Transcriber: Capa Girl Reviewer: eric vautier
Duke is the first university in the US
to integrate Humanities Laboratories into undergraduate education.
And Humanities Laboratories are meant to
inspire work in history, literature and languages
by the collaborative research structures of science labs,
and also by the challenge to find instrumental goals
for the analytical imagination and research scope
of people working in humanities fields.
And in Duke's first Humanities Lab, which is called the Haiti Lab
and which is devoted to finding solutions in the Haitian recovery
from the devastating 2010 earthquake,
one of our projects is a digital mapping of cholera in the Caribbean.
And you all may know that this past October Haiti began to have this epidemic
that has taken 5,000 lives and made 250,000 people ill.
And this was a mystery because everyone had assumed
the cholera would not be a part of Haiti's problems.
Now, diseases are always political.
How we understand people's pathology is very much shaped by
what we know about their communities and by the values
and presuppositions that we bring to understanding of their case.
This is a graffiti that equates president with cholera.
And in the case of Haiti it seems to me that one of the political problems
that has impacted on the treatment of cholera
is that we don't know enough about Haiti's history in NGO's structures.
In the case of Haiti that knowledge is especially important
because the question of where this cholera had come from
immediately became extremely politically intense
and actually almost upset this past fall's presidential elections.
One of the theories of where cholera came from
was that it had arrived in the UN mission to stabilize Haiti.
This is a French cartoon that shows a UN soldier
as roll of toilet paper saying "Shh."
You know, let's not talk about transmission.
And there've been many theories, but active investigation into questions about
how diseases extend their epidemic spreads
are very important for local communities
who are suffering from this kind of crisis.
Now, at the Haiti lab what we did --
because there is very little research on cholera in the 19th century Caribbean,
which was the last century in which there was cholera in the Caribbean,
we began to create the database of 19th century journalism
in terms of its coverage of cholera epidemics
because ship captains and international merchants
really needed to know in the 19th century
where they were gonna get stuck in a quarantine,
where there was a devastated economy because of cholera.
And so we were able to begin this mapping project,
which you can see out at the reception afterwards,
showing that almost the entire Caribbean was very much affected by cholera
in the 19th century, but never Haiti.
Even when the Dominican Republic had cholera
Haiti never had epidemic cholera.
This is an indication of the clustering of the dates
of all of these different epidemics as you can see 1884 was a huge year.
Cholera did not reach the Caribbean for the first time until 1833
just after it had arrived in Western Europe and the US.
Now, the ideal conditions for cholera in the 19th century Caribbean
had to do with things that we also now view as social problems.
If you look at this slave muster, it's a little hard to see it,
but there were thousands of slaves at that plantation
being packed into a slave muster.
Here is a slave ship just a sea of bodies on that crew, slave cabin
and these were the conditions along with military barracks in camps
that fostered cholera epidemics.
At the same time as people began to realize what the problems with living conditions were
there was sometimes a swing in the opposite direction
and a creation of a kind of sanitary imperialism
where things like occupations of another country
were justified on the basis of the idea that their sanitation engineering
might allowed disease to spread from their country to others
which can be viewed as a problem of sovereignty.
Now, in the case of Haiti -- Why didn't it have cholera?
One point is that Haiti is the first country of freed slaves
who founded their own independent nation in 1804
and so slavery had been abolished in 1793
much earlier than in the rest of the Caribbean.
And their indigenous army in Haiti was not living in barracks
and their population was dispersed not in plantations,
but in small regional farms.
And we encourage you, in the break, to visit our booth
check out our digital timeline, answer our little quiz
and come up with your own hypothesis about why there was not cholera
in 19th century Haiti and to reflect on
how this kind of knowledge can help us to confront future epidemics.
Thank you.
(Applause)