Book Talk: Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic by Eugene Raikhel

Please join us for the fifth event of our Work of Care in Russia speaker series, a book talk by Eugene Raikhel, author of Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic (Cornell University Press, 2016). Moderated by Svetlana Borodina.

Critics of narcology—as addiction medicine is called in Russia—decry it as being “backward,” hopelessly behind contemporary global medical practices in relation to addiction and substance abuse, and assume that its practitioners lack both professionalism and expertise. On the basis of his research in a range of clinical institutions managing substance abuse in St. Petersburg, Eugene Raikhel increasingly came to understand that these assumptions and critiques obscured more than they revealed. Governing Habits is an ethnography of extraordinary sensitivity and awareness that shows how therapeutic practice and expertise is expressed in the highly specific, yet rapidly transforming milieu of hospitals, clinics, and rehabilitation centers in post Soviet Russia. Rather than interpreting narcology as a Soviet survival or a local clinical world on the wane in the face of globalizing evidence-based medicine, Raikhel examines the transformation of the medical management of alcoholism in Russia over the past twenty years.