Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment by Joo Biehl Review by: Claudia Fonseca The Journal of the Royal

Anthropological Institute, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Sep., 2006), pp. 686-687 Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4092524 . Accessed: 07/09/2012 11:22
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686 BOOK REVIEWS of the world in which they live. And, in that goal, he succeeds magnificently. ROBERTA DELSON MARX TheAmericanMuseumof Natural History; Drew University premature baby (her third child), had burned her husband's documents and other belongings, and was known to attack people - in at least one instance, with a knife. The inevitable solution: emergency institutionalizationin whatever facilities available. Despite such damning documentary and visual evidence, the author raises doubt in the reader's mind: could this pathetic figure be something more than a raving madwoman - the role assigned to her by practicallyall concerned? This Bildung tale, told by the Brazilian-born author, raised in places and circumstances not so different from those of Catarina'schildhood, is divided in two parts. During the first, reflecting broad erudition, the author calls on thinkersfrom Nietzsche to Lacanto ponder the fate of 'ex-humans', left in 'zones of abandonment' such as the asylum he studied. Here, his text dialogues not only with Catarina's melancholy poetry, but also with the photos of Torben Eskerod,who forcefully frames scenes of utter abjection. In fact, despite the apt depiction of a two-tiered health system that in many cases condemns the Brazilianpoor to sordid neglect, this is the part I find less interesting. The tone of moral indignation seems to point an accusing finger at just about everyone (state officials, patients' families, hospital and shelter administrators,etc.), leaving 'Catarina's anthropologist' to restore humanity, both metaphorically and materially,where all others have failed. These somewhat existential musings begin to make retrospective sense when Biehl finally ventures outside the asylum, encountering a surprisinglywarm welcome among the various members (brothers, ex-husband, children) of Catarina's 'abandoning' family. Here, the analysis acquires proper ethnographic nuance and the reader becomes aware of paradoxicalsituations that go beyond individualvolition. Further,it is in this second half that the author realizes his stated ambition (inspired in authors such as ArthurKleinmanand Byron Good) to link personal experience and 'meaning-making' to large-scale power processes. Evokingsituations similarto those one might find in other Third(and even First) World countries, Biehl paints a glum picture of Brazil'srecent policies for the mentally ill: model programmes that, paradoxically,promote progressive exclusion. Representativesof the neo-liberal government greet the health movement's pleas for de-institutionalizationwith enthusiasm since 'community care' involves so much less financial input. Progressive

BIEHL, JoA . Vita:life in a zone of social abandonment.404 pp., illus., bibliogr. London,
Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 2005. ?21.95

(paper) Jojo Biehl's book - Vita:life in a zone of social abandonment- reads, in the best of ethnographic fashion, like a mystery thriller.The setting is a run-down philanthropicasylum in southern Brazilthat, during the years under
observation (1995-2003), harboured a motley

crew of elderly, physically handicapped, and mentally ill patients as well as domesticated street-dwellers and rehabilitateddrug-users. Our guide through this maze is Catarina,a wilted beauty, sinking ever deeper into her wheelchair, who tirelessly scribbles, in near-obsessive determination, what she calls her 'dictionary'. Having discovered, in this presumably psychotic patient, a cogent partner in dialogue, the ethnographer begins to perceive the apparently disconnected phrases written in her notebook as the musings of a poetic subjectivity,seeking desperately to be heard. Thus, the title of the book's introduction, copied from the opening pages of Catarina'snotebook reads 'Dead alive, dead outside, alive inside'. By leading his readers through the 'thick description of a single life', Biehl reveals a tale of 'social psychosis', involving years of misdirected government health policy, medical incompetence, and the gradual disappearance of the patient's family. As he pieces together the fragments of this woman's existence - first through Catarina'sown narrativeand then through the careful tracking down of medical records and family members - we discover a ruralworker who, as a young bride, and still caring for her invalid mother, migrates to the outskirts of the state capital, where she and other family members find work in the shoe industry. Complaining of persistent pain, and suffering frequent falls, she is quickly let off from work, becoming one more victim of the country's economic decline. Over the next few years, her periodic admissions to the region's different mental institutions register varied diagnoses: schizophrenia, postpartum depression, severe mood disorder. Catarina,her relatives inform public authorities, represents a hazard to society: she refused to nurse her

Journal of the Royal AnthropologicalInstitute (N.S.) 12, 675-724 @ Royal Anthropological Institute 2006

