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 popularizat ... 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.