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The Biology and Health of Poverty and Inequality It is now well accepted that social inequalities underlay health disparities in a variety of contexts. It has also become clearer that inequalities are growing in contexts of globalization and present a major challenge to public health (Farmer 1999; Feachem 2000; Kim et al. 2000; Sen 1992; Wilkinson 1996; Janes and Korbett in this volume). Biocultural anthropologists have contributed to these observations over the past two decades through grounded research on the dialectical interactions among social inequalities, livelihoods, food security, nutrition, and illness [see for example, Volumes 35 (Mazzeo et al. 2011) and 38 (Leatherman and Jernigan 2014) of Annals of Anthropological Practice].

One longitudinal example of these interactions is found in the District of Nuñoa in the southern Peruvian Andes. Nuñoa has been a site for over fifty years of research and provides a particularly good case of how changing political and economic conditions map onto health. Work from the 1980s illustrated how profound poverty and political marginalization resulting from centuries of exploitation, a failed agrarian reform, and the penetration of capitalist markets, were linked to diminished diets, nutrition, health, coping capacity, food production, and household economies (Leatherman 1996, 2005). Poorer households with less secure access to land and few economic resources experienced worse nutrition and health, and experienced greater impacts of poor health on agro-pastoral production and household livelihoods, thus perpetuating and exacerbating poverty. These harsh realities throughout the central and southern Andes may have contributed to and surely were exacerbated by the civil war between Sendero Lumnoso and the Peruvian state (Leatherman and Thomas 2009 ).