A Bug's Life and the Spatial Ontologies of Mosquito Management

This article uses the theory of Gilles Deleuze to address the disjuncture between (1) the mechanical, chemical, and thermal processes of transduction that determine the biogeographical life of the mosquito; and (2) the spatialities of historic and contemporary management strategies. The history of mosquito management reveals two operative spatial ontologies, one an immanent horizontalism underwriting an intimate strategy of detection and destruction of breeding sites, the other a transcendent verticalism appropriate for the partitioning of space in support of widespread chemical spraying of adult populations. We find that two institutions in contemporary, mosquito-rich Arizona—the Pima County Health Department and Maricopa County Vector Control—are representative of this split in management. In this article we attempt to account for the observed interagency differences. Doing so, we suggest, requires an assemblage theory that brings together managers, institutions, and sociocultural-environmental-technological-political contexts with the flights of the mosquito itself.