Eugene Raikhel
PhD, Princeton University, 2006
I am a cultural and medical anthropologist with interests encompassing the anthropology of science, biomedicine and psychiatry; addiction and its treatment; suggestion and healing; and post-socialist transformations in Eurasia. I am particularly concerned with the circulation of new forms of knowledge and clinical intervention produced by biomedicine, neuroscience and psychiatry. My 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.
I am currently completing a manuscript based on my doctoral research, titled Governing Habits: Addiction and the Therapeutic Market in Contemporary Russia. Based on fourteen months of fieldwork in St. Petersburg among institutions dealing with substance abuse, this book examines the political-economic, epidemiological and clinical changes that have transformed the knowledge and medical management of alcoholism and addiction in Russia over the past twenty years. Along with William Garriott, I am working on an edited volume, tentatively titled Anthropologies of Addiction: Science, Therapy and Regulation. I am also in the process of developing a second area of research on suggestion and placebo phenomena, and their links to embodied meanings, clinical encounters and broad cultural processes.
In 2006-07 I held a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University's Harriman Institute for Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies. From September 2007 to February 2010 I held a postdoctoral fellowship in the CIHR Strategic Training Program in Culture and Mental Health Services Research in the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University. While at McGill, I oversaw the implementation of the Canadian Institutes for Health Research-funded project "Improving Access to Clinical and Community Resources for Multicultural Mental Health Care." This project seeks to develop a web-based information and networking resource to help family physicians provide mental health care to Canada's increasingly diverse population.
I also developed and frequently contribute to Somatosphere, a collaborative academic weblog focused on medical anthropology at its intersections with cultural psychiatry, bioethics and science and technology studies.
Contact Information
Office Hours
Time may vary from week to week. For current office hours and to sign up, please visit: https://wiki.uchicago.edu/display/~eraikhel/Office+hours
Office hours are held in 5736 S. Woodlawn, #203
Courses for 2011-12
Winter 2012: Illness and subjectivity (CHDV 43302; ANTH 51305)
While anthropology and other social sciences have long explored the social and cultural shaping of the self and personhood, many scholars have recently employed the rubric of "subjectivity" to articulate the links between collective phenomena and the subjective lives of individuals. This graduate seminar will examine "subjectivity"—and related concepts—focusing on topics where such ideas have been particularly fruitful: illness, pathology and suffering. Syllabus
Spring 2012: Medical anthropology (offered both at the 20000-level for undergrads and the 40000-level for grad students; fulfills distribution requirements C (Culture and community) or D (Mental health and personality) for undergrads)
This course introduces students to the central concepts and methods of medical anthropology. Drawing on a number of classic and contemporary texts, we will consider both the specificity of local medical cultures and the processes which increasingly link these systems of knowledge and practice. We will study the social and political economic shaping of illness and suffering and will examine medical and healing systems – including biomedicine – as social institutions and as sources of epistemological authority. Topics covered will include the problem of belief; local theories of disease causation and healing efficacy; the placebo effect and contextual healing; theories of embodiment; medicalization; structural violence; modernity and the distribution of risk; the meanings and effects of new medical technologies; and global health.
Research and teaching interests
Biomedicine, science and society; Anthropology of psychiatry and neuroscience; Placebos, suggestion and healing; Culture and mental health; Clinical ethnography; Alcoholism, addiction and public health; Globalization, capitalism and postsocialism; Russia, Eurasia and Europe; North America
Selected publications
Eugene Raikhel. “Post-Soviet Placebos: Epistemology and Authority in Russian Treatments for Alcoholism.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry., 34(1): 132-68, 2010.
Eugene Raikhel. “Radical reductions: Neurophysiology, politics and personhood in Russian addiction medicine.” In Critical Neuroscience, Suparna Choudhury and Jan Slaby eds. Wiley/Blackwell, Forthcoming, 2010.
Eugene Raikhel. "Institutional Encounters: Identification and Anonymity in Russian Addiction Treatment (and Ethnography)." In Being There: The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth, John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi eds. University of California Press, 2009.
Laurence J. Kirmayer & Eugene Raikhel. "From Amrita to Substance D: Psychopharmacology, Political Economy, and Technologies of the Self." Transcultural Psychiatry, 46(1): 5-15, 2009.
Amir Raz, Eugene Raikhel and Ran Anbar. "Placebos in Medicine: Knowledge, Beliefs and Patterns of Use." McGill Journal of Medicine, 11(2): 206-211, 2008.
Fellowships and grants
Co-Investigator. "Improving access to clinical and community resources for multicultural mental health care." (L. Kirmayer, F. Lemire, K. McKenzie, C. McKnight, N. Caidi, A. Cortinois, M. Desmeules, R. Grad, I. Hemlin, A. Jadad, U. Kiziltan, Y. Leanza, G. Mazowita, L. O'Grady, P. Pluye, E. Raikhel, A. Ungureanu). Knowledge to Action grant, Canadian Institutes for Health Research, 2008-10.
Post-doctoral Fellowship, CIHR Strategic Training Program in Culture and Mental Health Services Research, Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University, 2007-09.
Post-doctoral Fellowship, Harriman Institute for Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies, Columbia University, 2006-07.
Fellowship of Woodrow Wilson Scholars, Princeton University, 2004-06.
Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, 2003-04.
Graduate Research Grant, Center for Health and Well-being, Princeton University, 2003.
