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 …
Tag Archives: Russia and Eurasia
Book review: Zigon’s "HIV is God’s Blessing"
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 …
Chernobyl Forever
This post was contributed by Sarah D. Phillips (Indiana University, Bloomington)
For a time, it seemed as if the 25th anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster might come and go relatively unnoticed and unremarked, at least by those persons with no direct experience of it. The nuclear accident at Chernobyl (Chornobyl’ in Ukrainian) came to be seen as a …
Give me the fear!
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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. …

