Paper short abstract:

In authoritarian Chechnya uncertainties in medical landscape concern not only people seeking healthcare but also people providing alternative therapies. We look at informal coping tactics of alternative healers in response to Covid-19.

Paper long abstract:

Being an unofficial complementary or alternative medicine healer in Chechnya, republic in the North Caucasus, is a risky endeavor. Official healers are institutionalized in Islamic Medical Center – a state funded medical center where people are cured according to Islamic medicine. A non-mainstream, noninstutionalized healer may overnight become an enemy of the state. With state-promoted tradition of collective responsibility he/she endangers not only himself or herself but also his or her family. Non-official healers, however, despite all odds, operate in Chechnya. We look at the ways in which they are traversing the periphery.

What are healers’ everyday tactics of navigating between the hegemonies of state apparatus and biomedicine? How, in a place where the state tries to regulate the most intimate spheres of life and impose its own vision of proper healing, alternative healers respond to Covid-19?

Basing on fieldwork in summer and autumn 2021 we will take a closer look on how grey zone healers waver in the Chechen medical landscape, how they narrate themselves and what strategies they used to avoid risks. We will show that for healers in Chechnya, adapted to unfavorable conditions, Sars-Cov-2 was just another obstacle to deal with along other obstacles posed by an authoritarian state to local non-official healers. These healers build an additional alternative healing setting for those who look for other than institutionalized healing in Chechnya.