Content area
Full Text
Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival. Joäo Biehl. Photographs by Torben Eskerod. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 466 pp.
"What most interests me as an anthropologist is the process of returning to the field. Repeatedly returning ..." [Biehl 2007:47]
Will to Live offers a moving and expansive account of the successes, possibilities, gaps, and limitations of the Brazilian AIDS policy and' the lives of poor and marginalized AIDS sufferers who engage in a day-to-day crafting of survival. In 1996, Brazil became the first developing country to officially adopt a national policy of universal access to antiretroviral therapy (ART). Several years ahead of global discussions on treatment versus prevention, Brazil's HIV/AIDS policy was a bold move that, in crucial ways, became a "model" and/or argument in support of a revived impetus toward targeted programs for high-profile diseases, toward publicprivate partnerships in the management of such diseases, and for what Biehl calls the "pharmaceuticalization of public health" (12) in the contemporary global health environment.
But this national policy took shape in and revealed a changing political context as well as long-standing severe economic and social inequalities. Processes of neoliberalization worked alongside Brazil's national project of democratization, giving rise to decentralization alongside a growing landscape filled with activists, nongovernmental organizations, and nomadic groups offering care and assistance. In this context, the experience of AIDS among the poor presented a range of paradoxes. While ART was available to select self-disciplined "patient-citizens" (302), subjects...