CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Zaretckaia, Evgeniia |
|---|---|
| Title | "No One Will Help You Except Yourself": Teaching, Learning, and Practicing Physical Rehabilitation in the Saint Petersburg Aikune Center |
| Summary | In this paper, I explore the health care strategies of people practicing aikune – a physical rehabilitation practice based on the principle of self-healing. The study is based on autoethnography and participant observation field work in the Saint Petersburg aikune center conducted in March 2018 – August 2019 and semi-structured interviews with ten patients and two instructors of the center. Aikune is a rehabilitation gymnastics for treatment and prevention of the spine and musculoskeletal system diseases. During sessions in aikune center, instructors explain the theory of how this method works and teach people how to perform exercises themselves. Going through an aikune session, people work on the spinal muscles and deal with specific body experience and pain that comes along with rehabilitation process. Both these experience and knowledge about physiology that they gain in the process of learning aikune change their relationships with their bodies, their perception of health and the role of pain in the process of rehabilitation and health care practices.In my research, I focus on the question of agency in a way people approach their health care in terms of treating and preventing diseases. Analyzing interview materials and my own experience in aikune community, I showcase the ways how self-healing skills and physiological knowledge change people’s health care strategies in their everyday lives and what changes this knowledge brings to people’s agency in a wide social context of contemporary Russia. The experience of rehabilitation teaches people to distinguish the recovery pain from the disease pain, perceiving pain in general as a language of communication with their bodies through the nervous system. According to this understanding of pain, they stop curing pain as a symptom, but they treat the problem instead. With the knowledge of self-healing, aikune center’s patients gain certain control over their bodies that lets them reduce the need for medical help. Physiological knowledge they receive during aikune sessions also helps people to restructure their habits and everyday lives in a way to maintain their health. Exploring the specificity of the embodied knowledge that practicing aikune produces, I approach the question of how the ideology self-healing contributes to personal transformation and transformation of the society. |
| Supervisor | Naumescu, Vlad; Geva, Dorit |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/zaretckaia_evgeniia.pdf |
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