Preparing cities for future pandemics. A Lévi-Straussian analysis of the H5N1 avian influenza in Hong Kong, Istanbul and New York in 2005

Year 2025, Volume: 45 Issue: 1, 76 - 96, 30.06.2025

Frédéric Keck

Abstract

This article presents the perception and management of avian influenza outbreaks in three cities in 2005, the year when the H5N1 virus spread from south China, where it emerged in 1997, to Europe, and where it was expected to arrive in America, where it finally arrived in 2022. Using the tools of Claude Lévi-Strauss in his 1962 book, La pensée sauvage, the article describes how relations between humans and birds (wild and domestic) account for the ways in which the same virus is governed differently in these three cities. If we start from how each city perceives the beings that populate its environment, and particularly the birds that carry warning signals about the threats that affect them in solidarity with humans, we see that these cities interpret differently the threat of a pandemic to which it is exposed, long before the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2010 and the SARS-Cov2 pandemic in 2020. Hong Kong interprets it in terms of the anxiety of the Hong Kong population and Australian experts about the consequences for the British colony to return to Chinese sovereignty. Istanbul interprets it in terms of its unique position at the crossroads between the Christian and Muslim worlds and the glorious memory of its role as an imperial capital. New York interprets it through the trauma of September 11, 2001, but also of the West Nile crisis that largely prefigured it two years earlier.

Keywords

H5N1 avian influenza, pandemic, preparedness, Lévi-Strauss, human/animal relations

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