Civil society and healing: Theorizing women's social activism in post-soviet Ukraine

Abstract

This article suggests a new tack on ‘NGO-graphy’ by setting up a dialogue between medical anthropological theories and the existing literature on postsocialist civil societies. Using data from Ukraine, I integrate recent critiques of ‘civil society’ discourses with an ethnographic investigation of the ambiguous personal transformations that social activism has generated for some women NGO leaders. The article asserts that, by applying the insights of critical-interpretive medical anthropology to the study of postsocialism, we can better track the dynamics of political, social, and personal change through which institutions are created, meaning-making surrounding self and society is negotiated, and powerful discourses are wielded to assert and contest the social worth of persons and groups.

Keywords:

• Postsocialism
• women
• civil society
• medical anthropology
• Ukraine

Acknowledgments

A previous version of this paper was presented at the 102nd Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Society in November, 2003, on the panel ‘Where Capitalism and Socialism Meet: Opening up a Comparative Anthropology of Post/Late Socialism(s).’ I would like to thank my co-organizers of the panel, Andrew Asher and Junjie Chen, as well as our discussants — Ann Anagnost, Daphne Berdahl, and Gerald Creed — for their insightful comments on my paper. I am grateful to the editors and to four anonymous reviewers who provided excellent suggestions for revising this article. This research was supported by grants from the International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX) (with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of State, and the U.S. Information Agency), Fulbright-Hays, the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, and The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. I thank all of these institutions for their support. None of these organizations are responsible for the views expressed here. This paper is dedicated to the memory of ‘Sophia,’ who died during 2005.

Notes

1. The names of all informants and organizations have been changed, to protect their privacy. Both Ukrainian and Russian are spoken in Ukraine. Here, ‘Ukr.’ designates transliterations from the Ukrainian, and ‘Rus.’ designates transliterations from the Russian. All translations from Russian and Ukrainian are my own. ‘Many-children’ families are those with three or more children. In Ukraine, there are about 497,000 such families, or 3.7 percent of the total number of families in Ukraine (Svyatnenko et al. 1999:141).

2. I spent two years in Kiev during 1998 and 1999, and returned for fieldwork during the summers of 2002 and 2003. My study is based on semi-structured and life-history interviews with II women social activists representing ten organizations. Although a few of the groups had organized loosely around a platform of women's rights, most focused exclusively on serving particular categories of dispossessed citizens.

3. Although the ruble-dollar exchange rate was I:I during the late Soviet period, the real value of the ruble was relatively greater, and, due to price fixing, 3,000 rubles in the Soviet Union had much more purchasing power than did $3,000 in the United States.

4. Haney (2000, 2002) has written of similar situations in Hungary.

5. Here I do not limit civil society institutions to NGOs, but rather present community organizations such as the ones I have studied as a particularly apt example of the links between social change and personal transformations.

6. Fisher's (1997) seminal work has shaped the critical approaches taken by many anthropologists studying postsocialist civil societies. For critical accounts of civil society in Eastern Europe, see Creed (1991), Creed and Wedel (1997), Hann and Dunn (1996), and Helms (2003). Julie Hemment's (1998, 2000) work on NGOs, civil society, and transnational interventions in Russia is excellent; also see Armine Ishkanian (2003, 2004) on the multiple discourses deployed by women NGO activists in Armenia, and David Abramson's (1999a; 1999b) articles on civil society, NGOs, and corruption in Uzbekistan. Lori Handrahan (2002) has studied women's NGOs in Kyrgyzstan. Michele Rivkin-Fish's work (2000) critiques international health development interventions in Russia. Janine Wedel's (1998) study of development aid to Eastern Europe gone wrong also includes mention of the complexities of civil society building in the region.

7. Komsorgi were responsible for organizing the activities of the Komsomol at the school-wide level. Komsomol organizations held meetings, engaged in public service activities, arranged competitions, and organized recreational activities such as hiking and camping. The school's Komsorg oversaw all of these events. It is interesting to note that, in the 1970s, researchers found that ‘the elected leaders of the peer collective [such as the Komsomol] are … likely to be girls (in the thirty or more schools, camps, and Pioneer palaces visited [by researchers in the late 1960s], there was only one instance in which the highest officer was a boy)’ (Bronfenbrenner 1970:73). Reasons for this disparity are not forwarded, but it is implied by the author that girls were socialized into leadership roles in the Pioneer and Komsomol organizations because of traditional gender expectations that position girls and women as caregivers and ‘upbringers.’

8. For a detailed description of such methods, see Bronfenbrenner (1970), especially Chapter Two, ‘Upbringing in Collective Settings,’ and Chapter Three, ‘Psychological Implications of Soviet Methods.’

9. Wanner (1998:49) refers to this song (written by composer David Tuchmanov) as ‘one of the many forms of propaganda that bombarded individuals to remind them that they were Soviet.’

10. Donna Murdock (2003) offers a sensitive treatment of ‘professionalization’ of women's NGOs in Medellín, Colombia, that considers some of these issues.

11. The Great Terror refers to Stalin's attacks on all types of opposition (both real and imagined) to industrialize and collectivize the Soviet Union, and to destroy any form of self-government in the republics. It is estimated that in the Soviet Union around 500,000 people were executed in 1937–1939, and between three and 12 million were sent to labor camps. It is likely that ‘Ukraine's share of those who were victimized was disproportionately high’ (Subtelny 1994:420–421).

12. Similar questions are being asked in the United States regarding President George W. Bush's Faith-Based and Community Initiative, which removes restrictions on religious and other groups to provide social services.