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Governing Habits
Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic. Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge
By (author)
Eugene Raikhel
Genres:
Coping with drug & alcohol abuse, Drug & substance abuse: social aspects, Addiction & therapy
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Synopsis
Critics of narcology-as addiction medicine is called in Russia-decry it as being "backward," hopelessly behind contemporary global medical practices in relation to addiction and substance abuse, and assume that its practitioners lack both professionalism and expertise. On the basis of his research in a range of clinical institutions managing substance abuse in St. Petersburg, Eugene Raikhel increasingly came to understand that these assumptions and critiques obscured more than they revealed. Governing Habits is an ethnography of extraordinary sensitivity and awareness that shows how therapeutic practice and expertise is expressed in the highly specific, yet rapidly transforming milieu of hospitals, clinics, and rehabilitation centers in post Soviet Russia. Rather than interpreting narcology as a Soviet survival or a local clinical world on the wane in the face of globalizing evidence-based medicine, Raikhel examines the transformation of the medical management of alcoholism in Russia over the past twenty years.
Raikhel's book is more than a story about the treatment of alcoholism. It is also a gripping analysis of the many cultural, institutional, political, and social transformations taking place in the postSoviet world, particularly in Putin's Russia. Governing Habits will appeal to a wide range of readers, from medical anthropologists, clinicians, to scholars of post-Soviet Russia, to students of institutions and organizational change, to those interested in therapies and treatments of substance abuse, addiction, and alcoholism. New & Used
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What Reviewers Are Saying
An important contribution to the medical anthropology of therapeutic institutions and practices, offering new insights on the cultural specificity of biomedical and lay therapies of addiction. In Raikhel's careful account, authority, knowledge, and subjectivity are mutually transformed in the post-Soviet context. The book should be of broad use to those interested in the areas of post-Soviet healthcare, global health, and substance abuse treatment. It is also a vital contribution to the anthropology of medicine, psychiatry, addiction, institutions, and expertise. * Slavic Review * Highly nuanced and innovative. Governing Habits offers a highly convincing defense of the principled refusal of its author to take familiar, sweeping positions and instead focus on the fascinating particularities of the post-Soviet narcological practices and epistemological commitments. [The book] makes an important contribution to the anthropology of medicine through its vivid exploration of a history of medicalization that radically diverge from the 'two minds' of American psychiatry (Luhrmann 2001) and, by extension, the practice of addiction medicine in North America. * PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review * Raikhel has written a fine book that places Russia's treatment of alcohol use disorder in historical context, from nineteenth century Tsarist Russia, through the Soviet era, to the present postSoviet times....Governing Habits is one of the few books written by an anthropologist that details therapeutic interventions from the point of view of both physicians and patients within the larger economic, social, and cultural context. * Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences * Raikhel's book does valuable work both at the level of medical anthropologies of addiction, as well as at the level of anthropologies of Russia. By keeping the question of efficacy open, Raikhel enables readers to dive deeply into a different modality of treatment, offering a valuable comparative lens with which to view it, as well as the ontology of addiction itself. * Ethos *