BOOK REVIEWS687 psychiatristsspeak glowingly of new forms of citizenship for the mentally ill, but are unable to press through necessary reforms and alternative services that might guarantee adequate home care. The much idealized family, pat antidote to institutionalized care, never seems to be quite up to the mark.The net result is a growing number of disorientated people either on the street, or confined in unsupervised, philanthropic(and suspiciously commercial) shelters, run by unqualified volunteers - in Catarina'scase, mostly reformed junkies or born-again proselytizers. It is profoundly ironic that, despite the involvement of a small army of specialists doctors, social workers, human rights representatives, among others - no one had ever managed to arrange a neurological check-up for Catarina,one that would have revealed the rare genetic syndrome she, all her siblings, her mother, grandfather,and a good many of her over fifty cousins, aunts and uncles were carrying: Machado-Josephdisease. Until the anthropologist came along, no one had thought of taking the necessary steps that would connect this indigent woman to the pioneer research programme in the nearby universityhospital that specialized in exactly this disorder. Even more to the point, this autosomal dominant disease, typical of populations of Azorean descent, is characterizedby cerebellar ataxia (and progressive physical paralysis);it is not known to affect the patients' mental health. With the story's climax and denouement, the reader is provided with an object lesson of how genetic knowledge, produced through the intermingling of agencies (the author's and Catarina's), renders a redefinition of personhood as well as a realignment of family ties. In this particular'biological complex', characterizedby the interplayof genes and environment shaping Catarina'slife cycle, ethnography stands as the 'missing nexus' through which realityis not only understood, but transformed. CLAUDIA FONSECA Universidade Federaldo Rio Grandedo Sul a literalisthermeneutic. An elaboration of Crapanzano's 1999 Adolph Jensen lectures, this book's concern is with the imagination, as the work of both individuals and cultures. Here, 'imagination' is not taken to delineate some sort of highly structured ideational materialthat stands as the terminal result of a process, as it does in tropes such as 'imagined communities', the 'historicalimagination', or the 'social imaginary'. Rather,this book takes as its subject the act of escaping from obdurate, quotidian reality,the attempt to cross the 'imaginative horizons' that stand between the here and now and an only dreamed otherworldliness that is beyond our ability to perceive because of its spatial, temporal, or ontological distance. ForCrapanzano, the beyond of this horizon, which is portrayedthrough the spatial metaphor or 'hinterland', is complex, for of the arrihre-pays, two reasons. The first is the common epistemic anxiety that arises from the act of figuring the subjunctive, which is of interest only because of its lack of existence. The second difficulty emerges from the first, as this picturing of the ephemeral beyond serves to reduce it; the very act of conjuring and articulatingthe imaginative brings it into the realm of the here-and-now, of representation and of circulation,and hence undoes that unrealitythat was the very source of the imaginative's initialallure.Afterwards,the imaginative qualities continue to exist only in the form of an aura or penumbra attached to the representation, if at all. Despite the transient and otherworldly nature of his subject, Crapanzano argues that the imagination is suitable for ethnographic investigation. He turns his attention to how the imaginative is evoked, constructed, and situated, and to how these instantiations of the imagination reflexivelyrelocate the border between the here-and-now and the beyond of the imaginative (as well as retroactively transformthe already articulated imaginative itself). Crapanzano fleshes out this speculative ethnographic project through a series of montage-heavy meditations on fields that have been of recent or long-standing ethnographic interest, turning his attention to 'the between', to the body, to pain, to trauma, to hope, to the transgressive, to the erotic, to remembrance, and (finally) to world-ending and to death. In these chapters, Crapanzano engages in a series of vertiginous comparisons, drawn not only from
his own fieldwork in places such as Morocco, South Africa, and Southern California, but also from other sources - in one instance the Apache practice of 'speaking with names' is set aside a

VINCENT.Imaginativehorizons: CRAPANZANO, an essay in literary-philosophical anthropology. xiii, 260 pp., bibliogr. London, Chicago: Univ.
Chicago Press, 2004. ?13.50 (paper)

Following Servingthe word, his recent book on religious and legal literalismin America, Crapanzano's new book is an investigation on the faculty that, arguably, suffers the most under

Journal of the Royal AnthropologicalInstitute (N.S.) 12, 675-724 @Royal Anthropological Institute 2006