ABSTRACT
This chapter uses ethnographic research among export labour migrants from a rural province in northeastern Vietnam to examine how transnational mobilities create the conditions for epidemic outbreaks in home countries. Drawing on two examples of transnational labour migration and return, I trace how the infusion of foreign earned incomes in rural economies alters poultry production patterns in ways that generate new disease vulnerabilities for human and non-human animals. These examples contribute to existing narratives about epidemics and the economies in which they emerge. First, they expand accounts of epidemics that locate infectious agents on globally mobile bodies and commodities. Second, they problematise causal narratives that link global epidemic outbreaks to changing consumption patterns in cities. Third, these examples of migration and return extend anthropological understandings of livestock epidemics by attending to the complex aspirations and capacities of increasingly mobile, and increasingly wealthy, rural populations.
