João B Biehl
Biographic Data
| ID | 291 |
|---|---|
| NAME | João B Biehl |
| GIVEN NAMES | João B |
| FAMILY NAME | Biehl |
| SIGNATURE | BIEHL J B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4843-4804 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 50 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1119 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 52 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
A Arte da Interferência - Descolonizando a saúde global e perspectivando horizontes
Diante da incerteza pandêmica e da luta intensifi-cada contra o racismo sistêmico, este artigo argumenta que a antropologia médica é singularmente capaz de refletir sobre o momento que a saúde global vive. Isso é devido ao nosso com-promisso etnográfico e ativista com o corpo plural e com dis-tintas condições humanas, bem como à constante recalibração de contribuições teóricas e práticas para a arte do cuidado. Se a idéia de intervenção implica c…
Arquivamentos anticoloniais
Este ensaio desenterra a Guerra Mucker, o primeiro levante messiânico do Brasil moderno, ocorrido entre teuto-brasileiros em 1874 e deixado à impunidade, relegado à escória da história. O conflito fratricida teve como pano de fundo um expansionismo neocolonial que conectava a Europa à fronteira sul do país, refletindo também a dinâmica de racialização e a necropolítica das classes dominantes, assim como uma silenciada insurgência anticolonial de …
Arc of Interference
and forced migration, of infrastructural breakdown and abrupt climate change-mediated by extreme pop u lism, war, disinformation, and state and corporate efforts to dismantle piecemeal, though meaningful, agendas of socioeconomic rights.Meanwhile, the "ethnographic sensorium" has also kept eliciting peoples' plasticity and desires for self-determination and things to be other wise. 1 Today, we find ourselves past that stage of foreboding, and thi…
Ethnographic Open
Insurgent Archivings
While studying immigrant worlding in Brazil's nineteenth-century southern settler frontier, I stumbled across multiple ways of archiving, from poor farmers' viva voce prayers and reminiscences to the nurturing of herbal gardens and usage of forest medicinal products to communal vital registries and home burials (including my ancestors')-all bridging the sensual and conceptual realms through specific material constellations. I take the traces eman…
Will to Live
Will to Live
Oikography
Houses are at once built shelters; collections of relations, affects, and moralities; and nodes within neighborhoods, communities, and larger political-economic and environmental regimes. This Colloquy proposes oikography as an ethnographic approach that deconstructs technocratic assumptions about the house and traces the plasticity of dwelling across multiple space-times, with a focus on the action of house-ing. Inspired by critical perspectives…
The Pharmaceuticalization and Judicialization of Health
A major player in the political economy of pharmaceuticals in the Global South, and boasting a universal health care system, Brazil offers fertile ground for exploring the unanticipated ways people have mobilized for treatment access in contexts of stark inequality. In this article, I place the ever-evolving twin phenomena of the pharmaceuticalization and judicialization of health in a multilayered historical context: the post–World War II push f…
Descolonizando a saúde planetária
Intimamente conectada com decisões políticas e interesses de mercado, a pandemia de Covid-19 é uma calamidade crônica agudizada que assola o mundo inteiro, desestabilizando conhecimentos e práticas biomédicas hegemônicas e revelando a precariedade dos sistemas de saúde pública, assim como a impotência profunda das redes de seguridade social e a fragilidade dos laços de solidariedade que imaginávamos estáveis. O artigo reflete sobre os desafios im…
Do incerto ao inacabado
As criações etnográficas têm a sua origem na indeterminação dos nossos interlocutores e na plasticidade dos seus modos de vida e mundos locais. Este ensaio enfatiza a dimensão inacabada das pessoas no contexto de um Brasil quebra-cabeça, marcando futuros num presente violento e incerto e transformando-se através de relações, coisas, reivindicações, cuidado e busca de alternativas. A noção de devir, que organiza o escrito, enfatiza o poder plástic…
Judicialization 2.0
Over the past two decades, debate over the whys, the hows, and the effects of the ever-expanding phenomenon of right-to-health litigation ('judicialization') throughout Latin America have been marked by polarised arguments and limited information. In contrast to claims of judicialization as a positive or negative trend, less attention has been paid to ways to better understand the phenomenon in real time. In this article, we propose a new approac…
The books of the dead revisited
Examines mortality and morbidity in São Leopoldo/RS (1850-1880). Our interdisciplinary study is based on the Gemeindebücher (parish registers) produced by Lutheran communities. These "community books" reveal high rates of fertility and premature death. Infant mortality and maternal death assailed everyday life. Over half of all deaths were of infants and children. Of ten funerals, seven were for children and adults of reproductive and military ag…
Hereafter
The Anthropology of Becoming
How Can Urban Policies Improve Air Quality and Help Mitigate Global Climate Change
The challenging nature of gathering evidence and analyzing the judicialization of health in Brazil
de coletar evidncias e analisar a judicializao da sade no Brasil La desafiante naturaleza de reunir
Theorizing global health
Reflecting on the recent West African Ebola outbreak, this piece advocates for a critical and people-centered approach both to and within global health. I discuss the current state of the field as well as critical theoretical responses to it, arguing that an ethnographic focus on evidence and efficacy at the local level raises rather than lowers the bar for thoughtful inquiry and action. The current moment calls less for the all-knowing hubris of…
The work of evidence in critical global health
This special section critically examines the paradigms and values that undergird the ever-expanding field of global health. The richly textured ethnographic think pieces presented here tackle problems of evidence and efficacy as complex forms of ethical and theoretical engagement in contexts of neoliberalism, war, technological innovation, inequality, and structural violence. These works seek to contribute to a people-centered and politically rel…
Tratamentos jurídicos
Esse estudo mostra a luta de pais para que filhos portadores de mucopolissacaridose tenham acesso a medicamentos caros, em nome do direito universal à saúde. O trabalho explora como, no Brasil, o litígio pelo direito à saúde tornou-se um caminho alternativo de acesso à saúde e evidencia a disputa de diferentes atores dos setores público e privado no processo de judicialização da saúde. Entende-se, portanto, que a biotecnologia recria valores huma…
Patient-Citizen-Consumers
Situated at the meeting points of Law and Medicine, the 'judicialization of the right to health' is a contested and hotly debated phenomenon in Brazil. While government officials and some scholars argue that it is driven by urban elites and private interests, and used primarily to access high-cost drugs, empirical evidence refute narratives depicting judicialization as a harbinger of inequity and an antagonist of the public health system. This ar…
The postneoliberal fabulation of power
In Brazil's hybrid government of social protection and market expansion, there is under way afabulation of power, which ultimately serves to "de-poor" people seeking care, working infrastructures, and justice while also shoring up state politics as usual. This process became evident through the failure of a collaborative research project that I coordinated on right-to-health litigation. In rethinking that failure as an experiment in public ethnog…
The masked anthropologist
Comment on Coleman, Gabriella. 2014. Hacker, hoaxer, whistleblower, spy: The many faces of Anonymous. London and New York: Verso
Ethnography in the Way of Theory
Unfinished
This original, field-changing collection explores the plasticity and unfinishedness of human subjects and lifeworlds, advancing the conceptual terrain of an anthropology of becoming. People's becomings trouble and exceed ways of knowing and acting, producing new possibilities for research, methodology, and writing. The contributors creatively bridge ethnography and critical theory in a range of worlds on the edge, from war and its aftermath, econ…
Deleuze and the Anthropology of Becoming
Philosopher Gilles Deleuze emphasizes the primacy of desire over power and the openness and flux of social fields. In this article, we place our ethnographic projects among the urban poor in Brazil and Bosnia-Herzegovina in dialogue with Deleuze's cartographic approach to subjectivity and his reflections on control and the transformative potential of becoming. As people scavenge for resources and care, they must deal with the encroachment of psyc…
Life of the mind
In this article, I address the embroilment of medical science in the lifeworlds of the urban poor in Brazil, particularly the place of psychopharmaceuticals within households. I explore how psychiatric diagnostics and treatments are integrated into a domestic "dramaturgy of the real" and how family members use them to assess human value and to mediate the disposal of persons considered unproductive or unsound. I focus on the life of Catarina, who…
Vita
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 o…
SubjectivityEthnographic Investigations
This innovative volume is an extended intellectual conversation about the ways personal lives are being undone and remade today. Examining the ethnography of the modern subject, this preeminent group of scholars probes the continuity and diversity of modes of personhood across a range of Western and non-Western societies. Contributors consider what happens to individual subjectivity when stable or imagined environments such as nations and communi…
The Activist State
Pharmaceuticalization
This article examines the political economy of pharmaceuticals that lies behind global AIDS treatment initiatives, revealing the possibilities and inequalities that come with a magic bullet approach to health care. It tells how Brazil, against all odds, became the first developing country to universalize access to antiretroviral drugs-a breakthrough made possible by an unexpected alliance of activists, government reformers, development agencies, …
Ethnography in the Way of Theory
In this article, I return to my engagements with people in the field not only to address the specific circumstances and trajectories I encountered there, but to make a case for allowing our engagement with Others to determine the course of our thinking about them and to reflect more broadly upon the agonistic and reflexive relations between anthropology and philosophy. I do so in order to suggest that through ethnographic rendering, people's own …
Vita
Research Article| September 01 2001 Vita: LIFE IN A ZONE OF SOCIAL ABANDONMENT João Biehl João Biehl Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2001) 19 (3 (68)): 131-149. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-19-3_68-131 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation João Biehl; Vita: LIFE IN A ZONE OF SOCIAL ABANDONMENT. Social Text 1 September 2001; 19 (3 (68)): 131-149. doi: https://doi.org/10…
The judicialization of biopolitics
In Brazil, low- and middle-income patients are not waiting for new medical technologies to trickle down. They are using free legal assistance and a responsive judiciary to access health care, now understood as access to pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceuticalization and judicialization of health reveal an experiential-political-economic field beyond the biopolitics of populations. At stake in this field are the ways in which government (qua drug regu…
Symptom
In the domain of health, not only are the raw effects of economic, social, and medical inequalities continually devastating, but novel processes of reconfiguring illness experience, subjectivity, and control are also underway. Human relationships to medical technology are increasingly constituted outside the clinical encounter. In this article we explore how the domestic encroachment of medical commodities affects social bonds in both affluent an…
Ethnography as Political Critique
Ethnography as Political Critique João Biehl and Ramah McKay In a splintered world, we must address the splinters. -Clifford Geertz (2000:221) In his essay "The World in Pieces," Clifford Geertz (2000) wrote that a much more pluralistic politics seemed to be emerging in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and through the rise of borderless capitalism, the growth of technology and the mobility of people, and the emergence of new centers …
Bodies of Rights and Therapeutic Markets
Brazil is among the approximately 100 countries that recognize a constitutional right to health that includes access to medicines. All over Brazil, patients are turning to courts to access prescribed medicines. Although lawsuits secure access for thousands of people, at least temporarily, this judicialization of the right to health generates intensely complex sociomedical realities and significant administrative and fiscal challenges that, offici…
Antropologia no campo da saúde global
Neste artigo, eu exploro os limites de abordagens baseadas em balas mágicas para os problemas de saúde global e mostro como as iniciativas centradas nas pessoas desafiam as ortodoxias econômicas e dos direitos humanos e ampliam nossa percepção daquilo que é socialmente possível e desejável. Utilizo o meu estudo etnográfico de longo prazo sobre a resposta terapêutica brasileira ao HIV/AIDS e suas repercussões nos âmbitos de governo, mercados, sist…
Unfinished
This original, field-changing collection explores the plasticity and unfinishedness of human subjects and lifeworlds, advancing the conceptual terrain of an anthropology of becoming. People's becomings trouble and exceed ways of knowing and acting, producing new possibilities for research, methodology, and writing. The contributors creatively bridge ethnography and critical theory in a range of worlds on the edge, from war and its aftermath, econ…
Theorizing global health
Reflecting on the recent West African Ebola outbreak, this piece advocates for a critical and people-centered approach both to and within global health. I discuss the current state of the field as well as critical theoretical responses to it, arguing that an ethnographic focus on evidence and efficacy at the local level raises rather than lowers the bar for thoughtful inquiry and action. The current moment calls less for the all-knowing hubris of…
Descolonizando a saúde planetária
Intimamente conectada com decisões políticas e interesses de mercado, a pandemia de Covid-19 é uma calamidade crônica agudizada que assola o mundo inteiro, desestabilizando conhecimentos e práticas biomédicas hegemônicas e revelando a precariedade dos sistemas de saúde pública, assim como a impotência profunda das redes de seguridade social e a fragilidade dos laços de solidariedade que imaginávamos estáveis. O artigo reflete sobre os desafios im…
Tratamentos jurídicos
Esse estudo mostra a luta de pais para que filhos portadores de mucopolissacaridose tenham acesso a medicamentos caros, em nome do direito universal à saúde. O trabalho explora como, no Brasil, o litígio pelo direito à saúde tornou-se um caminho alternativo de acesso à saúde e evidencia a disputa de diferentes atores dos setores público e privado no processo de judicialização da saúde. Entende-se, portanto, que a biotecnologia recria valores huma…
The postneoliberal fabulation of power
In Brazil's hybrid government of social protection and market expansion, there is under way afabulation of power, which ultimately serves to "de-poor" people seeking care, working infrastructures, and justice while also shoring up state politics as usual. This process became evident through the failure of a collaborative research project that I coordinated on right-to-health litigation. In rethinking that failure as an experiment in public ethnog…
Patient-Citizen-Consumers
Situated at the meeting points of Law and Medicine, the 'judicialization of the right to health' is a contested and hotly debated phenomenon in Brazil. While government officials and some scholars argue that it is driven by urban elites and private interests, and used primarily to access high-cost drugs, empirical evidence refute narratives depicting judicialization as a harbinger of inequity and an antagonist of the public health system. This ar…
Peopling Global Health
The field of Global Health brings together a vastly diverse array of actors working to address pressing health issues worldwide with unprecedented financial and technological resources and informed by various agendas. While Global Health initiatives are booming and displacing earlier framings of the field (such as tropical medicine or international health), critical analyses of the social, political, and economic processes associated with this ex…
Drugs for All
I am interested in the arts of government that accompany economic globalization and in the remaking of populations as market segments (specifically therapeutic markets). Using the Brazilian response to AIDS as an ethnographic baseline, I examine the systemic relations between pharmaceutical commerce and public health care and the value systems that underscore global AIDS treatment initiatives. The pharmaceuticalization of governance and citizensh…
Will to Live
Research Article| September 01 2006 Will to Live: AIDS Drugs and Local Economies of Salvation João Biehl; João Biehl Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Torben Eskerod Torben Eskerod Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2006) 18 (3): 457–472. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2006-015 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation João Bi…
Do incerto ao inacabado
As criações etnográficas têm a sua origem na indeterminação dos nossos interlocutores e na plasticidade dos seus modos de vida e mundos locais. Este ensaio enfatiza a dimensão inacabada das pessoas no contexto de um Brasil quebra-cabeça, marcando futuros num presente violento e incerto e transformando-se através de relações, coisas, reivindicações, cuidado e busca de alternativas. A noção de devir, que organiza o escrito, enfatiza o poder plástic…
Homo Economicus and Life Markets
The books of the dead revisited
Examines mortality and morbidity in São Leopoldo/RS (1850-1880). Our interdisciplinary study is based on the Gemeindebücher (parish registers) produced by Lutheran communities. These "community books" reveal high rates of fertility and premature death. Infant mortality and maternal death assailed everyday life. Over half of all deaths were of infants and children. Of ten funerals, seven were for children and adults of reproductive and military ag…
Jammerthal, the valley of lamentation
Technology and Affect
Vita
Research Article| September 01 2001 Vita: LIFE IN A ZONE OF SOCIAL ABANDONMENT João Biehl João Biehl Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2001) 19 (3 (68)): 131-149. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-19-3_68-131 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation João Biehl; Vita: LIFE IN A ZONE OF SOCIAL ABANDONMENT. Social Text 1 September 2001; 19 (3 (68)): 131-149. doi: https://doi.org/10…
Social Death
Social Death João Biehl At Home in the Street: Street Children of Northeast Brazil. Tobias Hecht. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; 267 pp. "To the sons of workers, I will say that the guilty ones for the beatings they got for having eaten earth and shit out worms are not their parents at all. I know who they are." —Marilene Felinto1 Tobias Hecht's At Home in the Street is a social constructionist account of the cunning, loving, violen…
Biotechnology and Culture
Biotechnology and Culture. Paul E. Brodwin. ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.287 pp., index
The Activist State
Life of the mind
In this article, I address the embroilment of medical science in the lifeworlds of the urban poor in Brazil, particularly the place of psychopharmaceuticals within households. I explore how psychiatric diagnostics and treatments are integrated into a domestic "dramaturgy of the real" and how family members use them to assess human value and to mediate the disposal of persons considered unproductive or unsound. I focus on the life of Catarina, who…
Technologies of Invisibility
Will to Live
Research Article| September 01 2006 Will to Live: AIDS Drugs and Local Economies of Salvation João Biehl; João Biehl Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Torben Eskerod Torben Eskerod Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2006) 18 (3): 457–472. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2006-015 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation João Bi…
Will to Live
Introduction
Pharmaceuticalization
