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Review: "Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health, and the Politics of Entanglement" by
Alex Nading
Article · May 2018
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Book Review
Alex M. Nading, “Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health, and the Politics of Entanglement”,
University of California Press, California, 2014, 978-0-520-28262-9, 269 pages
Dengue, a viral infection transmitted to humans by the female Aedes aegypti mosquito, has set
its “rapidly expanding global footprint” (Simmons, et al., 2012) firmly on the landscapes of
public health, local and global politics, and socio-economic citizenship. Increasing from “1
million cases in the 1980s to 4.7 million cases between 2000 and 2007” (San Martin, et al.,
2010), dengue is now considered an emerging infectious disease, thereby establishing it as both
a global responsibility and a “global burden” (Simmons, et al., 2012). In his ethnographic work,
Mosquito Trails, medical anthropologist Alex Nading enters the conversation to rattle the field:
challenging global concepts of eradication and the establishment of boundaries between
humans and vectors, Nading offers novel anthropological perspectives on how dengue and the
mosquito are, and should remain, entangled with human social, political and economic life.
Set in Ciudad Sandino, a slum contiguous to Nicaragua’s capital Managua, Nading’s
16-month fieldwork historicises dengue through the work, lives and stories of his informants:
community health workers (brigadistas), garbage collectors, scavengers, scrap metal buyers,
residents, physicians, entomologists and epidemiologists. His ethnography is well-paced,
thoroughly pleasurable to read, and rich with a multidisciplinary approach. While its obvious
antagonist is the mosquito, Nading will surprise the reader by spending less time with the
vector and more imparting Nicaraguan socio-politics: from the Somoza dictatorship, the
Sandinista movement, to Hurricane Mitch in 1998. The reader may spend the first chapter
wondering when the mosquito will make its appearance. Yet unlike a chronological reader on
Latin American history, Nading’s ethnography weaves the socio-political narratives through
infrastructural artefacts: cotton becomes a gateway to Nicaragua’s agrarian past and the root
of Augusto César Sandino’s guerrilla army; the ‘Somoza stones’ used to build city streets reveal
a second life as “reminders of a history of urban resistance” (Nading, 2014:33), whether
employed by Sandinista insurgents to build barricades in the 1970s or by citizens in the early
2000s to “prop up broken-down cars” (Nading, 2014:33). This seems to follow Henare, et al.’s
Thinking Through Things or Daniel Miller’s The Comfort of Things, which consider the
ethnographic histories of things – yet as the chapters unfold, Nading’s literary choice reveals a
distinct purpose: by examining the cotton, street stones, pipes, power lines, etc., of Ciudad
Sandino, Nading examines the shared lives, the “multitude of livelihoods” (Nading, 2014:119),
which give humans and mosquitos a shared history. In this manner, the author elegantly
weaves his readership into the keystone of his work: the concept of entanglement.
Nading defines entanglement as “the unfolding, often incidental attachments and
affinities, antagonisms and animosities that bring people, nonhuman animals, and things into
each other’s world” (Nading, 2014:11). Entanglement goes hand in hand with a Nicaraguan
proverb: “mejor solo que mal acompañado / it’s better to be alone than in bad company”
(Nading, 2014:25). Although this phrase may seem to support eradication by “severing
connections” (Nading, 2014:26), Nading argues that “a lack of entanglement (…) was perhaps
the most unhealthy thing that could befall an urban Nicaraguan” (Nading, 2014:25). Building on
Ingold’s discourse of life as “a movement of opening, not of closure” (Ingold, 2011:4), Nading
depicts concepts of Nicaraguan health less as distancing and disentangling, and instead as a
constant negotiation of “building quality attachments” (Nading, 2014:26).
