Urban Readers Series: Eugene Raikhel - "Governing Habits" - William Nickell

The Urban Readers Series presents Eugene Raikhel in conversation with William Nickell on Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic.

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About the book: 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.

Raikhel's book is more than a story about the treatment of alcoholism. It is also a gripping analysis of the many cultural, institutional, political, and social transformations taking place in the post-Soviet world, particularly in Putin's Russia. Governing Habits will appeal to a wide range of readers, from medical anthropologists, clinicians, to scholars of post-Soviet Russia, to students of institutions and organizational change, to those interested in therapies and treatments of substance abuse, addiction, and alcoholism."

About the author: Eugene Raikhel is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. A cultural and medical anthropologist, his work follows therapeutic technologies as they move both from "bench to bedside" and from one cultural or institutional setting to another, examining how they intersect with the lives of practitioners and patients. He is the author of Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic (Cornell University Press, 2016), the editor (with William Garriott) of the volume Addiction Trajectories (Duke University Press 2013), the founder and editor of the medical anthropology web-forum Somatosphere.

About the interlocutor: William Nickell is Associate Professor of Russian literature in the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the aesthetic artifacts of large-scale social, economic and technical change. He is author of The Death of Tolstoy: Russia on the Eve, Astapovo Station, 1910, and of two works in progress: The Soviet Cure (a cultural history of Soviet sanatoria and rest therapies in the 1930s), and a companion volume to War and Peace.

About the series: In collaboration with the Seminary Co-op Bookstores, UChicago Urban has launched the Urban Readers Series, an author-centered series of readings and conversations at the Seminary Co-op.  At Urban Readers, people from all over Chicago can hear from the university's scholars and connect with one another over urban issues, histories and futures.  All books in the series are written by UChicago's faculty, alumni, and affiliates.