Maraña

“Based on a scrupulous ethnography conducted in the Colombian jungle, Pinto-García thoroughly demonstrates how leishmaniasis is both socially produced by the armed conflict and metaphorically constructed through the state’s biopolitics. At the interface between medicine, epidemiology, and ecology, she offers a critical anthropology of the complex interactions between warfare and disease.” -- Didier Fassin, author of “The Worlds of Public Health: Anthropological Excursions” “War exacts many obvious costs upon bodies and ecologies: grave injuries, toxic waste, psychological trauma. In Maraña, Pinto-García calls our attention to a slower, more elusive, yet no less consequential cost of war. Her gripping account of how cutaneous leishmaniasis came to be the signature pathology of Colombia’s protracted armed conflict blends a keen eye for scientific detail with an incisive and meticulous critique of militarized healthcare. A major contribution to environmental and medical anthropology, this book illustrates how relations of care for people and landscapes are shaped by economies of violence—and how it might be otherwise.” -- Alex M. Nading, author of “Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health, and the Politics of Entanglement” “This outstanding book constitutes a pathbreaking ethnography rooted in scientific evidence, technological studies, and medical anthropology, through which Pinto-García underscores and unwraps the maraña, or the entanglement, of the armed conflict with leishmaniasis in Colombia. She reveals how in this violent context, which takes place mainly in the tropical jungle, leishmaniasis has been constructed as a war or guerrilla disease. As the testimonies of soldiers, guerrillas, nurses, scientists, and local residents are unraveled, it becomes clear that the stigmatization of the disease has led to a biomedical war regime that prioritizes war over public health. The author leaves readers with the question of how to disentangle leishmaniasis and war, and how to consider a non-pharmaceutical solution to a public health problem.” -- María Clemencia Ramírez, author of “Between the Guerrillas and the State: The Cocalero Movement, Citizenship, and Identity in the Colombian Amazon” “Pinto-García negotiated remarkable access to both the Colombian Army and FARC guerrilla members. She deploys what she learned to tell multifaceted stories about the complex entanglements (or maraña) of war, disease, medicine, and violence, tracing the reciprocal interactions of leishmaniasis and its treatments amid a war that determined who fell sick and who could access care. Maraña offers poignant testimony of the suffering, stigma, and stigmata that endure long after formal hostilities cease.” -- David S. Jones, author of “Broken Hearts: The Tangled History of Cardiac Care” “Pinto-García’s Maraña is a milestone in new anthropologies of infectious diseases. No other monograph brings together the ethnographic study of war and zoonosis in such thought-provoking, boundary-breaking tension.” -- Christos Lynteris, author of “Visual Plague: The Emergence of Epidemic Photography”