Pathologies of Power

Pathologies 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.

ISBN 0520243269   Part volume With a New Preface by the Author ISBN13 9780520243262 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher The University Press Group Ltd   Weight (grammes) 599 Imprint University of California Press   Published in CA Format Paperback   Series ISSN 4 Publication date 22 Nov 2004   Series title California Series in Public Anthropology Writer of foreword Amartya K. Sen   Height (mm) 229 Library of Congress 2004010906   Width (mm) 152 DEWEY 305   Spine width (mm) 31 DEWEY edition DC22   Academic level Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly Pages 438

		Foreword by Amartya Sen
1		On suffering and structural violence : social and economic rights in the global era		29
2		Pestilence and restraint : Guantanamo, AIDS, and the logic of quarantine		51
3		Lessons from Chiapas		91
4		A plague on all our houses? : resurgent tuberculosis inside Russia's prisons		115
5		Health, healing, and social justice : insights from liberation theology		139
6		Listening for prophetic voices : a critique of market-based medicine		160
7		Cruel and unusual : drug-resistant tuberculosis as punishment		179
8		New malaise : medical ethics and social rights in the global era		196
9		Rethinking health and human rights : time for a paradigm shift		213

"In his compelling book, Farmer captures the central dilemma of our times - the increasing disparities of health and well-being within and among societies. While all member countries of the United Nations denounce the gross violations of human rights perpetrated by those who torture, murder, or imprison without due process, the insidious violations of human rights due to structural violence involving the denial of economic opportunity, decent housing, or access to health care and education are commonly ignored. Pathologies of Power makes a powerful case that our very humanity is threatened by our collective failure to end these abuses." - Robert S. Lawrence, President of Physicians for Human Rights and Edyth Schoenrich Professor of Preventive Medicine at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University "This is an angry and a hopeful book, and, like everything Dr. Farmer has written, it has both passion and authority. Pathologies of Power is an eloquent plea for a working definition of human rights that would not neglect the most basic rights of all: food, shelter, and health. This plea has special potency because it comes from Dr. Farmer, a person who has proven that the dream of universal and comprehensive human rights is possible, and who has brought food, shelter, health, and hope to some of the poorest people on this earth." - Tracy Kidder, author of Mountains beyond Mountains: Healing the World: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer"

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