Affliction

Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty inaugurates a novel way of understanding the trajectories of health and disease in the context of poverty. Focusing on low-income neighborhoods in Delhi, it stitches together three different sets of issues. It first examines the different trajectories of illness: What are the circumstances under which illness is absorbed within the normal and when does it exceed the normal putting resources, relationships, and even one's world into jeopardy? Parallel to the experience of illness within families and local communities, a second set of issues pertains to the way healers of different kinds understand their own practice. The astonishing range of practitioners found in the local markets in the poor neighborhoods of Delhi shows how the magical and the technical are knotted together in the therapeutic experience of both healers and patients. The book asks, What is expert knowledge? What is it that the practitioner knows and what does the patient know? How are these different forms of knowledge brought together in the clinical encounter, broadly defined? How does this event of everyday life bear the traces of larger policies at the national and global levels? Finally, the book interrogates the statistical models of disease prevalence and global programming that emphasize surveillance over care and attention to the specificities of local worlds. Yet the analysis offered retains an openness to different ways of conceptualizing "what is happening" and stimulates a conversation between different disciplinary orientations to health, disease and poverty.