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Alex M. Nading. Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health, and the Politics of Entanglement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. xvi + 269 pp. Ill. $29.95 (978-0-520-28262-9).
This ethnographic, anthropologic examination of dengue control activities in Ciudad Sandino (Managua metropolitan area, Nicaragua, 2006-9) seeks to demonstrate the importance of local specifics of how "people, pathogens, vectors, and their shared surroundings are always in the process of becoming, together" because "environments do not just cause health problems; rather humans and non-humans incorporate one another's actions" (p. 202). Nading's informants included community health workers (brigadistas, who worked as dengue case investigators and vector control officials), garbage collectors, scavengers, scrap metal buyers, Ciudad Sandino residents, physicians, entomologists, and epidemiologists.
The analysis is first concerned with the layout and culture of the place, its relation to garbage as a source of both mosquitoes and income (recycling), and the parasitic relationships between large brokers and scavengers, mosquitoes and people, and humans and the environment. Then Nading stresses the appeals of a well-ordered house and knowledge of the mosquito life cycle; the similarity of public health work with evangelical house-to-house visits and the mosquito's life (brief visits to the homes' most intimate spaces); and the gendered condition of dengue control work (women held responsible for prevention activities in the home, and the paradoxical self-identification of...