Lexington Books The Moral Discourse of Health in Modern Cairo: Persons, Bodies, and Organs

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. Review 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 About the Author 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.