Nearly two decades have now passed since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Over the next several months we will be running a series of articles which consider a specific issues related to health and medicine in the former Soviet Union. The articles comprising “20 Years After the Soviet Union” will highlight research by anthropologists and other social …
Jarrett Zigon. “HIV Is God’s Blessing”: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. 280 pages. $24.95.
Reviewed by Tomas Matza (Department of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University)
Anthropologists have taken a keen interest in the way that the collapse of the Soviet Union has impacted the everyday lives of the people living in that region. The fact …
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| Narcologist Vyacheslav Davidov (Photo: Gregory Warner) |
A couple of months ago I got an email from Gregory Warner, the health reporter for NPR’s Marketplace, who told me that he wanted to discuss my work. Gregory had just returned from Moscow, where he had visited a clinic which treated alcoholism with what seemed to be some very strange techniques. …
While medical anthropologists have done considerable research on both the global south and north, the larger region of East-Central, Eastern, and post-socialist Europe, with notable exceptions, has received limited attention so far. …
The latest issue of Medical Anthropology Quarterly isn’t a special issue but it does include three articles on medicine in socialist or post-socialist states: Cuba, Poland and Romania. Here are the titles and abstracts:
The Gift of Health: Socialist Medical Practice and Shifting Material and Moral Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba
Elise Andaya
Drawing on ethnographic data collected over 13 months …
Twenty years ago today the Berlin Wall fell (both materially and metaphorically) and state socialism in Eastern Europe entered its final period of collapse. However, as the ample anthropological literature on the area shows us (and as Slavoj Zizek discusses in an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times) two decades of postsocialism have had far from unequivocal results.
A …