Conclusion: Ethnographic Data as Medical Evidence

The Conclusion returns to the larger question of the role of ethnography in the development of plague science during the third pandemic. Discussing the challenges of rendering ethnographic data into epidemiological evidence within the context of epistemological entropy, it is argued that epidemiological reasoning developed on the basis of plague ethnographies entailed a two-way process: on the one hand, the ethnographic configuration of plague, as an infectious disease whose decipherment relied on the medical objectification of ethnographic data; and on the other hand, the representation of native societies in terms of being either cultural vectors of or culturally immune to the disease. It is hence argued that, in the case of the north-east Chinese-Russian frontier, this interpretive strategy condemned Mongol and Buryat societies to a static condition of functional unreason. Discussing how this form of ontological and epistemological enclosure continues to inform our postcolonial world, the Conclusion underscores the need for a critical and relational understanding of infectious disease.