CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Shapatava, Elene |
|---|---|
| Title | Healthy Body, Healthy Mind - Social Theory of Hygiene in the Georgian SSR |
| Summary | The MA thesis explores medical knowledge production in the Georgian SSR from the 1920s until the end of World War II. Soviet revolutionaries agitated for health as a metter of survival and political change. Medical institutions in different Soviet republics worked with cultural and revolutionary theoriests, who considered health and clean Soviet political subject as part of their modernizing, utopian project. In the context of social, cultural and political transformation, Soviet Social Theory of Hygiene was a field that made it possible to articulate the professional practice of hygienists, doctors, psychiatrists and even politicians with revolutionary project. Regarding this context, in the thesis I ask following questions: How body and medicalized subjectivity of Soviet citizen were understood in relation to political legitimising power in the Soviet Union from revolution of 1917 before the end of World War II? What was the language, symbolism, and form of the Soviet hygiene propaganda and practices in the Georgian SSR? How psychiatry and institutional care were the part of pedagogy with the goal of creation of the new Soviet citizen? How was the medical knowledge used as a tool of categorization in case of Georgian SSR? To answer these questions, I rely on discursive analyses of archival materials found during my research in the Georgian national archive and libraries. I will argue how medical and psychiatric knowledge production in the Soviet context was a biopolitical technique, which manufactured the acceptable and unacceptable subjects. I want to show how the vernacular Georgian cultural aspects and meanings mirrored discourse about body, hygiene and psychiatry produced in the centre of USSR. |
| Supervisor | Rajaram Prem Kumar |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/shapatava_elene.pdf |
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