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Zones of social abandonment are emerging everywhere in Brazil’s big cities—places like Vita, where the unwanted, the mentally ill, the sick, and the homeless are left to die. This haunting, unforgettable story centers on a young woman named Catarina, increasingly paralyzed and said to be mad, living out her time at Vita. Anthropologist João Biehl leads a detective-like journey to know Catarina; to unravel the cryptic, poetic words that are part of the “dictionary” she is compiling; and to trace the complex network of family, medicine, state, and economy in which her abandonment and pathology took form. An instant classic, Vita has been widely acclaimed for its bold fieldwork, theoretical innovation, and literary force. Reflecting on how Catarina’s life story continues, this updated edition offers the reader a powerful new afterword and gripping new photographs following Biehl and Eskerod’s return to Vita. Anthropology at its finest, Vita is essential reading for anyone who is grappling with how to understand the conditions of life, thought, and ethics in the contemporary world.

Zones of social abandonment are emerging everywhere in Brazil's big cities-places like Vita, where the unwanted, the mentally ill, the sick, and the homeless are left to die. This haunting, unforgettable story centers on a young woman named Catarina, increasingly paralyzed and said to be mad, living out her time at Vita. Anthropologist João Biehl leads a detective-like journey to know Catarina; to unravel the cryptic, poetic words that are part of the \"dictionary\" she is compiling; and to trace the complex network of family, medicine, state, and economy in which her abandonment and pathology took form. As Biehl painstakingly relates Catarina's words to a vanished world and elucidates her condition, we learn of subjectivities unmade and remade under economic pressures, pharmaceuticals as moral technologies, a public common sense that lets the unsound and unproductive die, and anthropology's unique power to work through these juxtaposed fields. Reissued nearly ten years after its initial publication with a new afterword and more compelling photos, Vita is an essential read for anyone who is grappling with how to understand the conditions of life, thought and ethics in the contemporary world.

Most literature concerning unintended pregnancy in Brazil highlights a link between 'adolescent pregnancy', poverty, marginality and gender inequality. Young women are seen to suffer disadvantages in the course of their lives due to unplanned pregnancies at an early age. This paper questions this picture, emphasising the ways in which adolescent pregnancy is socially constructed and wrongly portrayed as being the main difficulty facing young women in marginalised communities. Instead, it suggests that anthropological and public health debates should focus on how terms such as adolescence and pregnancy are understood and defined by the populations in question.