Welcome to Ambawati. A village in Rajasthan, midway between Delhi and Mumbai, where the western wind kicks up a dust. It irritates the lungs. The residents are mostly Adivasis and Dalits. Tuberculosis is rampant. It is entangled with inequality. This is the price the marginalized pay for health and policy decisions made in faraway Delhi and Geneva. Andrew McDowell gets entangled in the lives of the people of Ambawati, spending time at tea stalls, clinics, bedsides, fields, forests, and with nurses, doctors, quacks, mediums and mystics. He shows us how TB is an atmospheric illness dictated by social and biological realities.
With chapters on dust, clouds, breath, mud, and ghosts, McDowell develops a philosophy and phenomenology of breathing that attends to medical systems, patient care, and health justice. Breath—intimate and personal, shared and distributed—throws new light on public health and inequality. Breathless is both an act of meditation and a call to action.
India accounts for 30% of the world’s TB cases
2023 saw 28.2 lakh cases, 3.4 lakh deaths
50% of the affected suffer from malnutrition
State apathy towards a poor-person disease
Review
‘So accessible and complete… beautifully written… a masterpiece’—Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University
‘A stunning ethnography of embodiment, inequality, vitality, and care’—Harris Solomon, Duke University
‘Subtle and deeply sensitive… Breathless forces us to think’—Kaushik Sunder Rajan, University of Chicago
About the Author
Andrew McDowell is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana. He has a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from Harvard University. His work has appeared in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Ethos, Biosocieties, and The Lancet.
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