About

João Biehl is the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University, as well as the Director of the Brazil LAB at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. His ethnographic work explores how science and technology transition from laboratories to markets, health policies, and unequal lifeworlds in the Global South, with particular focus on the pharmaceuticalization of care and the judicialization of the right to health. His historical anthropological research traces nature-based healing practices and the afterlives of anti-colonial insurgencies in southern settler frontiers. Biehl has authored award-winning books such as 'Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment' and 'Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival,' which examine the experiences and treatment of mental illness and AIDS in Brazil, highlighting regimes of normalcy, access, marginalization, and the circuits of care and legal mobilization. His work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the J. I. Staley Prize, the Margaret Mead Award, and the Wellcome Medal. He has collaborated with scholars across disciplines on projects related to health, human rights, and social justice, and has held fellowships from prestigious foundations. Biehl's research is funded by various institutions, and he has been involved in interdisciplinary initiatives aimed at social and environmental justice, including the co-founding of the Brazil LAB, which focuses on issues such as Amazonian sustainability, inequalities, and indigenous knowledge. His current projects include a manuscript on the fratricidal Mucker War in southern Brazil and a co-edited volume on critical geographies, reflecting his broad engagement with ethnography, history, and activism.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Humanities
• Nursing
• Medicine
• Art
• Business
• Anthropology
• Public administration

Selected publications

• Indigenizing conservation science for a sustainable Amazon

  Science · 2024-12-12 · 26 citations

  articleSenior author

  Dialogues between Western and Indigenous systems are critical.

  PublisherDOI

• A Arte da Interferência - Descolonizando a saúde global e perspectivando horizontes

  Revista AntHropológicas · 2024-05-06

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Diante da incerteza pandêmica e da luta intensifi-cada contra o racismo sistêmico, este artigo argumenta que a antropologia médica é singularmente capaz de refletir sobre o momento que a saúde global vive. Isso é devido ao nosso com-promisso etnográfico e ativista com o corpo plural e com dis-tintas condições humanas, bem como à constante recalibração de contribuições teóricas e práticas para a arte do cuidado. Se a idéia de intervenção implica consertos tecnológicos e políti-cos, a antropologia permite modos alternativos de interferên-cia: desmobilizando idéias de naturalidade, desestabilizando o senso comum de quais formas de vida nossas sociedades e tec-nologias apoiam, e revelando compromissos que vão bem além de resgates humanitários pontuais atrelados e que procu-ram garantir a saúde como direito e instanciar justiça social. Contra o pano de fundo de uma crescente tensão entre a tec-nocrática produção de microdispositivos humanitários e o de-senvolvimento de uma ciência integrada de saúde planetária, o artigo ilumina a urgência da articulação de uma ética amazô-nica de cuidado.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Arquivamentos anticoloniais: a Guerra Mucker na fronteira sul e traços-daquilo-que-não-se-sabe

  Mana · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Resumo: Este ensaio desenterra a Guerra Mucker, o primeiro levante messiânico do Brasil moderno, ocorrido entre teuto-brasileiros em 1874 e deixado à impunidade, relegado à escória da história. O conflito fratricida teve como pano de fundo um expansionismo neocolonial que conectava a Europa à fronteira sul do país, refletindo também a dinâmica de racialização e a necropolítica das classes dominantes, assim como uma silenciada insurgência anticolonial de base: espaço-tempos e entrelaçamentos dos quais eu sou um descendente acidental. Embora amaldiçoado, um certo modo comunitário de cuidar de si mesmo e de seus entes queridos permaneceria vivo como um não-saber errante naquela paisagem sulina, manifestando o poder plástico da gente colonizada internamente. Ao dar atenção etnográfica a essa dimensão ahistórica, o ensaio delineia um outro lugar que desaloja o conhecido e possibilita capacidades distintas de sintonização e de contar histórias e, para os Mucker e seus descendentes, métodos alternativos de conceber o corpo e o mundo abertos ao Espírito da Natureza. O etnógrafo-contador-de-histórias é uma das muitas entidades que pulsam no palimpsesto poético-prismático de traços-daquilo-que-não-se-sabe, sempre prestes a se tornar outra coisa: um coletivo de copresenças que a práxis antropológica pode deixar apodrecer e continuar desaparecendo - como um modo de viver enxertado na natureza - ou que pode ser revivido por esses lampejos, mesmo sem linguagem.

  PublisherDOI

• INTRODUCTION

  2023-03-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 11 Ethnographic Open

  2023-03-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Arc of Interference

  2023-02-27

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  and forced migration, of infrastructural breakdown and abrupt climate change-mediated by extreme pop u lism, war, disinformation, and state and corporate efforts to dismantle piecemeal, though meaningful, agendas of socioeconomic rights.Meanwhile, the "ethnographic sensorium" has also kept eliciting peoples' plasticity and desires for self-determination and things to be other wise. 1 Today, we find ourselves past that stage of foreboding, and this writing, too, takes place at an edge of calamity's unfolding.While Rus sia wages a brutal neo co lo nial war against Ukraine and democracy itself, the cOvId-19 pandemic continues to rage across the world, undoing taken-for-granted ways of knowing and acting and revealing the thorough impotence of social safety nets, health-care systems, and hoped-for bonds of solidarity.Amid rippling health, economic, and po liti cal damage we are forced to reckon with the deadly impact of environmental decline; the utter fragility of our systems of preparedness; and the entrenched forms of structural vio lence that exacerbate vulnerability, mortality rates, mental illness, and disparities in care.These collective disasters affect and kill unevenly along the vectors of race, gender, class, nation and region. 2 Social media-saturated and divided as ever, necropo liti cal scenarios ask us to put what remains of our faith in the virologists, epidemiologists, vaccine developers, climate planners, governments, nonprofit organ izations, and other technocratic solutions to restore some sense of normality to social and economic life.But these, too, may fall short, reconfiguring and reinforcing inequities and control systems even after stimulus packages are unleashed and anticipated lifesaving technologies become available. 3 Meanwhile, Black Americans have reached a tipping point brought on by the white supremacy and systemic racism that, for centuries, have constrained their lives and foreclosed the life chances of people of color, often under the guise of a liberal po liti cal order, humanism, and fallacious systems of accountability.The police vio lence that has brutally marked the daily experiences of entire communities is, at long last, at the fore of po litical discourse around the world.The horrors of the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, have also prompted a recalling of generations of murdered Black citizens and unpre ce dented displays of activism and imagination for what could replace unjust modes of governance and oppressive dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, here and elsewhere. 4mid this general sense of vertigo and facing the fleeting promise of repair and abolition, we know that the pandemic, planetary demise, injustice, in equality, and health collapse are connected: not wanting to discount one

