Affliction inaugurates a novel way of understanding the trajectories of health and disease in the context of poverty. Focusing on low-income neighborhoods in Delhi, it stitches together three different sets of issues. First, it examines the different trajectories of illness: What are the circumstances under which illness is absorbed within the normal and when does it exceed the normal-putting resources, relationships, and even one's world into jeopardy? A second set of issues involves how different healers understand their own practices. The astonishing range of practitioners found in the local markets in the poor neighborhoods of Delhi shows how the magical and the technical are knotted together in the therapeutic experience of healers and patients. The book asks: What is expert knowledge? What is it that the practitioner knows and what does the patient know? How are these different forms of knowledge brought together in the clinical encounter, broadly defined? How does this event of everyday life bear the traces of larger policies at the national and global levels? Finally, the book interrogates the models of disease prevalence and global programming that emphasize surveillance over care and deflect attention away from the specificities of local worlds. Yet the analysis offered retains an openness to different ways of conceptualizing "what is happening" and stimulates a conversation between different disciplinary orientations to health, disease, and poverty. Most studies of health and disease focus on the encounter between patient and practitioner within the space of the clinic. This book instead privileges the networks of relations, institutions, and knowledge over which the experience of illness is dispersed. Instead of thinking of illness as an event set apart from everyday life, it shows the texture of everyday life, the political economy of neighborhoods, as well as the dark side of care. It helps us see how illness is bound by the contexts in which it occurs, while also showing how illness transcends these contexts to say something about the nature of everyday life and the making of subjects.
"Told with delicacy, vigor and a sharply critical eye, this compelling account of the everyday events of illness in low income neighborhoods [in Delhi] shows what anthropological attentiveness can do. If its power comes from the evident power of the mind behind it, it also comes from a modestly understated account of how to be both in the company of people and a recorder of affliction. Above all,
University of Cambridge
"Veena Das offers a complex ethnographic meditation on illness among the urban poor and the diverse kinds of response (practical, methodological, ethical) it invites. As Das so precisely attends to affliction, readers have the privilege of following one of anthropology's most distinctive and distinguished voices."
University of Toronto
"Reading Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty is like observing a master at work. [This is a] formidable piece of scholarship immersed in more than a decade of ethnographic engagement etched in stunningly crafted anthropological prose. This longitudinal immersion in the everyday lives of urban poor produces a tender and intimate account without lapsing into unwitting sentimentality. An ethnographi
