An important contribution to the medical anthropology of therapeutic institutions and practices, offering new insights on the cultural specificity of biomedical and lay therapies of addiction. In Raikhel's careful account, authority, knowledge, and subjectivity are mutually transformed in the post-Soviet context. The book should be of broad use to those interested in the areas of post-Soviet healthcare, global health, and substance abuse treatment. It is also a vital contribution to the anthropology of medicine, psychiatry, addiction, institutions, and expertise.
(Slavic Review) Highly nuanced and innovative. Governing Habits offers a highly convincing defense of the principled refusal of its author to take familiar, sweeping positions and instead focus on the fascinating particularities of the post-Soviet narcological practices and epistemological commitments. [ The book] makes an important contribution to the anthropology of medicine through its vivid exploration of a history of medicalization that radically diverge from the 'two minds' of American psychiatry (Luhrmann 2001) and, by extension, the practice of addiction medicine in North America.
(PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review) Raikhel has written a fine book that places Russia's treatment of alcohol use disorder in historical context, from nineteenth century Tsarist Russia, through the Soviet era, to the present postSoviet times....Governing Habits is one of the few books written by an anthropologist that details therapeutic interventions from the point of view of both physicians and patients within the larger economic, social, and cultural context.
(Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences) Raikhel's book does valuable work both at the level of medical anthropologies of addiction, as well as at the level of anthropologies of Russia. By keeping the question of efficacy open, Raikhel enables readers to dive deeply into a different modality of treatment, offering a valuable comparative lens with which to view it, as well as the ontology of addiction itself.
(Ethos)
