A politics of health: Medicine and marginality in northeastern Brazil
This dissertation examines struggles over the political potential and moral meanings of medicine in Pirambu, a low-income community ( favela) located on the fringes of Fortaleza, Brazil. The thesis begins by linking the desires that favela residents express for biomedicine to long standing historical processes such as rural-urban migration, and the rise of clinical medicine in Fortaleza, as well as to the more recent spread of pharmaceutical advertising in the favela. Next it traces the efforts of Fortaleza's government officials to incorporate favela residents into the city through the extension of medical development. Ironically, residents' desires for biomedicine are at odds with public health official's most recent medical development programs, which are funded by the World Health Organization and promote scientific versions of traditional medicine among the city's low-income residents. I argue that this disjuncture can be attributed at once to public health officials' misconceptions of favela residents as rural peasants who must rely on traditional customs as they adapt to urban life, and to residents' own view of biomedical commodities as offering them an opportunity to solidify kinship networks, to evaluate their social position within the community, and to expand their claims on the city of Fortaleza's resources.
In offering a historicized account of the plural healing practices currently available in Pirambu, as well as a detailed analysis of the process of medical decision-making (including practices such as defining illness symptoms, consulting healers and undergoing medical treatment) my aim is to extend current debates about medical pluralism and medicalization. A key assumption in much of this literature is that the acceptance of biomedicine erodes local notions of illness and healing, and invests illness episodes with a naturalizing, individualizing discourse, which renders them politically impotent. By drawing attention to the social relationships that are concretized in the production and circulation of biomedical commodities, I suggest instead that the consumption of biomedicine enables residents to respond to particular dilemmas and dislocations in their family life, as well as to the overall problem of social and political marginalization.