Description
Book SynopsisIncorporating investigative journalism, this title examines the contested place of health and development in El Salvador. It recounts the story of radical health activism from its origins in liberation theology and guerrilla medicine during the third-world country's twelve-year civil war, through development of a 'popular health system'.
Trade Review"
Healing the Body Politic is an impressive and well-argued work of ethnography. Sandy Smith-Nonini has written an interesting and precise book spiced with engaging stories that implant images in readers' minds that will likely persist long after they have put the work down." -- Leigh Binford * author of The El Mozote Massacre: Anthropology and Human Rights *
"An impressive, well-written book. Highly Recommended." * Choice *
"This is an exceptionallywell-researched book, and Smith-Nonini is a talented writer.
Healing the Body Politic will be of great interest to medical and psychological anthropologists as well as to cultural and social anthropologists, political scientists, historians, sociologists, and scholars in and of Latin America more generally."
* Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology *
"Smith-Nonini's book beautifully demonstrates the political and social struggle to control the symbolic power of healing, and the consequences of these struggles on the health of rural and poor Salvadorans through the past three decades." * Ethos *
"
Healing the Body Politic is a refreshing read when so much of contemporary anthropology is concerned with critiquing the cultures of expertise in international development institutions and casting doubt on the project of trying to improve health and well-being. Smith-Nonini’s work is instead optimistic; she sees the popular health system as an instantiation of hope."
* PoLAR *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Prologue: Terror and Healing in El Salvador
Introduction: Theorizing the Body and the State
Part One: Exclusion and the Politics of Bare Life
1. Manufacturing Ill-being
Repression's Repercussions
Part Two: War Against Health
3. Insurgent Health
4. Low-Intensity Conflict and the War against Health
5. Pacification
Part Three: Health against War
6. The Anatomy of "Popular Health" in the Repopulated Villages
7. The Elusive Goal of Community Participation
Part Four: War by Other Means
8. Popular Health and the State
9. Disinvesting in Health
10. The White Marches
Epilogue
Notes
References
Index
