Traveling with Sugar reframes the rising diabetes epidemic as part of a five-hundred-year-old global history of sweetness and power. Amid eerie injuries, changing bodies, amputated limbs, and untimely deaths, many people across the Caribbean and Central America simply call the affliction “sugar”—or, as some say in Belize, “traveling with sugar.” A decade in the making, this book unfolds as a series of crónicas—a word meaning both slow-moving story and slow-moving disease. It profiles the careful work of those “still fighting it” as they grapple with unequal material infrastructures and unsettling dilemmas. Facing a new incarnation of blood sugar, these individuals speak back to science and policy misrecognitions that have prematurely cast their lost limbs and deaths as normal. Their families’ arts of maintenance and repair illuminate ongoing struggles to survive and remake larger systems of food, land, technology, and medicine.
Traveling with Sugar Chronicles of a Global Epidemic
About the Book
Reviews
"A welcome contribution to medical anthropology and will also appeal to readers more generally interested in medical inequalities and global health policy."—Anthropology Book Forum
"This well-researched ethnography is an excellent addition to existing scholarship in that it offers fresh perspectives on the global history of sweetness and power and the ways in which this relationship continues to shape human health."—CHOICE
"Thoughtfully organized and powerfully written, this poetic piece humanizes both those who need care and those trying to provide that care. Traveling with Sugar can and should be taught in both undergraduate and graduate courses in medical anthropology, sociology, global health, and health disparity courses."—New Florida Journal of Anthropology
“A remarkably original work, Traveling with Sugar overflows with critical thought, haunting prose, and trenchant details. Its gripping personal stories trace painfully intimate connections between planetary crisis, economic disparities, and human health.”—Peter Redfield, author of Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors without Borders
“In one of my favorite passages, Amy Moran-Thomas describes how the experience of diabetes in Belize is like waiting for the hurricanes that now pummel the country with increasing intensity—beating one down with no time or technology for recovery. This is bioecological sociocultural analysis at its best.”—Kim Fortun, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine
Table of Contents
PART ONE. CONTEXTS
Approach
Emergency in Slow Motion
Shorelines—A Global Epidemic as Seen from Belize—Traveling with
Sugar—Errata: Methods and Mistakes—Slow Care
Past Is Prologue
Sugar Machine
Sweetness—Sugar Roads—Chronic Landscapes—Diabetes Multiple—
Still. There
What Is Communicable?
Caregivers in an Illegible Epidemic
Foot Soldiers—Non-Traumatic Measures—Displaced Surveillance—
Mixed Metaphors—Para-Communicable Conditions—Geographies of
Blame—Three Atmospheres
PART TWO. CRONICAS
Crónica One: Thresholds
Traveling an Altered Landscape with Cresencia
The Normal and the Extraordinary—Ancestral Discontent—Coral
Gardens and Their Metabolism—Sugar Girls—Land Tenure (Is This
Legal?)—On the Other Side—Dr. Saldo—Great White Hazards—
Healthy Living Made Fun and Easy!—Straddling
Crónica Two: Insula
Technology, Policy, and Other Units of Jordan’s Isolations
Type What?—Islands and Empire—Global Policy Gaps—Other
Orphans—Unsteady Units—Many Machines—The Life of Muerte—
Design Archipelagos—Counting
Crónica Three: Generations
Approaching “Biologies of History” with Arreini and Guillerma
Scientific Racism: Lineages—Housekeeping—Trans-Plantation—
Epidemiological Transition—Hunger and Diabetes—What Is the
“Epi” in Epigenetics?—Prevention—Blood’s Sugar—Quicksilver—
Sequencing
Crónica Four: Repair Work
Maintenance Projects with Laura, Jose, and Growing Collectives
Halfway Technologies—Phantom Limbs—Sugar Shoes—Dialysis:
Pressure—“We Don’t Want to Die”—Food Infrastructures—Between
Hurricanes—Prosthetic Hope International—Holding Measures—
The Gradual Instant
Epilogue
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About Translations
Image Credits
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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