Vita: Life In A Zone Of Social Abandonment - Rilegato

Biehl, Joao Guilherme

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0520242777 ISBN 13: 9780520242777

Casa editrice: Univ of California Pr, 2005

Riassunto

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 João 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.

As Biehl painstakingly relates Catarina’s words to a vanished world and elucidates her condition, we learn of subjectivities unmade and remade under 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 these juxtaposed fields. Vita’s methodological innovations, bold fieldwork, and rigorous social theory make it an essential reading for anyone who is grappling with how to understand the conditions of life, thought and ethics in the contemporary world.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

João Biehl is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. Torben Eskerod is an artist and works as a freelance photographer in Copenhagen. His website is www.joaobiehl.net.

Dalla seconda/terza di copertina:

"João Biehl's Vita is a greatly arresting work. The tale of Catarina is one that haunts the reader. This book's central character is sure to become an anthropological classic, her humanity reaffirmed by the author."—Arthur Kleinman, author of Writing at the Margin: Discourse between Anthropology and Medicine

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Univ of California Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0520242777
• ISBN 13: 9780520242777
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 404