2014 Recipient

The Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies, established in 2008 and sponsored by the Kathryn W. and Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology, or geography in the previous calendar year.

Winner: Erin Koch
Title: Free Market Tuberculosis: Managing Epidemics in Post-Soviet Georgia (Vanderbilt University Press)

Free Market Tuberculosis is a groundbreaking book that makes important contributions to postsocialist studies, social studies of medicine, development studies, and others. In Free Market Tuberculosis, Erin Koch investigates the social life of tuberculosis and TB interventions in post-Soviet Georgia as she documents more broadly the intended and unintended consequences of global standardization in an era of neoliberal capitalism. The book is at once a detailed study of the TB crisis in Georgia and an impressive study of global health:  how a globalized system of treatment lands in a place that is lacking the resources – social, economic, and political – to implement it effectively, and how this affects both the treatment and the spread of the disease. Koch also interrogates the ways in which the standardized treatment program endorsed by the World Health Organization (Directly Observed Therapy, Short-Course, or “DOTS”) has articulated with on-the-ground historical and cultural understandings about public health concerns such as TB, and Soviet practices associated with how health care is delivered. Drawing on her own anthropological research conducted since 2000, as well as published historical sources, Koch illuminates the many paradoxes of standardization of global health protocols as she details the “social fight against tuberculosis” as a local project that is nevertheless imbricated in multiple historical, scientific, and rhetorical processes. Together, the perspectives of diverse actors—TB specialists, laboratory technicians, representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the World Health Organization, prison officials, and the ethnographer herself—show how, as Koch argues, “tuberculosis is plural, not singular,” and as such demands interventions that go far beyond the primarily biomedical ones that comprise DOTS, the current global “gold standard” in TB treatment. Koch shows that the story of TB in Georgia today is one of structured uncertainties and competing logics of expertise amid the implementation of market-based health services, all of which are embedded in a vibrant culture of medicine that greatly pre-dates the Soviet period. Carefully researched and written in an engaging style, the book ultimately tracks how biopolitics and global governmentality operate as post-Soviet space is folded into and disciplined by global neoliberal capitalist institutions, systems and standards.

Honorable Mentions: Anya Bernstein and Krisztina Fehérváry