Traveling with Sugar

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. 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