ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I draw upon approaches from multispecies ethnography, environmental and medical history, and political ecology to explore how infrastructures of extraction, critical to the economics and logics of empire, facilitated a key epistemic rupture in the knowledge of the yellow fever virus and its existence in the world. The remaking of yellow fever and its ecologies from an urban disease into a sylvatic one turned the Guinean Forests of West Africa into a zone of endangerment and a resource frontier in advancing the careers of Western scientists. In the search for sylvatic yellow fever, knowledge and ways of being collided in a struggle over who had access to, and control of, the forest and its resources.
