Vita

by Biehl, Joao

• ISBN13: 9780520242784
• ISBN10: 0520242785
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-06-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

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'smethodological 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.

Author Biography

Joao Biehl is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University

Table of Contents

Introduction: "Dead alive, dead outside, alive inside"	1	(34)
PART ONE. VITA
A Zone of Social Abandonment	35	(11)
Brazil	46	(10)
Citizenship	56	(15)
PART TWO. CATARINA AND THE ALPHABET
Life of the Mind	71	(4)
Society of Bodies	75	(7)
Inequality	82	(3)
Ex-Human	85	(7)
The House and the Animal	92	(7)
"Love is the illusion of the abandoned"	99	(3)
Social Psychosis	102	(6)
An Illness of Time	108	(3)
God, Sex, and Agency	111	(12)
PART THREE. THE MEDICAL ARCHIVE
Public Psychiatry	123	(3)
Her Life as a Typical Patient	126	(4)
Democratization and the Right to Health	130	(8)
Economic Change and Mental Suffering	138	(8)
Medical Science	146	(5)
End of a Life	151	(8)
Voices	159	(4)
Care and Exclusion	163	(8)
Migration and Model Policies	171	(8)
Women, Poverty, and Social Death	179	(8)
"I am like this because of life"	187	(5)
The Sense of Symptoms	192	(7)
Pharmaceutical Being	199	(10)
PART FOUR. THE FAMILY
Ties	209	(9)
Ataxia	218	(11)
Her House	229	(6)
Brothers	235	(5)
Children, In-Laws, and the Ex-Husband	240	(8)
Adoptive Parents	248	(9)
"To want my body as a medication, my body"	257	(8)
Everyday Violence	265	(6)
PART FIVE. BIOLOGY AND ETHICS
Pain	271	(3)
Human Rights	274	(4)
Value Systems	278	(4)
Gene Expression and Social Abandonment	282	(10)
Family Tree	292	(5)
A Genetic Population	297	(10)
A Lost Chance	307	(6)
PART SIX. THE DICTIONARY
"Underneath was this, which I do not attempt to name"	313	(8)
Book I	321	(1)
Book II	322	(5)
Book III	327	(1)
Book IV	327	(3)
Book V	330	(1)
Book VI	331	(2)
Book VII	333	(1)
Book VIII	334	(1)
Book IX	335	(1)
Book X	335	(1)
Book XI	336	(1)
Book XII	337	(2)
Book XIII	339	(1)
Book XIV	340	(1)
Book XV	341	(1)
Book XVI	342	(1)
Book XVII	343	(3)
Book XVIII	346	(2)
Book XIX	348	(5)
Conclusion: "A way to the words"	353	(6)
Postscript: "I am part of the origins, not just of language, but of people"	359	(4)
Acknowledgments	363	(4)
Notes	367	(10)
Bibliography	377	(18)
Index	395