The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande
University of California Press, 2010. 264 pp., US$24.95 (paperback).
Angela Garcia’s magisterial, unsettling account of heroin addiction among a Hispanic community in Espanola Valley opens with a description of Nuevo Dias, a rural detoxification facility for drug users. Accepting the executive director’s challenge to “work” …
The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa’s Time of AIDS.
By Vinh-Kim Nguyen.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Pp. 256. ISBN 9780822348740. (Paperback, US $ 22.95)
Reviewed by Betsey Brada (Princeton University)
In The Republic of Therapy, Vinh-Kim Nguyen traces responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Francophone West Africa between 1994, when effective …
Jarrett Zigon. “HIV Is God’s Blessing”: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. 280 pages. $24.95.
Reviewed by Tomas Matza (Department of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University)
Anthropologists have taken a keen interest in the way that the collapse of the Soviet Union has impacted the everyday lives of the people living in that region. The fact …
Death in a Church of Life: Moral Passion during Botswana’s Time of AIDS. By Frederick Klaits. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010. Pp. 368. Paperback US$ 29.95 ISBN 9780520259669.
Review by Betsey Brada (University of Chicago)
Home to one of the world’s highest HIV prevalence rates, the southern African Republic of Botswana has drawn increasing attention over …
Chronic Conditions, Fluid States: Chronicity and the Anthropology of Illness
Lenore Manderson & Carolyn Smith-Morris, eds. Rutgers University Press, 2010. 320 pp., paperback.
Review by Matthew Wolf-Meyer (UC Santa Cruz)
The use and experience of time is a perennial, albeit minor, interest in anthropology generally, and medical anthropology in particular. This has everything to do with the processes of degeneration, …
Erica James. Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. 384 pages; $24.95
Review by Hanna Kienzler (McGill University)
“Supported by a rich cultural heritage, the Haitian people retain a capacity for hope, faith, and resilience that remains a tremendous resource for any efforts to rehabilitate the nation and its people” …