Introduction: the scales, subjects and politics of rural disease knowledge

The introduction to this book provides a heuristic periodization of the development of rural disease knowledge over the past 150 years. A first phase, situated between the 1880s and the 1920s, saw rural areas around the world – including Europe – become central to discovering pathogens, crafting scientific concepts, and testing top-down medical and hygienic interventions. A second phase, between the 1920s and the 1960s, was characterized by the discovery that certain diseases had a special ecology in rural spaces or in wild areas close to rural places, justifying sanitary actions to reinforce the borders between rural, urban, and wild spaces. Finally, a third phase emerged from the 1970s onwards. In this period, rural areas in Africa and Asia have been imagined as laying at the edge of natural viral reservoirs, where from new pathogens can spill over and eventually strike urban metropoles across the globe. This framing places rural areas at the fore of global health anxieties and pandemic preparedness techniques and policies. From this heuristic periodization, the introduction discusses the rural as a vital space for the encounter between experts and so-called non-experts. Discussing the importance of local and Indigenous knowledge, as well as the local-global dynamics of rural disease knowledge, the Introduction stresses that the rural has not simply been an object of medical research or public health intervention, but also a place where new knowledge has emerged, became negotiated, and assumed global proportions and consequences.