Antropologicheskij forum, 2018, no. 37

MEDICINE AS A CULTURAL SYSTEM? (Introduction to the Collection of Papers Presented at the Colloquium “Social Studies of Medicine in Post-Soviet Russia”)

Anna Klepikova
European University at St Petersburg
6/1А Gagarinskaya Str., St Petersburg, Russia
aklepikova()eu.spb.ru

Maria Pirogovskaya
European University at St Petersburg
6/1А Gagarinskaya Str., St Petersburg, Russia
mpirogovskaya()eu.spb.ru

Abstract: The introduction opens the thematic collection of papers on medicine and society in post-Soviet Russia and traces Russian situation of social studies of medicine. While Western medical anthropology is an established field of scholarship with a long history and an array of “classical” problems, in Russia it remains a comparatively new discipline, which could be explained by the positivist orientation of Soviet ethnography and the ideological basis of Soviet social policy.

Being embedded in state health management, it is biomedicine that serves the main framework for interpretation of problems of health and illness in post-industrial societies. However, it coexists, sometimes symbiotically, with other medical systems and practices. Post-Soviet situation is no exclusion: scholars stress intricate interaction and diffusion of biomedicine, ethnomedicine and CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) in post-Soviet countries. The present collection can vividly illustrate this argument through analysis of disability, reproduction and parenting. It manifests once and again how medicine works as another cultural system or another cultural language of society; we can hope to pierce the social logic of some historical period by exploring it.

Keywords: medical anthropology, social studies of medicine, biomedicine, ethnomedicine, CAM, post-Soviet studies, Russian studies, medical systems.

To cite: Klepikova A., Pirogovskaya M., ‘Meditsina kak kulturnaya sistema? (Predislovie k materialam kollokviuma “Sotsialnye issledovaniya meditsiny v postsovetskoy Rossii”)’ [Medicine as a Cultural System? (Introduction to the Collection of Papers Presented at the Colloquium “Social Studies of Medicine in Post-Soviet Russia”)], Antropologicheskij forum, 2018, no. 37, pp. 113–122.

doi: 10.31250/1815-8870-2018-14-37-113-122

URL: http://anthropologie.kunstkamera.ru/files/pdf/037/klepikova_pirogovskaya.pdf