02173nam a2200205   4500000000100000008004100001260003400042653003300076653002300109653001200132653001000144653001600154653001200170100001400182245010000196300001500296050001700311520161700328020002201945       2007                            d  bOrient LongmanaJames Staples10aSocial psychological aspects10aPatient perception10aleprosy10aIndia10aCommunities10aBethany1 aStaples J00aPeculiar people, amazing lives : leprosy, social exclusion, and community making in South India  axv, 290 p.  a130.28 STA b3 aPeculiar People, Amazing Lives sets out to challenge the widely held and deeply ingrained perception that people affected by leprosy are victims of the most terrible scourge imaginable. The experiences of those living in Bethany—a self-established leprosy community in South India—tell rather different, more nuanced, stories about what it is like to have leprosy at the onset of the twenty-first century. In this richly ethnographic portrait of Bethany people’s lives—whether at home in the leprosy colony, away begging in Mumbai or representing their histories through drama performance—James Staples explores how this apparently powerless group appropriates, embodies and redefines dominant ideas about caste, religion, the human body and Indian ways of knowing and being-in-the-world. They do so, as the book also reveals, against the various backdrops of colonialism, missionary endeavour, vernacular Christianity and Hinduism, medical practices, development and the State. At a time when the World Health Organisation (WHO) is declaring that leprosy as a public health problem has been globally eliminated, the narratives of those whose lives remain intricately affected by the disease are more than ever in need of telling. The people at the centre of this book are seeing their right to define their identities in relation to a particular disease—and to gain certain advantages from those identities—being slowly but forcefully eroded. They emerge not as victims but as a group ready to challenge existing power structures in order to represent themselves as a group with particular rights.  a978-81-250-2986-1