Title: Vita : life in a zone of social abandonment /
Authors: Biehl, João Guilherme.; Eskerod, Torben, 1960-
Publisher: University of California Press,
Year: 2013
Subjects: Vita (Asylum : Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil); Vita (Asylum : Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil); Institutional care Brazil Porto Alegre (Rio Grande do Sul); Marginality, Social Brazil Porto Alegre (Rio Grande do Sul); Institutional care; Marginality, Social; Brazil Porto Alegre (Rio Grande do Sul)
Abstract: "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"--Book cover.
Contents: Introduction: "Dead alive, dead outside, alive inside" -- pt. 1. Vita. A zone of social abandonment -- Brazil -- Citizenship -- pt. 2. Catarina and the alphabet. Life of the mind -- Society of bodies -- Inequality -- Ex-human -- The house and the animal -- "Love is the illusion of the abandoned" -- Social psychosis -- An illness of time -- God, sex, and agency -- pt. 3. The medical archive. Public psychiatry -- Her life as a typical patient -- Democratization and the right to health -- Economic change and mental suffering -- Medical science -- End of a life -- Voices -- Care and exclusion -- Migration and model policies -- Women, poverty, and social death -- "I am like this because of life" -- The sense of symptoms -- Pharmaceutical being -- pt. 4. The family. Ties -- Ataxia -- Her house -- Brothers -- Children, in-laws, and the ex-husband -- Adoptive parents -- "To want my body as a medication, my body" -- Everyday violence -- pt. 5. Biology and ethics. Pain -- Human rights -- Value systems -- Gene expression and social abandonment -- Family tree -- A genetic population -- A lost chance -- pt. 6. The dictionary. "Underneath was this, which I do not attempt to name" -- Book I-XIX -- Conclusion: "A way to the words" -- Postscript: "I am part of the origins, not just of language, but of people" -- Afterword. Return to Vita.