Healing the Body Politic

Healing the Body Politic is an impressive and well-argued work of ethnography. Sandy Smith-Nonini has written an interesting and precise book spiced with engaging stories that implant images in readers' minds that will likely persist long after they have put the work down. Leigh Binford, author of The El Mozote Massacre: Anthropology and Human Rights

An impressive, well-written book. Highly Recommended. Choice

This is an exceptionallywell-researched book, and Smith-Nonini is a talented writer. Healing the Body Politic will be of great interest to medical and psychological anthropologists as well as to cultural and social anthropologists, political scientists, historians, sociologists, and scholars in and of Latin America more generally. Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology

Smith-Nonini's book beautifully demonstrates the political and social struggle to control the symbolic power of healing, and the consequences of these struggles on the health of rural and poor Salvadorans through the past three decades. Ethos

Healing the Body Politic is a refreshing read when so much of contemporary anthropology is concerned with critiquing the cultures of expertise in international development institutions and casting doubt on the project of trying to improve health and well-being. Smith-Nonini’s work is instead optimistic; she sees the popular health system as an instantiation of hope. PoLAR