UCLA Press 2005. Soft cover, 402 pp. Signs of wear
Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of life--and death--in
extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights.
Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of
experience working in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the
social and economic rights of the world's poor is the most important
human rights struggle of our times. 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 embodied as disease and death. Yet this book is far from a
hopeless inventory of abuse.Farmer's disturbing examples are linked to a
guarded optimism that new medical and social technologies will develop
in tandem with a more informed sense of social justice. Otherwise, he
concludes, we will be guilty of managing social inequality rather than
addressing structural violence. Farmer's urgent plea to think about
human rights in the context of global public health and to consider
critical issues of quality and access for the world's poor should be of
fundamental concern to a world characterized by the bizarre proximity of
surfeit and suffering.