Vita : Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. /João Biehl

Cover; VITA; Title; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; Introduction: "Dead alive, dead outside, alive inside"; PART ONE. VITA; A Zone of Social Abandonment; Brazil; Citizenship; PART TWO. 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; 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 ExclusionMigration 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 IIIBook IV; Book V; Book VI; Book VII; Book VIII; Book IX; Book X; Book XI; BookXII; 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.

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.