This article examines the political economy of pharmaceuticals that lies behind global AIDS treatment initiatives, revealing the possibilities and inequalities that come with a magic bullet approach to health care. It tells how Brazil, against all odds, became the first developing country to universalize access to antiretroviral drugs-a breakthrough made possible by an unexpected alliance of activists, government reformers, development agencies, …
Ex-Human Reflections on Vita
SubjectivityEthnographic Investigations
This innovative volume is an extended intellectual conversation about the ways personal lives are being undone and remade today. Examining the ethnography of the modern subject, this preeminent group of scholars probes the continuity and diversity of modes of personhood across a range of Western and non-Western societies. Contributors consider what happens to individual subjectivity when stable or imagined environments such as nations and communi…
Drugs for All
I am interested in the arts of government that accompany economic globalization and in the remaking of populations as market segments (specifically therapeutic markets). Using the Brazilian response to AIDS as an ethnographic baseline, I examine the systemic relations between pharmaceutical commerce and public health care and the value systems that underscore global AIDS treatment initiatives. The pharmaceuticalization of governance and citizensh…
Accès au traitement du sida, marchés des médicaments et citoyenneté dans le Brésil d'aujourd'hui
Cet article traite des questions politiques et économiques que soulève, au Brésil, la politique du traitement du sida pour tous et examine sa portée sociale et médicale dans des contextes de pauvreté urbaine où le sida se propage très rapidement. Je démontre que la combinaison entre l'activisme des patients, les intérêts de l'industrie pharmaceutique et la réforme de l'État a conduit à un changement progressif du concept de santé publique. Celle-…
Symptom
In the domain of health, not only are the raw effects of economic, social, and medical inequalities continually devastating, but novel processes of reconfiguring illness experience, subjectivity, and control are also underway. Human relationships to medical technology are increasingly constituted outside the clinical encounter. In this article we explore how the domestic encroachment of medical commodities affects social bonds in both affluent an…
Deleuze and the Anthropology of Becoming
Philosopher Gilles Deleuze emphasizes the primacy of desire over power and the openness and flux of social fields. In this article, we place our ethnographic projects among the urban poor in Brazil and Bosnia-Herzegovina in dialogue with Deleuze's cartographic approach to subjectivity and his reflections on control and the transformative potential of becoming. As people scavenge for resources and care, they must deal with the encroachment of psyc…
Antropologia no campo da saúde global
Neste artigo, eu exploro os limites de abordagens baseadas em balas mágicas para os problemas de saúde global e mostro como as iniciativas centradas nas pessoas desafiam as ortodoxias econômicas e dos direitos humanos e ampliam nossa percepção daquilo que é socialmente possível e desejável. Utilizo o meu estudo etnográfico de longo prazo sobre a resposta terapêutica brasileira ao HIV/AIDS e suas repercussões nos âmbitos de governo, mercados, sist…
Bodies of Rights and Therapeutic Markets
Brazil is among the approximately 100 countries that recognize a constitutional right to health that includes access to medicines. All over Brazil, patients are turning to courts to access prescribed medicines. Although lawsuits secure access for thousands of people, at least temporarily, this judicialization of the right to health generates intensely complex sociomedical realities and significant administrative and fiscal challenges that, offici…
Homo Economicus and Life Markets
Ethnography as Political Critique
Ethnography as Political Critique João Biehl and Ramah McKay In a splintered world, we must address the splinters. -Clifford Geertz (2000:221) In his essay "The World in Pieces," Clifford Geertz (2000) wrote that a much more pluralistic politics seemed to be emerging in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and through the rise of borderless capitalism, the growth of technology and the mobility of people, and the emergence of new centers …
The phantasy of theory and the missing people
In this theoretically ambitious article, Andrés Guerrero aims to rethink the North's Master Narrative of liberal citizenship, comparing the administration of Indians in past Ecuador with the administration of illegal immigrants in Spain today "as a sort of distorted reflection
Vita
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 o…
Ethnography in the Way of Theory
In this article, I return to my engagements with people in the field not only to address the specific circumstances and trajectories I encountered there, but to make a case for allowing our engagement with Others to determine the course of our thinking about them and to reflect more broadly upon the agonistic and reflexive relations between anthropology and philosophy. I do so in order to suggest that through ethnographic rendering, people's own …
Sociology (31 works) · Political science (27 works) · Law (20 works) · Politics (19 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (16 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Ethnography (11 works) · Anthropology (10 works) · History (9 works)