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Forms of Living
Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty
Affliction inaugurates a novel way of understanding the trajectories of health and disease in the context of poverty. Focusing on low-income neighborhoods in Delhi, it stitches together three different sets of issues.
First, it examines the different trajectories of What are the circumstances under which illness is absorbed within the normal and when does it exceed the normal―putting resources, relationships, and even one’s world into jeopardy?
A second set of issues involves how different healers understand their own practices. The astonishing range of practitioners found in the local markets in the poor neighborhoods of Delhi shows how the magical and the technical are knotted together in the therapeutic experience of healers and patients. The book What is expert knowledge? What is it that the practitioner knows and what does the patient know? How are these different forms of knowledge brought together in the clinical encounter, broadly defined? How does this event of everyday life bear the traces of larger policies at the national and global levels?
Finally, the book interrogates the models of disease prevalence and global programming that emphasize surveillance over care and deflect attention away from the specificities of local worlds. Yet the analysis offered retains an openness to different ways of conceptualizing “what is happening” and stimulates a conversation between different disciplinary orientations to health, disease, and poverty.
Most studies of health and disease focus on the encounter between patient and practitioner within the space of the clinic. This book instead privileges the networks of relations, institutions, and knowledge over which the experience of illness is dispersed. Instead of thinking of illness as an event set apart from everyday life, it shows the texture of everyday life, the political economy of neighborhoods, as well as the dark side of care. It helps us see how illness is bound by the contexts in which it occurs, while also showing how illness transcends these contexts to say something about the nature of everyday life and the making of subjects.
First, it examines the different trajectories of What are the circumstances under which illness is absorbed within the normal and when does it exceed the normal―putting resources, relationships, and even one’s world into jeopardy?
A second set of issues involves how different healers understand their own practices. The astonishing range of practitioners found in the local markets in the poor neighborhoods of Delhi shows how the magical and the technical are knotted together in the therapeutic experience of healers and patients. The book What is expert knowledge? What is it that the practitioner knows and what does the patient know? How are these different forms of knowledge brought together in the clinical encounter, broadly defined? How does this event of everyday life bear the traces of larger policies at the national and global levels?
Finally, the book interrogates the models of disease prevalence and global programming that emphasize surveillance over care and deflect attention away from the specificities of local worlds. Yet the analysis offered retains an openness to different ways of conceptualizing “what is happening” and stimulates a conversation between different disciplinary orientations to health, disease, and poverty.
Most studies of health and disease focus on the encounter between patient and practitioner within the space of the clinic. This book instead privileges the networks of relations, institutions, and knowledge over which the experience of illness is dispersed. Instead of thinking of illness as an event set apart from everyday life, it shows the texture of everyday life, the political economy of neighborhoods, as well as the dark side of care. It helps us see how illness is bound by the contexts in which it occurs, while also showing how illness transcends these contexts to say something about the nature of everyday life and the making of subjects.
272 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 22, 2021
A tremendous, fascinating book about the human experience of disease and illness from the perspective of the poor and the healers of all sorts who treat them.
March 25, 2015
Veena Das is able to effectively combine ethnography and statistical anthropology to form a case study of non-traditional healers in India and Pakistan. The book is supposed to be about how individuals in communities deal with affliction and chronic pain, but often side steps to discuss how effective local healers are and their placement in communities.
The standout chapter is her discussion with the amil, or faith healer, and how he became an amil, or inherited the knowledge to become a faith healer. Though Ms. Das is skeptical of the story, she gives it adequate space and uses it as a rumination on the role that healers play, providing both physical and physiological treatment but also mental and holistic support.
I read Affliction to understand how families and individuals cope with others in their life who are afflicted with chronic pain. And I was mostly disappointed at her insights because they were brief. Otherwise good perspective on global health initiatives versus local practical applications.
The standout chapter is her discussion with the amil, or faith healer, and how he became an amil, or inherited the knowledge to become a faith healer. Though Ms. Das is skeptical of the story, she gives it adequate space and uses it as a rumination on the role that healers play, providing both physical and physiological treatment but also mental and holistic support.
I read Affliction to understand how families and individuals cope with others in their life who are afflicted with chronic pain. And I was mostly disappointed at her insights because they were brief. Otherwise good perspective on global health initiatives versus local practical applications.
December 15, 2022
Ethnography written w care. Das is ever the anthro, constantly balancing positionality and giving grace to interlocutors while making sense of/reconciling conceptions of disease and care at various levels.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews