ABSTRACT
Writing about the development of ideas and practices attached to microbes and the hygiene needed to control them in the nineteenth century, Bruno Latour remarks that he is less interested in the ‘application’ of a given power such as hygiene ‘on the bodies of the wretched and the poor’, than in ‘the earlier composition of an unpredictable source of power. It is precisely at the time when no one can tell whether he is dealing with a new source of power that the link between science and society is most important. When almost everyone is convinced, then, but only then and afterward, will hygiene be a “power” to discipline and to coerce’ (1988:256). My recent ethnographic fieldwork suggests that we are at precisely such a moment when new sources of power are developing.
