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Anarchy and the Kingdom of God: From Eschatology to Orthodox Political Theology and Back

Davor Džalto

Anarchy and the Kingdom of God presents the reader with a unique critique of both traditional and contemporary political theologies that have rationalized and justified power structures and ... More

Anarchy and the Kingdom of God presents the reader with a unique critique of both traditional and contemporary political theologies that have rationalized and justified power structures and oppression of various kinds. The book advances an “anarchist” theological approach to the socio-political sphere, which is based on some of the basic presuppositions of Orthodox Christian anthropology and metaphysics. Developing a coherent critique of power structures and oppression, as one of the most prominent forces in human history, Davor Džalto advances human freedom as a foundational theological principle. Building on insights and arguments ranging from New Testament texts and Church Fathers, to modern religious and political thinkers such as Nikolai Berdyaev, Jacques Ellul, and Sheldon Wolin, Džalto contextualizes the political realm as primarily the realm of power, which is rooted in a specific logic of being. This logic, based on self-affirmation and the power dynamics of domination/submission, is confronted here with a different (eschatological) mode of existence based on freedom and love. Developing an “anarchist” political theology, the book offers a method for dealing with a variety of contemporary social and political issues. With a genuine theological approach to the issues of human freedom and power dynamics, the book enables a fresh re-examination of the problem of democracy and justice in the age of global (neoliberal) capitalism.Less

Atonement and Comparative Theology: The Cross in Dialogue with Other Religions

Catherine Cornille (ed.)

The central Christian belief in salvation through the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ remains one of the most intractable mysteries of Christian faith. In Atonement and Comparative ... More

The central Christian belief in salvation through the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ remains one of the most intractable mysteries of Christian faith. In Atonement and Comparative Theology, Christian theologians with expertise in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, and African religions reflect on how engagement with these traditions sheds new light on the Christian understanding of atonement by pointing to analogous structures of sin and salvation, drawing new attention to the scandal of the cross, and offering fresh insight into the meaning of redemption. Together, they illustrate the many ways in which comparative theology may deepen and enrich Christian theological reflection upon the salvific meaning of the cross.Less

Between Form and Faith: Graham Greene and the Catholic Novel

Martyn Sampson

What is a “Catholic” novel? How does it relate to the intersection between literary theory and theology? What forms of dialogue can religious and secular critics enjoy? And what role can Graham ... More

What is a “Catholic” novel? How does it relate to the intersection between literary theory and theology? What forms of dialogue can religious and secular critics enjoy? And what role can Graham Greene play in the discussion? This book analyses the fiction of Greene in a radically new manner by considering in depth its form and content, which rests on the oppositions between secularism and religion, Sampson challenges these distinctions by arguing that Greene has a dramatic contribution to add to their methodological premises, and, especially, the imaginative and interpretative statuses of literature and Catholicism. Inclusive of Greene’s contribution are different critical and religious impulses that are present throughout the investigative tenors that his work invokes. Chapters on Greene’s four “Catholic” novels and two of his “post-Catholic” novels are complemented by a fresh and vital insight into the critical importance of his non-fiction. The study paints an image of an inviting yet beguilingly complex literary figure, and within new and significant perspectives on the growing importance of the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar. Greene is shown to be central to groups who have until now been largely neglected in literary debate.Less

The Body of the Cross: Holy Victims and the Invention of the Atonement

Travis E. Ables

The Body of the Cross is a study of holy victims in Western Christian history, and how their deaths led to the idea of the cross as a substitutionary sacrifice. Since its first centuries, ... More

The Body of the Cross is a study of holy victims in Western Christian history, and how their deaths led to the idea of the cross as a substitutionary sacrifice. Since its first centuries, Christianity has traded on the suffering of victims who were substitutes for the Christian social body. They secured holiness for the church by their own sacred power, or by their reprobation and rejection. Martyrs, mystics, and heretics suffered and died for the community, which expressed the power of their tortured flesh in eucharistic, social, and christological forms. Jesus Christ was one of those holy substitutes, but it was late in Western history that his body took on the status of the exemplary victim. This book traces that story, giving special attention to popular spirituality, religious dissent, and the writing of women. It examines how the symbol of the cross functioned in key moments in this history, including the parting of the ways of Judaism and Christianity, the gnostic debates, martyr traditions, and medieval mysticism and heresy. In a Reformation era haunted by divine wrath, these themes concentrated in a new idea: Jesus Christ died on the cross to absorb divine punishment for sin, a holy body and a rejected body in one.Less

