João Biehl 
Vita [EPUB ebook] 
Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment

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.


An instant classic,
Vita has been widely acclaimed for its bold fieldwork, theoretical innovation, and literary force. Reflecting on how Catarina’s life story continues, this updated edition offers the reader a powerful new afterword and gripping new photographs following Biehl and Eskerod’s return to Vita. Anthropology at its finest,
Vita is essential reading for anyone who is grappling with how to understand the conditions of life, thought, and ethics in the contemporary world.

Tabella dei contenuti

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

Circa l’autore

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