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Caring for Strangers: Aging, Traditional Medicine, and Collective Self‐care in Post‐socialist Russia
Author(s) -
Chudakova Tatiana
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
medical anthropology quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.855
H-Index - 55
eISSN - 1548-1387
pISSN - 0745-5194
DOI - 10.1111/maq.12276
Subject(s) - precarity , embodied cognition , face (sociological concept) , health care , moral responsibility , public health , population ageing , sociology , population , social capital , public relations , political science , psychology , gender studies , medicine , nursing , law , social science , demography , artificial intelligence , computer science
This article explores how aging patients in Russia assemble strategies of care in the face of commercialization of medical services and public health discourses and initiatives aimed at improving the population's lifestyle habits. By focusing on how the formation of pensioner publics intersects with the health‐seeking trajectories of elderly patients, it tracks an emerging ethic of collective self‐care—a form of therapeutic collectivity that challenges articulations of good health as primarily an extension of personal responsibility or solely as a corollary of access to medical resources. By drawing on traditional medicine, these pensioners rely on and advocate for stranger intimacies that offer tactics for survival in the present through the care of (and for) a shared and embodied post‐socialist condition of social, economic, and bodily precarity.