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Review essay
Author(s) -
DAS VEENA
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.2006.33.1.27
Subject(s) - public health , alliance , power (physics) , criminology , sociology , social determinants of health , race (biology) , history , law , political science , gender studies , medicine , health care , physics , nursing , quantum mechanics
Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling during. Medical Nightmare . Charles L. Briggs with Clara Mantini‐Briggs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xxvi + 430 pp., illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor . Paul Farmer. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xxiv + 402 pp. In this essay, I review two recent books in the field of health and disease—one dealing with an epidemic and the other with the consequences of structural violence on morbidity and mortality among the poor. Both books are excellent demonstrations of how the alliance between global institutions, the state, and medicine (esp. public health) leads to discrimination on the basis of race and class. Arguing outward from the books, I ask whether new diseases replicate earlier fault lines or whether new kinds of discrimination come into being as other technical and social imaginaries of danger to the social body are generated. I raise some puzzles within the global TB scenario and discuss the appropriateness or lack thereof of analyses based on economic and public‐health models.