Health and Wealth on the Bosnian Market Intimate Debt [Hardcover]

Larisa Jasarevic offers an unforgettable look at the everyday experiences of people living in post-socialist, post-war Bosnia. Not at all existing on the world's margins, Bosnians today are concerned with the good life and are as entangled in consumer debt as everyone else. The insecurities of living in an economy dominated by informal networks of trade, personal credit, and indebtedness are experienced by Bosnians in terms of physical ailments, some not recognized by Western medical science. Jasarevic follows ordinary Bosnians in their search for treatment--from use of pharmaceuticals to alternative medicines and folk healers of various kinds. Financial well-being and health are woven together for Bosnians, and Jasarevic adeptly traces the links between the two realms. In the process, she addresses a number of themes that have been important in studies of life under neoliberalism in other parts of the world.

Larisa Jasarevic is Senior Lecturer in the Global and International Studies Program at the University of Chicago. An anthropologist, she is interested in bodies, natures, and popular knowledge in contemporary Bosnia.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Oddly Bodily Lives in the Market
1. Just Surviving: Living Well Since the Better Life
2. Insanely Generous: Making Wealth in an Economy of Debt
3. On the Edge: Worries in Common and Circumstantial Communities
4. Medical Detours: Materiality and Magicality of Quotidian Cures
5. Strava: Distant Bodies at Hand
6. What if Not For Real? Troubles with Medical Efficacy
Bibliography
Index

...A unique text and a brilliant intervention in two theoretical fields, as well as an important contribution to post-socialist ethnography. The author's incisive revelation is that ethnographers cannot forever segregate the economic and the bio-medical. ...A such, it is a highly important contribution to the field, and an exciting wotk from a new voice.

For scholars working on health and medls*