Pathologies of Power - $13.08 - Farmer, Paul; Sen, Martha (FRW) - 9780520243262

Pathologies of Power
Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor
Farmer, Paul
Sen, Martha (FRW)
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BOOK SUMMARY
Harrowing stories of life— and death— in extreme situations interrogates our understanding of human rights.

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BOOK SYNOPSIS
Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience working in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world's poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. With passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence. Farmer challenges conventional thinking within human rights circles and exposes the relationships between political and economic injustice, on one hand, and the suffering and illness of the powerless, on the other.

Farmer shows that the same social forces that give rise to epidemic diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis also sculpt risk for human rights violations. He illustrates the ways that racism and gender inequality in the United States are embodied as disease and death.

Yet this book is far from a hopeless inventory of abuse. Farmer's disturbing examples are linked to a guarded optimism that new medical and social technologies will develop in tandem with a more informed sense of social justice. Otherwise, he concludes, we will be guilty of managing social inequality rather than addressing structural violence. Farmer's urgent plea to think about human rights in the context of global public health and to consider critical issues of quality and access for the world's poor should be of fundamental concern to a world characterized by the bizarre proximity of surfeit and suffering.

BOOK EXCERPTS
Where do people earn the Per Capita Income? More than one poor starving soul would like to know.

In our countries, numbers live better than people. How many people prosper in times of prosperity? How many people find their lives developed by development?
Eduardo Galeano, "Those Little Numbers and People"

Everyone knows that suffering, violence, and misery exist. How to define them? Given that each person's pain has for him or her a degree of reality that the pain of others can surely never approach, is widespread agreement on the subject possible? And yet people do agree, as often as not, on what constitutes extreme suffering: premature and painful illnesses, say, as well as torture and rape. More insidious assaults on dignity, such as institutionalized racism and gender inequality, are also acknowledged by most to cause great and unjust injury.

So suffering is a fact. Now a number of corollary questions come to the fore. Whenever we talk about medicine or policy, a "hierarchy of suffering" begins to take shape, for it is impossible to relieve every case at once. Can we identify the worst assaults? Those most at risk of great suffering? Among persons whose suffering is not fatal, is it possible to identify those most at risk of sustaining permanent and disabling damage? Are certain "event" assaults, such as torture or rape, more likely to lead to later sequelae than is sustained and insidious suffering, such as the pain born of deep poverty or racism? Are certain forms of insidious discrimination demonstrably more noxious than others?

Anthropologists and others who take these as research questions study both individual experience and the larger social matrix in which it is embedded in order to see how various social processes and events come to be translated into personal distress and disease. By what mechanisms, precisely, do social forces ranging from poverty to racism become embodied as individual experience? This has been the focus of most of my own research in Haiti, where political and economic forces have structured risk for AIDS, tuberculosis, and, indeed, most other infectious and parasitic diseases. Social forces at work there have also structured risk for most forms of extreme suffering, from hunger to torture and rape.

Working in contemporary Haiti, where in recent decades political violence has been added to the worst poverty in the hemisphere, one learns a great deal about suffering. In fact, the country has long constituted a sort of living laboratory for the study of affliction, no matter how it is defined. "Life for the Haitian peasant of today," observed the anthropologist Jean Weise some thirty years ago, "is abject misery and a rank familiarity with death." The biggest problem, of course, is unimaginable poverty, as a long succession of dictatorial governments has been more engaged in pillaging than in protecting the rights of workers, even on paper. As Eduardo Galeano noted in 1973, at the height of the Duvalier dictatorship, "The wages Haiti requires by law belong in the department of science fiction: actual wages on coffee plantations vary from $.07 to $.15 a day."

AUTHOR BIO
Paul Farmer is Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School, Chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Founding Director of Partners In Health. Among his books are Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues (California, 1999), The Uses of Haiti (1994), and AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame (California, 1992). Farmer is the winner of a MacArthur Foundation 'genius' award and the Margaret Mead Award for his contributions to public anthropology.

Amartya Sen, whose work challenges conventional market-driven economic paradigms, is the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics. He teaches at Trinity College, Cambridge University.

BOOK REVIEWS
"Thoughtful and provocative."—American Scientist<

"Paul Farmer is a superb physician, a penetrating anthropologist, and a prophet of social justice. He combines an unflinching moral stance—that the poor deserve health care just as much as the rich do—with scientific expertise and boundless dedication. He has saved the lives of countless destitute patients in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, and he has shown that effective health services, even complex medical regimens, can be put in place in impoverished communities. . . . Farmer's moral philosophy, anthropological insights, and medical successes are described in his trenchant and timely new book, Pathologies of Power."—Jeffrey Sachs, Natural History

"Pathologies of Power is a cry for those whose own shouts go unheard. It is a bitter dose of medicine doled out on behalf of the nameless, faceless millions who have no medicines of their own."—Maywa Montenegro, Boston Globe Book Section

"There are many kinds of gifted physicians: clinicians, researchers, and those who build institutions. Paul Farmer is the rarest of all: a prophet. . . . Pathologies of Power is a profound work; it deserves the widest possible audience."—New England Jrnl of Medicine

"This emotional book is an appeal for a struggle for equity in the field of health and human rights."—Boleslav L. Lichterman, British Medical Journal (bmj)

"It's crucial that we confront the link Farmer reveals between social inequality and disease."—Utne

"This detailed analysis of public health draws on perspectives from anthropology, history, liberation theology, sociology, law, and medicine. From this broad platform, Farmer takes us back through the causative underpinnings of disease-ridden lives and paints a unifying picture of ruling power structures aligned against impoverished constituents. His conclusions are well articulated, thoughtful, and damning. . . . Through his engaging and passionate style, Farmer gives voice to the unheard poor around the world and challenges medical professionals to broaden the vision of medicine to include human rights. In reinvigorating the role of human rights in the health and well being of the poor, Farmer's book is a valuable addition to the growing literature on health and human rights."—The Lancet

"This is an angry and a hopeful book, and, like everything Dr. Farmer has written, it has both passion and authority. Pathologies of Power is an eloquent plea for a working definition of human rights that would not neglect the most basic rights of all: food, shelter and health. This plea has special potency because it comes from Dr. Farmer, a person who has proven that the dream of universal and comprehensive human rights is possible, and who has brought food, shelter, health, and hope to some of the poorest people on this earth."—Tracy Kidder, author of The Soul of a New Machine and Home Town

"Farmer's brilliance and charisma leap from the pages of his book. He challenges us to face the urgent theoretical and political challenges of the twenty-first century by linking structural violence to embodied social suffering and in the process calls for a new definition of human rights. Once this book is out, we will no longer be able to remain complacently--or rather, complicitly--on the sidelines."—Philippe Bourgois, author of In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio

"A passionate critique of conventional biomedical ethics by one of the world's leading physician-anthropologists and public intellectuals. Farmer's on-the-ground analysis of the relentless march of the AIDS epidemic and multi-drug resistant tuberculosis among the imprisoned and the sick-poor of the world illuminates the pathologies of a world economy that has lost its soul."
--Nancy Scheper-Hughes , author of Death without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil

MORE BOOK INFO
ISBN: 0520243269
ISBN(13-digit): 9780520243262
Copyright: 2004
Dewey Decimal: 305.5/69
Library of Congress: 2004010906
Book Publisher: Univ of California Pr
Language: ENG
No. of Pages: 402

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