This article examines the gendered consequences of linking family support to state pronatalist goals in contemporary Russia. By analyzing the policies, proposals, and critiques circulating on the maternity capital program, Michele Rivkin-Fish demonstrates how state power and citizenship are being constructed through struggles over the meanings of gender and family. She further argues that studies of Russian demographic politics must bring attention to both institutional transformations and the symbolic levels of discourse. This holistic approach, rooted in feminist anthropology, illuminates the particular, cultural logics informing demographic debates as well as the apparent contradictions between ideologies, policies, and practices. Pronatalist discourses engage Russian politicians, experts, and laypersons in efforts to undo the troubling legacy of Soviet gender relations and the 1990s fertility crisis; in the process, these policies define and deploy state power in ways that sustain and normalize gender inequalities.
The creation of class subjectivities is an important but understudied topic for social memory studies, particularly in former socialist contexts. Soviet policies generated fertile conditions for the intertwining of class subjectivity and popular memory by deploying the categories of “intelligentsia” and “worker” as reified, enduring, and oppositional groups and privileging these groups in contradictory and often hypocritical ways. In this article, I explore the traces such policies left on contemporary, educated Russians’ sense of themselves as long‐standing victims of class‐based dispossession. Ethnographically, I examine debates I had with Russian friends about Mikhail Bulgakov's popular novel, Heart of a Dog, which depicts the Bolsheviks’ establishment of power in the 1920s through the eyes of an elite physician–scientist. Exploring Russians’ reactions to this story and their sense of its broader relevance reveals how aspiring middle‐class subjects embraced a narrative of the Soviet past to justify the emerging inequalities of market reforms. Narrative landscapes of the socialist past illuminate a politics of victimization and moral restitution that underlies the contemporary embrace of inequality and stratified consumption. [memory, class, stratified consumption, health care, postsocialism, Russia]
The socialist and postsocialist contexts offer important challenges for anthropologists developing a critical analysis of fertility. The need for fertility studies to address class and gender inequities is often overlooked by postsocialist scholars, whose work is mired in responses to the socialist past and ongoing pronatalist campaigns. I examine the ways that fertility analysis has been used in national political struggles in Russia, and explain why supporters of democratic reforms and women's rights have neglected to address gender and class issues in their fertility studies. While Russian nationalists cite fertility decline as proof that market reforms threaten Russia's existence, defenders of neoliberalism draw on demographic transition theory to redefine fertility decline as a universal sign of socioeconomic development. Working with conventional demographic paradigms and a postsocialist cultural logic, Russian transition theorists simultaneously oppose pronatalist politics, support women's reproductive choice, and reproduce the limitations of liberal paradigms regarding the family, society, and public policy. This article shows how anthropological critiques of demographic transition theory can be expanded and nuanced by considering the ways this theory gets adapted to particular cultural logics and political contests. [Keywords: anthropology and demography, postsocialism, Russia, fertility decline]
Leaders of health professional schools often support community-based education as a means of promoting emerging practitioners' awareness of health disparities and commitment to serving the poor. Yet, most programs do not teach about the causes of health disparities, raising questions regarding what social and political lessons students learn from these experiences. This article examines the ways in which community-based clinical education programs help shape the subjectivities of new dentists as ethical clinician-citizens within the US commodified health care system. Drawing on ethnographic research during volunteer and required community-based programs and interviews with participants, I demonstrate three implicit logics that students learned: (1) dialectical ideologies of volunteer entitlement and recipient debt; (2) forms of justification for the often inferior care provided to "failed" consumers (patients with Medicaid or uninsured); and (3) specific forms of obligations characterizing the ethical clinician-citizen. I explore the ways these messages reflected the structured relations of both student encounters and the overarching health care system, and examine the strategies faculty supervisors undertook to challenge these messages and relations. Finally, I argue that promoting commitments to social justice in health care should not rely on cultivating altruism, but should instead be pursued through educating new practitioners about the lives of poor people, the causal relationships between poverty and poor health, and attention to the structure of health care and provider-patient interactions. This approach involves shining a critical light on America's commodified health care system as an arena based in relations of power and inequality.
This article views reproductive health activism as a fruitful site for analyzing the cultural logics through which legitimate claims for women's needs become expressed and circumscribed. It begins from the observation that in the United States and Britain, reproductive health has been a key arena for feminist political claims and struggles for women's rights, bodily integrity, access to health care, and demands for authority in relations with experts. These concerns and struggles have not, however, emerged in all postsocialist contexts, and new activism in Russia reveals strikingly different agendas. Innovative groups of health providers seeking to increase women's access to birth control methods and safe sex, home birth opportunities, and improved health services work outside of feminist perspectives and reject political paths for change. By examining the ideological inspirations, cultural logics, and political-economic constraints shaping the outreach work of Russian health practitioners, the article explains how and why health activism became a site for personal "spiritual" revival and the strengthening of nuclear families. It also explores how conditions following the collapse of socialism have further legitimized activists' rejection of political agendas for change.
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