From the Fat of Our Souls offers a revealing new perspective on medicine, and the reasons for choosing or combining indigenous and cosmopolitan medical systems, in the Andean highlands. Closely observing the dialogue that surrounds medicine and medical care among Indians and Mestizos, Catholics and Protestants, peasants and professionals in the rural town of Kachitu, Libbet Crandon-Malamud finds that medical choice is based not on medical efficacy but on political concerns. Through the primary resource of medicine, people have access to secondary resources, the principal one being social mobility. This investigation of medical pluralism is also a history of class formation and the fluidity of both medical theory and social identity in highland Bolivia, and it is told through the often heartrending, often hilarious stories of the people who live there.

Libbet Crandon-Malamud is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University and Director of Gender Studies, University of Arkansas, Little Rock.

"Illustrated with insightful examples and couched in a witty and comfortable writing style, the complex argument and terminology of medical pluralism becomes familiar as one progresses through the book."—Monica Von Thun Calderon, Times of the Americas

"Crandon-Malamud uses the self-reflexive voice of the 'new ethnography' (but with greater political conviction and more humanity) in tandem with traditional empirical tools such as informant surveys. . . . Its most important message is that medicine everywhere—not just in Kachitu—is a means to effect change, to represent and reconstruct the world in accordance with one's own vision."—Lynn M. Morgan, Medical Anthropology Quarterly