Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival

By João Biehl

Book Overview

Will to Live tells how Brazil, against all odds, became the first developing country to universalize access to life-saving AIDS therapies--a breakthrough made possible by an unexpected alliance of activists, government reformers, development agencies, and the pharmaceutical industry. But anthropologist Jo o Biehl also tells why this policy, hailed as a model worldwide, has been so difficult to implement among poor Brazilians with HIV/AIDS, who are often stigmatized as noncompliant or untreatable, becoming invisible to the public. More broadly, Biehl examines the political economy of pharmaceuticals that lies behind large-scale treatment rollouts, revealing the possibilities and inequalities that come with a magic bullet approach to health care.

By moving back and forth between the institutions shaping the Brazilian response to AIDS and the people affected by the disease, Biehl has created a book of unusual vividness, scope, and detail. At the core of Will to Live is a group of AIDS patients--unemployed, homeless, involved with prostitution and drugs--that established a makeshift health service. Biehl chronicled the personal lives of these people for over ten years and Torben Eskerod represents them here in more than one hundred stark photographs.

Ethnography, social medicine, and art merge in this unique book, illuminating the care and agency needed to extend life amid perennial violence. Full of lessons for the future, Will to Live promises to have a lasting influence in the social sciences and in the theory and practice of global public health.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691143854
• ISBN13: 9780691143859
• Release Date: May 2009
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 2.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Giving a face to HIV/AIDS in Brazil

Biehl's Will to Live takes on the challenging task of examining the institutional forces behind Brazil's lauded HIV/AIDS response while also highlighting the personal stories of some of the individuals most impacted by Brazilian HIV/AIDS policy. By pairing interviews with policymakers and physicians with interviews of Bahia's poorest AIDS patients, Biehl demonstrates the complexity of the state of the epidemic in modern-day Brazil. Biehl's talents as an ethnographer are most apparent in his longitudinal fieldwork at Caasah, a grassroots health service in Salvador, which allows him to track how HIV/AIDS influences the life paths of impoverished AIDS patients. Through his skilled interviewing, Biehl fully captures the life stories of his interviewees - giving a face to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Brazil and fully engaging the reader. Additionally, Biehl examines issues of pharmaceutical governance, the challenges associated with a "magic bullet" approach to health care, and the influence of HIV/AIDS activism on AIDS policies in Brazil. Torben Eskerod's powerful images of those most vulnerable to the disease beautifully complement Biehl's precise yet descriptive prose. This fascinating follow-up to Biehl's first book, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment, winner of the Margaret Meade Award for 2007, leaves the reader considering the kinds of changes that need to be made to worldwide HIV/AIDS programs to make them more successful. Will to Live is an excellent contribution to the academic AIDS/HIV literature and individuals from fields such as global public health, medical anthropology, and social medicine would greatly benefit from wrestling with the arguments presented here.