Zones of social abandonment are emerging everywhere in Brazil’s big cities—places like Vita, where the unwanted, the mentally ill, the sick, and the homeless are left to die. This haunting, unforgettable story centers on a young woman named Catarina, increasingly paralyzed and said to be mad, living out her time at Vita. Anthropologist João Biehl leads a detective-like journey to know Catarina; to unravel the cryptic, poetic words that are part of the “dictionary” she is compiling; and to trace the complex network of family, medicine, state, and economy in which her abandonment and pathology took form.

As Biehl painstakingly relates Catarina’s words to a vanished world and elucidates her condition, we learn of subjectivities unmade and remade under economic pressures, pharmaceuticals as moral technologies, a public common sense that lets the unsound and unproductive die, and anthropology’s unique power to work through these juxtaposed fields. Vita’s methodological innovations, bold fieldwork, and rigorous social theory make it an essential reading for anyone who is grappling with how to understand the conditions of life, thought and ethics in the contemporary world.

Introduction: “Dead alive, dead outside, alive inside”

PART ONE. VITA
A Zone of Social Abandonment
The Politics of Death
Citizenship

PART TWO. CATARINA AND THE ALPHABET
The Life of the Mind
A Society of Bodies
Brazil
Ex-Human
The House and the Animal
“Love is the illusion of the abandoned”
Social Psychosis
An Illness of Time
God, Sex, and Agency

PART THREE. THE MEDICAL ARCHIVE
A Deadening Language
Schizophrenia
The Right to Health and Psychiatric Reform
Life Determinations
Catarina and Medical Science
No Human Relations
Dead Voices
The House of Mental Health
The Model City
An Epidemic of Mental Illness
“I am like this because of life”
The Typical Symptom
Pharmaceutical Abandonment

PART FOUR. THE FAMILY
Unused Words
A Medical Visit
Semblance
The Fraternal Tie
The In-Laws and Ex-Husband
A Family Business
The Pharmakos
Temporality

PART FIVE. BIOLOGY AND ETHICS
Reason
Jurisprudence and Morality
Currency
The Biological Complex
The Family Tree
A Genetic Population
A Lost Chance

PART SIX. THE DICTIONARY
“Underneath was this, which I do not attempt to name”
Book I
Book II
Book III
Book IV
Book V
Book VI
Book VII
Book VIII
Book IX
Book X
Book XI
Book XII
Book XIII
Book XIV
Book XV
Book XVI
Book XVII
Book XVIII
Book XIX
Conclusion: “A way to the words”
Postscript: “I am part of the origins, not just of language, but of people”

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

João Biehl is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. Torben Eskerod is an artist and works as a freelance photographer in Copenhagen. His website is www.joaobiehl.net.

“Reads, in the best of ethnographic fashion, like a mystery thriller.”—Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

"João Biehl's Vita is a greatly arresting work. The tale of Catarina is one that haunts the reader. This book's central character is sure to become an anthropological classic, her humanity reaffirmed by the author."—Arthur Kleinman, author of Writing at the Margin: Discourse between Anthropology and Medicine

Margaret Mead Award, Society for Applied Anthropology
Leeds Award in Urban Anthropology, Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology
Benjamin L. Hooks Outstanding Book Award, Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change
Stirling Prize of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, for Best Published Work in Psychological Anthropology.
Eileen Basker Memorial Prize, Society for Medical Anthropology
(Honorable Mention) Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, The Society for Humanistic Anthropology

Visit João Biehl's web page