Contagion and Control: States, Societies, and Disease across India and China

Singh’s Academy project seeks to explore why polities with similar epidemiological, demographic, and socioeconomic conditions have been characterized by strikingly different levels of effectiveness in countering equivalently severe challenges posed by a disease. Specifically, she seeks to understand the differential success in the control of infectious disease through the historic spread of vaccines. Drawing on a wide range of textual and visual archival sources, Singh structures her book around three sets of paired comparisons of the spread of vaccines across cities and provinces in India and China at different periods in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Breaking from dominant social science explanations that tend to focus on top-down processes of provision, Singh emphasizes bottom-up processes of how health technologies are received by local people. She traces differences in the popular reception of health interventions to the way in which these technologies are framed and communicated to the people. Her theoretical framework helps to illuminate how the successful adoption of a health technology is primarily contingent upon its integration into local systems of meaning, motivation, and authority. In particular, Singh argues that health interventions are more likely to elicit popular support if they are framed as cognitively aligned with prevailing cultural etiologies, rituals, and medical treatments for the disease; embedded in affective appeals such as nationalism; and communicated to local populations by authoritative institutions.