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Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Stories in the Time of Cholera

Tonight I am beginning Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling During a Medical Nightmare. From the U. of California Press website:

Cholera, although it can kill an adult through dehydration in half a day, is easily treated. Yet in 1992-93, some five hundred people died from cholera in the Orinoco Delta of eastern Venezuela. In some communities, a third of the adults died in a single night, as anthropologist Charles Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs, a Venezuelan public health physician, reveal in their frontline report. Why, they ask in this moving and thought-provoking account, did so many die near the end of the twentieth century from a bacterial infection associated with the premodern past?

Sounds like a barrel of monkeys, doesn’t it? This is the fourth and final book for Foundations of Applied Anthropology II and in the true spirit of the discipline, they’ve saved the most depressing for last. I haven’t really blogged about the other books we’ve read, but I’m going to try and do so for this one because I have a feeling it’s going to be quite a kick in the gut. The only book in the past couple of years that has had a profound impact on me has been Sam Harris’ The End of Faith (see my post here). Although about a completely different subject, I hope that Stories has just as much of an influence on the way I see the world around me. So far I’ve only read the preface and learned that the contributing author, Clara Mantini-Briggs, often distanced herself from the writing process because of her level of involvement on the front lines. It doesn’t promise to be a pretty picture of health and humanity, but one of my strongest beliefs is that one has to confront the ugliness of the world head on if change is to be realized. So I'm not sure how much I'll blog along the way, but I wanted to throw out a "before picture" and at least an "after picture" when I've finished. Welcome to Will's Book Club.

Posted by Will at March 29, 2006 08:27 PM in Books