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.

Vita's methodological innovations, bold fieldwork, and rigorous social theory make it an essential reading for anyone who is grappling with how to understand the conditions of life, thought, and ethics in the contemporary world.

All Our Kin: Strategies For Survival In A Black Community is a landmark study by Carol B. Stack that challenges the misconception of poor families as unstable and disorganized. The book provides an in-depth chronicle of a young white woman's sojourn into The Flats, an African-American ghetto community, where she studies the support systems that family and friends form to cope with poverty.

Eschewing the traditional methods used by anthropologists, which often involve approaching through authority figures and community leaders, the author enters the community via an acquaintance from school. This approach allows her to become one of the first sociologists to explore the black kinship network from the inside.

The result is a revealing study that shows how families in The Flats adapt to their poverty conditions by forming large, resilient, lifelong support networks based on friendship and family. These networks are shown to be powerful, highly structured, and surprisingly complex. The book also serves as an indictment of a social system that reinforces welfare dependency and chronic unemployment.