HIV is God's Blessing Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia [Hardcover]

This provocative study examines the role of todays Russian Orthodox Church in the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Russia has one of the fastest-growing rates of HIV infection in the world80 percent from intravenous drug useand 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 questionsof 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.

Jarrett Zigonis Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author ofMorality: An Anthropological PerspectiveandMaking the New Post-Soviet Person: Moral Experience in Contemporary Moscow.

Zigon's ethnography provides a fascinating window onto the concrete processes through which people undergoing rehabilitation for drug addiction are remade as moral persons. This book adeptly combines ethnographically-based descriptions with forays into theology and Soviet history to deliver a compelling account of self-transformation in a contemporary Russian Orthodox milieu. Eugene Raikhel, University of Chicago

Over the last decade, anthropologists have increasingly come to study the role of morality in shaping the course of social life. Within anthropological debates around morality, Zigon has been developing one of the most creative and challenging positions. In this book, he pushes his project to a whole new level, working it out carefully through an important ethnographic case. lÃU