Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 305.569 EAN: 9780520243262 ISBN: 0520243269 Label: University of California Press Manufacturer: University of California Press Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 438 Publication Date: November 22, 2004 Publisher: University of California Press Sales Rank: 2953 Studio: University of California Press
Product DescriptionPathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of life-and death-in extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights. 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.
What Others Say
This book should change you
How are we all responsible for each other? Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (California Series in Public Anthropology, 4) will bring that connection quite clear.
Review from Branddenotes.blogspot.com
I liked it best for introducing me to the concept of "structural violence" - essentially whenever the way an economy is set up guarantees that people at the bottom will be victims of violence - whether de jure (rape, murder) or de facto (preventable diseases, hunger). And also for introducing me to some excellent liberation theologians who reminded me that not all religious people are despicable hypocrites, and some top, top poets.
Farmer's perspective on countries full of structural violence like Haiti and "shock therapy" Russia is intensely personal, and his entire book comes from one who spends more time curing people than sitting in an office or library and writing. Not to say that is a good or bad thing, but that is the style ... Read More
Admire Paul Farmer, but not necessarily his book; read Kidder instead
Paul Farmer has long been famous, I take it, within the medical community as a brave lifesaver in some of the world's most destitute places. He's lived in Haiti for 20-some years, tending to the poor and sick. He used his success against tuberculosis there as a springboard into Russia, where he's helped prevent the spread of Multidrug-Resistant Tuberculosis (MDRTB) within and beyond the country's prison population. He is, to put it succinctly, a saint.
His fame spread to a much broader audience with the publication of Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains: Healing the World: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer. Mountains Beyond Mountains is a hopeful, awe-inspiring, life-changing book. A couple years after reading it, I picked up Farmer's ... Read More
Pathologies of Power
Buy Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (California Series in Public Anthropology, 4)! Paul Farmer is a highly effective individual, and shows how one man can and did make a difference. He opens the window on what's going on in Latin America.
Health and survival as human rights
Paul Farmer, perhaps the most famous 'Third World doctor' living today, has written an eloquent and moving plea for a reconsideration of modern approaches toward healthcare in the developing nations in Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (California Series in Public Anthropology, 4), "Pathologies of Power". Based on his personal experiences of care in Haiti, but also his professional visits to Russia, Africa, Central America, Mexico, Cuba and many other places besides, Paul Farmer demonstrates that the problematics of healthcare and those of poverty and inequality are insolubly linked in these nations. Whoever says "heal the sick" must also say "end poverty", for the one is not possible without the other; and whoever says "prevent disease" must also say "destroy socio-economic inequality", for the one is not possible without ... Read More
