Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium ed. by Veena Das and Clara Han (review)

The first one, “Natality, Sexuality, Reproduction,” contains seven chapters spanning adoption in Mexico (Anaid Citlalli Reyes-Kipp), miscarriages in a Palestinian refugee community in Lebanon (Sylvain Perdigon), and the symbolism of pregnancy among transgender hijras in Orissa (Vaibhav Saria). The second section, “Medical, Legal, and Pharmaceutical Spaces,” comprises ten chapters on topics from waiting in British National Health System facilities (Sophie Day) to pharmaceutical politics in Nepal (Ian Harper and Nabin Rawal) to right-to-health litigation in Brazil (João Biehl).Together they relate affliction and recovery to social institutions and considerations of justice. The final section, “Death and Dying,” not only has geographical reach, from post-genocide Cambodia (Anne Yvonne Guillou) to youth and cemeteries in urban Congo (Filip De Boeck); it also comprehends very different genres—a graph-filled article on mortality rates by sex (Rabia Ali and Jishnu Das) and the touching personal “Chemonotes” of medical historian Harry M. Marks, to whom the compendium is dedicated.