Full Description
Incorporating investigative journalism and drawing on interviews with participants and leaders, Sandy Smith-Nonini examines the contested place of health and development in El Salvador over the last two decades. Healing the Body Politic recounts the dramatic story of radical health activism from its origins in liberation theology and guerrilla medicine during the third-world country's twelve-year civil war, through development of a remarkable "popular health system," administered by lay providers in a former war zone controlled by leftist rebels. This ethnography casts light on the conflicts between the conservative Ministry of Health and primary health advocates during the 1990s peace process--a time when the government sought to dismantle the effective peasant-run rural system. It offers a rare analysis of the White Marches of 2002û2003, when radicalized physicians rose to national leadership in a successful campaign against privatization of the social security health system. Healing the Body Politic contributes to the productive integration of medical and political anthropology by bringing the semiotics of health and the body to bear on cultural understandings of warfare, the state, and globalization.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Terror and Healing in El Salvador
Introduction: Theorizing the Body and the State
Part One: Exclusion and the Politics of Bare Life
1. Manufacturing Ill-being
Repression's Repercussions
Part Two: War Against Health
3. Insurgent Health
4. Low-Intensity Conflict and the War against Health
5. Pacification
Part Three: Health against War
6. The Anatomy of "Popular Health" in the Repopulated Villages
7. The Elusive Goal of Community Participation
Part Four: War by Other Means
8. Popular Health and the State
9. Disinvesting in Health
10. The White Marches
Epilogue
Notes
References
Index
