Lifelines

“Lifelines is a highly perceptive work of anthropology whose lessons run deep and far. Harris Solomon applies his substantial ethnographic talent to the problem of traumatic traffic accidents in contemporary Mumbai, knitting the infrastructure of the city together with that of hospital and home. Through a focus on ubiquitous and devastating injury, he reveals how central mobility is to bodily life and how relationships and institutions in turn allow bodies to move. This beautifully rendered, luminous account deserves a wide readership.” - Julie Livingston, author of Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa

“Offering new language and ideas to medical anthropology while providing insights into systematic suffering and the ways efforts to address it become routinized, Lifelines is a stunning and brilliant book.” - Sarah Pinto, author of The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis

"Lifelines is a subtly crafted account of the tangled relations between mobility and life in the contemporary city. In that sense, it contributes to a vibrant discussion on mobility, infrastructure and urban life across South Asia and other regions of the world today. . . . The manuscript’s strengths lie in how it radiates out from its empirical focus: trauma as it moves in and through the hospital as a site of medicalised care." - Waqas Butt, South Asia

"These case studies are . . . wonderfully elaborated and contextualized within the respective families and neighbourhoods and show the negotiations around disability, blame, responsibility and fault." - Annika Strauss, Anthropos

"The book is extremely detailed and top-notch in terms of ethnographic methods." - Rana Abhyendra Singh, IIAS Review

"[T]his is a stupendous work of medical anthropology, providing a new lens through which to view traffic-related trauma and associated movements, with specific reference to a major city of the Global South. It brilliantly captures injury’s relational kinetics after the accident, explained with plenty of examples and theoretical dialogue." - Saurav K. Rai, H-Asia