Socialist Panaceas: Efficacy, ideologies of health, and multiple modernity at the crossroads of state and ethnic medical knowledge in the USSR

• Applicant: Maria Pirogovskaya, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History ; Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology ; History of Science
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 544928375

The interdisciplinary project explores Socialist panaceas of ethnic origin during the long Soviet era, the process of their taming by the state medicine, and their uses by lay persons. By examining cure-alls and detailing how they were built by Soviet medicine and how they circulated in the public, the project studies the entanglements of ethnomedical knowledge and state medicine from the 1920s to the 1980s. It hypothesizes that the state medicine and lay and ethnic practices were not disparate entities but instead presented a heterogeneous continuum, or a medical nexus, which, under certain conditions, created opportunities for exchange and collaboration as well as fostered informal economies. The project is organized around a key concept of efficacy. Tracking down how efficacy is produced in different social settings and how lived experience and beliefs shape it provides an insight into ideologies of health and their embodiment. Efficacy helps to unpack how the medication is conceptualized, what is considered “medicinal”, which understanding of health it taps into, and how technologies, regimes of health and medicinal substances attune to each other. Since certain medications were regularly referred to and circulated in public discourses as panaceas, this vernacular naming is used as a primary analytic. In overall, the project follows holistic medications in order to discuss how the positivist Soviet medicine created pockets for vernacular medical knowledge of ethnic origin and how state medicine developed synergy with lay medical cultures. In this regard, it contributes to a wider discussion of Soviet modernization and multiple, or entangled modernity that the Soviet state exemplifies. The project speculates on how different forms of medical knowledge interact, and what type of interactions are possible. More specifically, it addresses three sets of research questions: What structural and sociocultural factors facilitated the appearance of panaceas in the USSR and how lay medical culture fostered demand in these medications? How did vernacular medicine and state medicine exchange and contest ideas, resources, and experience? How was the efficacy of cure-alls negotiated and whose expertise was involved in the process? To answer these questions, the project zooms into the case studies of Pantocrin (extract of deer antler velvet), Central Asian mumiyo (high-altitude bitumen of organic origin), and Buryat Tibetan medicinal formulas. Their varying degrees of success/failure and public recognition help to grasp structural factors that contributed to their pharmacological status and social reputation. These case studies are investigated both from above, through official documents and lab reports, and from below, through lay trajectories of panaceas, that are reconstructed by their traces in private archives and oral histories. In sum, they reflect how efficacy has been tested, supported, or challenged in everyday life.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants