Résumé
Lassa fever is a viral haemorrhagic fever spread by a rodent, Mastomys natalensis, in West Africa. People become infected through contact with these rodents, but we do not know precisely when, where and how humans are infected. In the case of Lassa fever, where most transmission is assumed to take place from contact with rodents in domestic spaces, the multispecies nature of homes becomes a key lens for ethnographic attention for exploring the dense and entangled nature of the zoonotic interface that creates the conditions for Lassa fever to move across species. Our observations take in human-rodent encounters at the zoonotic interface for Lassa fever. Being and thinking with no-human others helps to deepen our understanding of the assemblages that constitute multispecies forms of existence. We present here a more-than-human approach to the study of Lassa science and the implications of living with and experiencing Lassa fever. We include an attention to (non-human) others, the places they inhabit and the importance of co-habiting.These deeply intertwined forms of human – rodent cohabitation are largely unwanted by humans and are considered problematic. However, our ethnography describes the inseparability of rodents and humans as they make their homes together in the same spaces, in ways that engage partly overlapping and partly distinct forms of space and time. Furthermore, these spatial and temporal dimensions of multispecies domesticity themselves cannot be understood in isolation from their material and affective content or from processes of political-economy and history. Attention to the production of domestic spaces from both rodent and human perspectives shows that viral ‘reservoirs’ do not exist as backgrounded containers ‘holding’ the virus, but are mostly likely produced within domestic spaces through mutualities of rodent-human activity and relations.