James C. McCann,The Historical Ecology of Malaria in Ethiopia. Deposing the Spirits

Abstract

Amid renewed calls for global malaria eradication, historian James C. McCann delivers a timely reminder of the complexity and resilience of malaria. His argument concerns interdisciplinarity, humility and scale. He asserts, ‘Biomedicine’s malaria failures to date have begged a return to a fuller ecological understanding of the ecology of malaria’ (p. 120). Such an understanding is more easily achieved at the local scale than the global scale at which many malaria narratives and interventions are shaped. McCann is adamant that, as he states more than once, ‘all malaria is local’ (pp. 37–8). McCann’s experience in the district of Burie as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1970s and as a Fulbright-Hays grantee in 1998 gave him the opportunity to observe first-hand the changing ecology of the Ethiopian highlands. He adds to that perspective solid historical research on nosologies of fever in vernacular and expert ‘mindscapes’ in Ethiopia’s distant and more recent past. The book is organised into six chapters arranged in roughly chronological order that explore different aspects of the local population’s encounters with malaria.