Class Acts: Derrida on the Public Stage

Michael Naas

Class Acts looks at two often neglected aspects of Jacques Derrida’s work as a philosopher, namely, his public presentations and his teaching, along with the question of the “speech act” that links ... More

Class Acts looks at two often neglected aspects of Jacques Derrida’s work as a philosopher, namely, his public presentations and his teaching, along with the question of the “speech act” that links them, that is, the question of what one is doing when one speaks in public in these ways. The work is divided into two parts, each of which follows Derrida’s itinerary with regard to speech act theory from the 1970s through the 1990s. Part I, titled “Derrida in Montreal,” analyzes Derrida’s critique of John Austin and his own subsequent redefinition of speech act theory over the course of three public lectures or events (in 1971, 1979, and 1997), all three, for reasons I try to identify and explain, in Montreal. Part II. “The Open Seminar,” begins with an overview of Derrida’s teaching career and his famous “seminar” presentations, along with his own explicit reflections on pedagogy and educational institutions beginning in the mid-1970s. It then turns to the way Derrida interrogated and himself redeployed speech act theory in three recently published seminars (on life-death, theory and practice, and forgiveness). We ultimately come to see through this juxtaposition that, whether he was in a conference hall or a classroom, Derrida was always interested in the way in which spoken or written words might not just communicate some meaning or intent but give rise to something like an event. This is a book about the possibility of such events in Derrida’s work as a pedagogue and public intellectual.Less

Commodified Communion: Eucharist, Consumer Culture, and the Practice of Everyday Life

Antonio Eduardo Alonso

A range of contemporary theological reflection on consumer culture in the United States shares a conviction that the central task of theology is to respond, resist, or reshape consumer culture. And ... More

A range of contemporary theological reflection on consumer culture in the United States shares a conviction that the central task of theology is to respond, resist, or reshape consumer culture. And in many of these narratives, the location par excellence of that response is the Eucharist. Christian hope, they argue, is found in our effective cultivation of practices of everyday resistance to the market. This book argues that reducing the work of theology to resistance and centering Christian hope in a Eucharist that might better support that resistance undermines our ability to talk about the activity of God within a consumer culture, binds grace to human activity, and instrumentalizes the Eucharist into ethics. By reframing the question in terms of God’s activity in, and in spite of, consumer culture, it proposes a mode of theological reflection on consumer culture and Eucharist that sees their interrelationship in light of the unique challenges that American consumerism poses to Christian thought and practice. With an angle of vision shaped by Michel de Certeau’s insight into the tactics of everyday life and Walter Benjamin’s way of seeing “theological” wishes and desires invested in fallen commodities, it offers a lived theological account of consumer culture that recognizes not only its deceptions but also traces of truth in its broken promises and fallen hopes. And it proposes a vision of the Eucharist that takes seriously its this-worldly materiality even as it makes promises this world cannot keep.Less

The Corpse in the Kitchen: Enclosure, Extraction, and the Afterlives of the Black Hawk War

Adam John Waterman

The Corpse in the Kitchen explores relationships between the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the enclosure of Indigenous land and extraction of Indigenous resources, and settler colonialism as a ... More

The Corpse in the Kitchen explores relationships between the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the enclosure of Indigenous land and extraction of Indigenous resources, and settler colonialism as a technique of racial capitalism. Drawing upon the literature and historiography of the so-called Black Hawk War, it looks to the colonization of the upper Mississippi River lead region as one instance of primitive accumulation for purposes of mineral accretion. While conventional histories of the Black Hawk War have treated the conflict as gratuitous and tragic, The Corpse in the Kitchen argues that the conflict between Black Hawk, settler militias, and the federal military were part of a struggle over the dispensation of mineral resources, specifically, mineral lead. The elemental basis for the fabrication of bullets, the federal state had a vested interest in control over regional lead resources, as a means of manufacturing the implements by which it would secure its sovereignty over North America. As the basis for metallic type, the abundance of lead drawn from the mines of the upper Mississippi would also occasion an expansion of printing, creating new technologies of memory and forgetting. The Corpse in the Kitchen explores the intimacies between extraction and killing, writing, printing, memory, and forgetting, a story of settlers as rapacious consumers of Indigenous peoples.Less

Couch City: Socrates against Simonides

Harry Berger

Ward Risvold and J. Benjamin Fuqua (eds)

