Jessica Robbins
Enveloped Lives is a fascinating exploration of health care in postsocialist Lithuania. Through sensitive ethnographic investigation, Rima Praspaliauskiene offers readers a lens through which to understand how Lithuanians navigate morality and ethics in everyday life.
Maryna Nading
In Enveloped Lives, Rima Praspaliauskiene skillfully weaves together a variety of perspectives, ethnographically incorporating voices of patients and their relatives, neighbors, and health care providers. In this clever and vivid book, she shows how gift giving resists attempts to commodify care.
Cristiana Giordano
Enveloped Lives is a sophisticated and timely account of patient-doctor relationships in post-Soviet Lithuania. Through careful empirical exploration of health and care, this book sheds light on the complexity of neoliberal reforms in Eastern Europe, and the contradictions and continuities between a soviet past and a European future. Rima Praspaliauskiene's compelling and nuanced writing takes the reader into patients' stories, doctors' dilemmas, and relatives' conundrums with great depth. This ethnography is an invaluable contribution to discussions around the political economy of care, affective and institutionalized forms of treatment, and the ambivalence of belonging to Europe.