João Biehl
Professor
Ph.D. Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley 1999.
Ph.D. Religion, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley 1996.
Interests
Sociocultural and medical anthropology, social studies of science and religion, global health, subjectivity, ethnographic methods, critical theory, Brazil and Latin America.
João Biehl is the author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (U California Press 2005) and of Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival (Princeton U Press 2007). These books are ethnographic studies of the experience and treatment of mental illness and HIV/AIDS respectively. Both Vita and Will to Live explore new geographies of access and marginalization that have emerged alongside pharmaceutical globalization. They also elaborate on networks of care that poor urban patients create in their daily struggles to survive. Biehl is also the co-editor of Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations.
Vita garnered six book awards, including the 2007 Margaret Mead Award of the American Anthropological Association. Will to Live received the 2008 Diana Forsythe Prize of the American Anthropological Association. Biehl received the Rudolph Virchow Award for his articles “The Activist State” and “Pharmaceuticalization.”
Biehl’s research has been supported by grants from the Guggenheim, MacArthur, Wenner-Gren and Ford Foundations and from Princeton’s Grand Challenges Initiative. He held the Harold Willis Dodds Presidential Preceptorship and was a member of the School of Social Science and of the School of Historical Studies of the Institute for Advanced Study. He was also a member of the Center for Theological Inquiry and a visiting professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Biehl received Princeton’s Presidential Distinguished Teaching Award in 2005.
Before joining the Princeton faculty in 2001, Prof. Biehl was a National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. He earned a doctorate in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley and a doctorate in Religion from the Graduate Theological Union. He received a master’s degree in philosophy and undergraduate degrees in theology and journalism from academic institutions in Brazil.
Biehl is currently writing The Valley of Lamentation, the history of a religious war—the Mucker war—that took place among German immigrants in 19th century Brazil. He is also co-editing When People Come First, a book on evidence, theory, and advocacy in global health. His current research explores the social impact of large-scale treatment programs in resource-poor settings and the role of the judiciary in administering public health. Biehl is the co-Director of Princeton’s Program in Global Health and Health Policy.
Selected Publications
Books:
Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations (João Biehl, Byron Good, Arthur Kleinman). Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Articles:
“Symptom: Subjectivities, Social Ills, Technologies” (João Biehl and Amy Moran-Thomas). Annual Review of Anthropology, 2009, 38: 267-88.
“Judicialisation and the Right to Health in Brazil” (Biehl J, Petryna A, Gertner A, Amon JJ, Picon PD). The Lancet, 2009, 373: 2182-84.
“Accès du traitement du sida, marches des medicaments et citoyenneté dans le Brésil d’aujourd’hui.” Sciences Sociales et Santé, 2009, 27(3): 13-46.
"Drugs for All: The Future of Global AIDS Treatment." Medical Anthropology, 2008, 27(2):1-7.
“Pharmaceuticalization: AIDS Treatment and Global Health Politics.” Anthropological Quarterly, 2007, 80(4):1083-1126.
"Ex-Human: Reflections on Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment.” City & Society, 2007, 19(1):81-85.
“Will To Live: AIDS Drugs and Local Economies of Salvation” (a photographic essay with Torben Eskerod). Public Culture, 2006, 18(3):457-472.
“Life of the Mind: The Interface of Psychopharmaceuticals, Domestic Economies, and Social Abandonment.” American Ethnologist, 2004,31 (4): 475-496.
“The Activist State: Global Pharmaceuticals, AIDS, and Citizenship in Brazil.” Social Text, 2004,22(3):105-132.
Book Chapters
“The Brazilian Response to AIDS and the Pharmaceuticalization of Global Health.” In Anthropology and Public Health: Bridging Differences in Culture and Society (second edition) edited by Robert A. Hahn and Marcia Inhorn. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp.480-511. “The Mucker War: A History of Violence and Silence.” In Postcolonial Disorders edited by Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Sandra T. Hyde, Sarah Pinto, and Byron Good. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008, pp.279-308.
“Pharmaceutical Governance.” In Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices edited by Adriana Petryna, Andrew Lakoff, and Arthur Kleinman. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006, pp.206-239.
“Technologies of Invisibility: The Politics of Life and Social Inequality.” In Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality, and Life Politics, edited by Jonathan Xavier Inda. London: Blackwell, 2005, pp. 248-271.
