“A formidable contribution to a variety of entangled subdisciplines, from medical anthropology, disabilities studies, and science and technology studies to the anthropology of war and peace. . . . Maraña’s ethnographic acumen and conceptual ambition points to a new direction in understanding the ever-entangled realm of medicine, disease, and social conflict.”
— Medical Anthropology
“Maraña makes a significant contribution to the history and anthropology of science, medicine and war. It demonstrates how technoscientific practices, including drug regulation, clinical protocols and research writing, participate in the production of wartime social orders. By centering a disease that is neither spectacular nor usually fatal, Pinto-Garcia illuminates how the costs of war accumulate in bodies, infrastructures and epistemologies beyond armed confrontation.”
— British Journal for the History of Science
“There are moments in our careers when we don’t realize we’ve been waiting for a book until it lands in our laps—one that encompasses so many of our interests, both academic and personal. Pinto-García’s book, Maraña . . . does just that. It speaks to militarism, political ecologies of the jungle, geopolitics of war and peacemaking, infectious disease management, and biopolitics, all beautifully woven together through a rich ethnography that is at once theoretically dense and eminently readable.”
— Antipode
“In Maraña, Pinto-García envelops the reader in the complex maraña of the armed conflict and leishmaniasis. . . . Pinto-García makes clear that without disrupting the entrenched systems of violence within medicine and militarism, any solution will remain partial at best.”
— The Lancet
“Maraña . . . reconfigures how we understand infectious disease in conflict zones by embedding cutaneous leishmaniasis within the entangled ecologies of Colombia’s armed conflict. Situated at the intersection of medical anthropology, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and political economy, this book challenges biomedical and military logics that treat disease as apolitical and isolate it from the broader forces that shape its emergence and management.”
— Tapuya
“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 and 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 health care. 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”
“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.”
— Kenneth T. MacLeish, author of “Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community”
“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. Pinto-García reveals the maraña to prompt the healing of suffering bodies.”
— Claudia Leal, author of “Landscapes of Freedom: Building a Postemancipation Society in the Rainforests of Western Colombia”
“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, 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.”
— Olga Restrepo Forero, Universidad Nacional de Colombia
