Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewMohammed Tabishat has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of the everyday health problems of the poorer classes in Cairo. Most interesting is his account of the Islamic concept of al-nafs that people employ to address—as a single field of dis-ease—what biomedicine identifies as either ‘physical’ or ‘psychological’ illness and as its social, political, and economic causes. Strongly recommended. -- Talal Asad, Emeritus Distinguished Professor, Graduate Center of the City University of New York
A rich ethnographic account of illness and health in contemporary Cairo. Written with great insight and sensitivity, Tabishat examines how the vocabularies of sickness and well-being reflect an evolving fusion of Islamic concepts of moral and physical health with the perspectives and practices of modern bio-medicine. His work provides a poignant reminder that the health of the body is as much a moral and political-economic condition as it is a physical and physiological one. A major contribution to the medical anthropology of the Middle East. -- Charles Hirschkind, University of California, Berkeley
Table of ContentsList of tables and figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Society in Medicine and Health Chapter One: Health of “Modern” Life: Examples from self-guides Chapter Two: Family Life, Health, and Illness in Būlāq Abul‘ela Chapter Three:‘Iḍḍaghṭ: Biomedicine for Social Critique Chapter Four: Society in Life and Death Chapter Five: Ethnography as Cultural Critique Index About the Author
