Pathogenic Metabolisms: A Rift and the Zika Virus in Mato Grosso, Brazil

Abstract

AbstractThe Zika virus in Brazil is often portrayed as emerging in and more severely inflicting the country’s impoverished coastal urban areas. However, the virus also impacted residents in wealthier and more rural areas. To understand how the Zika virus moved to seemingly less likely places, I bring political ecological approaches to health and disease into conversation with scholarly accounts of metabolic rifts. Making an incorporated comparison of the ways in which global finance and the Brazilian state shaped the relationship between urban and rural areas, I demonstrate how the era of modernist urban industrialisation resulted in the creation of more traditional spaces of Zika emergence in the country’s urban impoverished areas and the shift towards neoliberal agricultural extractivism resulted in the creation of seemingly more unusual spaces of Zika emergence in the wealthier less populated interior.