The Moral Discourse of Health in Modern Cairo
Persons, Bodies, and Organs
By (author) Mohammed Tabishat
Not available to order
Publication date:
21 March 2014Length of book:
200 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9780739179802
In The Moral Discourse of Health in Modern Cairo: Persons, Bodies, and Organs, Mohammed Tabishat posits that health care practices in Egypt constitute an index to read the way political, economic, and social conditions are experienced by those who use, embody, or live them and cope with their outcomes. These practices carry the code of the socio-cultural matrix in which they are embedded; they speak of the rationalities of different help-seeking efforts. In doing so, they represent the moral principles underlying the social efforts to alleviate pain and maintain life as a whole. Health-related practices in this sense constitute a critical platform to know, feel and live in both the physical and moral sense.
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.