Jarrett Zigon 
HIV is God’s Blessing 
Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia

This provocative study examines the role of today’s Russian Orthodox Church in the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Russia has one of the fastest-growing rates of HIV infection in the world—80 percent from intravenous drug use—and the Church remains its only resource for fighting these diseases. Jarrett Zigon takes the reader into a Church-run treatment center where, along with self-transformational and religious approaches, he explores broader anthropological questions—of morality, ethics, what constitutes a ‘normal’ life, and who defines it as such. Zigon argues that this rare Russian partnership between sacred and political power carries unintended consequences: even as the Church condemns the influence of globalization as the root of the problem it seeks to combat, its programs are cultivating citizen-subjects ready for self-governance and responsibility, and better attuned to a world the Church ultimately opposes.

Содержание

Acknowledgments

Introduction


Part I: Backgrounds

1. HIV, Drug Use, and the Politics of Indifference

2. The Church’s Rehabilitation Program

3. The Russian Orthodox Church, HIV, and Injecting Drug Use

4. Moral and Ethical Assemblages

5. Synergeia and Simfoniia: Orthodox Morality, Human Rights, and the State

6. Working on the Self


Part II: Practices

7. Enchurchment

8. Cultivating a Normal Life

9. Normal Sociality: Obshchenie and Controlling Emotions

10. Disciplining Responsibility: Labor and Gender


Some Closing Words

Notes

References

Index

Об авторе

Jarrett Zigon is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Morality: An Anthropological Perspective and Making the New Post-Soviet Person: Moral Experience in Contemporary Moscow.