Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival

by João Biehl

Will to Live tells how Brazil, against all odds, became the first developing country to universalize access to life-saving AIDS therapies--a breakthrough made possible by an unexpected alliance of activists, government reformers, development agencies, and the pharmaceutical industry. But anthropologist João Biehl also tells why this policy, hailed as a model worldwide, has been so difficult to implement among poor Brazilians with HIV/AIDS, who are often stigmatized as noncompliant or untreatable, becoming invisible to the public. More broadly, Biehl examines the political economy of pharmaceuticals that lies behind large-scale treatment rollouts, revealing the possibilities and inequalities that come with a magic bullet approach to health care.

By moving back and forth between the institutions shaping the Brazilian response to AIDS and the people affected by the disease, Biehl has created a book of unusual vividness, scope, and detail. At the core of Will to Live is a group of AIDS patients--unemployed, homeless, involved with prostitution and drugs--that established a makeshift health service. Biehl chronicled the personal lives of these people for over ten years and Torben Eskerod represents them here in more than one hundred stark photographs.

Ethnography, social medicine, and art merge in this unique book, illuminating the care and agency needed to extend life amid perennial violence. Full of lessons for the future, Will to Live promises to have a lasting influence in the social sciences and in the theory and practice of global public health.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Sociology, Medical, Medicine

472 pages, Hardcover

First published October 29, 2007

About the author

João Guilherme Biehl is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University

Reviews

[Ethan Adelman-sil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will To Live is a fantastic exploration of the HIV and AIDS epidemics in Brazil. Integrated with in depth fieldwork, Biehl explores many theories of living and existing on the margins and in a time of crisis. While the beginning is hard to read, Chapter 3 (Hidden Epidemic) is so elucidating it makes the whole book worthwhile (which isn't to say that the rest of the book isn't also fantastic). Quite easily one of the best books I have ever been assigned to read in a class. I would recommend it to anyone interested in disease, health, social relations, or anthropology.

[Janita · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not very accessible to non-anthropology readers or lower year anthropology students.

João Biehl is adept on demonstrating the local and global effects of the pharmaceuticalization of public health and the shifting identities of marginalized AIDS subjects.

His attention to the daily lived experience of AIDS is affective, but problematic in its disinterest in reducing stigma.