In Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia (Duke University Press, 2018), Tomas Matza traces the landscape of “psy” disciplines, practices, and institutions across postsocialist Saint Petersburg. Writing with a distinctive conceptual subtlety and care, Matza pushes beyond a range of well-established interpretations to examine the multiple ways in which psychotherapy has provided tools for people to understand …
My research in Việt Nam addresses how medicine, health, and disease function as political and cultural signifiers as well as telegraphing – in the form of epidemiological data and public health outcomes – important features of the socioeconomic order. While health and disease are highly politicized everywhere in the world, these issues take on intriguing significance in socialist and formerly …
In Health and Wealth on the Bosnian Market: An Intimate Debt, Larisa Jašarević explores the mutual entanglement between the economy, living body and the good life in postsocialist and postwar Bosnia. Beautifully written and theoretically sophisticated, this ethnography is a key addition to scholarly literature on debt, moral economies, medical anthropology, and material bodies. We are pleased to …
In my fieldwork at the Cardiology Unit at Vilnius public hospital I encountered what I call “the cake case.” In 2009-2010 I was in Lithuania to study how medical care was transforming as the state embarked on health care reform that aimed to rationalize and privatize public services. In particular, the neoliberal reform projects targeted informal payments, or “bribes,” that …
Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied
Stanford University Press, 2013; 328 pages.
Scholars of social and cultural memory in the post-Soviet space are well aware of the Memory at War project—the international collaborative effort to understand battles over memory as they were waged in postsocialist Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. …
Reflex. The images themselves seem to come reflexively. The clinician’s percussion hammer bouncing off of the knee. A startled infant. I hadn’t thought much about the idea of the reflex. At least not since the fifth grade, when I had unsuccessfully tried to condition four white laboratory mice to respond either to the sound of a bell or a flashing …