In addition to providing a thorough philological review, this book revises the way scholars have tended to read the Simonides episode from Plato’s Protagoras. Couch City ties this review with a ... More

In addition to providing a thorough philological review, this book revises the way scholars have tended to read the Simonides episode from Plato’s Protagoras. Couch City ties this review with a literary interpretation of the poem’s involvement in the dialogue, how the dialogue itself may be read literarily, and, most importantly, how these readings work together rather than as discrete, incidental literary interventions in Socrates studies. It uses concepts like the performatives of speech-act theory to demonstrate how the structure of the dialogue sanctions the poem’s transgressive playfulness as much as how Socrates’s performance of the poem informs that structure as well as its execution. As much as Couch City examines classical rhetoric and philosophy, it reverberates just as much into contemporary literary studies. The book marries careful structural reading of the poem and dialogue with broader conceptual investigation that may be applied to or re-read in the poem or its reading, producing an argument that rejects the notion that Socrates fails Plato’s philosophical project, but rather complicates it in literary fashion by performing sophistry in order to defeat sophistry.Less

Eros: Beyond the Death Drive

Rosaura Martinez Ruiz

This book considers a promise left unfulfilled in Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Principle of Pleasure. There Freud suggests that he will investigate a psychic tendency that is not subject to the ... More

This book considers a promise left unfulfilled in Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Principle of Pleasure. There Freud suggests that he will investigate a psychic tendency that is not subject to the pleasure principle, but in fact for Freud the latter remains sovereign. Following Jacques Derrida, Martínez argues that when the pleasure principle comes into contact with the death drive (a tendency toward aggression or cruelty), the psyche can take detours that, without exceeding the limit of the pleasure principle, can nevertheless defer it. Eros: Beyond the Death Drive reflects on these deviations of the pleasure principle, which Martínez finds both in the political sphere and in intimate relations. Following these erotic paths, Martínez argues that the forces of the death drive can only be resisted if resistance is understood as an ongoing process in which erotic action and the construction of pathways for sublimation are interminable tasks. We know that the final accomplishment of these tasks is impossible, but, like Freud’s “impossible professions,” they remain imperative. Though always incomplete, they remain undeniably urgent, and psychoanalysis and deconstruction remind us of their urgency. In complementary ways, both Freud and Derrida teach us that the death drive is insurmountable, but that through political action we can delay, defer, and postpone it. Martínez shows us that this effort of resistance must be uninterrupted. Calling for the creation and maintenance of a “community of mourning duelists,” this book builds toward the affirmation of the kind of “erotic battalion” that must always be mobilized.Less

Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor

Allan Punzalan Isaac

Filipino Time examines how a variety of immaterial labor performed by Filipinos in the Philippines and around the world, while producing bodily and affective disciplines and dislocations, also ... More

Filipino Time examines how a variety of immaterial labor performed by Filipinos in the Philippines and around the world, while producing bodily and affective disciplines and dislocations, also generate and explore vital affects, multiple networks, and other worlds. Whether in representations of death in a musical or keeping work time at bay in a call center, these forms of living emerge from and even work alongside capitalist exploitation of affective labor. Affective labor involves human intersubjective interaction and creative capacities. Thus, through creative labor, subjects make communal worlds out of one colonized by capital time. In reading these cultural productions, the book traces concurrent chronicities, ways of sensing and making sense of time alongside capital’s dominant narrative. From the hostile but habitable textures of labor-time, migratory subjects live and weave narratives of place and belonging, produce new modes of connections and ways to feel time with others.The book explores how these chronicities are re-articulated in a capacious archive of storytelling about the Filipino labor diaspora in fiction, in a musical, in an ethnography, and in a documentary film. Each of the genres demonstrates how time and space are manifest in deformations by narrative and genre. These cultural expressions capture life-making capacities within the capitalist world of disruptions and circulations of bodies and time. Thus, they index how selves go out of bounds beyond the economic contract to transform, even momentarily, self, others, time, and their surroundings.Less

The Form of Love: Poetry's Quarrel with Philosophy

James Kuzner

Can poetry, even a deeply philosophical poetry, articulate something about love that philosophy itself cannot? The Form of Love argues that it can. In close readings of seven “metaphysical” poems, ... More

