Disciplines Anthropology Medical Anthropology

Traveling with Sugar by Amy Moran-Thomas

Traveling with Sugar Chronicles of a Global Epidemic

by Amy Moran-Thomas (Author)
December 2019
First Edition
Hardcover
$85.00, £66.00 Paperback
$34.95, £27.00 eBook
$34.95, £27.00
Courses
Medical Anthropology People & Cultures of North America
Title Details

Rights: Available worldwide
Pages: 384
ISBN: 9780520297548
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 30 b/w photographs, 2 maps

About the Book From Our Blog About the Author Reviews Table of Contents Awards Related Books

About the Book

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.

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About the Author

Amy Moran-Thomas is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Reviews

"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

"The reckoning of the living and dead, history and future, limb and loss through a mirror of the planet—its health, sickness, destruction—tells a powerful story . . . not only [of] human bodies but also plants, seeds, food systems, synthetic and herbal medicines, weather, and lands."—American Anthropologist

"Traveling with Sugar is an accomplished work that lives up to its premise: telling a global story through an intimate portrayal of people’s slow and constant care."—Anthropology Book Forum

"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 luminous ethnography . . . resists tragedy by attending to people’s capacity for 'extraordinary survival' and mutual aid . . . [and] asks us to grapple with profound transdisciplinary questions about how the past lives in the present."—Bulletin of the History of Medicine

"A masterclass in accompaniment . . . refreshes our understanding of etiologies of diabetes in profoundly urgent ways. . . . Each chapter is a rich and original contribution on its own, and together the book is a discipline-altering tour-de-force."—Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences

"A remarkable work. . . . A story of the long-term impact of the European empires and commercial expansions. . . that developed the sugar plantation economy of Central America and the Caribbean."—American Journal of Human Biology

"The trouble [this book] highlights is not a lack of knowledge, but the cruelty of a profit-driven system that allows, even encourages, living, breathing, loving, always-human people to be treated as disposable."—Medical Anthropology Quarterly

“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

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

Awards

Foundation for the Society of Health and Illness Book Prize 2021, British Sociological Association
Victor Turner Prize 2021, Society for Humanistic Anthropology
SLACA Annual Book Prize 2019, Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology