial trade or environmental threats, I would ask how this
notion relates to the domain of life. If ‘event technology’ is
part of biosecurity, what does it tell about the new forms of
life that emerge? . . . A sentinel is a living being that sends
signals on a front line to other living beings at the back line.
The virtuality of the anticipated event becomes actual through
the difference between species.” Thus, for Keck, biosecurity
provokes a new form of life, which brings together multi-
species relationships in the face of common threats.
I have not considered these questions empirically. However,
what I offer analytically in my article’s conclusion is aimed
precisely in that direction: how an event technology could
invoke a new mode of subjectivity that generates uncertainty
rather than controlling it; that is, whether technologies of
governing that focus on uncertainty rather than risk also pro-
voke new forms of life, in particular, within the field of bio-
security or new modes of subjectivity, in general.
—Limor Samimian-Darash
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