Pathologies of Power

Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor : with a New Preface by the Author

Author: Paul Farmer
ISBN: 9780520243262

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

Publisher: University of California Press
Publish Date: 2005

Subjects: History / Africa / General, History / Latin America / General, Social Science / Anthropology / General, Social Science / Poverty & Homelessness, Social Science / Social Classes

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Cross-Cultural Center (Location: Political Science (POLI))