Maraña: War and disease in the jungles of Colombia By LinaPinto‐García, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2025. 205 pp.

Colombia's prolonged conflict has received no shortage of scholarly attention.Within the country, civil war provided the fertile grounds upon which its storied social science tradition was erected.As scholarly analysis offered ever-growing precision about the actors, interests, methods, and victims of war, scholars increasingly became aware of the un-manageability of the conflict as a conceptual object.Perhaps due to the longevity of the conflict, its many transformations, the many ways in which it has touched the whole of the country, the war in Colombia has opened enormously productive sites of research that touch on a multitude of sites, process, and subjects, broadly querying the orthodoxy about just what a war is.Yet authors interested in thinking through the war's impact on biomedical practices and institutions have often focused on the psychological and physical sequelae experienced by former combatants or the changing landscape of international aid in conflict situations.Conflict for these authors -as for many other authors in the social scientific literature concerned with biomedicine and war -exists as a source of injury for soldiers and civilians, or as a target of violence by armed actors.Lina Pinto-García's Maraña makes an important contribution to this literature, exploring how disease and conflict become entangled, expanding war tactics, altering the mechanism of international aid, leveraging pharmaceuticals, transforming ecosystems of infection, and transforming landscapes of suspicion and trust.Her analysis boldly broadens the anthropological conceptual repertoire on violence and war by considering illness and warfare as mutually constitutive and profoundly enmeshed.Concretely, the book investigates leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease spread by sandflies whose most visible symptoms are open sores on the skin.In Colombia, the sandflies make their home in the selva, the jungles where guerrillas also make camp, where the war is often fought, and where civilians increasingly work and live at the edges of the so-called formal economy.Garcia-Pinto seizes on this connection, tracing the metonymic bundle of leishmaniasis, selva, and combatants, to elucidate how war and disease become entangled, transforming and being transformed in turn by the other.In so doing, she opens novel grounds for examining the processes of war, layering political and economic analysis of warfare with considerations of its effects on biodiversity, medical practice, international aid, and scientific knowledge production."Leishmaniasis in Colombia" she writes, "shows how society and technoscience influence each other in a violent context, creating and reproducing warfare systems of health and illness that divide people into allies and excluded enemies"(162).The very title of the book signals to the readers the untamed tangle through which war is enmeshed in the daily reality of Colombians.In Spanish, the word maraña is often spoken in a snarl and is used