  PublisherDOI

• Ethnographic Open

  2023-02-27

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Insurgent Archivings

  Current Anthropology · 2022-12-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  While studying immigrant worlding in Brazil’s nineteenth-century southern settler frontier, I stumbled across multiple ways of archiving, from poor farmers’ viva voce prayers and reminiscences to the nurturing of herbal gardens and usage of forest medicinal products to communal vital registries and home burials (including my ancestors’)—all bridging the sensual and conceptual realms through specific material constellations. I take the traces emanating from this unschooled sensorium as an “unfinished system of nonknowledge” forged against the specter of death, as in the 1874 fratricidal conflict that crushed the natural enlightenment of the so-called Mucker false saints. Here, on the edges of colonization, traces-of-what-one-does-not-know testify to the house as an ongoing index of survival and insurgency: both a cluster of materialities, relations, and affects through which complex practices of healing and living on emerge together and an archiving operation combining the historical and the unhistorical in the refiguration of humanness and futurity. As these flickering homespun traces exceed the racialization and necropolitics conjured by the ruling classes and confront brutal efforts at “silencing the past,” they also carry “the poetry it is possible not to write”—that is, folks’ imaginative and horizon-making capacities, which include the Spirit of Nature and relationships to our dead and which storytelling animates time and again.

  PublisherDOI

• Supreme Court v. Necropolitics: The Chaotic Judicialization of COVID-19 in Brazil.

  Health and Human Rights · 2021 · 44 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Law

  Worldwide, governments have reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic with emergency orders and policies restricting rights to movement, assembly, and education that have impacted daily lives and livelihoods in profound ways. But some leaders, such as President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, have resisted taking such steps, denying the seriousness of the pandemic and sabotaging local control measures, thereby compromising population health. Facing one of the world's highest rates of COVID-19 infections and deaths, multiple political actors in Brazil have resorted to judicialization to advance the right to health and other protections in the country. Responding to this litigation has provided the country's Supreme Court an opportunity to assertively confront and counter the executive's necropolitics. In this article, we probe the malleable form and the constitutional basis of the Supreme Court's decisions, assessing their impact on the separation of powers, on the protection of human rights (for example, on those of prisoners, indigenous peoples, and essential workers), and relative to the implementation of evidence-based interventions (for example, lockdowns and vaccination). While the court's actions open up a distinct legal-political field (sometimes called "supremocracy")-oscillating between progressive imperatives, neoliberal valuations, and conservative decisions-the capacity of the judiciary to significantly address systemic violence and to robustly advance human rights remains to be seen.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Descolonizando a saúde planetária

  Horizontes Antropológicos · 2021-04-01 · 21 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Resumo Intimamente conectada com decisões políticas e interesses de mercado, a pandemia de Covid-19 é uma calamidade crônica agudizada que assola o mundo inteiro, desestabilizando conhecimentos e práticas biomédicas hegemônicas e revelando a precariedade dos sistemas de saúde pública, assim como a impotência profunda das redes de seguridade social e a fragilidade dos laços de solidariedade que imaginávamos estáveis. O artigo reflete sobre os desafios impostos aos cientistas sociais e profissionais da saúde em contextos neoliberais e à beira da autocracia num momento em que seus métodos e conceitos-chave são chamados a dar conta de forma mais adequada aos complexos enredos territorializados pela emergência generalizada e a cultivar micro, meso e macromodos de resistência. Assim, instrumentos analíticos da antropologia médica e da saúde global crítica, como vulnerabilidade estrutural, determinantes políticos, racialização, farmaceuticalização e descolonização do saber, podem ser valiosos recursos para leitura do presente e de intervenção nele, mas são também desafiados pela dinâmica realidade que se desdobra. Contra o pano de fundo de uma crescente tensão entre a tecnocrática produção de microdispositivos humanitários e o desenvolvimento de uma ciência integrada de saúde planetária, o artigo ilumina a urgência da articulação de uma ética amazônica de cuidado.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Arthur Kleinman

  53 shared

• Byron J. Good

  Harvard Global Health Institute

  53 shared

• Sarah Pinto

  49 shared

• Delvecchio Good

  Jewish General Hospital

  49 shared

• David H. Barlow

  49 shared

• Sandra Teresa Hyde

  McGill University

  49 shared

• Joseph J Amon

  19 shared

• Adriana Petryna

  14 shared

Awards & honors

• J. I. Staley Prize of the School of Advanced Research
• Margaret Mead Award of the American Anthropological Associat…
• Anthony Leeds Prize of the Society for Urban, National, and…
• Eileen Basker Memorial Prize of the Society for Medical Anth…
• Stirling Prize of the Society for Psychological Anthropology