Abstract

Contemporary imaginaries of ‘planetary health’ and ‘one health’ call upon new combinations of knowledge to address pressing global-scale predicaments. These configurations are illustrative of broader planetary imaginaries in the Anthropocene, yet are contested by knowledges from different times, places and scales. Focusing on ideas and actions around infectious diseases, their ecologies and socialities, and drawing on examples from the ethnography of zoonoses – diseases passed from animals to people – in West Africa, I address what anthropocenic reconfigurations are obscuring and marginalising – including creative ways that people interrelate with non-human natures in living and dealing with disease. I argue for an opening-up of planetary (health) imaginaries to greater appreciation of local socio-natures in all their diversity, and for a politicisation of our engagements with ecologies and non-human natures that better appreciates plurality and uncertainty.