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The Plantation as Hotspot - Capital, Science, Labour, and the Earthly Limits of Global Health

Alex Nading
Central American sugarcane plantations have become ‘hotspots’ of chronic kidney disease (CKD), with work-related heat stress the factor most strongly associated with the disease. Drawing on ethnographic research on CKD in Nicaragua and a close reading of scientific and policy documents, this article frames the plantation as a health ‘hotspot’ in three ways: as a site of intensive environment altering investment, sites of public health scrutiny and as hotspots of political action.
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Alex Nading is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. He is the author of Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health, and the Politics of Entanglement (University of California Press, 2014), and his research on human-animal health, toxicity, and global health science has been published in venues including Cultural Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, American Anthropologist, and the Annual Review of Anthropology. He is the Editor of Medical Anthropology Quarterly.

Learning points

  • Why is the notion of “hotspot” useful as a critical tool for Medical Anthropology?
  • What does it mean to say that the risk of disease is not located, but “locational”?
  • In his text, the author shows that although the companies that own the sugarcane fields justified chronic kidney disease as a result of heat or moral failure, the sugarcane workers, the interlocutors of the research, pointed to other factors. What were these factors?

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