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activities. With regard to the U.S., this historical process began in the
18 thcentury and picked up speed in the 19th, and in the course of time
repeatedlyputAmericancitizensinto"thehandsofothers,"byexposing
them to often unknown biological risks which they would not have
incurred before. Inversely, but this is mostly forgotten, it also put the
(hemispheric) others of this process into the hands of the Americans
which were trespassing more and more frequently on their home
territories.
Aside from such historical considerations, my preference for
"precariousness" in the present inquiry is also based on the fact that the
term asusuallyunderstoodnamesaconditionwhichisatthesametime
both serious and virtual. "Precariousness" references a potential danger,
even a presumed, imaginary one, not the actual danger itself. The term
combines an overall sense of existential exposure with an inscrutable
latencywhichseemstodownplay,ifnotdisguisetheactualdanger.Both
processes are part of the temporality of mass disease, which I have
commented on before. A person or a situation is precarious if
"characterized by a lack of security or stability that threatens with
danger"—butthisdoesnotimplyimminentperil("Precarious"n.pag.).
Thus understood, precariousness describes quite accurately the
conditions obtaining in encounters with disease ecologies. A person
exposed to such an ecology may get infected or may not. Disease
ecologies produce likelihoods, but not inevitable outcomes. They make
people do certain things (such as taking preventive medical action) and
avoid others (having close contact with local inhabitants). For this
reason, precariousness, for all its ambivalences, produces material
effects, but it is "a materialism of the imaginary" (Althusser,Essays
136)thatcomesintoplayhere:onecanneverknowwhatmighthappen.
The individual and social praxis which arises out of such a sense of
precariousness can—as will be shown—determine the motives, the
behavior, even the life chances, of people as they navigate spaces,
diseased or not, across the Americas. Concerning these, people could
and did know, through reports, rumors, bits of collective memory, that
some places were dangerous to their health. But this knowledge was
always uncertain: not everybody exposed to disease ecologies would
actuallygetinfectedandnoteveryoneinfectedwouldshowsignsofthe
illness, and not everybody would actually die. Dealing in probabilities,
notcertainties,is apeculiarity ofprecariousmomentswhichonceagain