88 RüdigerKunow
major step in turning the spaces in which U.S.-Americans live into a
controlledenvironment:theavailabilityofairconditioninghelpedbring
an intractable, hot zone under control and made possible the mass
settlement of the Old South and parts of the West and South West. In
addition, from the earliest stages of this technology in Chicago's meat
packingfactories,viathe1920sinstallationofcoolingsystemsinmovie
theatersallthewaytoitsfull-scaleapplicationinsuburbanhomesinthe
late 1940s and 1950s, air-conditioning has become a defining presence
in the everyday lives of U.S.-Americans. As this example illustrates,
successes in subduing a seemingly intractable ecology have effects
whicharebothmaterialandcultural:withoutair-conditioning,theallure
of sunshine-and-the-beach or of RV culture would have been much
weakerandtheprofitsgainedfromitmuchsmaller.
In past and present, and across the spaces of U.S. empire, disease
ecologies have been highly significant—they can shape the life chances
ofhumanbeings—butalsosignifyinginthattheymapuponthephysical
landscape zones of (relative) biological comfort and of danger (Kunow,
"'Roots'"10),ordesireanddisgust.Asaresultofsuchmappings,abio-
cultural imaginary of the American hemisphere has formed itself over
the centuries whose early impact can be measured in tales of travel and
explorationfromDeSototoCharlesMasonandJeremiahDixon.^38 This
particular imaginary is an important reference area for cultural critique
because in past and present it has produced a stable link between
morality and materiality, dividing spaces intospaces of moral hazard
where people in ecologies are conflated with those very ecologies and,
spacesofmaterialdesire, regions and locations that were attractive for
trade, investment and settlements. Furthermore, by establishing a close
and stable association between dangerous diseases and certain places or
regions, disease was no longer an episodic pathology but became an
enduring, if largely imaginary, quality of some places and people and
legitimated those interventions in the name of a "prophylactic
protectionism" (Singer 30) which we will observe in the cases narrated
lateron.
(^38) Forfurtherexplorationsofthiscf.Savitt,esp.1-29;"LCDoctorsintheWild."
NationalParkService.NationalParkService,n.d.Web.11May2016.