"Anthropology needs to develop a listening capacity and to engage in an activist way, to become involved with the problem, not just to observe it from a distance", says Brazilian anthropologist João Biehl in a portrait on the website of his university (Princeton University).
Biehl has conducted fieldwork in Vita, a site in Porto Alegre that is populated by the sick, mentally ill and poor who have passed beyond the care of families and social institutions. He wrote about his experiences in "Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment" which revolves around an ethnographic study of Catarina, a young women who was considered by her family and various doctors to be insane. With no one to look after her, she had ended up at Vita. Se died in Vita in 2003.
Working with Catarina taught Biehl anthropology in a new way, he says.
Describing the impact of the book, Princeton anthropologist Carolyn Rouse said, "In addressing social policy and ethics, 'Vita' demonstrates how one person's life can be a basis for thinking about complex issues."
According to Biehl, places like Vita are emerging everywhere in urban Brazil, and the book shows "how economic globalization and state and medical reform coincide and impinge on a local production of social death."
>> read the whole portrait on Princeton University's website
Unfortunately, I couldn't find more texts by or about Biehl. His anthropology department looks like one of the worst faculty website on the web. But you'll find three papers on the website of Anthropology, Art, and Activism Series (Brown University).
UPDATE (9.2.07): Read the comment by Anne Galloway (Space and Culture)
SEE ALSO:
Professor studies society's poor by picking through trash
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More and more anthropologists, but they're absent from public debates - "Engaging Anthropology" (1)
Interview: Anthropologist studied poor fast food workers in Harlem
Poverty and health policies: Listening to the poor in Bangladesh
Too engaged anthropology? The Lumpenproletariat on the US-Mexican Border
This entry was posted by admin and filed under Latin- and Central America, applied anthropology, books, poverty, anthropology (general), ethics. 
I am rather apalled by the opposition between getting involved by activism and the “distance” of anthropology. An anthropology without activism need not be “distant” at all! Proper anthropology is heavily enganging but in a rather different manner than activism. Activism is not alway occupied with the why’s and the ambivalences, though it may be. And because activism is about politics and therefore about simplification, the subtle and detailed understanding of the subject might be lot if we were to simply blur academia with activism. This is not to say that anthropoligists should not take part in public debates, but that we should keep in mind our profession while doing this.