"Rivkin-Fish takes the reader into a new understanding of the fragile
and tense relations between state and market transitions, and into the deep
and
largely silent struggle for gender and health equity in Russia." –Adriana
Petryna, author of Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl
In the first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, deteriorating public health indicators such as below-replacement fertility and high rates of sexually transmitted diseases, abortions, birth traumas, and maternal mortality raised acute anxieties about Russia's future. This study documents the efforts of global and local experts, and ordinary Russian women in St. Petersburg, to explain Russia's maternal health problems and devise reforms to solve them. Examining both official health projects and informal daily practices, Michele Rivkin-Fish draws ethnographic and theoretical insights about the contested processes of interpreting and managing neo-liberal transitions in Russia and explores the challenges of bringing anthropological insights to public health interventions for women's empowerment.
Michele Rivkin-Fish is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Conceptualizing the Politics of Intervention
PART I. PROJECTS
1. Promoting Democracy through Moral Correction
2. Stimulating Providers, Individualizing Labor
3. Individualizing Disciplines of Sex Education
PART II. PRACTICES
4. Taking Responsibility for Ourselves
5. Personal Ties and the Authorization of Medical Power
6. Privatizing Medicalization
Conclusion: Transforming Feminist Strategies
Notes
Works Cited
Index
New Anthropologies of Europe Series
Publication date: 7/1/2005
248 pages, bibliog., index, 6 1/8 x
9 1/4