ABSTRACT
Taking up Raymond Williams’s now-familiar model of the keyword essay, this chapter considers the global moral panic around Ebola, that driver of both real and metaphorical viral border crossings. Examining terms from media, scholarly, and humanitarian responses to the West African Ebola outbreak of 2013–2015, including bushmeat, case, protection, survivor, and security, the author offers a set of critical and anthropologically informed interpretations, seeking to understand how meaning is constructed through the technologies and ideologies of global health, steeped as they are in the tremendous inequalities of the world system.
