Conclusion

The conclusion returns to the simple argument that culture and experience fundamentally shape how diabetes is enacted cross-culturally. This chapter reflects upon the four ethnographic case studies and proposes five ways in which anthropologists and public health practitioners should "rethink diabetes." First, it argues that diabetes must be understood as a disease of poverty as opposed to exclusively one of modernization. Second, it argues that diabetes is always syndemic, especially when it confronts the complexity of economic insecurity. Third, diagnosis is perhaps the most influential feature of syndemic suffering, which reveals how diabetes itself is experienced completely differently in the body pre- and post-diagnosis. Fourth, the social life of diabetes contributes to fundamentally shifting what it means to have and live with diabetes across contexts. Finally, the conclusion suggests that interventions for diabetes should be employ syndemic thinking by working both upstream to address social policy and downstream to navigate clinical challenges and community-based solutions.