The Excavating the Biosocial series has so far focused on birth cohorts as ethnographic object (Gibbon and Pentecost 2020). In this post, I explore the expansion of interest in the early life period, particularly for Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) research, to include ‘the preconception period.’ Recently, interest in this period has produced new kinds of trial communities …
Tag Archives: Diabetes
The ‘chronic’ lives of failing organs: afflictions of ambivalent care in Mexico
Life has always been difficult, Maria del Rosario told me, but she coped. That was before all the sickness. When her mother’s kidneys began to fail, she felt traumatised, utterly overwhelmed. No matter what she or anyone else did to help, it was no good. Their lives simply fell apart.[i]
Maria, a single mother of two, lived in Balcones …
Sugar and Tension: Diabetes and Gender in Modern India

Sugar and Tension: Diabetes in Modern India
Rutgers University Press, 2019. 202 pages.
Sugar and Tension is a must-read for anyone interested in how social constructions of gender influence the physical and mental health of individuals living with diabetes. Lesley Jo Weaver, a biocultural medical anthropologist with degrees in global health and in medical anthropology, presents case …
Book Forum––Harris Solomon’s Metabolic Living: Food, Fat and The Absorption of Illness in India
Harris Solomon’s Metabolic Living traces patterns of consumption, calories, and chronic disease to tell a story about the enfolding––the absorption and regulation––of food in and about the body in Mumbai. Solomon’s book is a powerful ethnographic reflection on how factors held as exterior (local and global cuisine, evolving and competing norms regarding eating and body image) are wholly interiorized. …
Emily Mendenhall’s Syndemic Suffering
Syndemic Suffering:
Social Distress, Depression, and Diabetes Among Mexican Immigrant Women
Left Coast Press Inc., 2012
Hardcover, 145 pages
US $28.45
In Syndemic Suffering, Emily Mendenhall explores the interactive relationship between myriad forms of violence, social suffering, and chronic disease, including diabetes and depression. Positioned between public health and critical medical anthropology, Mendenhall offers a comprehensive …
In the Journals… July 2012
For this first part of July starting us off is the July issue of Health with seven articles ranging from issues of identity in an online self-help diabetes community, gendered perspectives of own and partner’s weight to a critical review on the use of routine patient data and an exploration of the public debate on evidence of complimentary and …