Vita

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

Vita is a dumpsite of human beings. Cut off from family, the mentally ill and sick, unemployed and homeless, young and old are left to die. In Vita, the unwanted become unknowables, have no civil rights or accountability, and it is virtually guaranteed that their conditions will not improve. The book focuses on how the production of social death is experienced by the abandoned themselves. It's narrative is structured around a young women named Catarina, increasingly paralyzed, and who was said to be mad and to have no known origins.

"Joao 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

Introduction: "Dead Alive, Dead Outside, Alive Inside" PART ONE. VITA A Zone of Social Abandonment Brazil Citizenship PART TWO. CATARINA AND THE ALPHABET The Life of the Mind A 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 PART THREE. 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 PART FOUR. 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 PART FIVE. BIOLOGY AND ETHICS Pain Human Rights Value Systems Gene Expression and Social Abandonment Family Tree A Genetic Population A Lost Chance PART SIX. THE DICTIONARY "Underneath was this, which I do not attempt to name" Book I Book II Book III Book IV Book V Book VI Book VII Book VIII Book IX Book X Book XI Book XII Book XIII Book XIV Book XV Book XVI Book XVII Book XVIII Book 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 Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index