Segregation

patients. Ecks asks: why would Pfizer go through the trouble of making a publicfacing diagnostic tool and then recommend not sharing it with the public? He turns to a concept he terms ‘‘near-liberalism’’ to make sense of the contradictions in neoliberalism as they get deployed in local contexts. Such contradictions include corporate practices that tend toward empowering patients and emancipation, like the democratization and availability of public-facing depression diagnostic checklists, but also include contradictory elements that suspend patient empowerment practices as soon as they interfere with profits. Some of the highlights of Living Worth include how Ecks incorporates ethnographic evidence into his theoretical arguments. These moments effectively serve to highlight the real-world stakes of sometimes abstract arguments. For example, he takes the reader to a pharmacy in Kolkata in Chapter Nine (‘‘Generic: Distinguishing Good Similarity from Bad Similarity’’) to examine how similarly valued objects are differentiated through a case study of generic medications in India. India is one of the world’s major exporters of generic medications, which means there are many versions of the same drug to choose from when a physician writes a prescription. The large number of choices available presents a problem for pharmacists in Kolkata, who in turn must stock many offerings of the same kind of medication. In other chapters, Ecks’s argument would be enhanced by including more empirical context. For example, in Chapter Seven (‘‘Acting through Other [Prescribing] Habits’’) he questions the claim that patients are causing global rates of depression and anxiety to rise by turning the focus to physicians’ prescribing habits. He introduces an argument for ‘‘habitology,’’ or the study of how individuals engage in nonreflexive, embodied, and routine valuing practices, as an alternative to ethnography. He provides this interesting framework for the theoretical history of related concepts, like Mol’s praxiography, Latour’s theories of nonhuman agency, Weber’s habit, and Mauss’s and Bourdieu’s conceptions of habitus. This is an interesting discussion that evaluates norms, practices, and habits, but it is missing an empirical assessment of his own claims about habitology. Overall, the lack of empirical description, ethnographic illustrations, and reflections about the field research process detract from the arguments in the book. Living Worth is an excellent resource for students and scholars investigating interdisciplinary theories of value. Ecks’s theoretical framework and case studies provide substance that both advanced undergraduate students and scholars in sociology and anthropology will find interesting and useful.