To demonstrate entanglement, Nading turns to the houses of Ciudad Sandino, whose
interior, inhabitants, and stories he accessed through his participation with the brigadistas on
their house-to-house missions to eliminate mosquito breeding spots and inform householders
on dengue and mosquito lifespans. The Ae. aeypti mosquito, a “uniquely domestic creature”
(Nading, 2014:114), prefers smaller pools of still-standing water to lay their eggs, such as plant
pots, bottle caps and even CD covers. For the human inhabitants who had arrived as refugees
and built their houses themselves, the presence of the mosquito gave their houses a
paradoxical “expression of independence and a realisation of vulnerability” (Nading, 2014:113)
much in line with the aforementioned notions of (albeit: global) responsibility and burden.
Pressure was performed by the community to keep houses at a certain standard, for a
neighbour’s negligence could be detrimental to the health of others sharing the street. Two
examples especially stand out: first, entanglement through sewer pipes. Some citizens refused
to connect to the new system out of mistrust; others out of financial means to do so. The arrival
of a dengue outbreak was therefore rapidly blamed on those whose patio latrines collected
still-standing water, now “a new form of antisocial, polluting behaviour” (Nading, 2014:54-55).
Secondly: entanglement in Nicaragua’s garbage trade which, in 2008, “produced up to forty
million dollars for the national economy” (Nading, 2014:70). Garbage buyers, or chatarreros,
collected waste in their houses until the prices were ideal to sell, which created both a means
of financial survival and provided mosquitos with abundant breeding ground. Caught in a
paradox, the garbage collectors “were alternately the cause of and the solution to the dengue
crisis” (Nading, 2014:69).
Beyond urbanisation, entanglement was played out in the identities of the brigadistas
themselves. Chapter 4 discusses the effects of gendering and anthropomorphising the Ae.
aegypti mosquito. Calling the mosquito a ‘single mother’ egomorphises her to the brigadistas,
usually single mothers themselves, thereby transforming households into spaces women are
best suited to navigate, and teaching the women “more about who they were by inviting
themselves into the lifeworlds of mosquitoes” (Nading, 2014:117).
I found two weakness in Mosquito Trails. First, all chapters begin with biographical
narratives – be it Fatima’s symptoms in the Introduction or accompanying the trash collectors in
City of Emergencies – yet these narratives meet abrupt ends, leaving the reader with the
apprehension of an unfinished story. A clearer transition between, or perhaps a later
incorporation of, the opening narratives may be helpful to avoid this. Secondly, and in
agreement with Garcia (2016), Nading’s concluding statement that entanglement may “lead to
a more relational ethic of health” (Nading, 2014:208) offers little clarity on how this can inform
dengue as a global responsibility of “public health strategies” (Garcia, 2016:360).
In Mosquito Trails, Nading has accomplished an enjoyable literary experience coupled
with rich anthropological discourse and discussion pathways, more than can be explored in this
review. I have chosen to focus on Nading’s introduction of entanglement but following reviews
may equally focus on his other concepts: ‘evangelical ecology’, ‘original antigenic sin’ and
‘ecological aesthetic’. While his book has much to offer multidisciplinary fields, such as medical
discourse, Latin American studies and urban anthropology, I highly recommend this book as
staple literature to students of medical anthropology, especially those with an interest in
zoonotic infectious diseases.
Word count: 1043
Bibliography
Garcia, L.P. (2016) “A House-to-house Ethnography of Dengue in Nicaragua” in Science as
Culture, Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 356 – 360.
Henare, A., Holbraad, M., Wastell, S. (2007) “Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts
Ethnographically.” Oxon: Routledge.
Ingold, T. (2011) “Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description”. Oxon:
Routledge.
Miller, D. (2008) “The Comfort of Things”. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Nading, A.M. (2014) “Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health and the Politics of Entanglement”.
California: University of California Press.
San Martin, J.L., Brathwaite, O., Zambrano, B., Solorzano, J.O., Bouckenooghe, A., Dayan, G.H.,
and Guzman, M.G. (2010) “The Epidemiology of Dengue in the Americas over the Last Three
Decades: A Worrisome Reality” in American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, pp. 128 –
135.
Simmons, C.P., Farrar, J.J., Nguyen, V.C., Wills, B. (2012) “Dengue” in The New England Journal
of Medicine, Vol. 366. Pp. 1423 – 1432.
