The Fall 2022 Social Anthropology Seminar Series with Professor Michael Puett presents The Ruderal Science: Antibiotic Resistance, Bacteriophage Therapy, and the Archive of Recovery in Post-Soviet Georgia, a talk by Rijul Kochhar (Michigan Society of Fellows).

Abstract

This talk takes us on epistemic and epidemiological journeys to the former Soviet republic of Georgia, where I foreground a novel life-science technique of infection-control featuring ecologically-abundant bacteriophage (literally, “bacteria devouring”) viruses as a supplement in the struggle against antibiotic-resistant “superbugs”. Drawing on Cold War archives, oral histories, and ethnographic testimonies collected at the Eliava Institute for Bacteriophages, Microbiology, and Virology in Tbilisi, the talk excavates the century-long quest for bacteriophage therapy, tracing its fortunes as an “ecological" method of infection-control in the pre-Soviet Georgian republic, and under Stalin’s rule, through the pioneering efforts of the biologists Giorgi Eliava and the visiting discoverer of bacteriophages, Felix d’Hérelle. Thereafter, I focus attention on the fate of the institute in the wake of the fall of the USSR, exploring ethnographically the efforts to preserve a novel scientific technique under tumultuous post-Soviet conditions of war and destitution in the new republic of Georgia.

Whilst it received extensive patronage under Stalin, bacteriophage therapy failed to compete for dominance against Western antibiotics in the 20th century. Yet, it is being resurrected today as a form of “ruderal science”—a technique of the life-sciences ascendant amidst conditions of physical ruination—just as Eliava’s scientists recover from the devastations of the Soviet Union’s collapse to broadcast the Institute as a space of technoscientific salvation in emergent post-antibiotic worlds. The talk explores the ongoing collaborations between Eliava scientists and transnational audiences, examining the medical, regulatory, and political challenges implicated in efforts at scientific recognition and the mainstreaming of bacteriophage therapy in a time of planetary-scale antimicrobial resistance (AMR). I suggest that the concept of “autonomous life”—at simultaneously at embodied, local, and national scales—illuminates the political and epidemiological trajectory of bacteriophage science at the Eliava, helping us understand its establishment, praxis, and persistence over the twentieth century, and its efflorescence within a tense Caucasian neighborhood today.

Speaker Bio

Rijul Kochhar is an anthropologist and a historian of science whose research interests include transnational histories of infectious diseases, environmental anthropology, and critical theories of technology, disability, and rationality. Kochhar earned a PhD in History; Anthropology; and STS at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2022. He is currently affiliated with the Anthropology department and the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.