LOVE, SUPPORT AND KINDNESS FOR ALL: MEDICAL SUBJECTIVITIES IN A HEALTH CARE DIRECT SELLING COMPANY
LOVE, SUPPORT AND KINDNESS FOR ALL: MEDICAL SUBJECTIVITIES IN A HEALTH CARE DIRECT SELLING COMPANY

Summary/Abstract: In the context of an underfinanced and corrupt health system and also of the increasing implementation and promotion of neoliberal policies and their inevitably disastrous consequences on some social groups in the health care sector in post-socialist Romania, I conducted my ethnographic research for many months in a free-of-charge community health center in Bucharest. This center is the Bucharest headquarter, but only one of the many such community health centers which are burgeoning in Romania and which offer free health services as part of the marketing and sales strategy of an alternative health care direct selling multinational company, which enjoys the participation and acceptance of many people, especially old people from the working class. Closely associated to neoliberal policies but also to the revitalization movements, this direct selling company can be important in understanding how new medical subjectivities are produced in contemporary capitalism in the context of post-socialist Romania. Biomedicine was especially a prime subject of analysis in the domain of critical medical anthropology in relation to the way in which economic and political issues come to influence institutions, knowledge and medical practices. What I find more relevant to understand nowadays is the subject of commoditization of health, but also the strong links formed between capitalism and CAM, indigenous or traditional medicine. My research hypothesis is that this direct selling company exercises a form of hegemony, inevitably linked to the financial goals of the company, but also to the birth of a revitalization movement, a promised salvation in the face of economic, social and technological marginalization which is felt by many in the health care domain in Romania. This means that, although for the researcher the presence of this direct sales company can be seen at a structural level as maintaining the inequalities of access to quality health care services and efficient medical technologies, for the members of these health care centers the hopes and benefits produced by the hegemony are experientially and consciously significant.

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