New Anthropologies of Europe
Daphne Berdahl, Matti Bunzl, and Michael Herzfeld, editors
Indiana University Press is pleased to announce the recent publication of:
Women's Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Intervention
Michele Rivkin-Fish
"An unparalleled study of a transforming and privatizing Russian health care
system. Rivkin-Fish takes the reader into a new understanding of the fragile
and tense relations between state and market transitions, and into the deep
and largely silent struggle for gender and health equity in Russia." Adriana
Petryna, author of Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl.
"Elegantly argued... a vibrant and incisive scholarly work." Alaina Lemon,
University of Michigan.
In the first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, deteriorating
public health indicators such as below-replacement fertility and high rates
of sexually transmitted diseases, abortions, birth traumas, and maternal
mortality raised acute anxieties over Russia's future. This study documents
the efforts of global and local experts, and ordinary Russian women in St.
Petersburg, to explain Russia's maternal health problems and devise reforms
to solve them. Examining both official health projects and informal daily
practices, Michele Rivkin-Fish draws ethnographic and theoretical insights
about the contested processes of interpreting and managing neo-liberal
transitions in Russia.
Global health advisors and Russian experts worked with different
understandings of Russia's social problems and emphasized dramatically
different notions of health and well-being. Calls for women's rights,
patient self-determination, and democratic reforms clashed with hopes for
increased individual discipline and enhanced professional authority. At the
same time, a shared logic about the process of intervention shaped these
projects: to overcome constraints of the socialist past, actors repeatedly
dismissed the state and public sphere as viable sources of social justice
and protection. In six case studies examining health care reform, patient
education, and the daily negotiations between doctors and patients,
Rivkin-Fish reveals how improving health became a matter of transforming
individuals' attitudes, values, and behaviors, in lieu of strengthening
collective systems for human welfare.
In dialogue with scholars and activists concerned with gender and democracy
in the former socialist world. This book brings a feminist concern with
power, authority, and global inequality to the study of socialism's
aftermath. By placing the work of development experts alongside that of
Russian activists and citizens, Rivkin-Fish explores the challenges of
bringing anthropological insights to public health interventions for women's
empowerment and democracy.
Michele Rivkin-Fish is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University
of Kentucky.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Part I: Projects
1. Promoting Democracy through Moral Correction
2. Stimulating Providers, Individualizing Labor
3. Public Education for Personal Intimacy
Part II: Practices
4. Taking Responsibility for Ourselves
5. Personal Ties and the Authorization of Medical Power
6. Privatizing Medicalization
Conclusion Transforming Feminist Strategies
Notes
References Cited
Index
For more information about this book, visit:
http://www.indiana.edu/~iupress/books/0-253-34580-4.shtml
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