Lina Pinto-García, <i>Maraña: War and Disease in the Jungles of Colombia</i> Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025. Pp. 240. ISBN 978-0-226-83934-9. $35.00 (paper).

In Maraa, Lina Pinto-Garcia rethinks infectious disease, war and biomedicine through an ethnographic study of cutaneous leishmaniasis (a parasitic disease) in Colombia's long armed conflict.Her central claim is precise and consequential: in Colombia, leishmaniasis is not merely a disease that occurs during war, but a disease of war, co-produced through the ecological, political, pharmaceutical and epistemic infrastructures of conflict.By tracing how sandflies, parasites, soldiers, guerrillas, drugs, laboratories and regulations are held together in what she calls a maraa, a tangled mesh of human and more-than-human relations, Pinto-Garcia challenges pathogen-centered and depoliticized models of infectious disease and situates war itself as a formative dimension of disease ontology.The book operates at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS), critical medical anthropology and Latin American history, while addressing questions central to the history of science about knowledge making under conditions of violence.Pinto-Garcia argues that leishmaniasis in Colombia has been socially and materially constructed as a 'war disease' and, more pointedly, as a 'guerrilla disease', a stigmatizing designation with serious consequences.Skin lesions become legible as signs of insurgency, collapsing diagnosis into counterinsurgency logics and rendering sufferers vulnerable to state and paramilitary violence.Disease marks function as biopolitical identifiers, illustrating how medical categories and bodily signs can be incorporated into state practices of surveillance and control.Conceptually, Maraa engages several foundational currents in the history and anthropology of science.Pinto-Garcia's insistence that leishmaniasis cannot be reduced to a parasite-host interaction, but must be understood as emerging from historically specific social, ecological and political arrangements echoes Charles Rosenberg's formulation of disease as a 'configuration' that stabilizes at the intersection of biological events and social negotiation.What Maraa adds is a sustained demonstration that protracted armed conflict can become one of the structuring conditions through which such configurations cohere.Her analysis of Glucantime (the medical treatment for leishmaniasis) as a technology that produces both medical effects and social distinctions resonates with Sheila Jasanoff's notion of co-production: pharmaceutical regulation, clinical practice and scientific knowledge help constitute categories of ally, enemy, deserving patient and disposable body.Pinto-Garcia's account of stigma, diagnosis and access to care also parallels Charles Briggs's work on 'sanitary citizenship' and the making of 'unsanitary subjects', in which medical classifications and narratives sort populations into those worthy of protection and those rendered suspect.Read through these lenses, Maraa appears as a conflict-specific