Can poetry, even a deeply philosophical poetry, articulate something about love that philosophy itself cannot? The Form of Love argues that it can. In close readings of seven “metaphysical” poems, this book shows how figures ranging from John Donne to Emily Dickinson use poetic form to turn philosophy to new ends, transforming its concern to know truth about love into concern to create virtual experiences of love. These poems create strange loves made in, rather than through, the forms—the devices, structures and forces particular to verse—where they appear. Tracing how poems think, this book argues, requires an intimate form of reading: close—from one perspective, even too close—attention to and thinking with the text. In The Form of Love, Kuzner reads as closely as possible in order to consider as seriously as possible how poetry thinks of love otherwise than other fields: how poems do not complete philosophy or compete with it, and how poetry and philosophy instead can enter into a relation that is itself like love.Less

Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later

Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis (eds)

This book looks at various ways freedom was both gained and lost during Reconstruction. Its unifying theme is the expansion and contraction of the many and varied manifestations and meanings of ... More

This book looks at various ways freedom was both gained and lost during Reconstruction. Its unifying theme is the expansion and contraction of the many and varied manifestations and meanings of freedom. The central issue of the that shaped Reconstruction was freedom—but not always in the way we might expect. The essays explore the frequent “gaps” between legal and political gains supposedly secured in the statute books and people’s actual lived experience. Even after legal emancipation, formerly enslaved people faced a lack of economic freedom dependent on equal educational access and employment opportunity. Freedom was not just a question of being enslaved or not enslaved; nor was it just about access to the ballot. Freedom to be educated; freedom to testify in court; freedom from imprisonment; even economic opportunity was a form of freedom. The book takes an expansive approach to studying Reconstruction. This book reaches beyond just the American South, to consider Reconstruction’s impact on freedoms in border states, on northerners, in Brazil, and even in Australia. It also expands the traditional periodization beyond 1876, because Reconstruction—when seen as a series of conflicts in which freedoms were gained and lost—doesn’t end in 1876 but one might argue continues to this day. Approximately 150 years after this crucial period in American history—so often overlooked in popular memory—a group of scholars come together to demonstrate that struggles over the meaning of freedom not only defined Reconstruction but also continue to shape America to this day.Less

Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India

Vaibhav Saria

This book seeks to describe the fullness of lives. As one of India’s third gendered populations, hijras are too often and easily relegated to positions of marginality as if their lives can be fully ... More

This book seeks to describe the fullness of lives. As one of India’s third gendered populations, hijras are too often and easily relegated to positions of marginality as if their lives can be fully contained within the imperatives of survival. By offering a way of thinking about sexuality in Indian kinship in relation to the queer figure, and by restating an argument for psychoanalytic thinking of the Indian family, the hijra is invited to step out from the long reaching shadows of global discourses of HIV prevention and human rights. Hijras are situated within the moral and ethical dramas that define their everyday lives such as discharging the duties of kinship, achieving financial solvency, choreographing love affairs, and participating in the sociality of the local world. By studying scenes in the marketplace where the flirting between the hijra and the men of the village take place, easy readings of marginality and the outsider status ascribed to the hijra are disputed. The focus is shifted from the queer son and the patriarchal father to the hijra sibling and her brother, to offer a new way of thinking about the Oedipal drama in South Asia. Dwelling with the hijras for a period of two years, begging on the trains with them and co-inhabiting various other sites offers a provocation to think about hijras as embedded in fields of power and circles of sociality that do not reduce their lives to suffocating oppression but render them in terms of aspirations for ethical accounting.Less

Homo Psyche: On Queer Theory and Erotophobia

Gila Ashtor

An analysis that focuses on the metapsychological dimension of queer theorizations will demonstrate why, in spite of how bold and emancipatory key queer formulations might initially seem, the field ... More

An analysis that focuses on the metapsychological dimension of queer theorizations will demonstrate why, in spite of how bold and emancipatory key queer formulations might initially seem, the field maintains an uninterrogated reliance on erotophobic psychological conventions that ultimately reproduces an erotophobic relationship to sexuality. Homo Psyche introduces metapsychology as a new dimension of analysis that zeroes in on the underlying psychological assumptions that determine contemporary critical thought. Such an intervention deepens current debates about the future of queer studies by demonstrating how the field’s systematic neglect of metapsychology as a necessary and independent realm of ideology ultimately enforces the complicity of queer studies with psychological conventions that are fundamentally erotophobic and therefore inimical to queer theory’s radical and ethical project. Homo Psyche therefore introduces a break with the current configuration of traditional psychoanalysis as the presumptive and undisputed foundation for radical psycho-sexual theorizations. In order to elaborate a critical alternative, the French theoretician Jean Laplanche (1924–2012) will be introduced. In order to rigorously articulate and defend the centrality of sexuality to psychic life, Laplanche insisted on “new foundations for psychoanalysis” that radically departed from existing Freudian and Lacanian models of the mind. This study conducts a purposive survey of six major theoretical concepts, through the lens of six eminent individual critics who represent exemplary, influential, and authoritative developments of them: Eve Sedgwick on “hermeneutics,” Leo Bersani on “sex,” Jane Gallop on “violation,” Lee Edelman on “radicalism,” Judith Butler on “gender,” and Lauren Berlant on “relationality.”Less

