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jeff's review
4.0
A pretty devastating overview of the macro situation around farm labor in the United States, and personal stories that made everything even more real. This is such an important topic, I hope more people get exposed to migrant / agriculture issues.
omemiserum's review
5.0
Okay, review time... this book was exceptional. Earnestly, one of the best I've ever read, and my first real ethnography of hopefully many future ones. 'Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies' discusses the lives and experiences of Triqui migrant farmworkers who pick fruit in the USA after making perilous journeys across the US border in a path rendered increasingly difficult and incriminated, yet ironically one upon which the US agricultural industry is entirely dependent for its current functioning. In truth, this book is full of irony, and full of cycles: the irony of the nutritional wellbeing of more affluent Americans being effectively reliant on the bodily abuse and deterioration of hundreds of thousands of farmworkers, for one, is not lost. Holmes impressively incorporates his observations, anecdotes, and recordings taken directly from the field, in an immersive ethnographic technique in which he fully participates and engages in the lives of the indigenous Triqui people he notes the experiences of, with theories of philosophy, medicine, and the social sciences. I hope this is standard anthropological practice, although I am doubtful (nonetheless, I am more optimistic that if not, things are improving... fingers crossed...). One of such frequently referenced academics is Bourdieu, whose insights I found pertinent and applicable - he discusses social reproduction, and the ways in which social and symbolic structures contribute to wider framework reproduction. All are victims, as to live is to participate in the 'game' wherein hierarchies exist and all experience violence implemented in varying forms - there is no capacity to opt out, as all perception occurs through the schemata produced within an unjust society, and as such there is an unknowing consent to the self-perpetuation of the oppressive power structures we all suffer at the hands of.
Chapters 4 and 5 were especially powerful to me in their glimpse into my preferred analysis of medicine via the biopsychosocial lenses that interact with it. Chapter 5 especially looked a lot at criticisms of the healthcare model (specifically in the USA, but that can translate to an extent elsewhere) that brought me back to my EPQ, albeit extending beyond the realm of mental health; the consistent failure to recognise the role of social structures and conditions as faulty causative agents in the realm of disease and ill health was brought up again and again, with an underlying failure of healthcare professionals in understanding the factors at play in Triqui health issues. Interestingly, Holmes looked at the bastardisation of the biopsychosocial model to a sort of 'biobehavioural' model, wherein the only validated factors in diagnosis and treatment were deemed to be the biological, i.e. blood tests and radiographic scans (so called 'objective' measures, as opposed to the 'subjective' and thus discounted patient recollections of their own suffering, often misinterpreted due to insufficient translation services regardless), and the behavioural (essentially blaming patients for their own problems, in the form of claiming alleged ethnic differences and cultural lifestyle choices, such as too much spicy food causing gastritis as opposed to a history of physical torture in the stomach region, or an ineptitude in one's job causing knee pain as opposed to the unavoidable physical strain their work involves). Equal parts fascinating and soul-destroying. Another point made in a similar vein was that concerning Crescencio's headaches, which occurred ostensibly due to his racialised mistreatment and abuse under the farm hierarchy, causing him to become angry with his family and drink to cope, in turn leading to him embodying racist stereotypes that would not exist if not for the structural damage of international inequity and neoliberal economic imperialism inducing his initial migration. The mistreatment which is justified by the stereotypes attributed to indigenous Mexicans cause his ill health (here, in the form of chronic headaches), and the justification of symbolic violence found here is reinforced by all subsequent experiences with healthcare, wherein the myopic biomedical lens through which he is viewed perpetuates further violence onto his body, and potentially the other people in his life who must face an individual whose personhood is being wrongly carved by maltreatment. All of this is expressed significantly better in the book, which I commend readers of this review to also read!
There are so many other things I should go into - in some ways, must go into - but I just can't cover everything, nor do I have the capacity to adequately recollect it all. It's so important for books like this to exist - politics is violence, and politics is medicine, and the detachment of politics and economics from the reality of people's lives is a scam that is directly leading to the deaths and suffering of billions. It is a scam incessantly justified, in many nefarious yet subtle ways, by the underlying belief that some people deserve it, or that it isn't so bad, or that there are inherent and biologically pre-determined factors that shift the constraints of humanity for certain groups so as to subliminally justify the ways in which they - sometimes, we - are subject to disproportionate structural violence. The systems upon which the foundations of this planet are built are fundamentally broken in so many ways. Holmes' work is one of many making me increasingly aware of that and the importance of working to change it.
Chapters 4 and 5 were especially powerful to me in their glimpse into my preferred analysis of medicine via the biopsychosocial lenses that interact with it. Chapter 5 especially looked a lot at criticisms of the healthcare model (specifically in the USA, but that can translate to an extent elsewhere) that brought me back to my EPQ, albeit extending beyond the realm of mental health; the consistent failure to recognise the role of social structures and conditions as faulty causative agents in the realm of disease and ill health was brought up again and again, with an underlying failure of healthcare professionals in understanding the factors at play in Triqui health issues. Interestingly, Holmes looked at the bastardisation of the biopsychosocial model to a sort of 'biobehavioural' model, wherein the only validated factors in diagnosis and treatment were deemed to be the biological, i.e. blood tests and radiographic scans (so called 'objective' measures, as opposed to the 'subjective' and thus discounted patient recollections of their own suffering, often misinterpreted due to insufficient translation services regardless), and the behavioural (essentially blaming patients for their own problems, in the form of claiming alleged ethnic differences and cultural lifestyle choices, such as too much spicy food causing gastritis as opposed to a history of physical torture in the stomach region, or an ineptitude in one's job causing knee pain as opposed to the unavoidable physical strain their work involves). Equal parts fascinating and soul-destroying. Another point made in a similar vein was that concerning Crescencio's headaches, which occurred ostensibly due to his racialised mistreatment and abuse under the farm hierarchy, causing him to become angry with his family and drink to cope, in turn leading to him embodying racist stereotypes that would not exist if not for the structural damage of international inequity and neoliberal economic imperialism inducing his initial migration. The mistreatment which is justified by the stereotypes attributed to indigenous Mexicans cause his ill health (here, in the form of chronic headaches), and the justification of symbolic violence found here is reinforced by all subsequent experiences with healthcare, wherein the myopic biomedical lens through which he is viewed perpetuates further violence onto his body, and potentially the other people in his life who must face an individual whose personhood is being wrongly carved by maltreatment. All of this is expressed significantly better in the book, which I commend readers of this review to also read!
There are so many other things I should go into - in some ways, must go into - but I just can't cover everything, nor do I have the capacity to adequately recollect it all. It's so important for books like this to exist - politics is violence, and politics is medicine, and the detachment of politics and economics from the reality of people's lives is a scam that is directly leading to the deaths and suffering of billions. It is a scam incessantly justified, in many nefarious yet subtle ways, by the underlying belief that some people deserve it, or that it isn't so bad, or that there are inherent and biologically pre-determined factors that shift the constraints of humanity for certain groups so as to subliminally justify the ways in which they - sometimes, we - are subject to disproportionate structural violence. The systems upon which the foundations of this planet are built are fundamentally broken in so many ways. Holmes' work is one of many making me increasingly aware of that and the importance of working to change it.