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João Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005. 404 pp.
Few anthropological case studies successfully interweave in-depth particular ethnography with a universal humanistic optic without losing site of the individual subject. João Biehl's Vita brilliantly and originally integrates these seemingly separate domains. Vita ensnares the reader in Brazil's intricate web of entrenched social inequalities ramified and magnified by the inefficiencies of the medical and public health system that directly affect community survival, kinship resilience, and ultimately individual physical and mental well being. Remarkably, Biehl is able to demonstrate how human death and suffering is inescapably tied to a Kafkian medical system where layer upon layer of bureaucracy, medical unaccountability, and patronizing hierarchies obscure and obliterate the causal forces that plunge humans into an ex-human existence.
Vita blends the genres of life history and classic ethnography detailing the social and intimate processes through which exclusion and abandonment are instrumentally forged, relegating the most vulnerable members of society diagnosed or m/s-diagnosed with a variety of conditions-ranging from mental illness to AIDS and drug addictions-to marginal zones of collective amnesia, social erasure, and annihilation. As Biehl describes, Vita is a site of "social abandonment" inhabited by those who were discarded by society and by the medical establishment as terminal "hopeless cases." This zone of abandonment is uncovered to the anthropologist through the life history of one individual subject, Catarina.
Latin for life, Vita ironically is best defined as a non-place where one dies socially and emotionally while physically still embodying vitality. Through Catarina, Biehl uncovers the systemic failures that deprive patients from their own social agency and medical history ultimately leading to their abandonment and public death. Why Catarina? As Biehl explains she was defined as "mad," but her words and her poetics suggested a willingness to live, a refusal to be forgotten, and a desire to be desired. Curiously, Catarina introduced herself as someone writing her own dictionary where she recorded a repertoire of everyday words selected from her past and present verbal interactions.
Her use of language as an instrument for representing a reality she refused to forget, suggested multiple anthropological possibilities. Selections from Catarina's dictionary are integrated into...