Infrapolitics: A Handbook

Alberto Moreiras

The personal is not political, even if politics marks it and, in many cases, determines it. Infrapolitics seeks to understand conditions of existence that are not reducible to political life and that ... More

The personal is not political, even if politics marks it and, in many cases, determines it. Infrapolitics seeks to understand conditions of existence that are not reducible to political life and that exceed any definition of world bound to political determinations. It seeks to mobilize an exteriority without which politics could only be business or administration, that is, oppression. It demands a change in seeing and an everyday practice that subtracts from political totalization in the name of a new production of desire, of a new emancipation, and of a conception of experience that can breach the general captivation of life. Infrapolitics thinks of itself as both a general critique of the political apparatus and as an imperative horizon for existential self-understanding. It understands the intense politicity of its gesture while at the same time claiming an enabling distance from politics. It is a form of thought aiming to provide content for a form of life. It offers a new theoretical practice for concrete existence. This book provides a genealogy of the notion and places it within contemporary philosophical reflection, examining its deployment in the wake of postphenomenology and deconstruction, Lacanian analysis, the principle of anarchy, and an egalitarian symbolization of social life.Less

Living with Concepts: Anthropology in the Grip of Reality

Andrew Brandel and Marco Motta (eds)

This collection brings together leading anthropologists and philosophers working in a wide range of contexts in order to rethink an oft taken for granted concept—the concept of the concept itself. ... More

This collection brings together leading anthropologists and philosophers working in a wide range of contexts in order to rethink an oft taken for granted concept—the concept of the concept itself. How do we picture what concepts are, what they do, how they arise in the course of everyday life? Challenging conventional approaches that treat concepts as mere tools at our disposal for analysis, or as straightforwardly equivalent to signs to be deciphered, the twelve contributors to Living with Concepts instead looks at the ways in which concepts are already intrinsically embedded in our forms of life, and thus how they constitute the very substrate of our existence as humans who lead lives in language. In other words, attention to our ordinary lives with concepts requires not a movement of ascent from the rough ground of reality into the skies of theory, but rather acceptance of the fact that thinking is congenital to living with and through concepts. Living with Concepts offers a critical and timely intervention into both contemporary philosophy and anthropological theory by deeply unsettling a distinction between thought and reality that is still too often smuggled back into the fold. In its place, the book takes the first step toward an anthropological practice guided by a realistic spirit—one in which the supposed need to grasp reality is replaced by an acknowledgement that we might instead be in its grip.Less

Material Mystery: The Flesh of the World in Three Mythic Bodies

Karmen MacKendrick

The material turn in the humanities (and social sciences) entails rejections along with its embrace of positive ideas about matter. It has largely rejected theology, though scholars of religion have ... More

The material turn in the humanities (and social sciences) entails rejections along with its embrace of positive ideas about matter. It has largely rejected theology, though scholars of religion have begun to change this; and it rejects anthropocentrism, particularly the idea that humans are uniquely capable of knowledge and action. This book takes up three apparently anthropocentric myths that are central to Abrahamic religions—those of the primal human, the incarnated figure of a redeemer, and the resurrected body. At first glance, the existence of these stories seems to reinforce a very human-centered theology. Many ancient and medieval readings of each of these mythic figures, though, particularly within the versions of the religious traditions that emphasize Wisdom, offer possibilities for readings that expand knowing, agency, and even divinity into all of the matter of the world. These mythic readings of matter, beginning with but not restricted to human bodies, supplement our factual, scientific readings of the material world to engage wider kinds of knowing and affective attention.Less

Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England

Jordan Kirk

Five hundred years before “Jabberwocky” and Tender Buttons, writers were already preoccupied with the question of nonsense. But even as the prevalence in medieval texts of gibberish, babble, ... More

