How do our beliefs about living with chronic illness shape the way we approach treatment and care?
Savoring Care challenges conventional narratives about living with type 2 diabetes. A chronic condition defined by insulin resistance and radical transitions in lifestyle, type 2 diabetes care is infused with individual blame and attempts to foster biomedical control. This book moves the focus away from blame and stigma towards the ways people with this chronic illness foster care, resilience, and well-being in their daily lives. Rather than centring diabetes management solely on diet and personal responsibility, this book explores how individuals and communities support one another through shared meals, therapies, and other forms of practical care.
Drawing on rich ethnographic research, editors and anthropologists Jessica Hardin and Emily Mendenhall illuminate how people respond creatively to a diabetes diagnosis, developing nourishing practices that prioritize relationships, friendship, and mutual care from around the world. Blending compassionate storytelling with accessible analysis, Savoring Care critiques dominant models of health, which frame diabetes as a failure of willpower or lifestyle, and instead highlights the alternative logics available as well as the diverse, meaningful ways people adapt to live well, understand their bodies, and thrive.
Introduction: Flourishing with Diabetes
Jessica Hardin and Emily Mendenhall
Section 1: Diabetes Is Always Relational
1. Funekas Kitchen: Diabetes Healing in Soweto Living Rooms Through Prayer
and Commensality in South Africa
Emily Mendenhall, Lindile Cele, Edna Bosire
2. Grace Between Wives: Living the Good Life in Senegal
Emma Nelson Bunkley, Fatoumata Diagne, Ndèye Aminata Mbaye
3. Tinkering: Getting by with Diabetes Through Creativity and Relational Care
in Fiji
Edward Narain and Tarryn Phillips
4. Ancestral Healing: Learning to Relate to Sugar in Brazil
D. Burnett
Section 2: Diabetes Always Reflects Social Structures
5. Friends Can Heal Pain in the Midst of Trauma: Manuelas and Alyshias
Story
Manuela Fuentes and Alyshia Gálvez
6. Socio-Somatic Generativity: A Life Story from Vietnam
Tine M. Gammeltoft and Dung V
7. Footsteps and Their Refusals: Tracing Sugar and Diabetes as Racial
Projects in New York
James Doucet-Battle
8. Native Youth Disruptions with Health and Food in Arizona
Tommey Jodie, Jesse Pablo, Laurel Bellante, Megan A. Carney
Section 3: Diabetes Is About More Than Diet
9. Iatrochemistry: Recipes That Heal
Emily Yates-Doerr
10. Connecting Care, Connecting Chronic Illness: Community, Rural Health, and
Insecurity in Hidalgo, Mexico
Emilia Mercedes Guevara
11. Don Agustin's Crafts: Patience, Skill, and Creativity in Weaving and
Healing the Fabric of Life
Laura Montesi
Section 4: Diabetes Is More Than Numbers
12. Outwitting Diabetes: Measuring and Sensing the Body in India
Pallavi Laxmikanth
13. Thriving While Struggling to Access Care in India
Lesley Jo Weaver
14. Trust: The Stress of Managing Diabetes and Collaborative Care in the
United States
Jessica P. Cerdeña and Genesis Santos
Complicating Conclusions: Relational Research and the Obligation to Create
Space for Difference
Jessica Hardin, Saunima'a Ma Fulu Aiolupotea, Uila Laifa Lima, Ramona
Boodoosingh, Tauaitala Poloie Lees, Tausala Aiavao, Falelua Maua
Jessica Hardin is a critical medical anthropologist, Honorable Barber B. Conable Jr. endowed chair and associate professor of anthropology at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Emily Mendenhall is a medical anthropologist, Guggenheim fellow, and professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
