Wizards, Gurus, and Energy-Information Fields: Wielding Legitimacy in Contemporary Russian Healing

Abstract

An important premise for the anthropological study of healing systems is that they are cultural domains, constituted by local systems of knowledge, meaning, and social relations. People undertake their quest for health with more conviction if the medical systems they resort to are meaningful for them (MacCormack 1986), if the conceptualizations of health, disease, and cure correlate with their more general cosmology, and fit within broader patterns of personal and collective identity construction. It is this meaningfulness of the systems of healing \vithin the broader domains of meaning-making, their place with reference to the dominant structures of knowledge and power, that may be understood as their legitimacy. This legitimacy may be particularly contestable in multiple medical systems, where several traditions of knowledge and institutional frameworks coexist and compete for state funding and paying clients, as well as for media coverage. In such a situation, discursive and performative strategies of legitimation can become a part of persuasiveness, both of an individual healer and of an ideology behind a certain therapy, thus having direct bearing on the therapeutic efficacy of treatment. In this paper, I will try to unravel strategies of legitimation used in the pluralistic medical field of the contemporary Russia. In this analysis, the Russian healing systems will be treated as reflecting broader cultural dynamics, expressing hitorical continuity as well as social change.