Enveloped Lives: Caring and Relating in Lithuanian Health Care

by Rima Praspaliauskiene

Overview

Handing envelopes containing money or gifts to doctors in public health care is often seen as a remnant of socialism that continues as an integral part of the Lithuanian health care system. Rima Praspaliauskiene uses the envelope to explore complex doctor-patient interactions that go beyond notions of the gift or the bribe. She reshapes our definition of corruption and encourages seeing these practices as emerging forms of care that impede the neoliberal health care reforms effected in the post-Soviet era.

Enveloped Lives extends the analytical categories of gift, care, money, and transparency, shifting attention away from material transactions by prioritizing relations and practices that transcend economic rationality. At a time when health care reforms and the costs of care are being widely debated, this book is a contribution to the larger discussion about the ethics and future of health care around the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501766114
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	11/15/2022
Pages:	162
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Rima Praspaliauskiene is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Enveloped Care
Interlude 1: The Circulating Chocolate Box
1. From Bribes to Copayments: Transforming Health Care in Lithuania
Interlude 2: The Surprise
2. Being Caught: Envelopes and Illness
Interlude 3: Of Envelopes and Greedy Doctors
3. "I Am a Doctor": Caught in Ambivalence
4. Collective Care: Relations of Obligation
Epilogue: From Litai to Euros

What People are Saying About This

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.