50 RüdigerKunow
points to important characteristics of chance meetings mediated by the
biology of human beings, be they meetings between a healthy and an
infected body or between the human body and a pathogenic
environment. Furthermore, I will have occasion to comment on another
highly important aspect of these encounters, namely their unique
temporality: for the most time they occur unexpectedly, which is why
theterm"outbreak"hasestablisheditselfasprincipaldesignatorofacute
massdiseases.Whatismore,theexchangeorpassingonofbiologically
active material is in almost all cases a process which humans cannot
plan, control, or contain. The people who find themselves (for good
reasons or bad ones) on the receiving end of biological exchanges tend
to experience them as interventions into their lives, their routines, and
for this reason find such encounters repugnant, undesirable, or even
unacceptable and seek to guard themselves against them, by fair means
orfoul.
This is especially so if the material being passed on is dangerous to
human health, as is the case in epidemic diseases caused by active,
pathogenicbiota.Nobodytakeslightlythepresenceofhazardousorlife-
threatening diseases among their midst. For these reasons, biological
encounters almost always have intense political, social, and cultural
resonances—resonances which are reflected in social and cultural
practices,ofteninaffectivelychargedforms.
The earliest example of this combination of affective and material
effects in recorded history of the Global North is the plague which hit
thecityofAthensintheyears430to427BCE.Thismedicalmassevent
killed between one third and two thirds of the population. It was a
contributingfactorforAthenstolosethePeloponnesianWartoitsrival
Sparta and effectively marked the end of Athenian hegemony in
classical antiquity. Such moments of biological encounters have
similarly been milestones also in the history of the Americas,^5 from the
(^5) Casesofintentionalexposuretopathogenicbioticmaterialsarerarebutusually
get high profile. Among the first historical instances when such exposure was
used as a biological weapon was the infamous 1763 Fort Pitt incident when a
British officer knowingly passed on blankets infected with smallpox to Native
Americans (for details cf. Mayor, Adrienne. "The Nessus Shirt in the New
World: Smallpox Blanket in History and Legend."The Journal of American
Folklore108.428 (1995): 54-77. Print.).—More recently, some gay activists, in