Joao biehl biography samples
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Vita : life in a zone of social abandonment
pages : 24 cm
"Zones of social abandonment are emerging everywhere in Brazil's big cities - places like Vita, where the unwanted, the mentally ill, the sick, and the homeless are left to die. This haunting, unforgettable story centers on a young woman named Catarina, increasingly paralyzed and said to be mad, living out her time at Vita. Anthropologist Joao Biehl leads a detective-like journey to know Catarina; to unravel the cryptic, poetic words that are part of the "dictionary" she is compiling; and to trace the complex network of family, medicine, state, and economy in which her abandonment and pathology took form eller gestalt. As Biehl painstakingly relates Catarina's words to a vanished world and elucidates her condition, we learn of subjectivities unmade and remade beneath economic pressures, pharmaceuticals as moral technologies, a public common sense that lets the unsound and unproductive die, and anthropology's unique power to work through
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Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival
"Biehl's powerful ethnography beautifully mixes visual and written portraits of those who lived and died as Brazil developed its public health and policy responses to AIDS. The author gives voice to those at the margins—the poor, the homeless, homosexuals, drug addicts, transvestites, prostitutes—who remained stigmatized and invisible as Brazil universalized access to AIDS therapies. . . . Biehl convincingly argues the importance of understanding the history and politics of AIDS pharmaceuticalization, the role of social mobilization, and the invisibility of the marginalized in official statistics and care in grasping the reality of AIDS in Brazil."—E.J. Schatz, Choice
"In Will to Live, João Biehl combines critical public health, ethnography, and even a mini epidemiological survey, studying AIDS therapies up, down, and sideways. . . . The running commentary from major decision-makers in the no
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VITA: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment
Introduction
Dead alive, dead outside, alive inside" 1 " 2 | Introduction beings. You must go there. You will see what people do to people, what it means to be human these days." I had grown up in an area outside Porto Alegre. I had traveled through and worked in several poor neighborhoods in the north and south of the country. I thought I knew Brazil. But nothing I had seen before prepared me for the desolation of Vita.
Vita did not appear on any city map. Even though the existence of the place was acknowledged by officials and the public at large, it was not the concern of any remedial program or policy.
Winkler was right. Vita is the end-station on the road of poverty; it is the place where living beings go when they are no longer considered people. Excluded from family life and medical care, most of the two hundred people in Vita's infirmary at that time had no formal identification and lived in a state of abject