What is Communicable? Unaccounted Injuries and “Catching” Diabetes in an Illegible Epidemic

Abstract

Long‐accepted models of causality cast diseases into the binary of either “contagious” or “non‐communicable,” typically with institutional resources focused primarily on interrupting infectious disease transmission. But in southern Belize, as in much of the world today, epidemic diabetes has become a leading cause of death and a notorious contributor to organ failure and amputated limbs. This ethnographic essay follows caregivers' and families' work to survive in‐between public health categories, and asks what responses a bifurcated model of infectious versus non‐communicable disease structures or incapacitates in practice. It proposes an alternative focus on diabetes as a “para‐communicable” condition—materially transmitted as bodies and ecologies intimately shape each other over time, with unequal and compounding effects for historically situated groups of people. The article closes by querying how communicability relates to community, and why it matters to reframe narratives about contributing causalities in relation to struggles for treatment access.

Interembodiment, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Health

“…Interembodiment throws into stark relief Senegalese women's insights into the role of inherited food pathways, nutritional landscapes, and communal eating in Senegalese concepts of inheritance. Amy Moran‐Thomas (2019) employs the idea of the “para‐communicable,” that is “chronic conditions that may be materially transmitted as bodies and ecologies intimately shape each other over time, with unequal and compounding effects for historically situated groups of people” (p. 489). The para‐communicable and generational time allow us to see how the idea of inheritance is a kind of interembodiment.…”

“…Interembodiment adds to these conceptions of inheritance by further troubling the categories between noncommunicable and communicable disease. Noncommunicable diseases are often discussed and defined as “linked to an individual's inborn genetic constitution or framed as resulting from personal choices and so‐called lifestyle behaviors” (Moran‐Thomas 2019: 475; see also Hatch 2016; Mendenhall 2019; Montoya 2011; Parides et al. 2007; Yates‐Doerr 2015).…”

Microbial Kin: Relations of Environment and Time

“…As developed in the critical framework by Max Liboiron (Michif‐settler) (2021), Reena Shadaan, and Michelle Murphy (Winnipeg Métis), “pollution is colonialism” (2020). Doing fieldwork in Belize, Amy Moran‐Thomas came to describe chronic health issues like diabetes that were entangled with exposures “as para‐communicable—chronic conditions that may be materially transmitted as bodies and ecologies intimately shape each other over time, with unequal and compounding effects for historically situated groups of people” (2019: 489). In the same way, the placeness of Mirpur, enteric disease, and malnutrition through microbiomes are para‐communicable.…”

“…11Please see: Haraway 2016; Agard‐Jones 2016; Lamoreaux 2020; Todd and Kanngieser 2020; Dow and Lamoreaux 2020; Shadaan and Murphy 2020; Moran‐Thomas 2019; Salmón 2000; Watts 2013, Donald 2016, and Reo 2019, respectively.…”

Uma antropologia da transmissão: mosquitos, mulheres e epidemia de Zika no Brasil

“…Nesse caso, a falta de saneamento, assim como as disparidades na qualidade dos serviços públicos -por exemplo, atendimento médico ou educação -podem até levar a uma maior proliferação de mosquitos, mas, principalmente, acabam tendo um efeito prejudicial em como se dá a reposta ao vírus. Afinal, corpos e ecologias saudáveis (ou não) se influenciam e se constituem ao longo do tempo (MORAN-THOMAS, 2019). Em outras palavras, se a oportunidade de alguém ser picado pode chegar a diferentes grupos, as desigualdades sociais, raciais e regionais determinam como a doença se manifesta e se desenvolve em cada indivíduo.…”