"This book is a must read not only for scholars and public health practitioners wanting to understand how women in contemporary India experience and respond to diabetes; but a broader audience interested in what ethnographies of chronic illness can tell us about gender roles, women's life priorities, and challenges to their wellbeing across the life course."
Mark Nichter, author of Global Health: Why Cultural Perceptions, Social Representation and Biopolitics Matter
"Sugar and Tension is a poignant ethnography that reveals how middle-class women in urban North India grapple with a mounting diabetes epidemic in the midst of shifting expectations and opportunities for women. Women with diabetes in Delhi often act in ways that run counter to biomedical recommendations. Weaver helps us to understand why, through her account of structural constraints that women face, and by showing how women justify their actions as they leverage ideas about relationships among diabetes, tension and self-sacrifice to engage in both social critique and self-validation. This book makes an important contribution to the studies of medical anthropology and gender in South Asia."
Cecilia VanHollen, author of Birth in the Age of AIDS: Women, Reproduction, and HIV/AIDS in India
"Recommended."
Choice
Sausage of Science
"This is a book where women's voices sing. It is filled with stories that make an imprint because they are narratively complex, in-depth, and speak to the heart of the issues that center the book: diabetes, the efforts and limitations of self-care, family, and, most importantly, gender....Beautifully articulates the everyday dilemmas women face as they manage competing demands and sometimes contradictory cultural poles as they try to live well, physically, mentally, and spiritually."
American Journal of Human Biology
"A clear and very compelling ethnography that demonstrates how for women in New Delhi, learning to be diabetic is as much about family and global development as it is about individual well-being. Weaver does not set up self-sacrifice and self-care as mutually exclusive possibilities but considers how acts of control and giving hold profound social meaning in North India. Overall, this highly readable book would be appropriate for undergraduate and graduate courses in medical anthropology, global health, biocultural anthropology, and the anthropology of gender."
Medical Anthropology Quarterly
"Weaver identifies this tension between self-care and societal demands in women in India and offers a way forward for all, with generalizable lessons for anyone dealing with a chronic disease. Sugar and Tension provides a unique and incisive view of diabetes in modern India, and highlights the potential for women to change their own place in society."
Latha Palaniappan, The Lancet
