In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Latin American Research Review 41.1 (2006) 234-240



[Access article in PDF]

Medical Profiling, Justice and Recognition

Renewals for Hope in Enduring Struggles

University of Sussex and University of Toronto
Disease in the History of Modern Latin America: From Malaria to AIDS. Edited by Diego Armus. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Pp. 326. $64.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.)
Globalización, Conocimiento Y Poder: Médicos Locales Y Sus Luchas Por El Reconocimiento En Chiapas. By Steffan Igor Ayora Díaz. (México: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 2002. Pp. 205.)
Staying Sober in Mexico City. By Stanley Brandes. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Pp. 239. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.)
Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling During a Medical Nightmare. By Charles Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. 456. $34.95 cloth.)
Maya Medicine: Traditional Healing in Yucatan. By Marianna Appel Kunow. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003. Pp. 160. $29.95 paper.)
Health Services in Latin America and Asia. By Carlos Gerardo Molina and José Nuñez del Arco. (Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank and The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Pp. 298. $24.95 paper.)
Entender Y Atender La Enfermedad: Los Saberes Maternos Frente A Los Padecimiento Infantiles. By Rosa María Osorio Carranza. (México, DF: CIESAS, INAH, INI, 2001. Pp. 276.)

While I am finishing off this review, Bush has just been reelected to a second term and some of us are feeling a post-election blues. The international health domain is one domain par excellence that is ridden by social inequities and by the often-uneasy synergy of private, public, local, and national forces. I am also blue because of a possible renewed unilateralism of the present administration and the resulting failure of [End Page 234] an image of international codependency and subsequently of social co-responsibility. To different degrees, some of these books are pointing to medical gazes and medical hybrid processes that require a renewed understanding of interdependency and co-responsibilities.

One aspect that emerges in these books is the production, circulation, and consumption of medical knowledge(s) and how these processes shape inclusionary and exclusionary forms of citizenship, particular forms of medical hierarchies, and medical justice. Charles and Clara (Mantini) Briggs powerfully unveil the complexity of the early 1990s cholera epidemic of the Delta Amacuro of Venezuela and reveal ways in which the shaping of sanitary subjects constituted the core mechanism of medical racial profiling. In their sophisticated and informative book they draw a picture of how cholera epidemic narratives and statistics have been underplayed as well as misunderstood by criollo doctors and regional and national public officials. Following first a conspiracy theory but then moving well beyond it, the Briggs unveil, in a sophisticated but also clear style, local, regional, and international forces at play in the shaping of two major Venezuelan representations of citizenship. One is the sanitized, criollo citizenship, outside the "dangerous" and to-be-contained cholera regional cordon, the other is the native, pre-modern, unsanitized Warao people. This indigenous group was first left to its own devices, but once the epidemic reached a critical mass, the group was aggressively targeted by media attention and by specific public health projects aimed at reducing the scale of the epidemic.

In the analysis of the partial shambles of that public health intervention (it seems that over 600 indigenous people died in that preventable epidemic) the Briggs do not raise a finger against public health officials in their re-nativization of Warao Indians as unsanitized subjects. They are instead more interested in unveiling the complex interplay of circulation of information, images, and resources that reproduce profound and historically sedimented social inequalities and racial profiling in Venezuela. They stress that the underlying of this epidemic has to be understood beyond the bona fide intentionality of the individual actors, into the wider playing of forces and unexpected consequences of action that such complex circulation engenders.

The Briggs show that logic of (medical) cultural sensitivity is...

pdf

Share