Alternative Healing Practices, Conspiracy Theory, and Social Trust in Post-Soviet Russia

Speakers): Dr. Konstantin Bogdanov, Professor at the Higher School of Economics, Saint-Petersburg; the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House), Russian Academy of Sciences

The paper provides a study of post-Soviet methods of alternative healing: in the late 1980s, these methods included hypnosis, "folk" and innovative forms of therapy, astrological predictions, spells and rituals, and new kinds of narcotics and medicines. Some of them were widely propagandized in the media; meanwhile, their distribution was accompanied by both radical ideological changes and the communicative transformation of the languages of social trust in the public sphere. The intensification of social trust requires the construction of danger, particularly images of enemies who are portrayed as threatening society. Some of the most relevant factors in support of this trust are the predictability and repetition of markers associated with communication within a given group. Such instances can be examined as examples of "stereotyped interaction" (in Lev Yakubinsky’s terms): this is a situation of emotional rather than verbal commonplaces.
The main questions of the talk are: What have been the cultural presuppositions of medical knowledge and social trust in Post-Soviet Russia? What role has Russian language tradition played in this context? To answer these questions, medical, anthropological, and cultural issues must be considered jointly. The paper combines historical, sociolinguistic, and anthropological approaches to assess medical knowledge in Russia in terms of cultural and linguistic traditions.

Konstantin A. Bogdanov is an anthropologist and philologist whose areas of investigation covers Classical Antiquity and Russian culture, including folklore, rhetoric, and the history of science and the humanities. He is the author of numerous articles and 9 books on Ancient and Russian Literature, Folklore, the History of Social Thought, the History of Russian and European Rhetoric, and the Cultural History of Russian and Soviet Humanities. Among his books, the most recent are Physicians, Patients, Readers: Pathographical Texts of Russian Culture (2017) and The Variables. A Weather of Russian History and Other Subjects (2014).