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.
Amy Moran-Thomas is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
PART ONE. CONTEXTSApproachEmergency in Slow MotionShorelines—A Global Epidemic as Seen from Belize—Traveling withSugar—Errata: Methods and Mistakes—Slow CarePast Is PrologueSugar MachineSweetness—Sugar Roads—Chronic Landscapes—Diabetes Multiple—Still. ThereWhat Is Communicable?Caregivers in an Illegible EpidemicFoot Soldiers—Non-Traumatic Measures—Displaced Surveillance—Mixed Metaphors—Para-Communicable Conditions—Geographies ofBlame—Three AtmospheresPART TWO. CRONICASCrónica One: ThresholdsTraveling an Altered Landscape with CresenciaThe Normal and the Extraordinary—Ancestral Discontent—CoralGardens and Their Metabolism—Sugar Girls—Land Tenure (Is ThisLegal?)—On the Other Side—Dr. Saldo—Great White Hazards—Healthy Living Made Fun and Easy!—StraddlingCrónica Two: InsulaTechnology, Policy, and Other Units of Jordan’s IsolationsType What?—Islands and Empire—Global Policy Gaps—OtherOrphans—Unsteady Units—Many Machines—The Life of Muerte—Design Archipelagos—CountingCrónica Three: GenerationsApproaching “Biologies of History” with Arreini and GuillermaScientific Racism: Lineages—Housekeeping—Trans-Plantation—Epidemiological Transition—Hunger and Diabetes—What Is the“Epi” in Epigenetics?—Prevention—Blood’s Sugar—Quicksilver—SequencingCrónica Four: Repair WorkMaintenance Projects with Laura, Jose, and Growing CollectivesHalfway Technologies—Phantom Limbs—Sugar Shoes—Dialysis:Pressure—“We Don’t Want to Die”—Food Infrastructures—BetweenHurricanes—Prosthetic Hope International—Holding Measures—The Gradual InstantEpilogueDedicationAcknowledgmentsAbout TranslationsImage CreditsNotesBibliographyIndex
"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."
