Available From UC Press

Traveling with Sugar

Chronicles of a Global Epidemic

Amy Moran-Thomas

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.

“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

384 pp.6 x 9Illus: 30 b/w photographs, 2 maps

9780520297531$95.00|£80.00Hardcover

Dec 2019