ABSTRACT

Ecology will be understood here as a systemic biological configuration that anchors features of the social and cultural space. The biology of human life, in a given spatial-temporal conjuncture, is, as I hope to show, an active shaping factor defining the opportunities as the limitations of individual or collective activities (Shilling 10-12). Such an interrogation has obvious echoes with older geopolitical climate theories (going back all the way to Montesquieu) but hopefully moves beyond them by showing in concrete situations how ecological factors determined the range of options of human actors, their hopes and fears, but also the ways in which they imagined themselves, others, and their place in the socio-cultural manifold. 1

Taking a clear departure from all forms of environmental determinism, ecology and ecological will be understood here in their original broad sense as the “study of the interrelationships between living organisms and their environment,” the sum total of the relations of organic life – including human life – with its physical surroundings (Lincoln, Boxshall, and Clark). A significant part of these relations is made up of encounters with biologically active materials, often of a pathogenic nature, such as bacteria, microbes, or viruses. 2 These encounters are the result of biological mobility, the never-ending movement of biological materials from place to place, at times assisted by carriers, resp. vectors, humans or animal, at others wholly independent. And while the mobility of bio-parts may for the most part be invisible, its effects

can be momentous, as when it generates disease ecologies. These specific ecologies are at the center of a new field of environmental science research. According to the definition given by the National Research Council:

The challenge is to understand ecological and evolutionary aspects of infectious diseases; develop an understanding of the interactions among pathogens, hosts/receptors, and the environment; and thus to make it possible to prevent changes in the infectivity and virulence of organisms that threaten plant, animal, and human health at the population level.