Lexington Books
Pages: 200
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9¼
978-0-7391-7979-6 • Hardback • March 2014 • $120.00 • (£92.00)
978-0-7391-7980-2 • eBook • March 2014 • $114.00 • (£88.00)
Mohammed Tabishat is assistant professor of socio-cultural anthropology at The American University in Cairo. His work explores how health care systems constitute indexes for social structure and cultural change. He has conducted fieldwork in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan.
List of tables and figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Society in Medicine and Health
Chapter One: Health of “Modern” Life: Examples from self-guides
Chapter Two: Family Life, Health, and Illness in Būlāq Abul‘ela
Chapter Three:‘Iḍḍaghṭ: Biomedicine for Social Critique
Chapter Four: Society in Life and Death
Chapter Five: Ethnography as Cultural Critique
Index
About the Author
Mohammed Tabishat has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of the everyday health problems of the poorer classes in Cairo. Most interesting is his account of the Islamic concept of al-nafs that people employ to address—as a single field of dis-ease—what biomedicine identifies as either ‘physical’ or ‘psychological’ illness and as its social, political, and economic causes. Strongly recommended.
— Talal Asad, Emeritus Distinguished Professor, Graduate Center of the City University of New York
A rich ethnographic account of illness and health in contemporary Cairo. Written with great insight and sensitivity, Tabishat examines how the vocabularies of sickness and well-being reflect an evolving fusion of Islamic concepts of moral and physical health with the perspectives and practices of modern bio-medicine. His work provides a poignant reminder that the health of the body is as much a moral and political-economic condition as it is a physical and physiological one. A major contribution to the medical anthropology of the Middle East.
— Charles Hirschkind, University of California, Berkeley