Five hundred years before “Jabberwocky” and Tender Buttons, writers were already preoccupied with the question of nonsense. But even as the prevalence in medieval texts of gibberish, babble, birdsong, and allusions to bare voice has come increasingly into view in recent years, an impression persists that these phenomena are exceptions that prove the rule of the period’s theologically motivated commitment to the kernel of meaning as over against the shell of the mere letter. This book shows that, to the contrary, the foundational object of study of medieval linguistic thought was vox non-significativa, the utterance insofar as it means nothing whatsoever, and that this fact was not lost on medieval writers of various kinds. In a series of close and unorthodox readings of works by Priscian, Boethius, Augustine, Walter Burley, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the anonymous authors of the Cloud of Unknowing and St. Erkenwald, it inquires into the way that a number of fourteenth-century writers recognized possibilities inherent in the traditional accounts of language transmitted to them from antiquity and transformed those accounts into new ideas, forms, and practices of non-signification. Retrieving a premodern hermeneutics of obscurity in order to provide materials for an archeology of the category of the literary, Medieval Nonsense shows how these medieval linguistic textbooks, mystical treatises, and poems were engineered in such a way as to arrest the faculty of interpretation and force it to focus on the extinguishing of sense that occurs in the encounter with language itself.Less

Missions Begin with Blood: Suffering and Salvation in the Borderlands of New Spain

Brandon L. Bayne

In 1695, Father Antonio Menéndez, the Rector of the Mayo and Yaqui missions of Sonora, wrote to Father Eusebio Kino to assure him that the recent revolt of the O’odham and death of the missionary ... More

In 1695, Father Antonio Menéndez, the Rector of the Mayo and Yaqui missions of Sonora, wrote to Father Eusebio Kino to assure him that the recent revolt of the O’odham and death of the missionary Father Javier Saeta was not a tragedy, but a triumph. He optimistically reassured Kino, “It is a good sign, Father, that all those missions begin with the blood of a minister to cultivate it since it is an indication of their perseverance and good stability.” While the idea that successful missions needed Indigenous revolts and missionary deaths seems counterintuitive, this book illustrates how it became a central logic of frontier colonization in Spanish North America. Missions Begin with Blood argues that martyrdom acted as a ceremony of possession that helped Jesuits understand suffering, violence, disease, and death as ways that God inevitably worked to advance Christendom. When positioning themselves vis-à-vis rival religious orders, petitioning superiors for support, preparing campaigns to extirpate native “idolatries,” or protecting converts from European and Indigenous enemies, Jesuits believed that winning would come through their wounding and victories through victimization. This book correlates these tales of suffering to deep genealogies of redemptive death in Catholic discourse and explains how such traditions and practices worked to rationalize early modern colonialism. Specifically, it focuses on an agricultural metaphor that pervaded missionary discourse where Jesuits understood their lives and labors as seed, watered by the sweat of their suffering, tears of their exile, and blood of their sacrifice.Less

Mixing Medicines: Ecologies of Care in Buddhist Siberia

Tatiana Chudakova

After the collapse of state socialism, Russia’s healthcare system, much like the rest of the country’s economic and social sphere, underwent massive restructuring, while the public saw the rise to ... More

After the collapse of state socialism, Russia’s healthcare system, much like the rest of the country’s economic and social sphere, underwent massive restructuring, while the public saw the rise to prominence of a variety of nonbiomedical therapies. Formulated as a possible aid to a beleaguered healthcare infrastructure, or as questionable care of last resort, “traditional medicine” in post-socialist Russia was tasked with redressing—and often blamed for—the fraught state of the body politic, while biomedicine itself became increasingly perceived as therapeutically insufficient. The popularization of ethnically and culturally marked forms of care in Russia presents a peculiar paradox in a political context often characterized by a return to robustly homogenizing state policies. In a context where displays of cultural, religious, and ethnic difference are tightly woven with anxieties about Russia’s status as a modern state, the rise of a therapeutic sphere that tended toward multiplicity, fragmentation, bricolage, and a certain ontological agnosticism in the treatment of bodies and subjects appears, at the very least, counterintuitive. Mixing Medicines is an ethnography of therapeutic life at the peripheries of the state, set in the Siberian region of Buryatia that unexpectedly finds itself at the forefront of projects of medical integration via a local tradition of “Tibetan medicine.” The book follows the therapeutic encounters between traditional healing and the different regulatory modalities that seek to incorporate it, exploring how projects of medical integration in Siberia articulate competing conceptualizations of universality, regional belonging, national inclusion, and the ethics of caring for bodies and subjects.Less