books

“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.”

“War exacts many obvious costs upon bodies and ecologies: grave injuries, toxic waste, psychological trauma. In Maraña, Lina 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.”

“This outstanding book constitutes a pathbreaking ethnography rooted in scientific evidence, technological studies, and medical anthropology, through which Lina 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, reinserted 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 what is essentially, a public health problem.”

“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”.

“Maraña is a work of remarkable methodological ambition and incisive interdisciplinary imagination. This tale of microscopic Leishmania parasites and the literal armies raised against them over the course of the Colombian armed conflict and its aftermath is not only a compelling story of the politics of knowledge and healing, but a conceptual account of the ways that war is made in the violence of cure. This is a book for a world in which war, disease, toxicity, and inequality can only be understood through their inescapable entanglement with one another. And just as crucially, it is a book that reveals those entanglements as places where peace, justice, and human and more-than-human flourishing may yet take root.”

“Maraña, which means entanglement but also jungle, presents a very original examination of the insidiousness of war, which includes critters, the state, and persistent ulcers. Considered a guerrilla disease, leishmaniasis has shaped the army, just as the war has shaped the ways in which this disease is spread, experienced, treated, and studied. Lina Pinto-García reveals the maraña to prompt the healing of suffering bodies.”

“Tracing leishmaniasis is an elusive task, even if the peace accords signed in 2016 that ended the forty-year Colombian armed conflict made it possible for Pinto-García to undertake this extraordinary work. The jungle-like maraña we are guided through is a complex ethnography of a disease, of sick bodies (legitimate and illegitimate), of a fragile peace process, and of the painful politics of the military-pharmaceutical complex in our contemporary world.  But we are not condemned to get lost in this maraña. Pulling these links can also open a path towards the possibility of another world.”