ISBN10: 0520243269, ISBN13: 9780520243262, [publisher: University of California Press, Berkerley] Softcover First Edition Paperback. Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of illness, of lifeand deathin extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights. Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience studying diseases in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the worlds poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. A thoughtful memoir 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 mirrored in pathology, plague, disease and death. Yet this doctors autobiography is far from a hopeless inventory of human suffering. Farmers disturbing examples are linked to a guarded optimism that new medical and social technologies will develop in tandem with a more ...
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ISBN10: 0520243269, ISBN13: 9780520243262, [publisher: University of California Press 2004-11-16, Berkeley] Softcover Language: ENG
[London, United Kingdom] [Publication Year: 2004]