Zigon Book Review

JARRET ZIGON 2011. HIV is God's Blessing: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia. Berkley: University of California Press. 280 Pp. ISBN 0520267648.

Since the publication of his 2008 book Morality: An Anthropological Perspective, Jarrett Zigon has had an important role in what must be thought of as, if not a turn, then a re-turn to issues of morality as a substantive object of ethnographic analysis. While morality and ethics are disciplinary concerns that run back to anthropologys founding moments, and while there are other important contemporary voices who have also done their share to bring attention to this problematic (for example, James Faubion, Saba Mahmood, and Joel Robbins), Zigon still must be given his due for putting this forward as a theoretical problem. Zigons latest book, HIV is Gods Blessing, continues with this project, this time fleshing out his theoretical interests in morality with an ethnography written within the context of that other recent anthropological cause clbre, Neoliberalism. Here, Zigons proximate object is the Mill, a Russian Orthodox heroin treatment center located outside of St. Petersburg, Russia. One of the few recovery centers for intravenous drug users run by the Orthodox church, the Mill is a place where addicts, through submission to a heterogenous mix of secular and religious practices and discourses, struggle to reinvent themselves as ethical subjects through submission to the Mills discipline so that they can engage in what they call a normal life. I say that the Mill is the proximate object of this ethnography because while the treatment centers regimen as well as its staff and transient patients are artfully described, Zigons attention and ambition here exceeds that of an ethnography of a total institution, or of a phenomenological account of a disciplinary process (although both descriptions due a certain justice to Zigons project). Rather, in this ethnography, objects of inquiry come and go as Zigons analytic telescope shifts focus to further horizons, only to come back again to more immediate spaces. Using the Mill as much as a lens for his gaze as his gazes object, Zigon take in other connected objects of differing scale and temporalities; his purview runs object wise from the current Russian macro-social political-economic order and Orthodox theology to the painfully intimate moments of individual lives, and he surveys truncated and expanded temporal horizons that stretches from

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the punctual present of the Mills three month treatment program, to the painful biographies and tentative post-heroin prospects of his informants, to broader Russian, Soviet, and Orthodox history and possible Neoliberal futures. This awkward scale of ethnography, as the Comaroffs (Comaroff and Comaroff 2003) would put it, is necessitated by one of Zigons chief claim, which is that we should not think of the Mill as either religious nor secular. Rather, he suggests that we must see it as an assemblage in the sense used by Collier and Ong (2005), a discordant stapling together of disparate ethical, religious, and political discourses and practices that function to produce subjects even if these discourses, as taken together, fail to form anything like a totality. It should be noted that this telescopic shifting of focus could be taken not just as central to the books thematic and as a description of Zigons method, but also to the practice of his informants as well as they shift their attention from what they aspire to, to what it is that they judge to be realistically within their grasp. Those that run the program see the salvation of the soul as its ultimate goal - hence the off-putting title of the book taken from a statement by a clergy member, which is supposed to suggest that the disease gives the afflicted an opportunity to reflect upon their lives and hopefully seek redemption. Despite this broader spiritual telos, those responsible for the treatment realize that they are lucky enough if their patients can manage their normal drug-free life once they are done with their three months at the Mill. Even this more modest goal is subject to shift and recalibration in the eyes of the Mills patients; knowing the depth of their struggle and their poor prospects for staying clean, many consider it a success if they can simply enjoy that normal life not into perpetuity, but just for a spell before the perhaps-inevitable relapse. That a short span of sobriety before using drugs again could be considered a victory is perhaps an irony, though Zigon would not count it as such. There are other ironies in this book, though, ironies where Zigon would endorse the use of the term. The greatest of these results from the way in which Orthodoxy which seems itself as a mortal opponent of the neoliberalism that has radically reshaped post-Soviet society has produced in the Mill a treatment system that in effect is tooled to create the very self-regulating, disciplined subjects that neoliberalism requires. This insight, while telling and ethnographically well-backed, touches on one of the few weak points in this otherwise fine volume. Neoliberalism, portrayed by Zigon at times as a substantive ordering rationality, and at other times as an encompassing metadiscourse, is always triumphant, and therefore has no effective outside,

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subsuming all that it encounters. Putting aside romantic issues such as resistance, this view is one that sits uneasily with Zigons claim of the assemblage-nature of the Mill. What sort of an emergent process is it when one element triumphs over all others? And what is it that these other aspects bring to the process if their contributions always get swallowed up by Neoliberalism? This may be assemblage theory as envisioned by Ong and Collier, but it is hard to see this as an assemblage in the originating Deleuzian sense of the term, where difference would not be merely the initial presumption, but product as well. This is a minor complaint, though, and there are many who would agree with Zigon in his bleak assessment. It certainly does nothing to take away from what Zigon has accomplished here: a nuanced and empathic portrait of ethical processes in the heat of rehabilitation. This is a book worthy of attention to those with an interest in the anthropology of ethics, religion, phenomenology, processes of subjectification, public health, or the ethnography of Eastern Europe. JON BIALECKI Department of Anthropology University of California jbialeck@ucsd.edu Citation Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff 2003 Ethnography on an Awkward Scale: Postcolonial Anthropology and the Violence of Abstraction. Ethnography 4(2):147-179 Collier, Stephan and Aiwha Ong 2005 Global Assemblages, Anthropologial Problems in Global assemblages: technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems, Aiwhas One and Stephans Collier, eds. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 1-21.